Chapter Text
Safety.
He could feel it-- wasn’t sure what it felt like, only that his stumbling feet were bringing him closer to it, shining bright and warm against the shadows that jostled and crowded him, tried to drag him down.
He’d never been a runner, really. Not his thing, to try to outrace or outfight, not when he could outclever. Not when it was so much easier to just arrange things so he was closer to the finish anyway, so he’d started before anyone else knew there was anything to start on.
Worked just fine as long as he was the one setting up the contest.
He laughed, a single huff that made the shadows rise in a tide, blanking his vision until he fought past them. His eyes had nothing to do with that golden safety ahead anyway; he could leave them closed. Almost less distracting that way.
At least it was, until something rose up in his path and he tripped, fell-- cobblestones smashing into him, knee and hip and shoulder. Fierce bite on his palms of gravel and stripped skin, a staccato counterpoint to the thudding in his head.
He clenched his fists. Ground his fingertips into those scrapes, focusing on that bright sharp pain to clear his head. Not far now, he could tell. Not far, if he could just make his body work.
He made it upright, still digging his nails into his palms. The pain danced sharp and angry, lit up ragged nerves. Pulled him on, toward that fuzzy promise of rest.
Fifteen feet, maybe? He could do fifteen feet. Could do fifteen feet standing on his head, right?
Ten feet.
Seven.
Four.
His eyes told him the house was dark, deserted. His eyes didn’t know shit. He reached out for the door and slapped it once, twice, the wood pulsing against his skinned hands.
“Coming!” rang a voice from inside, and he smiled viciously. Made it.
The door opened out from under him and he collapsed, ignoring the cry of “Crowley!” It was okay now.
He smiled up at the angel. “It wasn’t even me, this time.”
Aziraphale had no real reason why he’d hesitated over turning down the lamps and locking the door except for a feeling that something was happening, something that would need him before the night was done.
That feeling had been hovering for a couple of days now, cresting and ebbing in waves but never allowing itself to be pinned down. It was strong now, even if it refused to resolve itself more clearly. He hesitated again over barring the door to his small villa, instead closing his eyes in order to listen to the night. There were footsteps and the distant lowing of cattle; voices bouncing through the scattered houses, a thump and rustle down the street--
Someone thumped his door and he jumped; the shadow feeling resolved abruptly into here, now, this! “Coming!” Aziraphale said, and yanked open the door.
A tangle of limbs and bones tumbled into his shop, cap bouncing off to reveal crimson hair and unfocused golden eyes.
“Crowley!” He was kneeling already, pulling the long legs out of the doorway. Closed the door with a thought and winced at the solid thud of the bar slamming home. He hadn’t meant to put quite that much power into it.
Crowley was looking at him with a hope he’d rarely seen and a pain he too-often had. “It wasn’t even me this time,” Crowley said, and promptly went slack, eyes fluttering closed.
“Crowley-- Crowley! You wicked thing, don’t you dare--” Aziraphale patted at his face, then carefully checked his pulse, which was pounding and uneven. His breathing was ragged. But he didn’t seem about to discorporate right there on the floor, at least.
Aziraphale scooped up the demon and carefully brought him upstairs, settling him on the seldom-used bed. His clothes were ill-fitting, ragged, and filthy, clammy with fog where they weren’t soaked straight through. Aziraphale wrestled for a moment to tug the sodden cloth off, hung up over nerveless too-long arms, then gave up with an irritated snap.
Crowley’s clothes reappeared across the room, cleaned and mended. Crowley himself was now in a long nightshirt, for his modesty and his warmth. Aziraphale fussed for a moment more with collar and cuffs, making sure nothing was too tight--
Breath hissed across his teeth before he had entirely processed the burns on Crowley's wrists; skin-blistered rings that sparked of holiness when Aziraphale carefully touched them. “Oh, my dear boy,” he murmured, “What have they done to you?”
Crowley clearly wasn’t up to telling him. The marks spoke for themselves, though. Now he was looking he could see other places where holy things had been pressed into demonic flesh. One near the back of his neck. Circles around his ankles, less blistered than his wrists-- cushioned by his trousers, perhaps? The edge of something at his collarbone, an irregular line that trailed down his chest.
He made it here, Aziraphale told himself helplessly. At least he made it here, where I can help. It was scant comfort, though; he still wasn’t sure what to do about this. He had a supply of ointment that he kept on hand for when his people needed help, but it had been rather extensively blessed, and he didn’t dare use that on any part of Crowley, especially under the circumstances of... what? Burns? Pious poisoning?
