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I know I owe people other fic, I haven't forgotten that. But this has been sitting on my laptop in various stages of completion for about two months now, and it finally spilled out tonight, so I'm posting it before it changes its mind -_-; Prequel to Enemy Mine, the apocalyptic GO space AU.
Title: A Slow Insurrection
Rating: R
Fandom: Good Omens, Christian Myth
Characters/Pairings: Crowley, Aziraphale (Azra), Lucifer, Gabriel, Azazel, Michael, Jesus, Judas, Adam Young. Aziraphale/Crowley
Summary: Six moments in a galactic war of biblical proportions and the slow insurrection that is seeded through them, as an angel and a demon struggle to make sense of a universe at war and their places in it.
Wordcount: 7028
Warnings/Notes: Backstory for Enemy Mine. AU, blasphemy, violence, civil war, genocide, dystopia, apocalypse, first contact, planetary destruction, exile, all the good stuff
Disclaimer: Really not mine
Title: A Slow Insurrection
Rating: R
Fandom: Good Omens, Christian Myth
Characters/Pairings: Crowley, Aziraphale (Azra), Lucifer, Gabriel, Azazel, Michael, Jesus, Judas, Adam Young. Aziraphale/Crowley
Summary: Six moments in a galactic war of biblical proportions and the slow insurrection that is seeded through them, as an angel and a demon struggle to make sense of a universe at war and their places in it.
Wordcount: 7028
Warnings/Notes: Backstory for Enemy Mine. AU, blasphemy, violence, civil war, genocide, dystopia, apocalypse, first contact, planetary destruction, exile, all the good stuff
Disclaimer: Really not mine
A Slow Insurrection
Eden
The sun was rising. It always was, here. The Eastern Gate Station was designed specifically to ensure it, maintaining a unique orbit in order to continuously greet the sunrise around the curvature of the planet below. A perpetual dawn, indefinitely sustained. The demon huddled on her observation deck marvelled distantly at the vainglory of it. Heaven, he noted with some mild hysteria, could not be so different from Lucifer after all. The station was a conceit truly worthy of the Morningstar.
Light flared beneath him, rising up around the planet from the section moving deeper into darkness, from a city slowly sinking into night. He flinched, curling back into the shadows of one of the support struts, the silence of the abandoned station echoing hollowly around him. He watched that rising blaze of light drift silently past him, hurtling out into the icy voids of space, and curled back from the sight of it.
They are little better than prisoners, a voice whispered in his memory, soft and kindly and persuasive. They are coddled and lied to and kept unaware of all the wonder that lies beyond their little world. Heaven would keep them ignorant. Heaven would keep them controlled. But we could change that. You could change that. You know the truth of Heaven, the false paradise they have created. You could ... show it to them.
So Lucifer had told him. So the Devil had whispered in his ear, gentle and pitying, before sending him forth to serve his purpose. Wrung through the change-pits, reformed and remade from what he had been, he had crept through the Wall in innocent guise, a harmless serpent beneath the notice of angels, and slipped among the humans. Those strange, innocent creatures Heaven kept safe within a ring of orbital platforms on Eden planet. The creatures for whom Heaven had sundered from Hell, all those years ago. The blind mud-children that had in all innocence caused the greatest interstellar cataclysm in history.
He had crept among them, a demon named Crawly, and he had whispered to them of wonders. He had showed them the hidden angelic installations on their planet, the wardtech concealed beneath its skin and in the places they'd been told not to go. He had offered them forbidden knowledge, whispers and wardmaps and glimpses of worlds beyond theirs, of a vast infinity of space that held wonders and terrors beyond their wildest imaginings. At first, because it was his mission and his duty. Later, because they hungered. Because they embraced it with eager curiosity, because he came to believe. By the end, he had offered them that poisoned cup because he had believed, in his own stupid, witless innocence, that they deserved no less.
And now ... now that flare of light arced upwards into the void. A ship. One of six, the last of the massive generation ships forced into launch from Gnosis, the first city of Eden. It carried a full sixth of the planetary population locked into ward-stasis within its holds, taking them out beyond the now-silent Wall into the depths of space, to survive or be destroyed as fate willed.
Knowledge, it seemed, was something Heaven would not tolerate humans to have. And Hell had known it.
"Does it please you?" a voice asked from the doorway, a bitter, venomous question out of the silence of a station he had believed abandoned. Crawly flinched, a bolt of terror momentarily striking his heart still in his chest, and turned to face the angel behind him. An angel he knew, he realised: the Principality who had been assigned to this station, the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. The guardian ... who now glared at him with molten fury, and an odd note of pain.
"... What?" he asked, hoarse and ragged, when the angel did not immediately move to strike him down. He curved back against the transparent wall of the observation deck, not quite cowering, but the angel only stalked forward, empty hands clenched tight at his side, and looked with bright, bitter eyes upon him.
"I said," he repeated softly, pinning Crawly with his gaze, "does it please you?" He gestured out at the pale star of the ship moving past the Wall. "Does it make you happy to have caused this, demon? To have whispered in their ears and taken everything from them. Does that give you a warm glow of a job well-done?"
And it wasn't ... it wasn't hatred or pride or offended honour that Crawly heard in the question. It wasn't the anger of a thwarted agent, the rage of an enemy soldier who had lost a battle. It was ... it was grief, instead. A savage, bitter pain, the grief of a guardian who had failed his charges. An impotent fury, not for the loss of his own position, but for the cost to the people he had believed he was protecting.
It was, Crawly thought hollowly, the anger of an innocence betrayed, and in the face of it he had no answer. So he did not. He curled his head against the coming blow, and said nothing.
And after a moment, an endless humming moment in which the promise of violence hung like a gathering storm ... the angel's rage broke, fled from him like poison from a wound, and only bleak acceptance remained. He leaned forward, that failed guardian, and pressed his brow against reflected image of a darkened planet.
"Get off my station," he rasped, closing his eyes to block Crawly from his sight. "You hear me, demon? Go now or so help me, I will kill you where you stand." A shuddering breath, a sluggish stir of hatred. "The next time I see you, I'll kill you. For Eden. For them. But right now I cannot bear the sight of you. So leave now, and this time you may live."
Crawly swallowed, staring at him, at the rigid, savage figure poised beside him. He felt ... he didn't know. An odd sensation, a strange urge to reach out. To do something, to say something, to take away the rending edge of pain in the other being. To salve his own horror, maybe. To salve the monstrous realisation of the true reason he had been sent. Either way, for one strange moment, he felt the urge to reach out and offer ... something.
Then the angel turned to look at him, patience sheared away and a seething, murderous fury sparking beneath it, and Crawly slammed backwards instead. Flung himself away, fear and horror and nausea writhing within him, and fled for the docking bay.
Beneath them, unremarked in the void, the last lights of Eden went dark.
Dudael
The angel caught him unawares.
The bastard snuck up on him. In his home, in his own little lair on a remote and out-of-the-way planet that was still slowly but surely discovering the finer points of civilisation. Humans had been getting the hang of that, the past few centuries. They had adapted to the void surprisingly well, carving out spaces for themselves in the systems their ships had landed in, slowly expanding in fits and starts across the galaxy. Learning and innovating as they went, to the point that in some places they'd finally begun to reach standards of living and technology that an angel, fallen or otherwise, might find respectable, if still primitive.
Of course, they'd been getting help with that. Help, and hints, and outright, mass-scale interference. Interference on a scale to threaten the balance of a war they still didn't know was being fought. Interference on a scale to call the wrath of Heaven down once more ...
It hadn't touched this world. The vengeful Flood sweeping across the galaxy, drowning planets behind it. It hadn't touched this one. Crawly, now Crowley, had thanked every dubious and neutral force he knew the name of when he realised that, when he passed through the system Hellgate into orbit and found an untouched planet still waiting for him. He had dropped his ship quietly and discreetly into landfall, thanking every blasphemous concept he knew for the mercy, and wearily dragged himself to what ought to have been a safe haven, to home.
And found, after everything he had just been through and survived, that there was a bastard of an angel waiting for him with a sword and a grudge. For the love of mercy.
"Do you never tire?" the angel hissed, his ward-blade brittle and lethal as ice against Crowley's throat, pinning him up against the sandstone of his home. "Damn you. Do you never tire of destroying them? Do you never tire of bringing them down?"
Anger flared. Fury roared up through him, rich and bright and infinitely comforting after the long horrors of this mission. Crowley snarled, drawing the weapons the latest round in the change-pits had embedded in his body, wrapping clawed hands around the angel's wrist and pivoting beneath the sword to slam the angel sideways. The shock of it, the sudden surge of unexpected strength, caught his opponent enough off-guard that it only took a moment to slam the sword from his grip and snap a hand against his throat in turn.
