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Post-apocalyptic space opera AU. Of Good Omens. Because why not? I don't even know where this came from. I'm having a very strange week, yes? *shakes head, ducks sheepishly* Have some space-rebel angels and demons, okay?
Title: Enemy Mine
Rating: R
Fandom: Good Omens
Characters/Pairings: Azra (Aziraphale), Crowley, an enemy angel. Mention of Gabriel, Lucifer, Azazel, Adam. Crowley/Aziraphale.
Summary: On the burnt-out remains of a radiation-flooded planet, Heaven's spies and Hell's space fleets draw down on two battered rebel fighters, defectors who defy both sides equally and who have joined a rebellion that seeks to overthrow an entire cosmology. Heaven and Hell might have bitten off more than they can chew
Wordcount: 6562
Warnings/Notes: AU. Violence, civil war, religious conflict, genetic engineering, implied slavery, implied planetary destruction, implied genocide. You know. Cheerful stuff -_-;
Disclaimer: Not mine. Oh, so very much not.
Title: Enemy Mine
Rating: R
Fandom: Good Omens
Characters/Pairings: Azra (Aziraphale), Crowley, an enemy angel. Mention of Gabriel, Lucifer, Azazel, Adam. Crowley/Aziraphale.
Summary: On the burnt-out remains of a radiation-flooded planet, Heaven's spies and Hell's space fleets draw down on two battered rebel fighters, defectors who defy both sides equally and who have joined a rebellion that seeks to overthrow an entire cosmology. Heaven and Hell might have bitten off more than they can chew
Wordcount: 6562
Warnings/Notes: AU. Violence, civil war, religious conflict, genetic engineering, implied slavery, implied planetary destruction, implied genocide. You know. Cheerful stuff -_-;
Disclaimer: Not mine. Oh, so very much not.
Enemy Mine
The angel was dying. Crawling aimlessly across the blasted plains, the ward-metal drained to nothing over his back, his head bowed to the dust and only the scrabble of sun-burned hands to guide him, he looked about as dignified as an upturned turtle, and with about as much chance of surviving. The swollen sun glared down at him from a seared green sky, and didn't much care that it was killing him inch by burning inch.
The demon on the ridgeline above him, though, was still thinking about it.
"... Crowley?" crackled a voice in his ear, startling him briefly as he crouched thoughtfully in the shadow of a cracked boulder, staring down at the heat-drowned angel with narrowed golden eyes. "Crowley? Are you there?"
He reached up, touched at the curl of silver where his ear would have been in his other form, an arc of ward-metal across the yellow-white scales of his skull. "Ssh!" he hissed, testily. "What happened to radio silence, angel?"
There was a brief pause, and when the voice came back it was quieter, and a touch sheepish. "My apologies, dearest," Azra murmured, soft and rueful across the aether between them. "You know I get nervous when you're out alone. The orbital wards are picking up some strange readings, and I ... Well. I needed to hear your voice." An audible smile. "You know how I get, Crowley."
The demon snorted faintly, but his lip curled upwards at the same time, smiling entirely of its own accord. "Yes," he murmured. "I know." He sighed, sitting up on his haunches, eyes still tracking the slow, painful progress of the angel beneath him. "And I think I know what your readings are, too." He shook his head. "We've got company, angel. Either a groundship or fighters got through somewhere. I'm looking right now at a very irradiated angel crawling up towards our front porch."
The silence on the other end of the connection abruptly took on a much sharper, more attentive note. "Angel?" Azra asked sharply. "Are you sure? Not a Nephilim, or a human?"
"No," Crowley said shortly, watching the trailing of pale wings in the dust beneath him. "And not a demon either. Trust me, angel. I know what I'm looking at here."
Azra blessed softly under his breath. "Heaven," he said flatly. Not a question. "Not fighters. There's nothing close enough to send a lone fighter out here. It's a groundship. They've got one through somewhere."
Crowley hummed absent agreement, rocking smoothly to his feet and slithering down from his perch, slipping through the shadows and heading down towards the valley floor. "Thought so," he murmured, sliding his arc pistol gently down into his hand. "They're here for us, you think?"
Azra laughed, low and harsh, a faint tapping sound coming across the link as he called up the wardmaps back at the base. "Nothing else here, is there," he said, clipped and bitter. "An irradiated dustbath orbiting a distant sun. What other reason would they have to be here, aside from tracking down a couple of battered criminal scum?"
Crowley shook his head, tutting softly. "Easy, angel," he murmured, his scaled lips splitting into a grim, sardonic smile as he slid down the last of the scree slope and came about onto their visitor's trail. The skies were clear above him, but he set out at a rapid, ground-eating lope regardless. He'd hear a fighter coming, but a little caution never hurt anybody. "Not like we planned to stay here long regardless. And you never know. Might turn out useful."
"Useful?" Azra paused, the frown practically audible across the aether. "Crowley ... what are you doing? Please tell me you're not ..."
Crowley grinned blackly, letting Azra trail off into silence without answer. He had other fish to fry, circling the struggling figure of the angel warily, pacing him in a wide circle like the sweep of a shadow around the wheel of a sun. Never know what's a trap and what isn't, after all. Never can be too careful. But he had an idea, already, what sort of trap this was. He had an idea why angels came battered and burned to their door.
"Well now," he called across, the muzzle of his pistol resting casually on his opposite arm, crouching low to the baked earth as the angel's head snapped towards him, followed by a thin, warbling cry of pain at the sudden movement. "You look a little lost, friend."
"Crowley," Azra hissed, snarling invective in his ear. "You didn't."
"Hush, angel," he purred, grinning blackly in the white heat. "Trust me, alright? And get the decon wards up for me, won't you? I think we'll be having a guest."
"You ... you ..." The angel gave up, muttering something truly vile regarding Crowley's anatomy, and snapped across the line: "Fine. Fine. But if you die out there, I am not going to mourn you. You can forget that right now."
Crowley's smile faded off into something more rueful, slightly pained, and he nodded even though his partner couldn't see it. "So noted, angel," he murmured softly, and it was memory more than hearing that gave him the note of sorrow in Azra's voice in answer.
"Don't be long," the angel said, a soft sort of apology, and Crowley nodded in the sudden silence, his eyes hot and heavy on another angel entirely.
An angel who was looking at him now with pained, narrowed eyes, as bright and perfect a blue as the skies on cleaner worlds. An angel who had scrabbled upright in the dust to snarl at him through cracked and bleeding lips, a mask of disgust twisting sunburned features, instinctive challenge towards the demonic creature that crouched armed a little way away from him.
Crowley felt his lip lift slightly. Not a smile, no. Not that. He knew what the angel was seeing, knew what this dying creature saw when he looked at Crowley. The heavy, inhuman features, the serpentine yellow eyes, the thick scales the colour of bleached bone that masked any hint of angelicism his features had ever held. A demon, yes, humanoid only in vague shape, more serpent now than angel. Son of the dragon, oh yes.
"Long way from home space," Crowley noted casually, his pistol the same sort of black as his expression. "What's a nice angel like you doing on a Flooded world like this, hmm?"
"Kill me now, demon," the angel ... not spat. He'd have liked to spit it, maybe, liked the challenge of that, but a few hours baking in the killing heat of this little slice of purgatory tended to make that a difficult option. The words were rasped, instead, hoarse and cracked in the middle, and Crowley allowed himself to sneer at them.
"Doesn't look like I'd have to," he noted lightly, with a cheerful sort of darkness, nodding the nose of the pistol across the fairly pathetic figure his captive made. "You should have gone for something in scales, you know. Feathers and pale skin might be classical, but they don't do much against a radiation bath, do they?"
The angel snarled, coming up onto his knees and trying to flare his wings out to the side, an instinctive grasp at intimidation. The heavy feathers dragged in the dust, hanging limply, and Crowley simply raised a brow-ridge, heartily unimpressed.
"I would die before I wore the face of a demon," was the answer he got, and it seemed that contempt survived the heat much better than vitriol. The angel's features twisted, heavy lines of pride and defiance creasing the cracked skin, and an abrupt surge of humour bubbled through Crowley. A black and somewhat desperate amusement.
"Apparently so," he agreed, shaking his head against the trapped lump of humour, and then ...
Then he snapped his eyes to the angel's, golden gaze to blue, and let all hint of amusement drop from his tone. His face stilled, heavy features carving themselves into threatening lines, and abruptly the angel was looking not at a demon, a contemptible thing, but at a captor, at a threat. Suddenly the angel was a bird before a serpent, dirt-clogged wings fluttering painfully in agitation, and Crowley didn't even bother to sneer.