Who had even done this?
And why had Crowley felt that the first thing he said should be, basically, ‘it’s not my fault’?
Aziraphale was working himself into a proper tizzy when the door downstairs started shaking under a pounding fist.
He put on his best helpful-angel expression and grabbed the lamp as he made his way back downstairs. “Oh, my, it’s the middle of the night!” he said as he yanked open the door. “Is someone hurt?”
An angel stood there, tall and dark, looking down their nose at him. “Aziraphale. I don’t suppose you’ve seen the demon? No,” they went on, not giving him time to answer. “No, not you, not here in your little villa with your little couch and--” They sniffed disdainfully. “Is that wine I smell?”
“Baruch? That’s you, isn’t it?” Aziraphale said, mentally retuning himself from helpful to helpful and a bit dim. “What on earth are you doing on, erm... Earth? Last I heard, you were on training duty.”
“Archangels asked for volunteers-- said you were having trouble with your Adversary. Can’t think why, it’s not as if it’s clever.”
“He’s smarter than he looks.” Aziraphale shifted position, subtly filling up more of the doorway. “Would you, ah, like some wine? It’s quite good.”
That perfect nose wrinkled. “Eeugh. Gabriel said you ingested things. I didn’t believe it, but now I see....”
“A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed, surely,” Aziraphale murmured. “In any case, what can I do for you? If all you wanted was to turn up your nose at perfectly good wine--”
“Your Adversary.” Baruch loomed in toward him, aggrieved, and Aziraphale leaned back without moving from the door. “Had it captured-- got the humans in on it. Told ‘em it was the one who cursed their cattle.” Their little chuckle was not at all pleasant. “You should’ve seen how mad they got!”
“And, ah, did he? Curse their cattle?” At Baruch’s sharp look he went on hurriedly, “If he’s added that to his bag of tricks I shall have to be on the lookout! The humans do so depend on their livestock.”
“Nah, not this time. Wouldn’t put it past a demon, mind, but anyone could see it was just ordinary disease. Once their beasts start dying, the humans will work all the harder to catch it again. And won’t that be a sight?”
Aziraphale put a hand to his chest. “Gracious, I suppose I should help them! Once Crowley’s dealt with, then, then I should see the cattle safely cured. Reinforce their faith.”
“They’ll turn to the Light well enough once they’re starving. And your Adversary won’t be a problem for long-- I blessed the chains. Not sure how it got free, but it won’t happen again. Not the state it was in.” Their gaze sharpened on him. “You just stay put with your wine, though. In your soft little house. With all this, I just can’t think how you’ve let it get away so often--” this with an expression that said very clearly how he thought Aziraphale was failing to mete out Heavenly justice-- “but we’ll soon find it and have it taken care of.”
“Oh, but I must help you track the villain down. I insist! Let me grab my cloak--”
Baruch waved at him. “No, no need-- anyone can see you’d be useless at it. Just stay out of the way, right? Here with your... material things, while we do the work.”
“Oh, I say! You needn’t be rude abou--”
But Baruch was gone, stalking away with a fading, “...finish this and get back upstairs, being on Earth just turns people stupid...”
Aziraphale watched Baruch out of sight before shutting out the night chill and dropping the bar again. “This trip to Earth has not improved your outlook, has it?” he muttered, making his way up the stairs.
Crowley lay pale in the lamplight as Aziraphale settled next to the bed. “My dear, I’m so glad you were able to get here. I’ve just had the most dreadful visitor, and, well...” He brushed Crowley’s blistered wrist lying on the coverlet, winced again at the tingle of holiness. “I know how you got these, now. I’m afraid it was one of my lot stirring up trouble against you. Apparently they told the townspeople you were behind their cattle sickening!”
Crowley’s breath hitched, his body trembling.
“I know! As if you would ever. I think they’re gone for now, but I’ll need to go round tomorrow and do something about the livestock.” He reached out again, smoothing ginger hair out of the demon’s face. “And I shall have to see about warding this room better-- I shouldn’t be glad for your injuries, and, and I shan’t! But I do think that without them, Baruch might have sensed your presence. If you weren’t so desperately depleted!”
He stroked Crowley’s brow again. Frowned at the heat, the sheen of sweat he disturbed, and carefully cupped the side of Crowley’s face. It was a touch he could never have given had the demon been awake-- too many things that could never be said. Too much of his heart on his face, always. But now...
Now worry warred with prudence, and his heart was overfull. Too much, indeed. He started to pull away, only to have Crowley sigh and turn, leaning into his hand.