"Don't," Crowley hissed, a naked snarl into the stunned fury in the angel's face. "Don't you dare talk to me. I have just watched the Flooding of an entire planet, almost been torn apart by a grief-stricken fallen archangel, and stood on the irradiated ashes of a thousand murdered children. Don't you DARE talk to me of destroying people!" He lunged his weight forward, driving the angel above him, a crushing weight on the bastard's throat forcing him up the incline of the wall. Fury burned through him, as lethal as the radiation that had almost killed him, and he spat the last word in a paroxysm of rage: "It wasn't Hell that Flooded Grigoria!"
The angel made a strangled sound, a strained, breathless 'urk!', and slammed his locked arms upwards against Crowley's, kicking back off the wall for momentum. The blow slammed pain through Crowley's shoulders, almost threatening to snap the bones in his forearm, but it took another two to break his grip on the angel's throat, to make him let go and dart back a furious step away from the flung fists. The angel staggered backwards away from him, one hand raised wardingly between them, and stared at him in stunned, wary confusion for a moment, massaging his throat with the spare hand.
Crowley, for his part, found himself quivering with fury, a frantic stillness that threatened to fly apart at any moment. The rage was almost distant, a mania possessing his body that he didn't really seem to feel. He was ... almost glad of that.
"You ..." the angel started, flinching a little at the madness that visibly slammed through Crowley in response. "You were involved. Gabriel was tracking you. The woman ..." A hitch of breath, a skittering step backwards from Crowley's expression. "On Grigoria. Just ahead of the orbitals. The woman Azazel loved. You went to warn her. She was one of yours ..."
"She was a friend," Crowley roared, the rage flaring to incandescence for a second and then ... then it snuffed out, snapped out of existence within him and left him abruptly scoured behind it. He paused, crumpled, and the next words were only whispered. "Bless it, bless it. She was a friend, that was all she was." He laughed suddenly, bright and bitter. "They're not all whores and spies, you know. Hell. Even the ones that are. That's not all they do. That's not all they are!"
We, he meant to say. That's not all we are. But blessed if this bastard of an angel wrung that much weakness from him. He panted for a second, ragged, gasping gulps of air, and managed to steady his voice somewhat. Managed to look into the angel's wide eyes and keep his voice at least partially steady.
"She was a friend," he repeated, clipped and cold. "I knew her in Sumer system, decades ago. I lost track of her when she moved to Grigoria. When she fell in love with an archangel, how suicidal do you think I am? Do you think I'd willingly come within lightyears of Azazel?! I found out about the Nephilim from Gabriel, you stupid bastard, I knew because Heaven knew and I'm a damned good spy and not all the Whisperer's people are as good at keeping secrets as he is! I found out because suddenly there's whispers of abomination and annihilation across half the galaxy and she was stuck right in the middle of it. So, because she was my friend, I went to warn her."
The angel stared at him, blinking rapidly in wary confusion. He shook his head, looking bizarrely like he was actually listening, like he was trying to make sense of what Crowley was saying. Like he was actually entertaining the notion that it might be the truth.
"You broke Azazel out of Dudael," he said at last. Cautiously, more a question than an accusation. "We know it was you, no-one else is as slippery. Azazel's fall caused the loss of a whole system and an entire order of angels for Heaven, one of your people was the one to tempt him, and then you broke into a Heavenly prison and retrieved Azazel himself for Hell!" He straightened, challenge slipping back into his tone. "For God's sake, you cannot expect me to believe this wasn't some plan you orches--"
"Of course it was a plan," Crowley interrupted. Flatly, floating not on rage, now, but on a distant memory of fear and horror. "Lucifer sent me to retrieve him. A fallen archangel, one who would hate Michael and Gabriel so violently? That was too good for Hell to pass up, and I was right there on the scene. So he sent me. And apparently Azazel thought exactly the same thing you thought, he thought I'd sent her to seduce him as well. That I'd conspired to bring him low and break his power and bring Heaven in to murder his children. That was a fun conversation, let me tell you!"
And he'd survived it, he'd survived by the skin of his teeth and the strength of his grief for a woman they'd both cared for, but that hadn't changed the terror when Azazel turned on him. It hadn't changed the archangel's grief, it hadn't changed the staggering number of dead. It hadn't healed the blasted, burned horror of Grigoria's irradiated remains, it hadn't wiped away the thousands of murdered children and the scattered hundreds left fleeing across the galaxy. Powerful and warlike and vicious as the Nephilim had apparently been, the horror of their genocide was still a livid stain across his memory and his survival did nothing to change that.
"You don't get to blame me for this one, Principality," he rasped softly, staring out past the angel's shoulder into the memory of a Flooded world, of an archangel's mad, terrible grief and the serene, steady drift of orbital platforms out from the ruins of Grigoria, an implacable hunt spreading outwards to drown the last, fleeing steps of the Nephilim. "I can break a world with a whisper but I'm not alone in it." He smiled, black and bitter. "Will you put a sword to Gabriel's throat too?"
The angel didn't answer. This time, while it was Grigoria and not Eden that fell into night, it was the angel who said nothing, and ran from the demon's wrath.
Well. That made it two hollow victories between them, didn't it?
Babylon
"Don't say it. Please."
Crowley coughed, wiping sweat and dust away from his eyes with the back of one armoured hand, and stared down at the bedraggled prisoner that shared his bolt-hole. He'd pulled the angel out of several tonnes of rubble and debris, yanking the stunned, winged figure through the storm of fire and metal still raining down on the city around him, and it was only after he'd already shoved them both into the armoured remains of a groundship for shelter that he'd actually realised who the hell he'd rescued.
That realisation had been very rapidly followed by a drawn arc pistol and a snarled warning for the angel not to move, but it turned out that was largely unnecessary. Killing demons was ... not the most prominent thing on the angel's mind right now.
"... Don't say what?" he growled, rough and impatient, but he already knew. Given their history and the devastation that currently surrounded them, given the most memorable conversations Crowley had had with this enemy agent ... he already had an idea what it was the angel desperately didn't want him to voice.
The angel looked up at him, a pleading flash of hollow eyes in an ash-blackened face, and Crowley found himself wincing involuntarily. Not sympathy, never that. He'd learned that lesson centuries ago in an abandoned station. But some echo, maybe, of the strange urge he had felt then, that first time. The desire to lessen the blow for this being. The desire to ... to preserve some remnant of the innocence that had fueled that formidable anger.
"I know," the angel whispered now, a vicious, trembling acknowledgement, pale hands knotted into fists as he crouched beneath Crowley's pistol. "Damn you, damn it all, I know. I understand, alright?"
Metal rained around them, some millions of tonnes, fire and shredded debris and the ponderous, shattered weight of the greatest human installation ever built. The Babel Gate Tower, a massive and prodigiously unoptimised cylindrical object that had until recently hung in orbit over Babylon. The product of an unprecedented alliance of human systems, the best technology their collective genius could offer, it had been the first entirely human-built and human-controlled Gate access, a magnificent, defiant finger right in the teeth of the twin Empires. Something that would have allowed them unmonitored, uncontrolled access to gatespace, something that might potentially have provided them a window into the heart of Heaven or Hell, had they known where to point it. Something that would have allowed mere humans to challenge all the power and majesty of the Empires.
It had been Michael's hand that laid it low, Crowley thought. He was almost positive the constellation of eveningstar orbitals in Babylon's sky belonged to the Prince of Seraphs. When you wanted overwhelming force, when you wanted a firework show to strike terror into the hearts of all who opposed you, it was Michael you went to.
Well. Or Lucifer, but if Hell had been the ones to strike Babel down, the angel wouldn't have been near so upset. That was ... sort of the point, wasn't it? It hadn't been Hell that Flooded Grigoria. And it hadn't been Hell that destroyed the single greatest technological breakthrough humanity had ever achieved, simply because it was the greatest. Too great and too dangerous for Heaven to ever let it stand.
Heaven, who had sent humanity alone and helpless out into the stars all those centuries ago, just for having learned something Heaven didn't want them to know.
Crowley looked down into the pained, desperate comprehension in an angel's eyes, felt the echo of the blank, distant horror a newly-remade demon had felt when he'd abruptly realised the full vastness of what he had just done, what an older and more terrible power had carefully manipulated him into doing, and he flinched. Blessed, suddenly and vehemently, and jerkily lowered the muzzle of his pistol.
Not all the way. Paranoia was a survival trait in a demon. But enough that the mouth of his weapon was not the first thing the angel saw when he looked at him.
