Happy Holidays, caedesdeo!

[musegaarid.livejournal.com]

Title: The Price
By: unravels
Rating: PG
Summary: Crowley's people want to see some heads roll after the non-Apocalypse. Adam comes by to help him and Aziraphale figure out whose it should be.


It was a beautiful day, despite being rainy and chilly; due to the weather, there hadn't been a single customer in Aziraphale's shop all afternoon. The angel himself was enjoying the chilly day immensely, brewing tea in the back room, dusting shelves (but not the windows, oh heavens no, or people might think it an attractive place to browse), and moving some new-found volumes to the back room. It had only been a few days since he'd come home to find his shop restored from the pile of ash he'd imagined after Crowley's dismal recounting of the fire, and he was still finding unopened boxes full of treasures beyond even his wildest dreams. His dreams generally featured such extravagances as the original Revised Catalogue of the J. Sanford Saltus Collection of Louis XVII Books in the Library of the Salmagundi Club. But enough rare back issues of the Boy's Own would do just as well for turning a profit, if such were ever required, and the Revised Catalogue was secure in a cabinet well-hidden from prying eyes, anyhow.

He was just replacing a huge and ancient dictionary (one that included 'thou' without the label 'archaic' next to it) carefully on a shelf when the door burst open and Crowley stomped in. He was dripping, which was unusual if only in that the demon rarely allowed the rain to touch him.

"Good afternoon," Aziraphale got out, before Crowley stopped in front of him and tore off his sunglasses. The eyes beneath were golden, snakelike, and panicked.

"Have you been contacted?" the demon demanded.

"No," Aziraphale said. Oddly enough, he knew exactly what Crowley meant. "Of course not. You would know the minute I - well. Very soon afterwards." He had decided, over the course of the last few days and with the help of several gallons of tea, that what he wanted to do and what he ought to do might be different, but it was often best to follow one's instincts.

"Well, I have," Crowley said in a very low voice that wavered just a little. Had they been talking about something less deadly serious, Aziraphale might have found it intriguing. As it was, it was merely fortunate that the angel was no longer holding the dictionary.

"When? What did they want? Did they take you up about-- about before?"

"I didn't take notes," Crowley snapped. "It was very quick." He caught the look on the angel's face and straightened up a little. "They wanted to talk about it, yes. Something about 'responsibility' and 'disobedience' and 'letting the side down.'"

"Oh," Aziraphale said faintly.

"Apparently only my side," Crowley added. "I thought you might've heard something as well, and they were just trying to keep up with the Joneses. Sort of thing." He trailed off, looking hopefully at the angel.

"My dear--" Aziraphale began in a worried tone, but got no further than that. The bell over the shop door pealed out its merry tinkle, and before Crowley could turn to make sure the door slammed in the customer's face, Adam Young walked into the shop. In retrospect, Crowley was glad he hadn't slammed the door. Very, very glad.

"Adam! How did you get here?" Aziraphale asked, gaping.

"He just... wanted it," Crowley said poisonously. He was looking a little more sharply at Adam than Aziraphale thought was entirely warranted.

"I asked my dad to bring me, din't I?" Adam replied. He stoically avoided making a face at Crowley.

"Asked? Or told?" Crowley hissed.

"That's quite enough," Aziraphale broke in.

"Yeah, that's enough," Adam repeated, jerking his chin up in challenge.

"Got a little more comfortable with power, haven't we?" Crowley asked. "A little more cocky, it seems. Dangerous times. Soon enough he'll be reordering the planetsss," he told Aziraphale under his breath.

"So! To what do I owe the pleasure?" Aziraphale asked the boy. He was still in 'polite' mode and hoping very much not to have to switch over to 'stern.'

"Heard from my father. Not my dad," he corrected, frowning. "My Father."

"His Father," Crowley repeated, looking desperate.

"Did you." Aziraphale went very still, flicking his eyes to Crowley and back to Adam.

"Yeah. He wants me to find--"

"Find the ones responsible," Crowley interrupted, in a horrible monotone, "and see that they are destroyed. Was that it?"

"That was it," Adam said. "Only I'm not sure who he meant. Or why he's asking me anyway. Or why I should do what he says." He folded his arms stubbornly. "I'm only askin' in case he's set more than one person to doing this, and seeing as he did - as usual - I thought you should know." He turned directly to Crowley. "Nobody's allowed to touch my friends."

