Chapter Text
Adam hesitated.
The thing was, he was waiting. There was the dark undercurrent—ever-present, whispering, ready—and the Plan, and everything wound up in it.
The trouble, though, was the Plan. The whisper seemed to know there was some inscrutable clause in it, some unnamed thing that needed to happen at the appointed moment.
And Adam, as distressingly tired as he was after a day of saving the world, didn’t know what.
So he waited, which for some unspecified reason involved letting his eyes dart in the direction of Hell’s earthbound agent. Not so much a demon, that one, and never quite what he seemed.
“For a moment there, just for a moment,” said Crowley, to the angel, sitting with his head in his hands, “I thought we had a chance. He had them worried. Oh, well, it was nice while—”
“Excuse me,” said Aziraphale, getting to his feet, which drew Adam’s attention instantly. “This Great Plan,” he went on, narrowing his eyes at Adam in return, and then at the Metatron, “this would be the ineffable Plan, would it?”
Adam glanced at Crowley, who had stuck his finger-tips in his mouth and looked ready to die of embarrassment. Adam knew the feeling, he reckoned. School was like that.
“It’s the Great Plan,” said the Metatron, stiffly, glaring at Heaven's wayward agent. “You are well aware. There shall be a world lasting six thousand years, and it will conclude with—”
“Yes, yes, that’s the Great Plan all right,” Aziraphale said, with a stubborn air that Adam found impressive. “I was just asking if it’s ineffable as well. I just want to be clear on this point.”
“It doesn’t matter!” said the Metatron, with snippy impatience. “It’s the same thing, surely!”
Adam watched Crowley widen his eyes and begin to grin with sudden, fragile-seeming hope.
“So you’re not one hundred percent clear on this?” asked the angel, edging closer to his friend.
Friend, Adam thought, and time slowed to a standstill. Maybe it has to do with…
“It’s not given to us to understand the ineffable Plan,” the Metatron intoned meaningfully, “but of course the Great Plan—”
Crowley sucked in his breath, a curiously human affectation, and stepped up beside Aziraphale.
“But the Great Plan can only be a tiny part of the overall ineffability. You can’t be certain that what’s happening right now isn’t exactly right, from an ineffable point of view.”
It’s almost right, Adam thought, glancing at Beelzebub to see if Hell would weigh in.
“It izz written!” screeched the emissary, and Crowley shrank a fraction closer to Aziraphale.
“But it might be written differently somewhere else,” the demon said, anxiously seeking support from his counterpart. “Where you can’t read it.”
“In bigger letters,” Aziraphale asserted. His hand twitched at his side, almost brushing…
Oh, cor, Adam thought taking a step toward them, still in slow motion. I see.
“Underlined,” Crowley went on, clearly emboldened by this quite peculiar turn of events.
“Twice,” added Aziraphale, and his hand twitched again. He was reaching; did he know?
“Perhaps this isn’t just a test of the world,” Crowley challenged, stepping forward to meet Adam, and Aziraphale’s pinkie caught empty air. “It might be a test of you people, too. Hmmm?”
“Yeah, well,” Adam said hesitantly, feeling something snap and flood between the emissaries behind him, something distinctly not good, “it’s a test all right. A test of you.”
Crowley swallowed, blinking rapidly at Adam, and then turned to Aziraphale. “Angel, what—”
Just like that, the angel folded and recoiled, wringing his hands in dismay. “My dear, I don’t—”
Adam heard the thunderclap before he saw it split the sky, felt the emissaries’ presences behind him unfurl wings as broad as the horizon. And then there was the wind, wild and unforgiving.
“Oh no,” Crowley whispered, the armies’ advance reflected in his sunglasses’ lenses as he grabbed the hem of Aziraphale’s coat and yanked with all his strength. “Get down!”
Curiously detached, in whatever degree of muted separation he had set himself from the proceedings, Adam watched as the sunset ignited. Archers’ arrows, flame-fletched.
“Don’t!” Adam shrieked, but his voice was lost to the wind’s roar and the armies’ advance toward the very point where Aziraphale and Crowley knelt and shielded each other with shuddering wings. “I didn’t say you could do it, it’s not like this is what I wanted—”
And he was swept up by the wind, in a cloak of inky terror as the armies made landfall below.
WHAT YOU WANT IS IMMATERIAL, said Death, holding them aloft over what must be the best view in Creation. YOUR CHAMPIONS FAILED THE TEST.
“I didn’t want them to fail,” Adam insisted, feeling almost like he might cry, “but they had to want to pass, didn’t they? It was close. I could feel it.”
Death appeared to nod somberly, but there was a hint of amusement, too. HAND IN HAND.
“Wait, so it was what I saw,” Adam gasped. “Like they almost made it. Aziraphale tried to—”
IN MATTERS LIKE THESE, Death replied, grinning maniacally, THERE IS NO TRY. ONLY—
“Only do, yeah, I saw that movie,” said Adam, impatiently, realizing that the armies’ clamor and the humans’ shrieking probably meant no chance of reversal. “What can I do?”
