faemused | So here’s how the final 15 would have gone in swanlake!verse…

It’s been—may he be forgiven for saying so—one hell of a week.

The handful of years leading up to it have been some of the best of his existence. Every day he’s been able to spend time with his best beloved soul, having endless sorts of fun. Certainly the plague made things rather difficult—neither of them could be truly unaffected by the miasma of despair and horror it inspired in humanity—but at the very least, neither of them has had to bear it alone. He has Crowley, and Crowley has him, and they’ve done what they can for humanity and each other. Even in a quiet world, he could look down at the dark ring coiling around his finger, or at the gold one on Crowley’s, and know that at least something had turned out all right. Or rather that they’d made something turn out right, together.

Besides, in between the long conversations and the attempts to scatter little miracles in humanity’s path (to say nothing of the many sweet interludes of carnal pleasure), they’d had time to pursue new interests. There were so many human art forms to explore, and explore they certainly had. Aziraphale had filled an entire (albeit thin) book with his own poetry; Crowley had colonized a corner of the bookshop as a space to paint in. They’d tried their hands at brewing, and baking, and some of the fiber arts. [footnote: Aziraphale had, across the centuries, spent a fair bit of time in the Hebrides and had discovered he very much enjoyed the process of waulking wool cloth. Well. Most of the process, excluding the traditional use of stale urine. The process of spinning woolen thread, however, had turned out to be a touch more frustrating for him than he could have anticipated. For one thing, there was no communal singing.] They’d done jigsaw puzzles, and Lego sets, and even gotten Aziraphale’s antique computer to run some games. [footnote: “Blast it! I’ve been eaten by a grue again.” “That’s, what, five times now?” “You hush, foul fiend.”]

In short, they’d been happy, every bit as happy as human newlyweds.

And then Gabriel had turned up.

Just marched down the street fully nude, with an empty cardboard box shielding whatever bits he did or didn’t have, and straight up to the door of the bookshop. Apparently minus his memory of his own past and identity, which Aziraphale hadn’t believed until the former archangel had accepted a cup of cocoa and pronounced it wonderful.

Crowley had been less inclined to believe it (and had, unfortunately, dropped the Eccles cakes he’d brought over from the coffee shop across the street when he’d seen Gabriel for the first time). But he had, thankfully, agreed with Aziraphale that “Jim” needed at least temporary protection from the forces of Heaven and Hell, and had come up with the plan to cloak him with the smallest, sneakiest, most surreptitious half-a-miracle they could conjure.

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to either of them, there were several facts of the universe that would more or less firebomb this plan at the moment of execution:
1. Archangels have a tendency to amplify all miracles, no matter how small or insignificant, by default.
2. Angels and demons, when working together, tend to be far stronger than either party might be alone.
3. Love is (or at least can be) a natural magnifier of all things, and six thousand years’ worth of it has a measurable impact on the nature of reality in a number of ways.

While it still remains unclear which of these exactly was at work at the time, the tiny half-a-miracle they had planned registered as a 25-lazarii miracle instead. Which, in turn, brought several of Aziraphale’s former coworkers to Crowley, Fell & Co. to investigate.

Aziraphale, grasping for a cover story, had immediately seized on the most innocuous possible explanation he could think of: he had been trying to get two humans—his neighbors, Maggie and Nina—to fall in love. Granted, since humans have free will it was not technically possible to simply miracle them into love, so he’d done some rearranging of circumstances to make it more likely, and oops, wouldn’t you know it, he must have underestimated his own strength. As one tends to do when retired from official work, you understand. And would they perhaps like a cup of tea? (He knew they wouldn’t, but the offer would get them to leave much faster.)

None of them seemed to notice that his gold ring had been replaced in the years since they’d seen him with a slender serpentine band. Nor did they actually seem to register the change in names above the door or what that might signify. They did, however, promise/threaten to keep an eye on the situation.

Things had only gotten more interesting from there. There were only two things Gabriel remembered. One was fragments of a song—as he learned from Maggie, a Buddy Holly song that kept popping up on a jukebox in Edinburgh. The second was that something about the score of Adolphe Adam’s Giselle moved him to tears, although he could not explain why. It just made him think of something awfully wonderful and wonderfully awful, he said, only he couldn’t work out what the shape of it was.