Aziraphale came around the edge of the shelf where he'd stood frozen since Crowley walked in. "Your friends?" he repeated delicately. "You think they had something to do with that?"

Crowley had sunk down onto a box in the corner, head in his hands. He hadn't even bothered to brush it off with a look of disgust beforehand, which worried the angel even more than his dramatic pose.

"Stopped those cyclists from doin' what they were meant to do, din't they? With the crown an' the scales an' all that. Now that they know how to do it, I reckon they'd do it again. You can't have the 'pocalypse without those four, so if anybody wants it, my friends are in the way. An' I won't let 'em get in trouble for it."

"There were a lot of people involved, Adam," Aziraphale said. It was clear that he had mentally sidestepped the notion that they might be required to kill whatever unlucky participant they landed on.

"It could be them, I guess," Adam said slowly. "Not Them, I mean, the nightmares. The ones on the motorbikes. We could get 'em in here and take 'em out one by one."

"They'd only come back," Crowley put in. "Nice thought, though. Take them out one by one. Oh, ble... Birmingham."

"And I am not having Pollution in this shop," Aziraphale insisted. "He'll leave dust mites in all the rare bindings."

"I think that's Pestilence," Crowley put in, from between his fingers.

"Yes, yes," Aziraphale said, flapping a hand at him. "And Azrael would scare away my customers." Crowley finally lifted his head long enough to stare at the angel in disbelief.

"Since when is that a problem?"

"We've eliminated several options," the angel said, abruptly brisk. "And useless as we were, my dear, I can't conceive of any real fault in what we did. We lost Adam, true--"

"You lost me?" Adam broke in.

"--but we didn't cause anything," the angel finished, giving no indication that he'd heard Adam at all. "And none of the humans were responsible."

"Look, can we just cut through all this crap," Crowley cut in. "We know who's responsible. Or should I say, Who is responsible." After a weighty pause, it seemed Aziraphale couldn't hold back his stern expression any longer.

"You can put it all down to the Ineffable Plan if you like," he said quietly, "but you know perfectly well that both my people and your people wanted this, and Himself never even said one way or the other."

"So our, er, colleagues might have started it," Crowley put in, "but who screwed it up? Because my boss - his Father, in case you forgot - most certainly did want it."

"That's true," Adam said. "Pretty loud about it, too." Aziraphale looked grim.

"All right," he said, his voice flat. "You want to accuse Heaven of fiddling with the Devil's plans. I'm sure that will sort everything out. I have some candles around here somewhere." He made a show of moving purposefully toward a drawer behind his (nearly empty) cash register. "And I do hope that we are not being asked to negotiate. Such a discussion did not go well the last time, and I don't think either side are quite in a position to act impartially."

"You've lost your mind," Crowley said, desperate. "Adam. He's lost his mind. Do something."

"Actually," Adam said, "it's my fault." The other two stared at him, but Adam only shrugged. "I made it stop."

"Oh, yes, he did it," Crowley said smoothly to the angel, getting to his feet. "So now we just have to find a way of destroying him, and everything will be fine. Right as rain. I'll just be over here throwing up in this bucket."

"That's not a bucket," Aziraphale yelled, diving for the vase Crowley was eyeing. Adam, lost in thoughts of the past, blinked his way back to the present.

"No," he said at last, over the sounds of their struggle, "you can't."

"Oh, thank you for pointing that out, Negative Ned," Crowley said. His voice rang out as a hollow echo from inside the 'bucket' as he desperately wrestled with Aziraphale for possession.

"My Father won't let you," Adam continued, as if he hadn't heard. "So what would have happened if I hadn't been there?" Aziraphale let go abruptly. Crowley staggered back a few steps, holding on to the vase; rather than acting, he just stood there with it.

"We'd have tried," Aziraphale said. He was smiling faintly, but his eyes were far away and rather sad. "Failed, certainly. But we'd have made the attempt." He turned to Crowley. "Wouldn't we, my dear?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Crowley muttered.

"Does that even count?" the angel asked. His hair was a little mussed from the battle over the vase; dust mites were visible in the air behind him. Crowley thought he looked very fragile.

"If you'd had real power, it might have counted," Adam said. Crowley drew himself upright in a huff, clearly about to contest the phrase 'real power,' but Adam talked right past him. "And in a pinch, even that might have been enough. This is prob'ly a pinch sort of a situation."