"... For what little it's worth?" he said quietly. "I was sent here to see how much of a threat the Tower would be to Hell. If Gabriel hadn't gotten wind of it first, I can promise you, there would still have been new stars in Babylon's sky. They'd just have been morning instead evening." He smiled crookedly, a black little burst of humour. "Odd, don't you think, how difficult it can be to tell them apart sometimes?"
He'd seen it then, hadn't he? All the way back at the beginning, even newly made and with little memory, even torn and reforged and shaped in Lucifer's image. He'd still stood on the Eastern Gate Station, and noticed how very Lucifer-like a thing it was.
Hell was only Heaven under different management, in the end. The difference between them was only in terms of the name giving the order, not the nature of the orders themselves. And humanity, ever and always, would be the ones to pay for that.
Poor sorry bastards.
He shook his head, catching the angel's eyes again. "They've been stuck in the middle from day one, angel," he reminded gently. "The humans. They didn't mean to cause the largest war the galaxy has ever seen. They didn't mean to get Lucifer upset and split the Empire right down the middle, they didn't mean to get us all stuck in the endless bloody game of one-upmanship ever since. But they did, and that means they're always going to get the short end of the stick. They're always going to be the ones hurting and dying and getting blasted out of the fucking sky, and there's bugger all they can do about it. Or us, for that matter." He shrugged, stiff and pained and uneasy. "We're just the schmucks on the ground. All we can do is follow orders and hope ... hope it doesn't break anything too badly."
Like worlds, for example. Like the entire future of a race. But orders were orders, and there were more than a few things in this universe that were too big and too terrible to fight. Crowley had seen that. He'd lived it, maybe more times than he remembered, if the change-pits could wipe a memory clean more than once. Sometimes you just ... knuckled down, and did the job, and sometimes tried to salvage some little something. Some friend, or enemy, or piece of a world. Sometimes you just ... had to hope it would be enough.
"I can't ..." the angel started, staring up at Crowley in a mix of disgust and pity and pained, desperate horror. "I can't. How could you live like that? How could you make yourself?"
Crowley flinched. He went cold, the muzzle of his pistol coming back up, a hard, rigid expression slipping back over his face. "Because I don't have a lot of choice," he growled quietly. "And because I don't want to die."
And again, the angel had no answer. This time, though, it was because Crowley had struck him rather heavily across the head with the butt of his pistol. He had an escape to orchestrate, after all. He had an entire Heavenly fleet to outrun, and the news of a fallen Tower to report back to his superiors.
He left the angel safely in the relative shelter of the groundship, though. Sometimes ... sometimes you just had to salvage something.
Jerusalem
The metal shone in the desert sun, bright and painful stabs of light as he rolled the discs in his palm. Not wardtech. Nothing more than inert metal, precious on some worlds, worthless on others. Thirty pieces, all told. The price of two lives, even if one wouldn't be lost for long.
"... Crowley," a voice said cautiously, behind him. Familiar, now. Made so by millennia, by a hundred thousand shared conflicts, by one's blood on the other's weapon, by tiny services and betrayals spread across a thousand years and a thousand worlds. Familiar enough for the angel to know his name. Familiar enough for Crowley to know his in turn.
"Aziraphale," he answered quietly, without looking around. Without moving from his seat, sprawled on a low rise beneath a tree and the silent scrap of rope that hung from it. The silver shone viciously in his hand, and he was far too tired to meet an angel's gaze.
After a moment, a long, slow exhale, the angel came over and sat gingerly beside him. He wore a human body, a dark, desert-capable form born from whatever Heaven had in place of the change-pits. He looked, much as Crowley did, like the people that surrounded them, as native as any human on this world. It had been a long time, maybe centuries, since Aziraphale had worn the bright, dazzling forms angels favoured.
"They've buried the Son," the angel said softly, his eyes on Crowley's hand and the bloody price cradled there. "Heaven has two stars in orbit. They'll retrieve him soon, maybe three days. If he hasn't raised himself, that is. Things are ... a little uncertain."
"I'm sure," Crowley said, distant and noncommittal. He should be angry, maybe. Or relieved. Or even triumphant, given the role he had played, the orders he had carried out so very, very well. He should feel something. But he didn't. The most he felt, right now, was a deep, unutterable weariness.
The silence stretched, for a while. Long and pained, opening like the chasms between them, the shared triumph and utter failure of the last three decades, the last three years. Hell had won, in the slaying of a Son and the dark determination of confused and fearful people. Heaven had won, in His promised return, and in what He would have learned by His death. Humanity, forever caught between them, had known a brief moment of hope, and heard a voice that told them for the first time since Babel fell that cooperation might yet grant them wonders.
Crowley, with silver in his palm and two men's blood upon it, didn't really care. He was too tired.
"... I tried, you know," Aziraphale whispered. Part offering and part exhausted, pained commiseration. "Iscariot. I tried to offer forgiveness, hope. Something. He was a pawn, your pawn. He had to know that. I ... I tried." It wasn't even an accusation, wasn't flung against Crowley as it had been so many times before. The angel was just ... saying it. Saying that he had tried to save the man Crowley'd been ordered to betray. That he'd tried to salvage something, when there could be no hope of either of them disobeying.
In response, Crowley's lips peeled back, nothing close to a smile, drawing back over pointed teeth and a serpentine tongue. Bleak, so very bleak.
"I tried for forty days," he rasped in agreement. "Forty days and forty nights. I told him. I told him what was coming, what he would suffer, what he'd pay for standing up against both bloody Empires, God's Son or no God's Son." He snarled, clenching his hand around the coins, pale bone showing through dark knuckles. "All he had to do was pick a side, be a king or an emperor or a god. All he had to do. But he picked them. He walked in there, and he died for them, and now ... now they'll die for him too. Wars will start and worlds will fall, and it'll be the Nephilim all over again before it's through. And, do you know the worst thing?"
He grinned, rolling his head to find the angel watching him, to find the dark, desperate pity in his enemy's eyes. Crowley curled his bloodied palm tight around shards of metal and laughed black and old into his enemy's understanding.
"The worst thing is, I'll be lauded for it," he hissed, low and savage with the anger he'd thought had been crushed out of him. "For tempting him. For whispering words in that poor bastard Iscariot's ear, for offering empires to the Sons of Gods to lead them astray." He sneered, black and terrible. "Ask me again, angel. Ask me, Guardian. Ask me if that pleases me. Ask me if I never tire."
He wrenched himself to his feet, a brutal, savage motion of his arm flinging silver into the dust at an angel's feet, the rope swinging above his head where a man had hung himself in horror at the vastness of what he'd done, what an older and more terrible power had manipulated him into doing. Crowley wrenched himself to his feet and paced in raging, contained despair beneath the pained gaze of an angel, the only angel, who knew full well what echoes played around them.
"... They chose it," that angel offered. It was an empty reassurance, weak and hopeless against those echoes, but he offered it anyway. To salve his own horror, maybe. To try and salve them both. "They knew they were pawns. They knew they would pay for it, in the end. They knew, Crowley. And they still ..."
And they still. Ever and always, they still. The eternal hubris, the eternal hope. To drink from a poisoned cup, to nurse a forbidden love, to build a forbidden tower, to stand in defiance of empires. To take their own lives, in payment for actions that could never be undone. To rage and to act and to fight and to fall. Knowing they were going to die, again and again, every time, they still.
Maybe that, that knowledge, that death, was why they did it. That poisoned gift they had been given so many aeons ago, that Crowley had helped to give them. Maybe, when death was a certainty anyway, it was the action itself that mattered, more than whether you would live or die because of it. Maybe it was only in the face of inevitable consequence that courage could ever actually matter.
Maybe that was why Crowley, who had always nursed some desperate hope that he might live, had no courage of his own. Nor ever had.
He looked over, met an angel's eyes, the only being on any planet who had ever questioned what they did to each other and actually expected an answer. Crowley looked at the angel, the enemy, Aziraphale, who looked back at him with the echo of his own shame, and smiled. Dark and pained and serpentine.
"Do you ever wonder, angel?" he asked softly, "what will be the cost for what we choose?"
London
There was a Gate in the air above the city. Far above, kissing the lower reaches of orbit, but at the same far lower than any Gate had a right to go. It hung there like an angry, defiant star, a mouth waiting to open and denounce them all, while around it, bewildered and desperate and furious, the fleets of Heaven and Hell swarmed and fought and fell.