Death tilted his head, and they drifted a fraction lower. They were suspended directly above the angel and the demon, whose wings hadn’t been spared the archers’ volley.
“Hey,” Crowley coughed, swiping off his shades so he could look Aziraphale in the eye. “So…”
Aziraphale had been, up till that moment, trying to tug an arrow from the juncture of Crowley’s wing and shoulder. The endeavor had gone poorly; their hands and faces were bloody.
“I am trying to get us through this in one piece, dear boy,” said the angel. “If you’d—”
“If nothing,” said a taunting voice from behind them, because the combat, now hand-to-hand, had begun to close in around their island of relative calm. “Aziraphale, is that you?”
Adam didn’t like the look of the red-haired angel with what looked like a complicated spear.
“Listen,” he said desperately, tugging at Death’s ragged, star-studded cloak as it whipped around them, “I have an idea. They mentioned something, that—that ineffability?”
Death inclined his head, tugging his cloak out of Adam’s trembling hand. I’M LISTENING.
“That, well, it’s like…it’s a kind of clause, isn’t it?” Adam forged on. “Like an escape route. They were about to take it, take each other’s hands, yeah? But they missed it.”
Laughing, Death tipped his head back to the maelstrom Heaven’s army had left in its wake.
YOU NOTICED THAT THEY MISSED IT, he conceded, spreading his arms, obscuring the seething clouds. WELL DONE, ADAM YOUNG. YOUR MOVE?
Adam chewed the inside of his cheek, watching as the angel with the spear-like weapon approached Aziraphale’s back, which was turned to him. Or was the angel a her?
“Yes,” Aziraphale was saying wearily, as if no time had passed since the other angel’s greeting.
“What are you doing?” Crowley hissed. “That one’s trouble, that one’s always been—”
“Oh, Az, you didn’t,” drawled the red-haired angel, raising the weapon. “That’s just adorable.”
Aziraphale drew a shuddering breath, refusing to turn, refusing to tear his eyes from Crowley.
“I thought we had a chance, too,” he said urgently, “and, Crowley, listen, I want you to know—”
“You know how this ends!” called another angel, one Adam hadn’t noticed. “Join us or fall!”
CLOCK’S TICKING, Death said. ODD AS THIS SOUNDS, I DON’T HAVE ALL DAY.
“This Ineffability Clause,” Adam replied, swallowing hard. “That’s my move. The minute they die, your clock resets. Since Crowley moved before they could touch, he gets to try over an’ over again till he gets it right. I mean, Aziraphale can help, I s’pose, but he can’t know. Every time Crowley fails, though, the clock, see—it’s got to restart. Not to this morning, I reckon. It all moves so fast once it gets going. Wednesday, maybe. Before all the fuss started. Wednesday night. You can pick what hour, even.”
Death’s eyes flashed in unashamed amusement. COMPLINE, THE NIGHT-TIME PRAYER.
Adam shook his head. “You’re going to have to tell me what time. I don’t know that old stuff.”
ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK, Death said, shaking one bony hand side to side. GIVE OR TAKE.
“That’s my bedtime,” said Adam, glumly, “but I reckon it’s got to be sometime, so why not.”
YOU DO REALIZE, Death continued, THAT THIS WILL BE TORTURE FOR CROWLEY? TORMENT THE LIKES OF WHICH HELL HAS NEVER EVEN CONCEIVED.
Adam knew that Death had a point. The whisper in him ebbed, and then swelled, suggesting that he had a place in the atrocities below. A place of absolute command, his birthright.
“He’s just got to stick it out, hasn’t he,” Adam said, “since I’m sticking this out an’ everything.”
Someone shrieked down below, and it wasn’t one of the humans.
Adam peered at the source of the sound, his heart skipping a beat at the terrible sight.
Crowley, despite Aziraphale’s desperately spread wings, had taken an arrow square in the chest.
“That wasn’t very sporting of you, dear girl,” Aziraphale seethed, glancing over his shoulder.
“Not really,” said the pale-haired angel, tilting her head at the spear-bearer. “Do the honors?”
Crowley spat blood in the dust, pitching forward before Aziraphale could ask what he was doing.
“Whatever you wanted me to know,” he rasped in agony, wings beating to keep balance as he threw his arms around Aziraphale’s neck, “it can’t…have been very important, can it?”
“No, my dear,” Aziraphale whispered, clinging to him in kind. “It can’t very well have been.”
Ghastly, to watch them smile at the futility of their wistful joke. Even worse, to watch the red-haired angel meet the fraught gold of Crowley’s defiant gaze and finally lunge forward.
The complicated spear lanced through Aziraphale and Crowley like they were tissue paper.
Adam looked away, fixing his stinging eyes on Death’s. Remembering Crowley’s defiance, he extended his hand and worked. The Ineffability Clause, their terms, all of it.
“There,” Adam said, sealing it with a forceful turn of his palm, trying not to cry. “It is Written.”
Nodding, Death extended his skeletal fingers, firmly clasping Adam’s. YES. SO IT IS DONE.