"I could leave you here," he murmured, dark and quiet. The angel flinched, but managed to keep his snarled defiance. "I could kill you with this here pistol, or I could just stand up, right now, amble away to leave the sun and the heat to finish you for me." He chuckled blackly. "It wouldn't take long, I think. I've been watching you for the past hour. Your wards are almost out. Once they fail, you're going to get the full dose of Flood radiation. You'll be dead as any Nephilim. A nice bit of irony to take you to an unmarked grave, don't you think?"
The angel said nothing. Sneered, desperately, but said nothing. Crowley smirked, cold and cruel.
"But that's not where this is going, is it?" he asked softly. Watching those hard, defiant eyes, watching the distant whisper of calculation behind them. "You're not going to die here. You've never believed this will kill you, or you'd have stopped crawling long ago." He tilted his head, smiling darkly as a faint shadow of consternation, sudden worry, passed across that peeling face. "I wonder," he murmured. "I wonder ... why that is."
He didn't get to see what the angel would have answered, though. The ward-metal at his ear spat suddenly, a shocking crackle in the stillness, and his head jerked sideways despite himself, trying to get away from it. He hissed, a hand darting from under his pistol to the side of his head, and snarled into the aether.
"Bless it, angel, what the hell ...?!"
"Get out of there now, Crowley," Azra snapped right over him, his voice hard and edged with alarm. "A star's just risen on our southern horizon. Angels are the least of our troubles."
Crowley blinked, a heavy slide of opaque lids, and dropped his arms of his knees, the pistol hanging absently from one hand. The angel stared at him, eyes narrowing in mixed suspicion and alarm, but Crowley wasn't really focusing on him anymore.
Instead, he looked south, to the distant rise of red mountains and the green heat-haze over them. He looked to the horizon, where a pale white star had appeared above the mountains, glimmering soft and innocent against the green. The angel's gaze, following his, went wide and white, though he made no sound, nor any other indication of shock.
Hmm. Interesting, that.
"Morningstar or evening?" Crowley asked Azra softly, though he thought he might already know the answer. He watched the pale shining as the star seemed to swell, enlarging gently where it spun above the earth. Even as he watched, another star winked into existence alongside it, smaller, little more than a pinprick, but growing larger almost immediately. A small constellation waiting to happen, it looked like. Moving rapidly towards planetary orbit.
"... Morning, I think," Azra whispered, voice hushed and pained. "Almost definitely. There's at least six orbital platforms gating in-system. They'll ... they'll be here within three hours."
Crowley frowned thoughtfully, tapping his jaw with the muzzle of his pistol. He glanced over at their guest, now staring at the distant constellation, wings fluttering subconsciously in agitation. Surprised, Crowley thought. A touch panicked. Well. Watching Lucifer's morningstars from planetside would do that. But he thought this might mean something more than that. He thought that this had not been meant to happen.
"He's surprised," he murmured softly, into Azra's distant ear. "Our visitor. This wasn't meant to happen. We weren't meant to be disturbed."
Azra paused, fingers falling still on the keys. He'd be frowning thoughtfully, Crowley imagined. He'd be wearing his consideration mapped across his brow.
"You don't think they're here for us," his angel guessed, after a moment. Crowley smiled grimly.
"No," he agreed, letting the constellation grow unheeded on the horizon while he watched his captive instead, eyes narrow and golden in his face. "Orbitals, angel. Those aren't for us. Two little defectors aren't worth six morningstars, are they?" He paused. Not so much thinking, really, as letting the suspicions that had been lurking ever since he'd first seen the angel slide gently to the surface. "But then ... neither is one battered hunter, either."
Azra didn't catch that, not all of it. Azra wasn't the professional paranoiac that Crowley was. But he caught enough, understood enough of the implications, for alarm and a hard edge of desperation to snap into his voice.
"Leave him," his partner instructed, voice flat in Crowley's ear. "Crowley. Whoever he is. Whatever they're hunting. Leave him, come home and leave him. This is too big. We can't ... We're not able for this right now."
Almost as though he could hear him, the other angel turned his head to Crowley, turned away from the morningstars on the horizon and met Crowley's gaze with blue eyes that were suddenly a lot more lucid and a lot less contemptuous than they'd been a moment before. Crowley met them, head-on and unperturbed, and saw the calculation that had always been lurking there.
"... No," he said, slowly. Ignoring the startled snatch of breath on Azra's end, ignoring the calm gibbering in the back of his own skull. Just holding that bright, sharp gaze with his, and running through the ramifications. "I don't think we have that choice anymore, Azra. And I'm not sure we'd want it even if we did." He paused, a faint smile lurking on scaled lips. "As I said. I think this might turn out to be ... useful."
He surged smoothly to his feet, darting across to his prisoner with the speed of a striking snake. The angel lunged backwards, his wings flailing as he skittered away, but Crowley wasn't in the mood for that. Morningstars made a demon impatient, you know. He snapped out a hand, grabbed the angel by the back of the neck, and pressed his pistol into the soft flesh of an angelic throat.
The angel went still. Completely so, his eyes glaring up at Crowley from a suddenly immobile face. Crowley, for his part, just smiled darkly down at him.
"Got a choice for you," he said quietly, leaning his face close to the other's, ignoring the leisurely speeding of his heart as it kicked into higher gear. "I don't know who you are, though I can guess which faction you're coming from. I don't know why you wanted to be taken by us, when I'm next to positive you could have walked across this planet untouched by radiation if you'd wanted to." He lifted his lip, a light sneer of black amusement. "But whoever the hell you are, you've got morningstars hunting you, and I'm guessing that puts a slight crimp in your plans. So I think we might want to change tacks, here. And I think we might want to do so quickly. Don't you?"
For a long second, the angel said nothing. Azra was silent too, hushed breathless across the aether connection, and for a moment all Crowley could hear was the slow, heavy pounding of his own blood in his ears, the sluggish thunder of cold blood in the heat. And then ...
"What do you propose?" the angel said, and oh, there was no false defiance now. No contempt, no stereotypical sneering. Just cold, hard confidence, and the flat glimmer of intelligence in blue eyes. Crowley felt the chill sweep over him, even having known. He felt the flush of fear.
"... You want us," he said, after a few hard heartbeats. "Not dead. You could have done that from the air. You want something from us, and I don't think it's our lives. Right?" The angel raised an eyebrow, a slight, noncommittal sneer twitching his lip, and Crowley felt his heart stutter. Ignored it, shook it away. "You also need off-planet right now if you don't want to be a rapidly spreading cloud of atoms when the fireflowers hit in three hours. You may be good, but if you had something capable of taking out six morningstars, we'd have felt it come in. So." He paused, breathed. "So you've got two goals, both of which involve coming with me. Now, for preference. And ... at a significantly faster pace than this irradiated crawl you've been imitating for the past few hours. Wouldn't you agree?"
The angel stared at him. Blinking, hard and sharp and bewildered, his hands pressed into baked dust and the morningstars looming ever larger on the southern horizon. Crowley stared back, his heart thundering quietly in his chest, Azra's breathing so carefully steady over the link.
"... Why not just kill me?" the angel asked, after a moment. His voice quiet, curious, careful contemplation the only expression on his face. No fear. Even now. Even with a demon's pistol pressed beneath his chin and a hellish constellation gently forming in the skies above them. This angel had never, not once, been afraid.
Crowley closed his eyes, that same trapped bubble of amusement beating his ribs behind his heart, and lowered his pistol, stepping back with a shake of his head and a bright, savage smile on his lips. He felt Azra listening. He felt the distant, shining presence of his partner with a sudden, knifed intensity, and knotted his hand around the pistol grip.
"Because I'm not sure I can," he answered, soft and blistering, with that fatal suspicion lurking beneath it. Who this angel might be. What this angel might be. "Because you can't kill us at least until we get out of the morningstars' range, and that gives us time to work on some other options. Because whatever it is you think you'll get from us, I know we won't be giving it."
He paused, his expression darkening as he looked skywards, exhaustion and pain and an old, bright hate, and when he looked back down the angel's eyes had narrowed, some glimmer of realisation dawning quietly behind them. Crowley smirked, black and pained.