Not Babel. Neither Heaven nor Hell, but not Babel either, that wonder and that folly all over again. Something smaller, more refined, infinitely more dangerous. A wild card in a war of Empires that might threaten to topple everything, to pull the foundations from beneath an entire cosmology and tumble it all into dust. The Gate that hung above London was neither of Hell nor Heaven nor Humanity, but from some strange, alien mix of all three, from some abominable echo of Nephilimic construction.
Above London, above a tiny, backwater world in a tiny, backwater system, the Anti Christ had come to power, the Adam's Gate had sprung into being, and the beginning of the end had finally come calling.
"It's almost beautiful, isn't it?" the angel at his side asked softly, his pale form leaning back into the shadow of one of the control tower support struts, his face tipped skyward to watch the writhing and raging of battle above them. "Apocalyptic, of course. The end of everything. But, at the same time ..."
"Yeah," Crowley murmured, resting his hand against the glass of the observation deck, watching as the bloom of fireflowers in the darkness created a final, perpetual sunset above the planet. "At the same time. Yes."
"It's our fault, of course," Aziraphale went on, mild and absent. "Losing track of the Devil's Son. Allowing him to be raised on some backwater, human planet, knowing nothing but love, nothing but frailty. Letting him be raised in the company of mortals and Nephilim and Heaven knows what else. Letting him grow without interference." He smiled, a tiny, private thing, empty and fierce. "All our fault, this time. The ending of another world. Of all the worlds. Dearie, dearie me. However will we live with the shame."
Crowley stared at him. His world blanked, for a second, went white and distant at that echo so casually wielded, and when it came back he turned and he met Aziraphale's gaze and he hissed. "... You bastard. You bastard, angel."
Aziraphale just looked at him. There was a strange light in his eyes, a burning Crowley hadn't seen since a dawn station above a planet falling into darkness, a fierce luminescence that hadn't existed since the Guardian of a world long fallen. The light, the rage, of a wounded innocence, returned once more.
"Haven't we destroyed enough of them?" the angel asked him, soft and sibilant, savage. "Orders after orders, haven't we killed enough, Crowley?" He smiled, pale and shining, and gestured out at the destruction on the other side of a thin pane of glass. "And this time we failed to obey them, we failed to do as we were told, and it's happening anyway. No matter what happens, no matter what we do, death seems inevitable. So why not ... why not do something different. Why not fuck them, why not salvage something, why not try." He laughed, a twitching, fluttering lift of his lip. "Damnit, damnit, I want to be a guardian again, not an executioner. I want to ... I want to try. The universe is ending, Crowley. Why not hold a sword to their throats for a change, hmm? Why the hell not?"
Something hammered at the back of Crowley's ribs, at the back of his brain. A memory, the fragment of a memory, something where no memories should be, after Lucifer's change-pits. Something that had always been, from the moment he'd understood the horror of what he'd done, and wanted to comfort his enemy through it.
"I've always wondered," he said distantly. Not exactly an answer, but bearing on it. "Why those libraries were left on Eden. Why the knowledge was left, where anyone could find it, if only they dared ... if only they dared accept the consequences." He tilted his head, a frozen whirl of stars falling into his stomach. "I wondered ... why the first person to speak of human cooperation since the fall of Babel was the Son of God. Why he had to die because of it. Why he did it anyway."
Aziraphale stared at him, pale and frozen and so very, very bright, all of a sudden. Shining like silver, the price of two lives. Aziraphale stared at him, and the silence yawned breathless and terrible between them.
"... What if we were meant to?" Crowley whispered, a tiny question into the void. "It's not Heaven vs Hell. They don't matter. What if it's just ..."
What if it was choice and consequence. For all of them. What if it was the price humanity paid for knowledge, and Heaven paid for obediance, and Hell paid for defiance. What if it was the price Grigoria had paid for love, and the Nephilim for existing, and the Christ for standing, and the Anti Christ ... the Anti Christ for building an alien gate and defying everything and ending the universe.
What if death was inevitable, and the only things that mattered were the choices you made despite it?
"I don't want to die," Crowley said at last, that one truth he had nursed through millennia, that one shame that had dogged him through the fall of a thousand worlds. "I don't want to die, angel. But I am fed up of letting everyone else do it for me, either."
Because there had been a ship above Gnosis and a tower above Babylon and a gate above London, and he was tired of seeing them fall, tired of knowing he had let them. He was curled in the shadow of another support strut, standing above another world rolling into night, and he was bloody tired of it. He was tired, and he was angry, and he didn't want to hide a wounded innocence anymore. Not from Aziraphale. And not from all the eyes in Heaven or Hell, either.
"I have a ship," he said, holding out a hand, tight and quivering and desperately, furiously hopeful. "It's the best ship in the galaxy, the fastest and the best and it's home. It could ... it could get us through that Gate." He smiled, dark and serpentine and grim. "It could take us out beyond the Wall, Aziraphale. If that would please you any."
And the angel smiled, and the angel took his hand, and the angel said:
"My dear, it would please me greatly."
Tadfield
They tumbled out from the maw of gatespace into a strange, distant system, a system neither they nor the Bentley's nav system recognised. Which might have been a concern, maybe, if an entire fleet hadn't immediately surrounded them on reentry and made several other concerns rather more immediately pressing.
They were past caring, though. Fear and hope and desperate determination had tangled between them, a solution to all those millennia of bloodied silence, and it would take a good deal more than an alien fleet to force them back.
"Nephilim," Aziraphale whispered as they drifted under guard towards the great space station at the centre of the fleet, hushed even though no-one could hear them. "Those are Grigorian war designs, aren't they?"
"Mmm," Crowley agreed, equally quiet, equally without reason. "There's human in there, though. And something of Hell. I think that's a Cerebus weapon system, at x2y5z3 close range. See the trio clustering on the ports?"
Aziraphale glanced at him. "Defectors?" he asked, carefully. Crowley shook his head.
"I'd have heard," he said shortly. "At least if they were pre-Apocalypse. It could be part of his original guard, though. When we lost him, there were several of his demonic bodyguard that vanished with him. Or it could be Adam himself." His lip curled sardonically. "He was the Prince of Hell, after all. Human-raised or not, there'll always be a touch of his father in him."
A hand curled around his own, fingers threading through his lightly, and Crowley glanced over at the angel in startlement. Aziraphale frowned carefully at him. "Does that worry you?" the angel asked, entirely seriously. "Will he be enough his father to hurt you?"
Crowley gaped at him a little bit. "Me?" he managed, after a moment. "You're the angel, Aziraphale. Shouldn't you be more worried about him hurting you?"
And then ... then Aziraphale looked at him, for longer than Crowley thought the angel had ever looked at him before, and with an expression he had never seen. He had thought he'd seen every emotion the angel possessed, all the rage and horror and humour and pity and love, but he had never seen this. He knew he hadn't.
"Call me Azra," the angel said, very slowly. "I don't think I'll be an angel much longer, nor able to bear an angel's name. And I think ... I think I have never been more worried about threats to me than to you." He paused, smiled slow and tremulous. "I ought to have killed you, the first time we met. I ought to have killed you every time we met. But somehow ... somehow I don't think I could ever really bear the thought. Not even then. You have cost me everything I ever believed I loved, and I think I would sooner die than see you hurt."
Crowley stared. Even as Tadfield Station drifted ever closer across the wardmaps, even as their choices came ever closer to calling, he simply stood. Simply stared. Remembering the strange ache in his chest, all those thousands of years ago, the need to reach out and offer something that might salve an angel's pain. The need, ever and always, to salvage some little thing from the horror and the exhaustion of an endless war, and the way that thing had so often been ... been an angel, an enemy, someone he should have seen destroyed so many times.
He stood on the bridge of a salvaged ship, in the shadow of the most apocalyptic consequence of any choice he had ever made, and he felt ... he felt the slow unfurling of a wounded innocence, and a hope he thought he'd been cured of long, long since.
"You have always been an angel," he said finally, hoarse and thick. "Azra, if that's what you want. But you will always be an angel." A smile, lopsided and bright. "You didn't Fall. You just hung around with a bad crowd and ... and wandered vaguely downwards, that's all."
Aziraphale, Azra, laughed at that. Stepped close, an odd sort of twist to his smile, a strange courage in the lift of his hand and the trail of soft fingertips over Crowley's cheek. He touched Crowley gently, a strange shining in his eyes, and leaned close while Crowley held very, very still.
"Stay with me," the angel murmured, moving so close as though to leave no room for any silence to ever reach between them again. "Stay with me, demon mine, and I'll kill anyone who touches you again. Stay with me and I'll make sure you stay alive. Or I will die trying."