Aziraphale panicked for a moment, then sighed. “Very well, if that’s what you want, my dear. But you may have to settle for being cared for by a very distracted angel, I’m afraid. I don’t know how long we might have before Baruch decides to come insult me again, and I cannot have them finding you if they do.”
He summoned a quill and ink pot from his desk downstairs and juggled everything for a moment until he found a way to prop the journal open on his lap. “I do wish I knew what to do for your burns, but I’m dreadfully afraid anything I could do to heal them might, well, might do more harm than good. I daren’t try adding anything that even feels like grace at the moment. So you must rest, my dear boy, and I must see to concealment first because if I am found to be harbouring you, well, then neither of us will be doing the other any good.”
He worked, making notes in his knee-balanced journal and spattering rather more ink around than he would prefer-- these breeches would never be the same, and he rather feared his linens and cuffs would only be fit for scraps and dusters after! But every time he pulled his hand from Crowley’s face the demon grew more restless, and so he balanced it all as best he could.
By the time he was done he had acquired a bit of hope and a great deal of worry.
His journal was usually used for notes on what the townspeople needed, laid out so that he wouldn’t let too many days slip by without checking on several long-term projects. It now also held the schematic for what he very much hoped was a workable set of wards for his room, to make anything here seem beneath notice. Perhaps, as Crowley recovered and grew stronger, he could...
No, Aziraphale told himself sternly. He might need to re-work them later, accept that as given. Getting protections in place at all must be the first thing.
He needed both hands for the warding. There was no other way for it. So he tried to ignore how much cooler the air of the room felt in contrast to the fevered skin he’d been holding. Crowley was simply too hot-- that fever would have been dangerously high for a human, and Aziraphale was coming to understand that he did not know how hot was too hot for a demonic corporation. And he needed to, but there was simply no one he could ask.
Even Crowley, he mused as he turned reluctantly away to start drawing wards around door and window, probably couldn't tell him. Certainly he wasn’t likely to remember much about his condition now, and Aziraphale couldn’t imagine the demon willingly staying in Hell to observe even if the denizens of Hell were mad enough to try such experiments on each other. Which he hoped they weren’t.
For now, though, he tried to bend his mind to the task at hand, drawing his painstaking runes and symbols.
It was not his best work, he admitted ruefully when he was done. He dropped into a seat on the bed next to Crowley and automatically settled his hand against the demon’s burning cheek. Crowley had gotten restive shortly after he’d started working, and his focus had been split by the shifting and harsher breathing behind him. But it would all be lost if Baruch managed to sense his patient, and he’d not be surprised if the other angel was getting frustrated by now at having been foxed out of their prey. So, if with a less steady hand than he would have wished, he’d persevered.
“Shhh,” he said. “Shh. I’m here. I don’t, don’t know at all what to do for you! But I’m here, my dear boy. I'm here.”
It was now, as he yet again brushed damp hair out of Crowley’s face, that he made the discoveries that put a different complexion on this whole affair. The first was that Crowley was not merely restive but shaking, waves of tension wracking through the slender, overheated frame.
The second, as he tried to calm the demon and his own pounding, panicking heart, was that the sweat on his hand from Crowley’s brow felt ... familiar.
Holy.
Aziraphale was up like a shot, grabbing a cloth and wiping it along Crowley's face, down his neck. He gathered as much of the sweat as he could, and then-- acutely aware of how strange this was, but needs must-- held it to his face and breathed.
It was weak. Thank G-- he flicked his eyes upward, in case the Almighty was watching, but declined to actually summon Her. Thankfully, anyway, it was weak.
Weak but, now he was looking for it, unmistakable. Holiness. Faint and corrupted but still holy. Wicking along the fibres toward his fingers, toward his face where the cloth lay against his cheek. Even the air in here, close as it was with the lamp lit and the shutters closed, smelled of it.
“No,” he said aloud, appalled. “No no no!”
With an impatient snap the shutters cracked open and air moved lightly through the room. With another snap he had a jug of cool, fresh water and a cup, a third got him buckets of clean water. One to rinse, one to rinse again. It was imperfect, but it was the best he could likely do.
Aziraphale dropped the cloth in the wooden bucket, swirling it about through the water. Lightly wrung it out and drew it along Crowley's face and neck, his arms where they could be reached past the nightshirt, rinsing frequently.
He paid special attention to the wrists, now hot and blistering. Crowley shuddered, whimpered without waking. Twitching at the touch of cool water against the ragged burns. But the skin seemed better for it.