"And because," he said softly, his pistol slipping back into its holster as he held out a clawed hand to help an angel to his feet, "I stopped leaving people to die by Lucifer's hands a long time ago."
He heard the soft hitch of Azra's breath, the silent weight of history spun between them, and felt the knot of old pain and old triumph tighten in his chest. A black, dark sneer crested on his features, something that wasn't for the angel staring up at him, wondering if he should take an offered hand, nor for the angel listening in their distant ship, remembering having taken one so many years ago. No. This sneer, this savage thing, was for someone else entirely, a beautiful and terrible face distantly remembered, and the stars hanging in their sky to remind them of him.
"It ain't just Heaven we've been telling to go fuck themselves," he told the angel sprawled before him, the spy who'd come hunting renegades, and grinned darkly when that same angel reached up and, finally, let a demon pull him to his feet.
"... So I see," the angel murmured, watching him with thoughtful eyes, and Crowley only barely kept himself from flinching. Only barely kept himself from shying away, ancient instincts reminding him exactly why you never let an angel see you true, and then only because he had more important things to be thinking about.
Like getting back to base in time to get the hell off this planet and out of blast range, for example. Six morningstars. That wasn't something you sent just to firebathe the surface. No, oh no. Six orbitals was what you sent when you were looking to lance fire through to the heart of worlds and watch them tear apart beneath it. Six morningstars was what you sent when you wanted to be really, really sure your target wasn't ever coming back.
"Shall we, then?" he asked, light and bright and listening to the sluggish thunder of his heart. He almost laughed at the angel's expression, at the incredulity there. "Come on. We've two hours to get clear of this mess before we're all atoms. Kick it into gear, won't you?"
And yes, he was aware that taunting something on the order of what he suspected this angel to be was not at all wise. Even without Azra's faint hiss in his ear, Crowley was aware of that.
He just wasn't sure, at this point, how much he cared.
***
Azra was already strapped into Weapons & Tactical when Crowley hit the bridge, leaving the pilot seat and Navigation open for his partner while he focused on the six stars two planets out and crawling closer across the wardmaps. He looked up as Crowley came through the door at speed, his blue eyes as shockingly bright as ever in his radiation-browned face, and his expression floating somewhere between controlled panic and extreme exasperation. Crowley, all panic aside, had to pause for a moment to flash him an appreciative and innocent-looking grin.
Azra took that one about as well as he'd ever had, raising a supremely skeptical and slightly disgusted eyebrow in response, and Crowley laughed, quick and bright, and swung over to Tac to lean down and press a brief, bruising kiss to his angel's lips.
Damn, he loved him. All panic aside, all morningstars in the universe aside, that would ever and always be true.
"They're just under a hundred minutes away," Azra managed after a moment, glaring faintly at Crowley while he slung himself down into the pilot's seat and pulled down the headset. "We've got something moving on the surface, too. Smaller, much smaller. I'm guessing the groundship our new guest came on."
Crowley grunted, dialing up his connection to the ships AI absently as he scanned the wardmaps. "Yeah," he agreed. "Radiation poisoning my arse. He was doing his damnedest to look pathetic, but he wasn't ever going to get killed down here. He'd backup all along."
"Mmm," Azra murmured, his lip curling faintly. Crowley didn't think he was even conscious of it. "Gabriel. I'd bet you your choice of unFlooded worlds. He's one of Gabriel's. This has the Whisperer's fingerprints all over it."
Crowley snorted softly. "Uh-huh. And guess which archangel's forces would be exactly the sort of thing to pull six morningstars to a deserted rad-bath in the arse-end of nowhere." He sighed, shaking his head. "Ten to one odds that's Azazel up there. What do you bet?"
"Absolutely nothing," his partner returned easily. "I'll leave the fool's bet to other people, if you don't mind." There was a soft change of pitch from his station, the sub-audible whine of the Swords coming online. Twin orbital mining lasers mounted above and below the axis of the ship, they weren't much good for long distance fighting, but they'd leave some nice cauterised wounds behind them when running a blockade or making a run for it ahead of a morningstar's fighter complement. Azra'd always been rather knacky with them. "Incidentally. Where is our guest, dearest?"
"Behind three layers of wards down in decon one," Crowley replied, in the process of disengaging the ship's planetside camouflage and bringing them up into low hover for the first time in four months. "He wasn't particularly happy about a glorified jail cell, of course, but getting space-side ahead of planetary immolation is always a good argument for cooperation."And then, while he was thinking about it, he snapped his fingers at his headset, calling the AI. "Speaking of. Ben, dial the decon suite up to archangel level, will you? That angel's at the very least a sneaky bastard working for the sneakiest of all bastards. Let's not take chances, shall we?"
The ship hummed, Bentley remotely triggering the ward-layers across the lower decks, and Crowley looked across to find Azra eyeing him contemplatively. He raised a questioning brow-ridge, but his angel only shrugged lightly, a faint curl of amusement on his lips.
"Did anyone ever tell you you're very paranoid, my dear?" was all he asked, his blue eyes bright and gentle across the shadowed bridge and the glow of wardmaps. Crowley smiled, a tired little smirk of acknowledgement.
"I was born in Hell, angel," he murmured back, wry and rueful. Azra winced, a clouded protest trying to form behind his eyes, but he didn't disagree. They'd settled this old argument long ago. Wherever Crowley had originally been spun into being, his mind and his memories and his body itself had been reformed in Lucifer's change-pits. It was as close to birth as he could still remember. "It's not paranoia when the whole universe really is out to get you, is it?"
"... No," Azra agreed softly, after a long moment. "No, I suppose not." And it wasn't pity, not really. Rather, the empathy and the consideration of someone who had, by this stage, been hunted and betrayed a time or twenty himself, and knew paranoia well enough to shake it by the hand. That, as much as anything else, was the reason Crowley loved him.
Then the angel blinked, shaking himself as though to forcibly bring himself back on track. His eyes tracked back to the morningstars looming ever closer on the wardmaps, now less than seventy minutes out, and also the smaller flare of the Heavenly vessel gearing up down-continent of them. Bringing himself back to the situation at hand with a vaguely sheepish start.
"Ahem," Azra coughed, his lip quirking sheepishly. "Ah. That aside, dear one. Are we ready to go, would you say?"
Crowley chuckled. "Remembered the impending apocalypse, have you?" he asked lightly, and grinned into the dirty look Azra sent him. "Good to go, angel. Ben's locked onto the Adam's Gate in-system. All we've got to do is clear orbit and beat it back for the solar corona to link up before that new constellation gets in range." His grin this time wasn't directed at Azra, but rather at the universe at large. "Who do you want to bet on in a race between morningstars and Bentley, do you think?"
Azra raised both eyebrows this time, looking Crowley askance. "I don't know," he answered sweetly. "Who do you want to be on between a pair of Swords and six entire orbital firestars plus whatever Heaven's put down here to escort their top spies?" He snorted, shaking his head. "Let's get clear first, brag later, hmm?"
Crowley saluted him with one clawed hand, spinning the chair back around away from Tac in the process. "Aye sir!" He snickered, ignoring Azra's low hiss at the back of his head, and gripped the throttle between both hands. "Don't slay anyone I wouldn't slay, darling."
"I'll slay you if you don't ..." Azra started, and then shut up with a faint yelp as Crowley threw the switches all at once, the Bentley surging up the lie of the land before wheeling out into the great green skies of a Flooded world in an arc that lit up every wardmap in range. Somewhere down in the lower decks, an angel was probably cursing viciously as the g-force flattened him all unwary to the floor, the option of warning him having conveniently slipped his captors' minds. Crowley felt his serpentine lips peel back over pointed teeth, a black slit of fierce delight in his scaled face, and whooped softly into the aether as they came about and opened the engines for escape velocity.
"... I hate you," Azra muttered, cursing furiously under his breath, and swung back around to his wardmaps with more than a hint of pique in his movements. "One of these days, Crowley. One of these days."
"Any time, angel," Crowley purred, laughing faintly as adrenalin pushed even his sluggish blood into something rapid and almost delighted. "Head's up, incidentally. I think that's Heaven coming on hot behind us."
"Tch," Azra hissed, flicking across his maps with contemptuous fingers. "Not firing on us. Not with their man aboard. Did he get a signal off somehow?"
"Wouldn't surprise me. I watched him pretty close, but if he's Gabriel's then who knows what kind of wardtech he has." Crowley shrugged, most of his focus on the thinning atmosphere around them as they burst out into high orbit. "Should be tied down under the wards now. Probably why they're so keen to stay close."