"Until the end of the universe," Crowley agreed, soft and quiet, and forbore to mention that he had salvaged an angel first, and had no intention now of ever being the last to fall. "Until the fall of Heaven and Hell and everything in between, angel. No matter who comes for us, no matter what happens on the station."
"Good," Azra said, a shaking, savage figure against him, smiling crookedly in the light of Tadfield on the wardmaps, and then the angel kissed him. Sweet and deep and dark as the innocence they had both lost, and yes, Crowley thought. Heaven or Hell or Death be damned.
Yes, it was very good indeed.
A/N: Based on episodes from Christian Myth and Good Omens. 'Eden' corresponds to the Book of Genesis, 'Dudael' corresponds to the Book of Enoch, 'Babylon' to Genesis again, 'Jerusalem' to the Gospel of Matthew (for that version of Judas' death), 'London' to Good Omens, and 'Tadfield' to a projected aftermath and up into 'Enemy Mine'. Heh.
Eden
The sun was rising. It always was, here. The Eastern Gate Station was designed specifically to ensure it, maintaining a unique orbit in order to continuously greet the sunrise around the curvature of the planet below. A perpetual dawn, indefinitely sustained. The demon huddled on her observation deck marvelled distantly at the vainglory of it. Heaven, he noted with some mild hysteria, could not be so different from Lucifer after all. The station was a conceit truly worthy of the Morningstar.
Light flared beneath him, rising up around the planet from the section moving deeper into darkness, from a city slowly sinking into night. He flinched, curling back into the shadows of one of the support struts, the silence of the abandoned station echoing hollowly around him. He watched that rising blaze of light drift silently past him, hurtling out into the icy voids of space, and curled back from the sight of it.
They are little better than prisoners, a voice whispered in his memory, soft and kindly and persuasive. They are coddled and lied to and kept unaware of all the wonder that lies beyond their little world. Heaven would keep them ignorant. Heaven would keep them controlled. But we could change that. You could change that. You know the truth of Heaven, the false paradise they have created. You could ... show it to them.
So Lucifer had told him. So the Devil had whispered in his ear, gentle and pitying, before sending him forth to serve his purpose. Wrung through the change-pits, reformed and remade from what he had been, he had crept through the Wall in innocent guise, a harmless serpent beneath the notice of angels, and slipped among the humans. Those strange, innocent creatures Heaven kept safe within a ring of orbital platforms on Eden planet. The creatures for whom Heaven had sundered from Hell, all those years ago. The blind mud-children that had in all innocence caused the greatest interstellar cataclysm in history.
He had crept among them, a demon named Crawly, and he had whispered to them of wonders. He had showed them the hidden angelic installations on their planet, the wardtech concealed beneath its skin and in the places they'd been told not to go. He had offered them forbidden knowledge, whispers and wardmaps and glimpses of worlds beyond theirs, of a vast infinity of space that held wonders and terrors beyond their wildest imaginings. At first, because it was his mission and his duty. Later, because they hungered. Because they embraced it with eager curiosity, because he came to believe. By the end, he had offered them that poisoned cup because he had believed, in his own stupid, witless innocence, that they deserved no less.
And now ... now that flare of light arced upwards into the void. A ship. One of six, the last of the massive generation ships forced into launch from Gnosis, the first city of Eden. It carried a full sixth of the planetary population locked into ward-stasis within its holds, taking them out beyond the now-silent Wall into the depths of space, to survive or be destroyed as fate willed.
Knowledge, it seemed, was something Heaven would not tolerate humans to have. And Hell had known it.
"Does it please you?" a voice asked from the doorway, a bitter, venomous question out of the silence of a station he had believed abandoned. Crawly flinched, a bolt of terror momentarily striking his heart still in his chest, and turned to face the angel behind him. An angel he knew, he realised: the Principality who had been assigned to this station, the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. The guardian ... who now glared at him with molten fury, and an odd note of pain.
"... What?" he asked, hoarse and ragged, when the angel did not immediately move to strike him down. He curved back against the transparent wall of the observation deck, not quite cowering, but the angel only stalked forward, empty hands clenched tight at his side, and looked with bright, bitter eyes upon him.
"I said," he repeated softly, pinning Crawly with his gaze, "does it please you?" He gestured out at the pale star of the ship moving past the Wall. "Does it make you happy to have caused this, demon? To have whispered in their ears and taken everything from them. Does that give you a warm glow of a job well-done?"
And it wasn't ... it wasn't hatred or pride or offended honour that Crawly heard in the question. It wasn't the anger of a thwarted agent, the rage of an enemy soldier who had lost a battle. It was ... it was grief, instead. A savage, bitter pain, the grief of a guardian who had failed his charges. An impotent fury, not for the loss of his own position, but for the cost to the people he had believed he was protecting.
It was, Crawly thought hollowly, the anger of an innocence betrayed, and in the face of it he had no answer. So he did not. He curled his head against the coming blow, and said nothing.
And after a moment, an endless humming moment in which the promise of violence hung like a gathering storm ... the angel's rage broke, fled from him like poison from a wound, and only bleak acceptance remained. He leaned forward, that failed guardian, and pressed his brow against reflected image of a darkened planet.
"Get off my station," he rasped, closing his eyes to block Crawly from his sight. "You hear me, demon? Go now or so help me, I will kill you where you stand." A shuddering breath, a sluggish stir of hatred. "The next time I see you, I'll kill you. For Eden. For them. But right now I cannot bear the sight of you. So leave now, and this time you may live."
Crawly swallowed, staring at him, at the rigid, savage figure poised beside him. He felt ... he didn't know. An odd sensation, a strange urge to reach out. To do something, to say something, to take away the rending edge of pain in the other being. To salve his own horror, maybe. To salve the monstrous realisation of the true reason he had been sent. Either way, for one strange moment, he felt the urge to reach out and offer ... something.
Then the angel turned to look at him, patience sheared away and a seething, murderous fury sparking beneath it, and Crawly slammed backwards instead. Flung himself away, fear and horror and nausea writhing within him, and fled for the docking bay.
Beneath them, unremarked in the void, the last lights of Eden went dark.
Dudael
The angel caught him unawares.
The bastard snuck up on him. In his home, in his own little lair on a remote and out-of-the-way planet that was still slowly but surely discovering the finer points of civilisation. Humans had been getting the hang of that, the past few centuries. They had adapted to the void surprisingly well, carving out spaces for themselves in the systems their ships had landed in, slowly expanding in fits and starts across the galaxy. Learning and innovating as they went, to the point that in some places they'd finally begun to reach standards of living and technology that an angel, fallen or otherwise, might find respectable, if still primitive.
Of course, they'd been getting help with that. Help, and hints, and outright, mass-scale interference. Interference on a scale to threaten the balance of a war they still didn't know was being fought. Interference on a scale to call the wrath of Heaven down once more ...
It hadn't touched this world. The vengeful Flood sweeping across the galaxy, drowning planets behind it. It hadn't touched this one. Crawly, now Crowley, had thanked every dubious and neutral force he knew the name of when he realised that, when he passed through the system Hellgate into orbit and found an untouched planet still waiting for him. He had dropped his ship quietly and discreetly into landfall, thanking every blasphemous concept he knew for the mercy, and wearily dragged himself to what ought to have been a safe haven, to home.
And found, after everything he had just been through and survived, that there was a bastard of an angel waiting for him with a sword and a grudge. For the love of mercy.
"Do you never tire?" the angel hissed, his ward-blade brittle and lethal as ice against Crowley's throat, pinning him up against the sandstone of his home. "Damn you. Do you never tire of destroying them? Do you never tire of bringing them down?"
Anger flared. Fury roared up through him, rich and bright and infinitely comforting after the long horrors of this mission. Crowley snarled, drawing the weapons the latest round in the change-pits had embedded in his body, wrapping clawed hands around the angel's wrist and pivoting beneath the sword to slam the angel sideways. The shock of it, the sudden surge of unexpected strength, caught his opponent enough off-guard that it only took a moment to slam the sword from his grip and snap a hand against his throat in turn.
"Don't," Crowley hissed, a naked snarl into the stunned fury in the angel's face. "Don't you dare talk to me. I have just watched the Flooding of an entire planet, almost been torn apart by a grief-stricken fallen archangel, and stood on the irradiated ashes of a thousand murdered children. Don't you DARE talk to me of destroying people!" He lunged his weight forward, driving the angel above him, a crushing weight on the bastard's throat forcing him up the incline of the wall. Fury burned through him, as lethal as the radiation that had almost killed him, and he spat the last word in a paroxysm of rage: "It wasn't Hell that Flooded Grigoria!"