"This shouldn't be possible," Aziraphale said gently. "My dear, I know you're in no position to... Hmm. If your corporation has decided to try to, to expel the worst of the blessing, I think we must give it all the tools we can. I shall try to be gentle, but you must drink something, you must. I don't believe your body can sustain this, as weakened as you are."
Crowley, of course, did not reply. Nor did he make a sound as Aziraphale slipped one arm beneath his shoulders and pulled him up, tipped a glass of fresh water to his lips.
It spilled over, mostly, soaking into the nightshirt and coverlet.
There had to be a trick to this, drat it. Aziraphale had seen this done-- many times, even, when attending on sick rooms and hospitals-- but he’d never had to do it himself, not entirely the human way. Gabriel could complain all day about frivolous miracle use, but the amount of miracle power it took to coax a swallow out of someone barely showed up in any accounting. It was a wonderful trick.
It was a trick he didn’t dare use on Crowley, poisoned as he already was.
“Crowley! Crowley, dear, you must drink something.” He put the glass down so that he could pat at flushed cheeks, hoping for a response. “You simply must!”
In the end he’d got more water on the bedding than into Crowley, but the demon had had at least some and the shaking had slowed. Crowley’s fever had spiked again soon after and left him mopping off not-quite-Holy but holier-than-that sweat from the demon’s corporation. After paying special attention to the burns at neck and wrists that he could easily reach, and finding more marks that went past those barriers, Aziraphale finally ended up vanishing the entire nightshirt.
Anger overtook him before he had time to be embarrassed about unclothing Crowley’s corporation without permission. The burn at Crowley’s nape was sharp and small. The line at his collar trailed along to end at a cross over his heart, which Aziraphale thought might have been made by a rosary.
Breath hissed across Aziraphale’s teeth as he examined more skin, anger creeping into a proper rage. More smaller points as he looked; the rosary seemed to have been popular. Whatever Baruch had done to set the humans on, blessed chains were clearly only the start of it.
He swallowed it down. “I’m sorry, my dear. I’m so so sorry. I should have looked you over more carefully when I put you to bed. I should have, should have known what was going on in my town. Under my own nose, why didn’t I know?”
Aziraphale worked to keep his hands steady. Ripped up old linens and laid them wet over the worst burns as he found them. They were too precarious, here; Baruch could report them right into their deaths if he wasn’t careful. Blundering around into any confrontation that wasn’t carefully controlled would be... well, it wouldn’t be good, that much was certain.
He felt he should be used to it by now, swallowing down his own heart when dealing with Heaven.
“I should have known. But I... I suspect it was not an oversight, that I did not know. Baruch has never been one for, for sharing with others, if they perceive that glory is to be had. And I don’t think they ever liked me that much.” He started at the beginning again, taking up the cloths from the worst burns and rinsing as much holiness from them as he could, laying them back with plain clean water. “I am beginning to suspect that he hid all this from me deliberately. Wanted to show that we guardians were not working as we needed to. Not, not up to snuff, as they say.”
The lamp burned low and began to gutter. He refilled it with a snap and kept working.
It seemed to be working, at least. By the time he was hearing the cheery, brainless warble of robins outside his window he fancied Crowley was doing better-- not so alarmingly hot, and the wracking spasms that had taken him over earlier had calmed somewhat.
“I do hope I’m not merely seeing what I wish to see.” Aziraphale frowned at the wash water, the feeling of holiness in it, and snapped to refill his buckets with fresh water, clear and cold and pure.
The sun was high now, lighting the room where Crowley lay quietly. “I do believe you’re doing better,” Aziraphale said, hands working in the now-familiar rhythm of rinsing and cleaning. He’d gotten the demon to drink more water, earlier, and then some broth. “Your colour is much less alarming, you know. And I fancy this is working.”
The water in the buckets had been replaced again, but the rate at which he was accumulating holiness seemed to have slowed. He chose to take this, too, as a good sign.
“I’m terribly afraid I ought to step out for a bit, though. You will be all right til I come back, won’t you? Only I really should see to the cattle. It won’t make Baruch any happier, but it should make the townsfolk think they’ve seen the back of you.”
Crowley, predictably, did not respond.
"And I rather suspect Baruch is going to show up while I do. I hope not, of course, but best to prepare for the worst and all that. So I'm going to have to leave you alone for a while, I'm afraid. And... I must, I must be able to convince him that you’re no longer a problem.”
He pulled off a long, thin strip from his torn linens and the knife he used to keep his quill sharp. “I do wish I had a better idea. And I wish I could ask you about this properly first, I really do. But I'm afraid all I can do is say that I'm very sorry, my dear."