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Crowley paused with his hand on the doorknob. An alien presence skittered at the edge of his perception, making him itchy and irritable at his inability to identify it.
Something was in there.
It wasn’t Aziraphale. Or at least, it wasn’t only Aziraphale. Most demons shied away from angelic auras, but after a thousand years with the Arrangement, and several millennia preceding it littered with less formal truces, the mental signature that said Aziraphale to him had long ago stopped feeling unwelcoming. No, whatever was in there wasn’t another angel. While the hum that buzzed aggravatingly in his skull held a touch of divine grace, it was no more than a faint hint. That pretty much ruled out contact from Aziraphale’s home office. Upstairs’ messengers gave new meaning to the word flamboyant, and Crowley knew they’d consider such an understated presence beneath them. Proud bastards. What was that which comes before the Fall, again?
While useful, knowing what it wasn’t didn’t actually help him to determine what it was. There were too many different types of beings out there tainted with a hint of righteousness. He could stand around and list them alphabetically all day and never hit the correct one. Gritting his teeth at the realization that he wasn’t going to get any answers by standing around and guessing, Crowley wrenched the door open and stepped inside.
The shop was empty, as was to be expected at this time of day, but the faint murmur of voices coming from the direction of the stock room drew his attention. Following the sound, Crowley crossed the threshold into the back to find Aziraphale chattering excitedly with a dark-haired man in Aramaic over a pile of moldy scrolls. The strange prickle dancing across his skin increased as he glanced at the man sitting in what he considered his chair and suddenly the pieces in his mind slipped into place with a resounding click.
Nephilim.
More specifically, one nephil, sitting at Aziraphale’s back table. You heard all about the sons of God and the daughters of man but, really, it’s not as if angels were any less equal-opportunity than their Creator in that respect. All angels were sexless in their base form, so why was it a surprise if more than a few decided to self-identify as female? With a human mother and a celestial father you got a child who was just a bit more hardy than average, divinely beautiful and effortlessly charismatic. A lot like Adam Young, actually. But switch things around and have that being born of an angelic mother? You got something far more insidious. Gravid angels didn’t carry for nine months; even in human form, their bodies were never designed to be utilized in such a manner. It took almost a hundred years for the child to quicken, nearly a century incubating in the essence of God’s light. It made for an interesting recipe: Take one angelic egg, add the seed of man, mix in celestial harmony and stew as directed. What came out of the proverbial oven was a creature steeped in divinity - wingless, human form contrasted with an aura of innate power. They wore the shell of a man, but didn’t age. All wounds but the most dire were healed instantly. Last Crowley had heard they’d made some kind of game out of it, cutting each other’s heads off to see who was the better man. Crazy buggers.
They may have been conceived by the divine, but ironically that was what really pushed them over the edge in the end. Being conceived, instead of plucked directly from the ether, meant that their connection to the fabric of reality wasn’t what it should be in a creature of such inherent power. At their core, they were human beings in all the ways that really mattered. Funny little human-shaped brains trapped in ethereally blessed bodies, twisting and twisted as they struggled to comprehend the magnitude of eternity. Ultimately, it drove them mad. Humans were never meant to live forever, psychologically they just couldn’t take it. Hell got almost all of them after the first century or so. He’d run across a few in his time. Usually you could feel them from miles away, shining like lighthouses in the dark sea of humanity. Most of them killed each other off before they realized they could learn to dampen the beacon glow. It took time and effort to discover how to dim that internal radiance. and this one had obviously had a long time to practice.
The man’s profile struck him as oddly familiar. He racked his memory for a long moment, struggling to place the face. His fingertips sharpened reflexively to claws once he did. “I remember you,” Crowley said slowly in a language so old it didn’t even have a name. “You were with those bastards that sacked Ebla.”
“Which time?” The man asked casually as he turned, facing the demon with a smirk that tilted up at the corners.
“Oh!” Aziraphale cried, noticing him for the first time. “My dear, you’re early! I wasn’t expecting you ‘til at least a quarter past.” His words to the angel’s company sank in and Aziraphale frowned at the two of them, “You two know each other?”
“We could stand to be introduced,” Crowley drawled. “Oddly enough, I don’t think I caught his name while he was busy carving my heart out.”
“Methos!” Aziraphale sputtered in shock, turning wide eyes toward his guest.