The angel made a strangled sound, a strained, breathless 'urk!', and slammed his locked arms upwards against Crowley's, kicking back off the wall for momentum. The blow slammed pain through Crowley's shoulders, almost threatening to snap the bones in his forearm, but it took another two to break his grip on the angel's throat, to make him let go and dart back a furious step away from the flung fists. The angel staggered backwards away from him, one hand raised wardingly between them, and stared at him in stunned, wary confusion for a moment, massaging his throat with the spare hand.
Crowley, for his part, found himself quivering with fury, a frantic stillness that threatened to fly apart at any moment. The rage was almost distant, a mania possessing his body that he didn't really seem to feel. He was ... almost glad of that.
"You ..." the angel started, flinching a little at the madness that visibly slammed through Crowley in response. "You were involved. Gabriel was tracking you. The woman ..." A hitch of breath, a skittering step backwards from Crowley's expression. "On Grigoria. Just ahead of the orbitals. The woman Azazel loved. You went to warn her. She was one of yours ..."
"She was a friend," Crowley roared, the rage flaring to incandescence for a second and then ... then it snuffed out, snapped out of existence within him and left him abruptly scoured behind it. He paused, crumpled, and the next words were only whispered. "Bless it, bless it. She was a friend, that was all she was." He laughed suddenly, bright and bitter. "They're not all whores and spies, you know. Hell. Even the ones that are. That's not all they do. That's not all they are!"
We, he meant to say. That's not all we are. But blessed if this bastard of an angel wrung that much weakness from him. He panted for a second, ragged, gasping gulps of air, and managed to steady his voice somewhat. Managed to look into the angel's wide eyes and keep his voice at least partially steady.
"She was a friend," he repeated, clipped and cold. "I knew her in Sumer system, decades ago. I lost track of her when she moved to Grigoria. When she fell in love with an archangel, how suicidal do you think I am? Do you think I'd willingly come within lightyears of Azazel?! I found out about the Nephilim from Gabriel, you stupid bastard, I knew because Heaven knew and I'm a damned good spy and not all the Whisperer's people are as good at keeping secrets as he is! I found out because suddenly there's whispers of abomination and annihilation across half the galaxy and she was stuck right in the middle of it. So, because she was my friend, I went to warn her."
The angel stared at him, blinking rapidly in wary confusion. He shook his head, looking bizarrely like he was actually listening, like he was trying to make sense of what Crowley was saying. Like he was actually entertaining the notion that it might be the truth.
"You broke Azazel out of Dudael," he said at last. Cautiously, more a question than an accusation. "We know it was you, no-one else is as slippery. Azazel's fall caused the loss of a whole system and an entire order of angels for Heaven, one of your people was the one to tempt him, and then you broke into a Heavenly prison and retrieved Azazel himself for Hell!" He straightened, challenge slipping back into his tone. "For God's sake, you cannot expect me to believe this wasn't some plan you orches--"
"Of course it was a plan," Crowley interrupted. Flatly, floating not on rage, now, but on a distant memory of fear and horror. "Lucifer sent me to retrieve him. A fallen archangel, one who would hate Michael and Gabriel so violently? That was too good for Hell to pass up, and I was right there on the scene. So he sent me. And apparently Azazel thought exactly the same thing you thought, he thought I'd sent her to seduce him as well. That I'd conspired to bring him low and break his power and bring Heaven in to murder his children. That was a fun conversation, let me tell you!"
And he'd survived it, he'd survived by the skin of his teeth and the strength of his grief for a woman they'd both cared for, but that hadn't changed the terror when Azazel turned on him. It hadn't changed the archangel's grief, it hadn't changed the staggering number of dead. It hadn't healed the blasted, burned horror of Grigoria's irradiated remains, it hadn't wiped away the thousands of murdered children and the scattered hundreds left fleeing across the galaxy. Powerful and warlike and vicious as the Nephilim had apparently been, the horror of their genocide was still a livid stain across his memory and his survival did nothing to change that.
"You don't get to blame me for this one, Principality," he rasped softly, staring out past the angel's shoulder into the memory of a Flooded world, of an archangel's mad, terrible grief and the serene, steady drift of orbital platforms out from the ruins of Grigoria, an implacable hunt spreading outwards to drown the last, fleeing steps of the Nephilim. "I can break a world with a whisper but I'm not alone in it." He smiled, black and bitter. "Will you put a sword to Gabriel's throat too?"
The angel didn't answer. This time, while it was Grigoria and not Eden that fell into night, it was the angel who said nothing, and ran from the demon's wrath.
Well. That made it two hollow victories between them, didn't it?
Babylon
"Don't say it. Please."
Crowley coughed, wiping sweat and dust away from his eyes with the back of one armoured hand, and stared down at the bedraggled prisoner that shared his bolt-hole. He'd pulled the angel out of several tonnes of rubble and debris, yanking the stunned, winged figure through the storm of fire and metal still raining down on the city around him, and it was only after he'd already shoved them both into the armoured remains of a groundship for shelter that he'd actually realised who the hell he'd rescued.
That realisation had been very rapidly followed by a drawn arc pistol and a snarled warning for the angel not to move, but it turned out that was largely unnecessary. Killing demons was ... not the most prominent thing on the angel's mind right now.
"... Don't say what?" he growled, rough and impatient, but he already knew. Given their history and the devastation that currently surrounded them, given the most memorable conversations Crowley had had with this enemy agent ... he already had an idea what it was the angel desperately didn't want him to voice.
The angel looked up at him, a pleading flash of hollow eyes in an ash-blackened face, and Crowley found himself wincing involuntarily. Not sympathy, never that. He'd learned that lesson centuries ago in an abandoned station. But some echo, maybe, of the strange urge he had felt then, that first time. The desire to lessen the blow for this being. The desire to ... to preserve some remnant of the innocence that had fueled that formidable anger.
"I know," the angel whispered now, a vicious, trembling acknowledgement, pale hands knotted into fists as he crouched beneath Crowley's pistol. "Damn you, damn it all, I know. I understand, alright?"
Metal rained around them, some millions of tonnes, fire and shredded debris and the ponderous, shattered weight of the greatest human installation ever built. The Babel Gate Tower, a massive and prodigiously unoptimised cylindrical object that had until recently hung in orbit over Babylon. The product of an unprecedented alliance of human systems, the best technology their collective genius could offer, it had been the first entirely human-built and human-controlled Gate access, a magnificent, defiant finger right in the teeth of the twin Empires. Something that would have allowed them unmonitored, uncontrolled access to gatespace, something that might potentially have provided them a window into the heart of Heaven or Hell, had they known where to point it. Something that would have allowed mere humans to challenge all the power and majesty of the Empires.
It had been Michael's hand that laid it low, Crowley thought. He was almost positive the constellation of eveningstar orbitals in Babylon's sky belonged to the Prince of Seraphs. When you wanted overwhelming force, when you wanted a firework show to strike terror into the hearts of all who opposed you, it was Michael you went to.
Well. Or Lucifer, but if Hell had been the ones to strike Babel down, the angel wouldn't have been near so upset. That was ... sort of the point, wasn't it? It hadn't been Hell that Flooded Grigoria. And it hadn't been Hell that destroyed the single greatest technological breakthrough humanity had ever achieved, simply because it was the greatest. Too great and too dangerous for Heaven to ever let it stand.
Heaven, who had sent humanity alone and helpless out into the stars all those centuries ago, just for having learned something Heaven didn't want them to know.
Crowley looked down into the pained, desperate comprehension in an angel's eyes, felt the echo of the blank, distant horror a newly-remade demon had felt when he'd abruptly realised the full vastness of what he had just done, what an older and more terrible power had carefully manipulated him into doing, and he flinched. Blessed, suddenly and vehemently, and jerkily lowered the muzzle of his pistol.
Not all the way. Paranoia was a survival trait in a demon. But enough that the mouth of his weapon was not the first thing the angel saw when he looked at him.
"... For what little it's worth?" he said quietly. "I was sent here to see how much of a threat the Tower would be to Hell. If Gabriel hadn't gotten wind of it first, I can promise you, there would still have been new stars in Babylon's sky. They'd just have been morning instead evening." He smiled crookedly, a black little burst of humour. "Odd, don't you think, how difficult it can be to tell them apart sometimes?"
He'd seen it then, hadn't he? All the way back at the beginning, even newly made and with little memory, even torn and reforged and shaped in Lucifer's image. He'd still stood on the Eastern Gate Station, and noticed how very Lucifer-like a thing it was.
Hell was only Heaven under different management, in the end. The difference between them was only in terms of the name giving the order, not the nature of the orders themselves. And humanity, ever and always, would be the ones to pay for that.
Poor sorry bastards.