And then, of course, the very eager and innocent junior angel calling themselves Inspector Constable had turned up on the doorstep to unobtrusively monitor them. Even if both he and Crowley bristled somewhat at the knowledge they were being watched, they both also had to admit that the angel sent down for the job was really rather sweet, in a funny way. [footnote: “Do you think we were ever that young, Crowley?” “Angel, we’re all the same age. All created before the rest of the universe.” “If you’re going to be pedantic, dearest, I’m going to ensure that your monstera sprouts rosebuds.” “You wouldn’t dare!”]

So Aziraphale had taken a brief jaunt up to Edinburgh in the Bentley, the keys having been lent to him by his begrudging but not entirely unwilling spouse. There he had discovered two very interesting facts. One, the Buddy Holly song Gabriel almost remembered popped up on every single record the jukebox played, no matter what buttons were pressed otherwise. Two, one of the televisions in the pub spent most of its time unplugged, because apparently whenever it was plugged in it ignored any attempts to change the channel or programme, instead showing a Royal Ballet performance of Giselle on repeat. (“Not great for the general mood when the crowd just wants to watch the footy on a Friday night. S’why we got that other flat screen. But we’ve got a couple regulars who come in for a pint and chips and watch the ballet. Old couples, mostly. That’s the only time we turn it back on.”)

Of course, both Heaven and Hell had persisted in pursuing Gabriel, and the human romance angle still needed some tending to. So Aziraphale had arranged for a ball at the bookshop, disguised as the monthly Whickber Street Traders’ Association meeting, which also served the function of keeping as many of his neighbors as possible safe from harm. [footnote: And giving him an excuse to dance with Crowley.] Which worked for a while, but not nearly as long as he had hoped—barely an hour in, an understaffed [footnote: Hell, like some miserable human workplaces, did in fact have enough bodies to cover the entire shift—but the time management was so poorly done that anything like effective distribution of labor was a rare accident.] half-a-horde of demons stormed the shop.

Crowley’s quick thinking had saved most of the humans. Aziraphale had used his halo to help the rest of them.

Then Upper and Lower Management had showed up.

To Aziraphale’s utter shock, not only had “Jim”‘s errant memory been hidden in a housefly, but he was able to catch quick glimpses of it as Gabriel reabsorbed it. Just flashes of meetings in an Edinburgh pub, where a song a demon and angel enjoyed together became the sole working selection on the jukebox, and a television had become permanently stuck on Giselle. (Apparently the Lord of Flies had done a brief stint of experimenting with a more ethereal form to torment the souls of the dead and the living alike—heartbroken dead maidens and the youths who had betrayed them—which had evolved into the legend of the Wilis. Gabriel, who had never seen a ballet before, was enchanted by the thought and by the humans using their bodies to express the torture and joy of love.)

Together, he and Crowley—and a host of bewildered angels and demons—watched Beelzebub and Gabriel join hands and disappear. Possibly off to Alpha Centauri, where the absolutely-not-a-bit-sentimental-so-stop-smirking-at-him Crowley had once suggested they run away to if Earth were destroyed.

It would have been all over at that point, except. Except. The Metatron wanted to see Aziraphale, and offer him a coffee.

Years ago, before the Armageddon that wasn’t and the fairy tale that became reality, Aziraphale would have leaped at the chance to become Supreme Archangel. But several years of wedded bliss had left him cold to the thought—why would he want a sterile white desk in Heaven’s offices when he could sit on his comfortable sofa with Crowley’s head in his lap?

Except then the Metatron says, “I understand you’ve formed a de facto partnership with the demon Crowley.” And his gaze flicks past Aziraphale’s shoulder, to the sign above the shop. The sign none of the other angels or demons had noticed, that announced both of their names side by side.

Some little voice inside Aziraphale whispers, that’s a threat. I don’t know how, but it is. Be careful. Protect what you love.

“Might I have a little time to think about the offer?”

“Certainly. Shall we say—“ The Metatron checks his watch, unnecessarily. Just a little after eight in the morning. “—noon?”

“Of course.”

Nervous, contemplative, Aziraphale makes his way back into the bookshop. Out of sheer habit he begins closing the blinds, one by one, though this time a new habit goes alongside them: calling over his shoulder.

“Crowley? Darling, are you still here?”