Side Mission

Part One

The only empty residence in Tadfield was a cottage that looked like something Helen Allingham could have painted. It was the kind of cottage that existed so that young artists could arrive and paint postcards in a more innocent era. There were tiny rooms, sun-dappled from diamond glass windows, a hedge grown through with wildflowers, roses winding up the walls, and a horseshoe over the door. It was pretty and romantic and quite sickeningly twee, and Crowley felt the urge to knock down some internal walls and paint everything black.

"Oh, how delightful!" Aziraphale's eyes shone blue and green and brown, making Crowley think of sunlight playing on a lake. He clasped his hands, cheeks tinged with the faint pink of the English roses on the wall. "It's simply perfect."

Crowley slouched and glared at him a little, hands in pockets, completely casual and infatuated, and then looked pointedly at the horseshoe.

Aziraphale beamed at him, waving an absent-minded hand. The horseshoe decided it would rather be lying in the road than above the door than being all unneighbourly and discouraging evil from entering. Ducking his head in half-acknowledgement of the gesture, Crowley stepped through the narrow doorway, shoulders hunched in self-protection against all the quaintness. It wasn't that he had anything against Victorian architecture or decorating in general, he'd fit in well with all that neo-Gothic, but plaids and florals belonged back there. Of course, Aziraphale had never quite left them behind.

"No place for a demon. You should have it," Crowley said, following his thought.

"Nonsense. It's charming. You'll be perfectly happy here," Aziraphale said, as if he didn't know Crowley's aesthetic perfectly well. Cornflower wallpaper was not remotely demonic, and Aziraphale knew it. Besides, he was a demon, he wasn't supposed to be perfectly happy. "I do think we should obtain an electric kettle, though." In some things, Aziraphale had moved into the twentieth century, practically the twenty-first, so long as they affected his comfort and convenience. His kettle didn't have temperature controls, but Aziraphale had heard somewhere that the point of an electric kettle was to produce the perfect temperature of water, and so it did. "Besides, there's nowhere else available. You'll have to make do."

"I could—" Crowley raised his hand, and felt Aziraphale's hand on his wrist. He froze instantly. Six thousand years of friendly enmity, and he could still count all the times Aziraphale's skin had touched his. It still sent jolts of liquid fire through him, every time.

"I won't have you making innocent people homeless on our behalf."

"There's no such thing as innocent people. We've been through that," Crowley said, his voice maybe a touch more sibilant than usual, but nothing to give away how achingly dry his throat suddenly was. "Aziraphale, there's no time for messing around. We only have two years to find and influence the Johnson kid, or it's all over. We can't be thwarted by estate agents."

"We'll just have to share the cottage." Aziraphale spoke steadily, as if it was nothing at all, and part of Crowley wanted to say: Easy as all that? After millennia of He's not my friend, I don't even know him? But he wasn't cruel enough to fling that in the angel's face. The angel who had spent the last nine years risking detection by helping raise what had turned out, on further investigation, to be the wrong golden-haired baby boy. And if Aziraphale hadn't put together the clues and gone to check... No, Crowley couldn't bring himself to do anything but accept the courage involved in the offer to live and work together.

"If you're sure, angel," he said softly, pathetic excuse for a demon that he was.

"Of course I'm sure." Aziraphale looked around the tiny, sunlit kitchen. "I've always wondered what it would be like to lodge with a chum. It'll be fun."