He shook his head, catching the angel's eyes again. "They've been stuck in the middle from day one, angel," he reminded gently. "The humans. They didn't mean to cause the largest war the galaxy has ever seen. They didn't mean to get Lucifer upset and split the Empire right down the middle, they didn't mean to get us all stuck in the endless bloody game of one-upmanship ever since. But they did, and that means they're always going to get the short end of the stick. They're always going to be the ones hurting and dying and getting blasted out of the fucking sky, and there's bugger all they can do about it. Or us, for that matter." He shrugged, stiff and pained and uneasy. "We're just the schmucks on the ground. All we can do is follow orders and hope ... hope it doesn't break anything too badly."
Like worlds, for example. Like the entire future of a race. But orders were orders, and there were more than a few things in this universe that were too big and too terrible to fight. Crowley had seen that. He'd lived it, maybe more times than he remembered, if the change-pits could wipe a memory clean more than once. Sometimes you just ... knuckled down, and did the job, and sometimes tried to salvage some little something. Some friend, or enemy, or piece of a world. Sometimes you just ... had to hope it would be enough.
"I can't ..." the angel started, staring up at Crowley in a mix of disgust and pity and pained, desperate horror. "I can't. How could you live like that? How could you make yourself?"
Crowley flinched. He went cold, the muzzle of his pistol coming back up, a hard, rigid expression slipping back over his face. "Because I don't have a lot of choice," he growled quietly. "And because I don't want to die."
And again, the angel had no answer. This time, though, it was because Crowley had struck him rather heavily across the head with the butt of his pistol. He had an escape to orchestrate, after all. He had an entire Heavenly fleet to outrun, and the news of a fallen Tower to report back to his superiors.
He left the angel safely in the relative shelter of the groundship, though. Sometimes ... sometimes you just had to salvage something.
Jerusalem
The metal shone in the desert sun, bright and painful stabs of light as he rolled the discs in his palm. Not wardtech. Nothing more than inert metal, precious on some worlds, worthless on others. Thirty pieces, all told. The price of two lives, even if one wouldn't be lost for long.
"... Crowley," a voice said cautiously, behind him. Familiar, now. Made so by millennia, by a hundred thousand shared conflicts, by one's blood on the other's weapon, by tiny services and betrayals spread across a thousand years and a thousand worlds. Familiar enough for the angel to know his name. Familiar enough for Crowley to know his in turn.
"Aziraphale," he answered quietly, without looking around. Without moving from his seat, sprawled on a low rise beneath a tree and the silent scrap of rope that hung from it. The silver shone viciously in his hand, and he was far too tired to meet an angel's gaze.
After a moment, a long, slow exhale, the angel came over and sat gingerly beside him. He wore a human body, a dark, desert-capable form born from whatever Heaven had in place of the change-pits. He looked, much as Crowley did, like the people that surrounded them, as native as any human on this world. It had been a long time, maybe centuries, since Aziraphale had worn the bright, dazzling forms angels favoured.
"They've buried the Son," the angel said softly, his eyes on Crowley's hand and the bloody price cradled there. "Heaven has two stars in orbit. They'll retrieve him soon, maybe three days. If he hasn't raised himself, that is. Things are ... a little uncertain."
"I'm sure," Crowley said, distant and noncommittal. He should be angry, maybe. Or relieved. Or even triumphant, given the role he had played, the orders he had carried out so very, very well. He should feel something. But he didn't. The most he felt, right now, was a deep, unutterable weariness.
The silence stretched, for a while. Long and pained, opening like the chasms between them, the shared triumph and utter failure of the last three decades, the last three years. Hell had won, in the slaying of a Son and the dark determination of confused and fearful people. Heaven had won, in His promised return, and in what He would have learned by His death. Humanity, forever caught between them, had known a brief moment of hope, and heard a voice that told them for the first time since Babel fell that cooperation might yet grant them wonders.
Crowley, with silver in his palm and two men's blood upon it, didn't really care. He was too tired.
"... I tried, you know," Aziraphale whispered. Part offering and part exhausted, pained commiseration. "Iscariot. I tried to offer forgiveness, hope. Something. He was a pawn, your pawn. He had to know that. I ... I tried." It wasn't even an accusation, wasn't flung against Crowley as it had been so many times before. The angel was just ... saying it. Saying that he had tried to save the man Crowley'd been ordered to betray. That he'd tried to salvage something, when there could be no hope of either of them disobeying.
In response, Crowley's lips peeled back, nothing close to a smile, drawing back over pointed teeth and a serpentine tongue. Bleak, so very bleak.
"I tried for forty days," he rasped in agreement. "Forty days and forty nights. I told him. I told him what was coming, what he would suffer, what he'd pay for standing up against both bloody Empires, God's Son or no God's Son." He snarled, clenching his hand around the coins, pale bone showing through dark knuckles. "All he had to do was pick a side, be a king or an emperor or a god. All he had to do. But he picked them. He walked in there, and he died for them, and now ... now they'll die for him too. Wars will start and worlds will fall, and it'll be the Nephilim all over again before it's through. And, do you know the worst thing?"
He grinned, rolling his head to find the angel watching him, to find the dark, desperate pity in his enemy's eyes. Crowley curled his bloodied palm tight around shards of metal and laughed black and old into his enemy's understanding.
"The worst thing is, I'll be lauded for it," he hissed, low and savage with the anger he'd thought had been crushed out of him. "For tempting him. For whispering words in that poor bastard Iscariot's ear, for offering empires to the Sons of Gods to lead them astray." He sneered, black and terrible. "Ask me again, angel. Ask me, Guardian. Ask me if that pleases me. Ask me if I never tire."
He wrenched himself to his feet, a brutal, savage motion of his arm flinging silver into the dust at an angel's feet, the rope swinging above his head where a man had hung himself in horror at the vastness of what he'd done, what an older and more terrible power had manipulated him into doing. Crowley wrenched himself to his feet and paced in raging, contained despair beneath the pained gaze of an angel, the only angel, who knew full well what echoes played around them.
"... They chose it," that angel offered. It was an empty reassurance, weak and hopeless against those echoes, but he offered it anyway. To salve his own horror, maybe. To try and salve them both. "They knew they were pawns. They knew they would pay for it, in the end. They knew, Crowley. And they still ..."
And they still. Ever and always, they still. The eternal hubris, the eternal hope. To drink from a poisoned cup, to nurse a forbidden love, to build a forbidden tower, to stand in defiance of empires. To take their own lives, in payment for actions that could never be undone. To rage and to act and to fight and to fall. Knowing they were going to die, again and again, every time, they still.
Maybe that, that knowledge, that death, was why they did it. That poisoned gift they had been given so many aeons ago, that Crowley had helped to give them. Maybe, when death was a certainty anyway, it was the action itself that mattered, more than whether you would live or die because of it. Maybe it was only in the face of inevitable consequence that courage could ever actually matter.
Maybe that was why Crowley, who had always nursed some desperate hope that he might live, had no courage of his own. Nor ever had.
He looked over, met an angel's eyes, the only being on any planet who had ever questioned what they did to each other and actually expected an answer. Crowley looked at the angel, the enemy, Aziraphale, who looked back at him with the echo of his own shame, and smiled. Dark and pained and serpentine.
"Do you ever wonder, angel?" he asked softly, "what will be the cost for what we choose?"
London
There was a Gate in the air above the city. Far above, kissing the lower reaches of orbit, but at the same far lower than any Gate had a right to go. It hung there like an angry, defiant star, a mouth waiting to open and denounce them all, while around it, bewildered and desperate and furious, the fleets of Heaven and Hell swarmed and fought and fell.
Not Babel. Neither Heaven nor Hell, but not Babel either, that wonder and that folly all over again. Something smaller, more refined, infinitely more dangerous. A wild card in a war of Empires that might threaten to topple everything, to pull the foundations from beneath an entire cosmology and tumble it all into dust. The Gate that hung above London was neither of Hell nor Heaven nor Humanity, but from some strange, alien mix of all three, from some abominable echo of Nephilimic construction.
Above London, above a tiny, backwater world in a tiny, backwater system, the Anti Christ had come to power, the Adam's Gate had sprung into being, and the beginning of the end had finally come calling.
"It's almost beautiful, isn't it?" the angel at his side asked softly, his pale form leaning back into the shadow of one of the control tower support struts, his face tipped skyward to watch the writhing and raging of battle above them. "Apocalyptic, of course. The end of everything. But, at the same time ..."
"Yeah," Crowley murmured, resting his hand against the glass of the observation deck, watching as the bloom of fireflowers in the darkness created a final, perpetual sunset above the planet. "At the same time. Yes."