“It was over five thousand years ago, Aziraphale,” Methos said sourly. “You remember what the world was like back then.” Turning his attention back to Crowley, he smiled disarmingly, “No hard feelings, I hope?”
“Oh,” the demon replied, an answering smile that Aziraphale could have told anyone was the most dangerous one in his arsenal stretched tight across his face. “I’m not one to hold a grudge.” In a flash of movement too quick for a human to follow Crowley pounced, bearing the man to the floor and thrusting his scalpel-like claws into his chest. Sinking his talons into pulsing mass of flesh he found, one sharp twist tore the offending muscle free. Holding up the quivering pulp between them, Crowley grinned like the predator he was, all sharp teeth and gleaming yellow eyes. “Now we’re even,” he breathed. Methos blinked at him, choking out a gurgle that, in another situation, might have become a sardonic chuckle before going slack beneath him.
“CROWLEY!!!” Aziraphale screeched from behind him, incandescent with fury as he jerked him to his feet. “What were you thinking?!” the angel raged. “That man was a guest in my house! You can’t go 'round killing people just because they offended you five millennia ago!”
Shaking the angel off, he dropped the heart back into the dead man’s chest cavity. Scooping his sunglasses off the floor by the body where they’d fallen during the scuffle, he dusted himself off and willed the thick ichor coating his suit away.
“Just settling an old score,” he said with a smirk as he slid the glasses up the bridge of his nose. Aziraphale glared at him in response. “Oh come now, angel,” he sighed in exasperation. “It’s not as if I actually harmed him. He’s one of the Nephilim! He’ll be back on his feet before you can make a pot of tea!”
Aziraphale sniffed, refusing to be derailed from his snit by such logic. Waving a hand over the gory mess on his floor, the angel returned his visitor’s corpse and clothes to their original condition. A moment later the body jerked, twitching as it returned to life.
“Guh.”
“Very articulate,” Crowley sniped as he stepped over the prostrate form and seated himself at the table, manifesting an uncorked bottle of 1784 Chateau d'Yquem with a glass already poured in his hands.
Methos shook his head to clear it as he struggled to sit up. “Well, I haven’t died like that in few centuries.”
Aziraphale carefully helped him stand, offering an arm for him to lean on when it seemed he might sway. Crowley frowned into his glass at his counterpart’s solicitousness.
“I’m so sorry,” the angel began, but Methos cut him off with a wave.
“Nothing to apologize for,” Methos told him as he slid into the other seat. “As your friend…Crowley was, it?” he queried of the other being at the table. The demon nodded slightly, tipping his glass toward him in acknowledgement. “Yes, well, as Crowley said, we’re even now.” Grimacing at the still obviously flustered blond by his side, he reached up and squeezed the angel’s hand. “Really Aziraphale, it’s alright. From what little I remember of that battle, I don’t blame him.” A wicked grin split his face. “It’s not as if I was a nice man back then, after all. I’m quite sure I deserved it.”
Crowley knuckles tightened around his glass as Aziraphale cupped the man’s hand with both of his own and beamed at him warmly. “That’s really very magnanimous of you, my dear!”
“Sit down, angel,” Crowley commanded as he miracled a third chair and slid it his way. “No one appreciates your bloody hovering.”
Frowning at him, Aziraphale ignored his order in favor of carefully removing his old scrolls from the tabletop before something else happened to them. Shaking his head at the overt stubbornness, Crowley manifested a couple more glasses and slid one Methos’ way as a peace offering. As long as he made nice, he knew it wouldn’t take long for the angel to calm down. He was reliable that way.
Cocking an eyebrow in surprise, the human immortal took the glass without comment. The pair watched silently as the other man-shaped being poured over his scrolls, inspecting each one individually before returning them to their normal resting place, tsking angrily at Crowley for every drop of blood he had to vanish away.
“Really, Crowley,” the angel huffed as he carefully locked the last scroll away. “You couldn’t have been more careful? Some of these scrolls are absolutely irreplaceable!”
Sharing an amused glance with Methos against his will, Crowley replied dryly, “Right. No problem. I’ll just make a note, shall I?” The demon pantomimed writing on a tablet in mid-air, “Next time I decide to eviscerate someone around Aziraphale’s stock, be mindful of the blood splatter.”