"Trying to follow us?" Azra asked. Mostly rhetorically, he was already bringing the lower laser to bear. "Never mind. I don't like having Heaven looking over my shoulder at the best of times. This is not the best of times."
Crowley sneered, guiding the Bentley around the lunar orbit to slingshot deeper into the system. Conveniently, in the complete opposite direction to the encroaching morningstars. "Go easy on them, angel. They've still got Azazel to worry about, and they don't have a Gate like we do. Let's not handicap anyone too badly just yet, hmm?"
"I'm just going to discourage them a little," Azra agreed, his Swords already carving several brilliantly prohibitive paths between them and the pursuing vessel. "It's not like they won't have backups. Gabriel's not that arrogant, especially not if Azazel's going through a keen phase."
Crowley raised a brow-ridge, as invisible here as it had been across the aether link earlier. "If I'm paranoid, angel, you're cynical, has anyone ever told you that?" He bit off an oath, coming out from behind the smaller of the two moons to find a cluster of fighters accelerating towards them from the morningstars' direction. Sent a complement on ahead, fucking bastards, fine. "Incoming, darling. Eyes forward."
His partner hissed, taking one last swipe down at the Heavenly vessel and hurriedly designating a wardmap sector to keep an eye on it before swinging around to bring his Swords to bear on the oncoming threat. Crowley, with casual faith in Azra's prowess, aimed the Bentley for the slightly straggly cluster on the in-system end of the line, still swinging them around on the sling-shot course for the center of the system, and simply plowed forward on full steam, practically daring the Hellish forces to stay in his path.
Most of them did. Hell bred the fighter classes more for bloodlust and bloody-mindedness than smarts these days. Crowley'd been one of the originals, and an infiltrator besides, a honey-pot. He'd escaped that, been allowed to keep his more circumspect leanings.
Thank Something for small mercies, he thought, with an absent sort of hysteria, and rolled the Bentley at the last minute to sweep beneath them, belly up and three dimensional beneath their flightpath, Azra's twin Swords coming gleefully and maliciously to bear. Ploughshares into Swords, wasn't that the saying? Regardless, they carved through the Hellships in their path very nicely indeed. Mining lasers tended to do that.
"Pick up the pace, dear," Azra called over from Tac. "Their line's swinging to follow us, and Gabriel's people have very considerately buggered off into the lunar shadow. Unless one of those squad leaders miraculously grows a brain long enough to realise we're not their target, we'll have the whole damn line after us inside a few minutes."
"What did I tell you about backseat driving, angel?" Crowley hummed back, already in hasty negotiation with Ben on the subject of survivable acceleration limits while trying to thread a needle inside a solar corona. Escaping the forces of Hell was all very well, but if they plowed into a sun and/or the Gate in the process, it wasn't going to do them all that much good, was it?
"Just thought you'd like some pertinent information, darling." Azra's voice was sharp, strained around the edges as he tried to dissuade several dozen fighters with exactly two weapons, neither of them kinetic. The shield wards on the outer skin screamed politely at them as several payloads erupted alarmingly close by, and Crowley hissed under his breath, abruptly deciding fuck it. Fuck it anyway.
Threading the needle at high velocity. Okay. He could do that. All it took was a little precision, and a little stubbornness, and the serene confidence that the Bentley could hold together through anything the universe could throw at it. Those things, he had. So. Why the fuck not, hmm?
"Ben," he said, with an odd note of cheer that had Azra's cursing cutting out behind him in alarm. "Open the Gate now, would you? We're going to be coming in a little hot, and I think I'd like the door to be wide open before we get there, for preference."
"Hate you," Azra chanted behind him, raking their pursuers with one last sweep before spooling down the Swords, sheathing them back against the ship's skin with a cheerful sort of panic. "Hate you, hate the universe. Do you think I ought to warn our passenger he's about to die?"
Crowley laughed, throwing an entirely unwise but also completely necessary look at his angel back over his shoulder. "Sure," he said, his eyes hot and golden as they met his partner's, as he met the heat there that was nothing like the blistering, irradiated glare of the burnt-out world behind them. "Sure, why not? Everyone deserves some warning before they die, right?"
Azra stared at him, something utterly wild and more than a little fierce in his eyes. "You ..." he said, very quietly. "You're a bastard, dearest. An utter bastard. And I love you." He smiled, dark and crooked. "Just thought you should know."
Crowley swallowed, hard and heavy, and looked back with all the heat his cold-blooded body possessed. "Takes one to know one," he murmured hoarsely, and grinned bright and savage back. "Hold onto something, angel. This will be somewhat bumpy."
His partner snorted. "This will be somewhat brief," he rejoindered, but gripped the edges of his seat anyway, his dark knuckles paling against the armrests with all the strength of angels. "This is your captain speaking," he said into the intraship comms, bright and manically cheerful. "We will shortly be passing through the eye of a needle at considerable velocity while in the midst of coronal turbulence. As I'm sure you realise, this will in all likelihood result in our destruction. We apologise for any disruption of espionage this may cause, and thank you for flying Bentley spaceways. Your patronage has been important to us."
The wild, bright burst of manic amusement carried Crowley right through the flare of the corona across the outer wards, his heart pounding fit to burst as he pulled the ship through the ionised ring of plasma by raw force of will and sought through the fire for the other, more ephemeral ring of an Adam's Gate. Laughter bubbled up through his throat, rich and genuine in the face of destruction, and if the prayer he uttered wasn't to any deity still recognised in this universe, it was still vehement and sincere enough to count for a wing and a prayer as they rolled with a desperate lack of elegance and threaded that vanishing needle.
In the sudden shock of silence as the distant roar of coronal interference cut out and the quiet warp of gatespace wrapped around them, the desperate snorting giggles that escaped him were almost louder than Azra's soft, vehement blessing behind him.
"Well," his angel said faintly, after a long moment. "That went surprisingly well, didn't it?"
"We have entered gatespace," Ben announced suddenly, cheerfully oblivious to the fact that he'd just scared his crew shitless, his voice cool and calm as only an electronic voice could be. "Burning through the sky, sir. 200 degrees. That's why they call us Mr Fahrenheit."
"... Ben?" Crowley managed, squinting painfully up at the wardmaps as his body slumped down into his seat as if all the strength it possessed had simply melted away. He still found enough to raise a hand towards the AI icon winking cheerfully down at him.
"Yes, sir?" Ben asked, with blithe curiosity.
"Shut up!" Crowley hissed, low and savage as his raised hand shaped itself into a gesture that would make even the lowest demon blush. Azra, behind him, burst into startled, hiccuping laughter.
"Oh," his angel managed, stuttering around his giggles. "Oh, dearest. Crowley, dear one." He shook his head, pressing his lips together. "Well. Look on the bright side, love."
Crowley didn't have the energy to raise a brow-ridge, simply settling for staring blankly and more than a little skeptically at the serene, innocent expression that crept across his partner's face. "Yeah?" he rasped, softly. "What bright side is that, angel?"
Azra smiled with all the innocence of an angel who'd never Fallen so much as he'd wandered vaguely downwards. "Well, with one of Gabriel's spies in our hold, at least we won't have to explain anything to Adam for a long while yet," he pointed out. "We can't very well cart a spy off to Tadfield Station and let him browse through all our secrets, can we?" He grinned, slow and secretive. "A nice extended tour of the Flooded worlds, while we try to figure out what the nice Heavenly assassin is trying to pull out of us, and see if we can't maybe dissuade him in the process. Doesn't that just sound lovely?"
Crowley squinted at him, dark and golden, and then asked, very, very slowly: "... Which one of us is supposed to be the demon, again?"
But the angel was right enough, he supposed. A few more months knocking around the blasted heaths of the universe, dodging morningstars and archangels, taking in the radiation and walking Heaven in the Nephilim's grave steps. Compared to the thought of facing Adam and trying to explain to him that they hadn't been trying to get killed, no sir, it was just there was this spy and these orbitals and the odd archangel, you know how it is ...
Well. Let's just say that Crowley was glad he was wearing his radiation body, shall we?
Azra smiled softly at him, struggling up out of Tac to reach across the bridge and tangle his dark fingers amongst the pale yellow of Crowley's, holding tight as he leaned down to him.