"It's our fault, of course," Aziraphale went on, mild and absent. "Losing track of the Devil's Son. Allowing him to be raised on some backwater, human planet, knowing nothing but love, nothing but frailty. Letting him be raised in the company of mortals and Nephilim and Heaven knows what else. Letting him grow without interference." He smiled, a tiny, private thing, empty and fierce. "All our fault, this time. The ending of another world. Of all the worlds. Dearie, dearie me. However will we live with the shame."
Crowley stared at him. His world blanked, for a second, went white and distant at that echo so casually wielded, and when it came back he turned and he met Aziraphale's gaze and he hissed. "... You bastard. You bastard, angel."
Aziraphale just looked at him. There was a strange light in his eyes, a burning Crowley hadn't seen since a dawn station above a planet falling into darkness, a fierce luminescence that hadn't existed since the Guardian of a world long fallen. The light, the rage, of a wounded innocence, returned once more.
"Haven't we destroyed enough of them?" the angel asked him, soft and sibilant, savage. "Orders after orders, haven't we killed enough, Crowley?" He smiled, pale and shining, and gestured out at the destruction on the other side of a thin pane of glass. "And this time we failed to obey them, we failed to do as we were told, and it's happening anyway. No matter what happens, no matter what we do, death seems inevitable. So why not ... why not do something different. Why not fuck them, why not salvage something, why not try." He laughed, a twitching, fluttering lift of his lip. "Damnit, damnit, I want to be a guardian again, not an executioner. I want to ... I want to try. The universe is ending, Crowley. Why not hold a sword to their throats for a change, hmm? Why the hell not?"
Something hammered at the back of Crowley's ribs, at the back of his brain. A memory, the fragment of a memory, something where no memories should be, after Lucifer's change-pits. Something that had always been, from the moment he'd understood the horror of what he'd done, and wanted to comfort his enemy through it.
"I've always wondered," he said distantly. Not exactly an answer, but bearing on it. "Why those libraries were left on Eden. Why the knowledge was left, where anyone could find it, if only they dared ... if only they dared accept the consequences." He tilted his head, a frozen whirl of stars falling into his stomach. "I wondered ... why the first person to speak of human cooperation since the fall of Babel was the Son of God. Why he had to die because of it. Why he did it anyway."
Aziraphale stared at him, pale and frozen and so very, very bright, all of a sudden. Shining like silver, the price of two lives. Aziraphale stared at him, and the silence yawned breathless and terrible between them.
"... What if we were meant to?" Crowley whispered, a tiny question into the void. "It's not Heaven vs Hell. They don't matter. What if it's just ..."
What if it was choice and consequence. For all of them. What if it was the price humanity paid for knowledge, and Heaven paid for obediance, and Hell paid for defiance. What if it was the price Grigoria had paid for love, and the Nephilim for existing, and the Christ for standing, and the Anti Christ ... the Anti Christ for building an alien gate and defying everything and ending the universe.
What if death was inevitable, and the only things that mattered were the choices you made despite it?
"I don't want to die," Crowley said at last, that one truth he had nursed through millennia, that one shame that had dogged him through the fall of a thousand worlds. "I don't want to die, angel. But I am fed up of letting everyone else do it for me, either."
Because there had been a ship above Gnosis and a tower above Babylon and a gate above London, and he was tired of seeing them fall, tired of knowing he had let them. He was curled in the shadow of another support strut, standing above another world rolling into night, and he was bloody tired of it. He was tired, and he was angry, and he didn't want to hide a wounded innocence anymore. Not from Aziraphale. And not from all the eyes in Heaven or Hell, either.
"I have a ship," he said, holding out a hand, tight and quivering and desperately, furiously hopeful. "It's the best ship in the galaxy, the fastest and the best and it's home. It could ... it could get us through that Gate." He smiled, dark and serpentine and grim. "It could take us out beyond the Wall, Aziraphale. If that would please you any."
And the angel smiled, and the angel took his hand, and the angel said:
"My dear, it would please me greatly."
Tadfield
They tumbled out from the maw of gatespace into a strange, distant system, a system neither they nor the Bentley's nav system recognised. Which might have been a concern, maybe, if an entire fleet hadn't immediately surrounded them on reentry and made several other concerns rather more immediately pressing.
They were past caring, though. Fear and hope and desperate determination had tangled between them, a solution to all those millennia of bloodied silence, and it would take a good deal more than an alien fleet to force them back.
"Nephilim," Aziraphale whispered as they drifted under guard towards the great space station at the centre of the fleet, hushed even though no-one could hear them. "Those are Grigorian war designs, aren't they?"
"Mmm," Crowley agreed, equally quiet, equally without reason. "There's human in there, though. And something of Hell. I think that's a Cerebus weapon system, at x2y5z3 close range. See the trio clustering on the ports?"
Aziraphale glanced at him. "Defectors?" he asked, carefully. Crowley shook his head.
"I'd have heard," he said shortly. "At least if they were pre-Apocalypse. It could be part of his original guard, though. When we lost him, there were several of his demonic bodyguard that vanished with him. Or it could be Adam himself." His lip curled sardonically. "He was the Prince of Hell, after all. Human-raised or not, there'll always be a touch of his father in him."
A hand curled around his own, fingers threading through his lightly, and Crowley glanced over at the angel in startlement. Aziraphale frowned carefully at him. "Does that worry you?" the angel asked, entirely seriously. "Will he be enough his father to hurt you?"
Crowley gaped at him a little bit. "Me?" he managed, after a moment. "You're the angel, Aziraphale. Shouldn't you be more worried about him hurting you?"
And then ... then Aziraphale looked at him, for longer than Crowley thought the angel had ever looked at him before, and with an expression he had never seen. He had thought he'd seen every emotion the angel possessed, all the rage and horror and humour and pity and love, but he had never seen this. He knew he hadn't.
"Call me Azra," the angel said, very slowly. "I don't think I'll be an angel much longer, nor able to bear an angel's name. And I think ... I think I have never been more worried about threats to me than to you." He paused, smiled slow and tremulous. "I ought to have killed you, the first time we met. I ought to have killed you every time we met. But somehow ... somehow I don't think I could ever really bear the thought. Not even then. You have cost me everything I ever believed I loved, and I think I would sooner die than see you hurt."
Crowley stared. Even as Tadfield Station drifted ever closer across the wardmaps, even as their choices came ever closer to calling, he simply stood. Simply stared. Remembering the strange ache in his chest, all those thousands of years ago, the need to reach out and offer something that might salve an angel's pain. The need, ever and always, to salvage some little thing from the horror and the exhaustion of an endless war, and the way that thing had so often been ... been an angel, an enemy, someone he should have seen destroyed so many times.
He stood on the bridge of a salvaged ship, in the shadow of the most apocalyptic consequence of any choice he had ever made, and he felt ... he felt the slow unfurling of a wounded innocence, and a hope he thought he'd been cured of long, long since.
"You have always been an angel," he said finally, hoarse and thick. "Azra, if that's what you want. But you will always be an angel." A smile, lopsided and bright. "You didn't Fall. You just hung around with a bad crowd and ... and wandered vaguely downwards, that's all."
Aziraphale, Azra, laughed at that. Stepped close, an odd sort of twist to his smile, a strange courage in the lift of his hand and the trail of soft fingertips over Crowley's cheek. He touched Crowley gently, a strange shining in his eyes, and leaned close while Crowley held very, very still.
"Stay with me," the angel murmured, moving so close as though to leave no room for any silence to ever reach between them again. "Stay with me, demon mine, and I'll kill anyone who touches you again. Stay with me and I'll make sure you stay alive. Or I will die trying."
"Until the end of the universe," Crowley agreed, soft and quiet, and forbore to mention that he had salvaged an angel first, and had no intention now of ever being the last to fall. "Until the fall of Heaven and Hell and everything in between, angel. No matter who comes for us, no matter what happens on the station."
"Good," Azra said, a shaking, savage figure against him, smiling crookedly in the light of Tadfield on the wardmaps, and then the angel kissed him. Sweet and deep and dark as the innocence they had both lost, and yes, Crowley thought. Heaven or Hell or Death be damned.
Yes, it was very good indeed.
A/N: Based on episodes from Christian Myth and Good Omens. 'Eden' corresponds to the Book of Genesis, 'Dudael' corresponds to the Book of Enoch, 'Babylon' to Genesis again, 'Jerusalem' to the Gospel of Matthew (for that version of Judas' death), 'London' to Good Omens, and 'Tadfield' to a projected aftermath and up into 'Enemy Mine'. Heh.
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