"So it's us after all," Aziraphale said in a wondering tone of voice. "I suppose this means that you have to punish us for fouling things up. We're scapegoats." He looked at Crowley, who was still blinking in confusion and clutching the vase, and drew himself up into a worried-looking, but straight-backed posture. "I'm afraid that is not going to be possible. I did possess the body of an innocent woman in order to interfere. I went--"

"Oh, please don't get all self-sacrificing," Crowley huffed. "I don't think I could take another go like that time in the 11th century when you--"

"We are not going to bring up that again." said the angel, stopping his confession in order to argue.

"I'm not 'taking out' either of you," Adam said vaguely, still lost in thought.

"You will if you're defending yourself," Aziraphale said, sounding very serious. He seemed to have been expecting this. "You will if I attack you."

The next few moments were a blur of action. Aziraphale had somehow re-acquired a sword, and was rushing across the room toward Adam with it entwined in flames and held out in front of him very foolishly. Adam nodded at him. Aziraphale, sword and all, vanished.

There was a moment of ringing silence.

"You just," Crowley said in despair. "You little. I."

From somewhere upstairs, there was a loud thunk, followed by a wail. Crowley's shock and rapidly rising fury dissolved into something pathetically hopeful, and he moved automatically toward the stairs. He had, it seemed, forgotten Adam was even there.

"He's fine," Adam said, effectively snapping the suspense. Crowley didn't appear to hear him, and Adam sighed the longsuffering sigh of one who is giving up on any attempt at rational discussion.

"Angel?" Crowley called from the bottom of the stairs. Aziraphale shuffled into view on the landing, sword still in hand, though it was no longer on fire.

"He's jus' off their radar," Adam explained. "It's not like it's any diff'rent. Right? You haven't been messin' people about, have you?"

"I just stabbed my antique rocking chair," Aziraphale said despondently. "I've had those cushions since the fourteenth century, and now they're nothing but ripped fabric and goose down. What? People?"

"Good riddance," Crowley muttered, but his relief at the angel's reappearance was all too evident.

"I said, you haven't been messin' people about. 'Cause you're not s'posed to do that," Adam repeated, but the angel merely stared around, stunned.

"He, er," Crowley began, then stopped. There was literally nowhere he could go with that which wouldn't end, he felt, with Aziraphale being disappeared in an unacceptable manner.

"Nice. It's a deus ex Adam," he said instead, but even he would have admitted that the joke was a lame one. His cool was proving to be a fleeting thing around here; belatedly, he thought some sunglasses on (he couldn't have said exactly when his had disappeared) and slouched against the nearest bookshelf. It wobbled alarmingly, and he stood up in haste.

"My dad's here," Adam announced, adding "my reg'lar dad," before Crowley could dive behind the shelf. "You remember what I said, all right?"

The bell at the shop door tinkled again, and he was gone.

"Goodness," Aziraphale said, still dazed.

"Yeah. Look, angel, uh." Aziraphale turned toward him, and Crowley almost forgot what he'd been planning to say.

"Do you want to grab some dinner?" he asked. It was almost shy. Something had definitely changed, but he'd be hard put to say exactly what it was. Aziraphale's stomach rumbled on cue.

"It's not dinnertime," Aziraphale said reluctantly.

There was a pause.

"I'm game if you are," Crowley said at the same time the angel said, "Of course, we could go now and avoid the rush."

Crowley waited while Aziraphale got his coat. He held the door of the shop and thoughtfully locked it behind them, then opened the passenger door of the Bentley for him. This was unusual enough, but Aziraphale's worry only grew when Crowley obeyed all the traffic laws and didn't break the speed limit all the way to the Ritz.

"My dear," he said as they examined the menus. Crowley had ordered two extra bottles of a very nice wine, as well as an extra appetizer that the angel had raved about the last time they were here. "I'm quite all right, you know."

Crowley looked him up and down. "You'd better be," he muttered.

"Pardon me?"

"Nothing."

"You're really being very extravagant. There's really no need--" He stopped when the demon looked up. Even Aziraphale found it difficult to read his expression behind the sunglasses.

"Oh, I thought you realized," the demon said, in the most normal tone of voice he'd used all afternoon. "You're paying."

Aziraphale was too relieved to complain.


Happy Holidays, caedesdeo, from your Secret Author!