"You," he said softly, while Crowley blinked languidly up at him. "You're the demon, dearest. You're my demon." He smiled, dark and dangerous, and leaned down to mouth softly over the thick scales of Crowley's features, soft heat that seared more than any sun. "So long as that's true, my dearest, there's no archangel in the universe who can stop the pair of us. Is there?"
... No, Crowley agreed silently, leaning up into his angel's embrace, basking like the serpent he was. Like the serpent he'd been made to be, more truthfully than Hell had ever anticipated. Curled into his angel's chest, his golden eyes narrowed to slits, he wrapped scaled arms around his partner with all the strength of demons, and sneered out at the universe behind them.
So long as Azra was his angel and he Azra's demon ... No. There really was no force, Heavenly or Hellish, that could hope to stop either of them. Which was just as well, really, considering there were so many that wanted to try.
After all, he thought muzzily. It's not paranoia when the universe really is out to get you.
Prequel/Backstory: A Slow Insurrection (7028 words, the War between Heaven & Hell, Aziraphale/Crowley)
The angel was dying. Crawling aimlessly across the blasted plains, the ward-metal drained to nothing over his back, his head bowed to the dust and only the scrabble of sun-burned hands to guide him, he looked about as dignified as an upturned turtle, and with about as much chance of surviving. The swollen sun glared down at him from a seared green sky, and didn't much care that it was killing him inch by burning inch.
The demon on the ridgeline above him, though, was still thinking about it.
"... Crowley?" crackled a voice in his ear, startling him briefly as he crouched thoughtfully in the shadow of a cracked boulder, staring down at the heat-drowned angel with narrowed golden eyes. "Crowley? Are you there?"
He reached up, touched at the curl of silver where his ear would have been in his other form, an arc of ward-metal across the yellow-white scales of his skull. "Ssh!" he hissed, testily. "What happened to radio silence, angel?"
There was a brief pause, and when the voice came back it was quieter, and a touch sheepish. "My apologies, dearest," Azra murmured, soft and rueful across the aether between them. "You know I get nervous when you're out alone. The orbital wards are picking up some strange readings, and I ... Well. I needed to hear your voice." An audible smile. "You know how I get, Crowley."
The demon snorted faintly, but his lip curled upwards at the same time, smiling entirely of its own accord. "Yes," he murmured. "I know." He sighed, sitting up on his haunches, eyes still tracking the slow, painful progress of the angel beneath him. "And I think I know what your readings are, too." He shook his head. "We've got company, angel. Either a groundship or fighters got through somewhere. I'm looking right now at a very irradiated angel crawling up towards our front porch."
The silence on the other end of the connection abruptly took on a much sharper, more attentive note. "Angel?" Azra asked sharply. "Are you sure? Not a Nephilim, or a human?"
"No," Crowley said shortly, watching the trailing of pale wings in the dust beneath him. "And not a demon either. Trust me, angel. I know what I'm looking at here."
Azra blessed softly under his breath. "Heaven," he said flatly. Not a question. "Not fighters. There's nothing close enough to send a lone fighter out here. It's a groundship. They've got one through somewhere."
Crowley hummed absent agreement, rocking smoothly to his feet and slithering down from his perch, slipping through the shadows and heading down towards the valley floor. "Thought so," he murmured, sliding his arc pistol gently down into his hand. "They're here for us, you think?"
Azra laughed, low and harsh, a faint tapping sound coming across the link as he called up the wardmaps back at the base. "Nothing else here, is there," he said, clipped and bitter. "An irradiated dustbath orbiting a distant sun. What other reason would they have to be here, aside from tracking down a couple of battered criminal scum?"
Crowley shook his head, tutting softly. "Easy, angel," he murmured, his scaled lips splitting into a grim, sardonic smile as he slid down the last of the scree slope and came about onto their visitor's trail. The skies were clear above him, but he set out at a rapid, ground-eating lope regardless. He'd hear a fighter coming, but a little caution never hurt anybody. "Not like we planned to stay here long regardless. And you never know. Might turn out useful."
"Useful?" Azra paused, the frown practically audible across the aether. "Crowley ... what are you doing? Please tell me you're not ..."
Crowley grinned blackly, letting Azra trail off into silence without answer. He had other fish to fry, circling the struggling figure of the angel warily, pacing him in a wide circle like the sweep of a shadow around the wheel of a sun. Never know what's a trap and what isn't, after all. Never can be too careful. But he had an idea, already, what sort of trap this was. He had an idea why angels came battered and burned to their door.
"Well now," he called across, the muzzle of his pistol resting casually on his opposite arm, crouching low to the baked earth as the angel's head snapped towards him, followed by a thin, warbling cry of pain at the sudden movement. "You look a little lost, friend."
"Crowley," Azra hissed, snarling invective in his ear. "You didn't."
"Hush, angel," he purred, grinning blackly in the white heat. "Trust me, alright? And get the decon wards up for me, won't you? I think we'll be having a guest."
"You ... you ..." The angel gave up, muttering something truly vile regarding Crowley's anatomy, and snapped across the line: "Fine. Fine. But if you die out there, I am not going to mourn you. You can forget that right now."
Crowley's smile faded off into something more rueful, slightly pained, and he nodded even though his partner couldn't see it. "So noted, angel," he murmured softly, and it was memory more than hearing that gave him the note of sorrow in Azra's voice in answer.
"Don't be long," the angel said, a soft sort of apology, and Crowley nodded in the sudden silence, his eyes hot and heavy on another angel entirely.
An angel who was looking at him now with pained, narrowed eyes, as bright and perfect a blue as the skies on cleaner worlds. An angel who had scrabbled upright in the dust to snarl at him through cracked and bleeding lips, a mask of disgust twisting sunburned features, instinctive challenge towards the demonic creature that crouched armed a little way away from him.
Crowley felt his lip lift slightly. Not a smile, no. Not that. He knew what the angel was seeing, knew what this dying creature saw when he looked at Crowley. The heavy, inhuman features, the serpentine yellow eyes, the thick scales the colour of bleached bone that masked any hint of angelicism his features had ever held. A demon, yes, humanoid only in vague shape, more serpent now than angel. Son of the dragon, oh yes.
"Long way from home space," Crowley noted casually, his pistol the same sort of black as his expression. "What's a nice angel like you doing on a Flooded world like this, hmm?"
"Kill me now, demon," the angel ... not spat. He'd have liked to spit it, maybe, liked the challenge of that, but a few hours baking in the killing heat of this little slice of purgatory tended to make that a difficult option. The words were rasped, instead, hoarse and cracked in the middle, and Crowley allowed himself to sneer at them.
"Doesn't look like I'd have to," he noted lightly, with a cheerful sort of darkness, nodding the nose of the pistol across the fairly pathetic figure his captive made. "You should have gone for something in scales, you know. Feathers and pale skin might be classical, but they don't do much against a radiation bath, do they?"
The angel snarled, coming up onto his knees and trying to flare his wings out to the side, an instinctive grasp at intimidation. The heavy feathers dragged in the dust, hanging limply, and Crowley simply raised a brow-ridge, heartily unimpressed.
"I would die before I wore the face of a demon," was the answer he got, and it seemed that contempt survived the heat much better than vitriol. The angel's features twisted, heavy lines of pride and defiance creasing the cracked skin, and an abrupt surge of humour bubbled through Crowley. A black and somewhat desperate amusement.
"Apparently so," he agreed, shaking his head against the trapped lump of humour, and then ...
Then he snapped his eyes to the angel's, golden gaze to blue, and let all hint of amusement drop from his tone. His face stilled, heavy features carving themselves into threatening lines, and abruptly the angel was looking not at a demon, a contemptible thing, but at a captor, at a threat. Suddenly the angel was a bird before a serpent, dirt-clogged wings fluttering painfully in agitation, and Crowley didn't even bother to sneer.
"I could leave you here," he murmured, dark and quiet. The angel flinched, but managed to keep his snarled defiance. "I could kill you with this here pistol, or I could just stand up, right now, amble away to leave the sun and the heat to finish you for me." He chuckled blackly. "It wouldn't take long, I think. I've been watching you for the past hour. Your wards are almost out. Once they fail, you're going to get the full dose of Flood radiation. You'll be dead as any Nephilim. A nice bit of irony to take you to an unmarked grave, don't you think?"
The angel said nothing. Sneered, desperately, but said nothing. Crowley smirked, cold and cruel.
"But that's not where this is going, is it?" he asked softly. Watching those hard, defiant eyes, watching the distant whisper of calculation behind them. "You're not going to die here. You've never believed this will kill you, or you'd have stopped crawling long ago." He tilted his head, smiling darkly as a faint shadow of consternation, sudden worry, passed across that peeling face. "I wonder," he murmured. "I wonder ... why that is."
He didn't get to see what the angel would have answered, though. The ward-metal at his ear spat suddenly, a shocking crackle in the stillness, and his head jerked sideways despite himself, trying to get away from it. He hissed, a hand darting from under his pistol to the side of his head, and snarled into the aether.
"Bless it, angel, what the hell ...?!"
"Get out of there now, Crowley," Azra snapped right over him, his voice hard and edged with alarm. "A star's just risen on our southern horizon. Angels are the least of our troubles."
Crowley blinked, a heavy slide of opaque lids, and dropped his arms of his knees, the pistol hanging absently from one hand. The angel stared at him, eyes narrowing in mixed suspicion and alarm, but Crowley wasn't really focusing on him anymore.
Instead, he looked south, to the distant rise of red mountains and the green heat-haze over them. He looked to the horizon, where a pale white star had appeared above the mountains, glimmering soft and innocent against the green. The angel's gaze, following his, went wide and white, though he made no sound, nor any other indication of shock.
Hmm. Interesting, that.
"Morningstar or evening?" Crowley asked Azra softly, though he thought he might already know the answer. He watched the pale shining as the star seemed to swell, enlarging gently where it spun above the earth. Even as he watched, another star winked into existence alongside it, smaller, little more than a pinprick, but growing larger almost immediately. A small constellation waiting to happen, it looked like. Moving rapidly towards planetary orbit.
"... Morning, I think," Azra whispered, voice hushed and pained. "Almost definitely. There's at least six orbital platforms gating in-system. They'll ... they'll be here within three hours."
Crowley frowned thoughtfully, tapping his jaw with the muzzle of his pistol. He glanced over at their guest, now staring at the distant constellation, wings fluttering subconsciously in agitation. Surprised, Crowley thought. A touch panicked. Well. Watching Lucifer's morningstars from planetside would do that. But he thought this might mean something more than that. He thought that this had not been meant to happen.
"He's surprised," he murmured softly, into Azra's distant ear. "Our visitor. This wasn't meant to happen. We weren't meant to be disturbed."
Azra paused, fingers falling still on the keys. He'd be frowning thoughtfully, Crowley imagined. He'd be wearing his consideration mapped across his brow.
"You don't think they're here for us," his angel guessed, after a moment. Crowley smiled grimly.
"No," he agreed, letting the constellation grow unheeded on the horizon while he watched his captive instead, eyes narrow and golden in his face. "Orbitals, angel. Those aren't for us. Two little defectors aren't worth six morningstars, are they?" He paused. Not so much thinking, really, as letting the suspicions that had been lurking ever since he'd first seen the angel slide gently to the surface. "But then ... neither is one battered hunter, either."
Azra didn't catch that, not all of it. Azra wasn't the professional paranoiac that Crowley was. But he caught enough, understood enough of the implications, for alarm and a hard edge of desperation to snap into his voice.
"Leave him," his partner instructed, voice flat in Crowley's ear. "Crowley. Whoever he is. Whatever they're hunting. Leave him, come home and leave him. This is too big. We can't ... We're not able for this right now."
Almost as though he could hear him, the other angel turned his head to Crowley, turned away from the morningstars on the horizon and met Crowley's gaze with blue eyes that were suddenly a lot more lucid and a lot less contemptuous than they'd been a moment before. Crowley met them, head-on and unperturbed, and saw the calculation that had always been lurking there.
"... No," he said, slowly. Ignoring the startled snatch of breath on Azra's end, ignoring the calm gibbering in the back of his own skull. Just holding that bright, sharp gaze with his, and running through the ramifications. "I don't think we have that choice anymore, Azra. And I'm not sure we'd want it even if we did." He paused, a faint smile lurking on scaled lips. "As I said. I think this might turn out to be ... useful."
He surged smoothly to his feet, darting across to his prisoner with the speed of a striking snake. The angel lunged backwards, his wings flailing as he skittered away, but Crowley wasn't in the mood for that. Morningstars made a demon impatient, you know. He snapped out a hand, grabbed the angel by the back of the neck, and pressed his pistol into the soft flesh of an angelic throat.
The angel went still. Completely so, his eyes glaring up at Crowley from a suddenly immobile face. Crowley, for his part, just smiled darkly down at him.
"Got a choice for you," he said quietly, leaning his face close to the other's, ignoring the leisurely speeding of his heart as it kicked into higher gear. "I don't know who you are, though I can guess which faction you're coming from. I don't know why you wanted to be taken by us, when I'm next to positive you could have walked across this planet untouched by radiation if you'd wanted to." He lifted his lip, a light sneer of black amusement. "But whoever the hell you are, you've got morningstars hunting you, and I'm guessing that puts a slight crimp in your plans. So I think we might want to change tacks, here. And I think we might want to do so quickly. Don't you?"
For a long second, the angel said nothing. Azra was silent too, hushed breathless across the aether connection, and for a moment all Crowley could hear was the slow, heavy pounding of his own blood in his ears, the sluggish thunder of cold blood in the heat. And then ...
"What do you propose?" the angel said, and oh, there was no false defiance now. No contempt, no stereotypical sneering. Just cold, hard confidence, and the flat glimmer of intelligence in blue eyes. Crowley felt the chill sweep over him, even having known. He felt the flush of fear.
"... You want us," he said, after a few hard heartbeats. "Not dead. You could have done that from the air. You want something from us, and I don't think it's our lives. Right?" The angel raised an eyebrow, a slight, noncommittal sneer twitching his lip, and Crowley felt his heart stutter. Ignored it, shook it away. "You also need off-planet right now if you don't want to be a rapidly spreading cloud of atoms when the fireflowers hit in three hours. You may be good, but if you had something capable of taking out six morningstars, we'd have felt it come in. So." He paused, breathed. "So you've got two goals, both of which involve coming with me. Now, for preference. And ... at a significantly faster pace than this irradiated crawl you've been imitating for the past few hours. Wouldn't you agree?"
The angel stared at him. Blinking, hard and sharp and bewildered, his hands pressed into baked dust and the morningstars looming ever larger on the southern horizon. Crowley stared back, his heart thundering quietly in his chest, Azra's breathing so carefully steady over the link.
"... Why not just kill me?" the angel asked, after a moment. His voice quiet, curious, careful contemplation the only expression on his face. No fear. Even now. Even with a demon's pistol pressed beneath his chin and a hellish constellation gently forming in the skies above them. This angel had never, not once, been afraid.
Crowley closed his eyes, that same trapped bubble of amusement beating his ribs behind his heart, and lowered his pistol, stepping back with a shake of his head and a bright, savage smile on his lips. He felt Azra listening. He felt the distant, shining presence of his partner with a sudden, knifed intensity, and knotted his hand around the pistol grip.
"Because I'm not sure I can," he answered, soft and blistering, with that fatal suspicion lurking beneath it. Who this angel might be. What this angel might be. "Because you can't kill us at least until we get out of the morningstars' range, and that gives us time to work on some other options. Because whatever it is you think you'll get from us, I know we won't be giving it."
He paused, his expression darkening as he looked skywards, exhaustion and pain and an old, bright hate, and when he looked back down the angel's eyes had narrowed, some glimmer of realisation dawning quietly behind them. Crowley smirked, black and pained.
"And because," he said softly, his pistol slipping back into its holster as he held out a clawed hand to help an angel to his feet, "I stopped leaving people to die by Lucifer's hands a long time ago."
He heard the soft hitch of Azra's breath, the silent weight of history spun between them, and felt the knot of old pain and old triumph tighten in his chest. A black, dark sneer crested on his features, something that wasn't for the angel staring up at him, wondering if he should take an offered hand, nor for the angel listening in their distant ship, remembering having taken one so many years ago. No. This sneer, this savage thing, was for someone else entirely, a beautiful and terrible face distantly remembered, and the stars hanging in their sky to remind them of him.
"It ain't just Heaven we've been telling to go fuck themselves," he told the angel sprawled before him, the spy who'd come hunting renegades, and grinned darkly when that same angel reached up and, finally, let a demon pull him to his feet.
"... So I see," the angel murmured, watching him with thoughtful eyes, and Crowley only barely kept himself from flinching. Only barely kept himself from shying away, ancient instincts reminding him exactly why you never let an angel see you true, and then only because he had more important things to be thinking about.
Like getting back to base in time to get the hell off this planet and out of blast range, for example. Six morningstars. That wasn't something you sent just to firebathe the surface. No, oh no. Six orbitals was what you sent when you were looking to lance fire through to the heart of worlds and watch them tear apart beneath it. Six morningstars was what you sent when you wanted to be really, really sure your target wasn't ever coming back.
"Shall we, then?" he asked, light and bright and listening to the sluggish thunder of his heart. He almost laughed at the angel's expression, at the incredulity there. "Come on. We've two hours to get clear of this mess before we're all atoms. Kick it into gear, won't you?"
And yes, he was aware that taunting something on the order of what he suspected this angel to be was not at all wise. Even without Azra's faint hiss in his ear, Crowley was aware of that.
He just wasn't sure, at this point, how much he cared.
***
Azra was already strapped into Weapons & Tactical when Crowley hit the bridge, leaving the pilot seat and Navigation open for his partner while he focused on the six stars two planets out and crawling closer across the wardmaps. He looked up as Crowley came through the door at speed, his blue eyes as shockingly bright as ever in his radiation-browned face, and his expression floating somewhere between controlled panic and extreme exasperation. Crowley, all panic aside, had to pause for a moment to flash him an appreciative and innocent-looking grin.
Azra took that one about as well as he'd ever had, raising a supremely skeptical and slightly disgusted eyebrow in response, and Crowley laughed, quick and bright, and swung over to Tac to lean down and press a brief, bruising kiss to his angel's lips.
Damn, he loved him. All panic aside, all morningstars in the universe aside, that would ever and always be true.
"They're just under a hundred minutes away," Azra managed after a moment, glaring faintly at Crowley while he slung himself down into the pilot's seat and pulled down the headset. "We've got something moving on the surface, too. Smaller, much smaller. I'm guessing the groundship our new guest came on."
Crowley grunted, dialing up his connection to the ships AI absently as he scanned the wardmaps. "Yeah," he agreed. "Radiation poisoning my arse. He was doing his damnedest to look pathetic, but he wasn't ever going to get killed down here. He'd backup all along."
"Mmm," Azra murmured, his lip curling faintly. Crowley didn't think he was even conscious of it. "Gabriel. I'd bet you your choice of unFlooded worlds. He's one of Gabriel's. This has the Whisperer's fingerprints all over it."
Crowley snorted softly. "Uh-huh. And guess which archangel's forces would be exactly the sort of thing to pull six morningstars to a deserted rad-bath in the arse-end of nowhere." He sighed, shaking his head. "Ten to one odds that's Azazel up there. What do you bet?"
"Absolutely nothing," his partner returned easily. "I'll leave the fool's bet to other people, if you don't mind." There was a soft change of pitch from his station, the sub-audible whine of the Swords coming online. Twin orbital mining lasers mounted above and below the axis of the ship, they weren't much good for long distance fighting, but they'd leave some nice cauterised wounds behind them when running a blockade or making a run for it ahead of a morningstar's fighter complement. Azra'd always been rather knacky with them. "Incidentally. Where is our guest, dearest?"
"Behind three layers of wards down in decon one," Crowley replied, in the process of disengaging the ship's planetside camouflage and bringing them up into low hover for the first time in four months. "He wasn't particularly happy about a glorified jail cell, of course, but getting space-side ahead of planetary immolation is always a good argument for cooperation."And then, while he was thinking about it, he snapped his fingers at his headset, calling the AI. "Speaking of. Ben, dial the decon suite up to archangel level, will you? That angel's at the very least a sneaky bastard working for the sneakiest of all bastards. Let's not take chances, shall we?"
The ship hummed, Bentley remotely triggering the ward-layers across the lower decks, and Crowley looked across to find Azra eyeing him contemplatively. He raised a questioning brow-ridge, but his angel only shrugged lightly, a faint curl of amusement on his lips.
"Did anyone ever tell you you're very paranoid, my dear?" was all he asked, his blue eyes bright and gentle across the shadowed bridge and the glow of wardmaps. Crowley smiled, a tired little smirk of acknowledgement.
"I was born in Hell, angel," he murmured back, wry and rueful. Azra winced, a clouded protest trying to form behind his eyes, but he didn't disagree. They'd settled this old argument long ago. Wherever Crowley had originally been spun into being, his mind and his memories and his body itself had been reformed in Lucifer's change-pits. It was as close to birth as he could still remember. "It's not paranoia when the whole universe really is out to get you, is it?"
"... No," Azra agreed softly, after a long moment. "No, I suppose not." And it wasn't pity, not really. Rather, the empathy and the consideration of someone who had, by this stage, been hunted and betrayed a time or twenty himself, and knew paranoia well enough to shake it by the hand. That, as much as anything else, was the reason Crowley loved him.
Then the angel blinked, shaking himself as though to forcibly bring himself back on track. His eyes tracked back to the morningstars looming ever closer on the wardmaps, now less than seventy minutes out, and also the smaller flare of the Heavenly vessel gearing up down-continent of them. Bringing himself back to the situation at hand with a vaguely sheepish start.
"Ahem," Azra coughed, his lip quirking sheepishly. "Ah. That aside, dear one. Are we ready to go, would you say?"
Crowley chuckled. "Remembered the impending apocalypse, have you?" he asked lightly, and grinned into the dirty look Azra sent him. "Good to go, angel. Ben's locked onto the Adam's Gate in-system. All we've got to do is clear orbit and beat it back for the solar corona to link up before that new constellation gets in range." His grin this time wasn't directed at Azra, but rather at the universe at large. "Who do you want to bet on in a race between morningstars and Bentley, do you think?"
Azra raised both eyebrows this time, looking Crowley askance. "I don't know," he answered sweetly. "Who do you want to be on between a pair of Swords and six entire orbital firestars plus whatever Heaven's put down here to escort their top spies?" He snorted, shaking his head. "Let's get clear first, brag later, hmm?"
Crowley saluted him with one clawed hand, spinning the chair back around away from Tac in the process. "Aye sir!" He snickered, ignoring Azra's low hiss at the back of his head, and gripped the throttle between both hands. "Don't slay anyone I wouldn't slay, darling."
"I'll slay you if you don't ..." Azra started, and then shut up with a faint yelp as Crowley threw the switches all at once, the Bentley surging up the lie of the land before wheeling out into the great green skies of a Flooded world in an arc that lit up every wardmap in range. Somewhere down in the lower decks, an angel was probably cursing viciously as the g-force flattened him all unwary to the floor, the option of warning him having conveniently slipped his captors' minds. Crowley felt his serpentine lips peel back over pointed teeth, a black slit of fierce delight in his scaled face, and whooped softly into the aether as they came about and opened the engines for escape velocity.
"... I hate you," Azra muttered, cursing furiously under his breath, and swung back around to his wardmaps with more than a hint of pique in his movements. "One of these days, Crowley. One of these days."
"Any time, angel," Crowley purred, laughing faintly as adrenalin pushed even his sluggish blood into something rapid and almost delighted. "Head's up, incidentally. I think that's Heaven coming on hot behind us."
"Tch," Azra hissed, flicking across his maps with contemptuous fingers. "Not firing on us. Not with their man aboard. Did he get a signal off somehow?"
"Wouldn't surprise me. I watched him pretty close, but if he's Gabriel's then who knows what kind of wardtech he has." Crowley shrugged, most of his focus on the thinning atmosphere around them as they burst out into high orbit. "Should be tied down under the wards now. Probably why they're so keen to stay close."
"Trying to follow us?" Azra asked. Mostly rhetorically, he was already bringing the lower laser to bear. "Never mind. I don't like having Heaven looking over my shoulder at the best of times. This is not the best of times."
Crowley sneered, guiding the Bentley around the lunar orbit to slingshot deeper into the system. Conveniently, in the complete opposite direction to the encroaching morningstars. "Go easy on them, angel. They've still got Azazel to worry about, and they don't have a Gate like we do. Let's not handicap anyone too badly just yet, hmm?"
"I'm just going to discourage them a little," Azra agreed, his Swords already carving several brilliantly prohibitive paths between them and the pursuing vessel. "It's not like they won't have backups. Gabriel's not that arrogant, especially not if Azazel's going through a keen phase."
Crowley raised a brow-ridge, as invisible here as it had been across the aether link earlier. "If I'm paranoid, angel, you're cynical, has anyone ever told you that?" He bit off an oath, coming out from behind the smaller of the two moons to find a cluster of fighters accelerating towards them from the morningstars' direction. Sent a complement on ahead, fucking bastards, fine. "Incoming, darling. Eyes forward."
His partner hissed, taking one last swipe down at the Heavenly vessel and hurriedly designating a wardmap sector to keep an eye on it before swinging around to bring his Swords to bear on the oncoming threat. Crowley, with casual faith in Azra's prowess, aimed the Bentley for the slightly straggly cluster on the in-system end of the line, still swinging them around on the sling-shot course for the center of the system, and simply plowed forward on full steam, practically daring the Hellish forces to stay in his path.
Most of them did. Hell bred the fighter classes more for bloodlust and bloody-mindedness than smarts these days. Crowley'd been one of the originals, and an infiltrator besides, a honey-pot. He'd escaped that, been allowed to keep his more circumspect leanings.
Thank Something for small mercies, he thought, with an absent sort of hysteria, and rolled the Bentley at the last minute to sweep beneath them, belly up and three dimensional beneath their flightpath, Azra's twin Swords coming gleefully and maliciously to bear. Ploughshares into Swords, wasn't that the saying? Regardless, they carved through the Hellships in their path very nicely indeed. Mining lasers tended to do that.
"Pick up the pace, dear," Azra called over from Tac. "Their line's swinging to follow us, and Gabriel's people have very considerately buggered off into the lunar shadow. Unless one of those squad leaders miraculously grows a brain long enough to realise we're not their target, we'll have the whole damn line after us inside a few minutes."
"What did I tell you about backseat driving, angel?" Crowley hummed back, already in hasty negotiation with Ben on the subject of survivable acceleration limits while trying to thread a needle inside a solar corona. Escaping the forces of Hell was all very well, but if they plowed into a sun and/or the Gate in the process, it wasn't going to do them all that much good, was it?
"Just thought you'd like some pertinent information, darling." Azra's voice was sharp, strained around the edges as he tried to dissuade several dozen fighters with exactly two weapons, neither of them kinetic. The shield wards on the outer skin screamed politely at them as several payloads erupted alarmingly close by, and Crowley hissed under his breath, abruptly deciding fuck it. Fuck it anyway.
Threading the needle at high velocity. Okay. He could do that. All it took was a little precision, and a little stubbornness, and the serene confidence that the Bentley could hold together through anything the universe could throw at it. Those things, he had. So. Why the fuck not, hmm?
"Ben," he said, with an odd note of cheer that had Azra's cursing cutting out behind him in alarm. "Open the Gate now, would you? We're going to be coming in a little hot, and I think I'd like the door to be wide open before we get there, for preference."
"Hate you," Azra chanted behind him, raking their pursuers with one last sweep before spooling down the Swords, sheathing them back against the ship's skin with a cheerful sort of panic. "Hate you, hate the universe. Do you think I ought to warn our passenger he's about to die?"
Crowley laughed, throwing an entirely unwise but also completely necessary look at his angel back over his shoulder. "Sure," he said, his eyes hot and golden as they met his partner's, as he met the heat there that was nothing like the blistering, irradiated glare of the burnt-out world behind them. "Sure, why not? Everyone deserves some warning before they die, right?"
Azra stared at him, something utterly wild and more than a little fierce in his eyes. "You ..." he said, very quietly. "You're a bastard, dearest. An utter bastard. And I love you." He smiled, dark and crooked. "Just thought you should know."
Crowley swallowed, hard and heavy, and looked back with all the heat his cold-blooded body possessed. "Takes one to know one," he murmured hoarsely, and grinned bright and savage back. "Hold onto something, angel. This will be somewhat bumpy."
His partner snorted. "This will be somewhat brief," he rejoindered, but gripped the edges of his seat anyway, his dark knuckles paling against the armrests with all the strength of angels. "This is your captain speaking," he said into the intraship comms, bright and manically cheerful. "We will shortly be passing through the eye of a needle at considerable velocity while in the midst of coronal turbulence. As I'm sure you realise, this will in all likelihood result in our destruction. We apologise for any disruption of espionage this may cause, and thank you for flying Bentley spaceways. Your patronage has been important to us."
The wild, bright burst of manic amusement carried Crowley right through the flare of the corona across the outer wards, his heart pounding fit to burst as he pulled the ship through the ionised ring of plasma by raw force of will and sought through the fire for the other, more ephemeral ring of an Adam's Gate. Laughter bubbled up through his throat, rich and genuine in the face of destruction, and if the prayer he uttered wasn't to any deity still recognised in this universe, it was still vehement and sincere enough to count for a wing and a prayer as they rolled with a desperate lack of elegance and threaded that vanishing needle.
In the sudden shock of silence as the distant roar of coronal interference cut out and the quiet warp of gatespace wrapped around them, the desperate snorting giggles that escaped him were almost louder than Azra's soft, vehement blessing behind him.
"Well," his angel said faintly, after a long moment. "That went surprisingly well, didn't it?"
"We have entered gatespace," Ben announced suddenly, cheerfully oblivious to the fact that he'd just scared his crew shitless, his voice cool and calm as only an electronic voice could be. "Burning through the sky, sir. 200 degrees. That's why they call us Mr Fahrenheit."
"... Ben?" Crowley managed, squinting painfully up at the wardmaps as his body slumped down into his seat as if all the strength it possessed had simply melted away. He still found enough to raise a hand towards the AI icon winking cheerfully down at him.
"Yes, sir?" Ben asked, with blithe curiosity.
"Shut up!" Crowley hissed, low and savage as his raised hand shaped itself into a gesture that would make even the lowest demon blush. Azra, behind him, burst into startled, hiccuping laughter.
"Oh," his angel managed, stuttering around his giggles. "Oh, dearest. Crowley, dear one." He shook his head, pressing his lips together. "Well. Look on the bright side, love."
Crowley didn't have the energy to raise a brow-ridge, simply settling for staring blankly and more than a little skeptically at the serene, innocent expression that crept across his partner's face. "Yeah?" he rasped, softly. "What bright side is that, angel?"
Azra smiled with all the innocence of an angel who'd never Fallen so much as he'd wandered vaguely downwards. "Well, with one of Gabriel's spies in our hold, at least we won't have to explain anything to Adam for a long while yet," he pointed out. "We can't very well cart a spy off to Tadfield Station and let him browse through all our secrets, can we?" He grinned, slow and secretive. "A nice extended tour of the Flooded worlds, while we try to figure out what the nice Heavenly assassin is trying to pull out of us, and see if we can't maybe dissuade him in the process. Doesn't that just sound lovely?"
Crowley squinted at him, dark and golden, and then asked, very, very slowly: "... Which one of us is supposed to be the demon, again?"
But the angel was right enough, he supposed. A few more months knocking around the blasted heaths of the universe, dodging morningstars and archangels, taking in the radiation and walking Heaven in the Nephilim's grave steps. Compared to the thought of facing Adam and trying to explain to him that they hadn't been trying to get killed, no sir, it was just there was this spy and these orbitals and the odd archangel, you know how it is ...
Well. Let's just say that Crowley was glad he was wearing his radiation body, shall we?
Azra smiled softly at him, struggling up out of Tac to reach across the bridge and tangle his dark fingers amongst the pale yellow of Crowley's, holding tight as he leaned down to him.
"You," he said softly, while Crowley blinked languidly up at him. "You're the demon, dearest. You're my demon." He smiled, dark and dangerous, and leaned down to mouth softly over the thick scales of Crowley's features, soft heat that seared more than any sun. "So long as that's true, my dearest, there's no archangel in the universe who can stop the pair of us. Is there?"
... No, Crowley agreed silently, leaning up into his angel's embrace, basking like the serpent he was. Like the serpent he'd been made to be, more truthfully than Hell had ever anticipated. Curled into his angel's chest, his golden eyes narrowed to slits, he wrapped scaled arms around his partner with all the strength of demons, and sneered out at the universe behind them.
So long as Azra was his angel and he Azra's demon ... No. There really was no force, Heavenly or Hellish, that could hope to stop either of them. Which was just as well, really, considering there were so many that wanted to try.
After all, he thought muzzily. It's not paranoia when the universe really is out to get you.
Prequel/Backstory: A Slow Insurrection (7028 words, the War between Heaven & Hell, Aziraphale/Crowley)
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