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When Crowley noticed that the bookshop was closed for three days in a row, he didn’t think much of it.
Now, Crowley hadn’t spoken to Aziraphale for seven months and twenty-two days, not that he was counting, but he had seen Aziraphale slipping in and out of his bookshop while driving down the street at a leisurely pace. It didn’t have anything to do with Aziraphale, he just very much liked that particular street—there was a lovely coffee shop across the street from Aziraphale’s shop, a record store next door—it was a nice street. Crowley and Aziraphale hadn’t fallen out, exactly, they’d just drifted apart. It was natural for friends to drift apart, even if they’d been friends for six thousand years.
Crowley wasn’t sure who stopped calling first, who stopped picking up, but they began getting lunch together less and less, weeks disappearing into months without having seen Aziraphale or hearing his voice, and that was when Crowley had started liking the street more and more.
Only when Crowley came home to a message in his answering machine did he realize something was up—really up. When was the last time Aziraphale had called? He stared at the notification for a long time, both hands flat on his desk, eyeing the answering machine as if he thought it might attack. Was he ready to hear Aziraphale’s voice again?
Crowley played the message and Aziraphale’s voice came out, tinny through the speakers, sounding short of breath and whiny, the way Aziraphale’s voice always sounded when he was anxious and panicking. “Crowley—oh, I do wish you’d pick up your phone—Crowley, I need you to come to Tadfield right away. I’m—I’m dog-sitting. I don’t know how to—” There was a fumbling sound, and then Aziraphale’s voice sounded far away and muffled. “Oh no, please don’t do that.” His voice came back, closer and clearer: “Just get over here please, Crowley.”
The line clicked and went quiet.
Crowley blinked at the phone. “Dog sitting?” he said. “I thought Dog was just a dog now.”
Dog was not, in fact, just a dog now.
Crowley was going an easy 170 down the highway, quickly approaching the edges of Tadfield, when he spotted the stream of smoke rising up from the woods that bordered it. He brought the Bently up short, tires screeching against the asphalt, and then executed a very violent U-turn on the highway—the exit for the road to the forest had been perhaps half a mile back.
He parked off the road, approximately as close as the road got to the stream of smoke, which he could still see rising above the sparse canopy of trees. He headed quickly through the trees, following the line of smoke.
He found Aziraphale standing in the clearing with the hell-hound—not Dog as Adam had known him, but the hell-hound, taller than Aziraphale’s waist, with ears unnaturally pointy and teeth so large he couldn’t comfortably close his mouth. The clearing was scattered with half a dozen fires the size of a burning bush that one might talk to, perhaps, fuelled with the sticks and dry leaves of the forest floor.
Aziraphale was frantically miracling the fires away, stamping out the embers under his feet, his coat flapping around his ankles, and shouting, “Leave it, leave it! Dog, please stop, please don’t—”
The hell-hound was running around, singeing the ground beneath his feet, violently mauling a small toy rabbit.
Crowley stopped at the edge of the clearing and lowered his sunglasses thoughtfully, taking in the scene. The rabbit was holding up quite well, he noticed. It looked like it was made of a rough white material, but had been patched up with brown fabric. No matter now viciously the hell-hound tore into it, the rabbit’s fabric never seemed to tear. The fires have been contained to the clearing, though much of the ground within it was thoroughly scorched.
All in all, it seemed like Aziraphale had things well in hand.
“Hello there,” Crowley said cheerfully, walking through the fires. Fire felt like a taste of home, and sometimes he’ll light his fireplace and linger in it like a bath. It wasn’t that he missed Hell, but he… kind of missed Hell, just a little. He missed the dark spaces and the smell of smoke, the way everything was either too hot and dry or too cold and damp, even if he did ultimately like Earth more. “Looks like you’re having a grand old time out here by yourself.”
Aziraphale looked up from the fires and spotted him, his face lighting up. “Crowley! I—oh, for goodness sake—” The hem of Aziraphale’s coat had caught fire.
Crowley waved a hand in his direction, a little miracle of his own, and the flames crawling up Aziraphale’s coat fizzled out, not so much as a scorch mark to be seen. He sauntered over to the hell-hound, who had the toy rabbit pinned quite helplessly to the ground, its white ears speckled with dirt. He could feel it in his consciousness, like a little computer tab in his brain, so he opened the connection and the hell-hound lifted his head from the rabbit, sitting up to attention.
Crowley leaned over to look the hell-hound in his eyes, which looked to be more like blackened eye sockets. He didn’t have to lean very far down. “Hello yourself,” he said. “What happened to you?”
“I think—well, I suspect it has something to do with Adam being away.” Aziraphale miracled the last of the fires away and joined Crowley in peering at the hell-hound, studying him as if their answers might be found written on his side. He was black and white, bony as if he was nothing but skin stretched over bones. He had one of his paws trapping the toy rabbit to the dirt. “Adam makes everything around him perfect, and now that he’s on vacation, Dog is changing back.”
Now that the fires were out and the hell-hound was sitting peaceably, Crowley was free to study Aziraphale. He looked exactly the same as he always had: his lovely blond curls cropped close to his head and his usual outfit of his white shirt, his vest, his coat, and his perfectly straight bowtie. Admittedly, seven months was not very long to miss someone in the scope of six thousand years, but they’d spent so much time together after the almost-Armageddon that even seven months felt like its own little eternity. Seven months was long enough for Crowley to have missed the arrival of several interesting books, he was sure. It was long enough for Aziraphale to take a pet-sitting job and not tell Crowley about it, even though it was a hell-hound.
Instead of I missed you so much, Crowley went with, “Tell me you don’t actually call him Dog.”
Aziraphale looked uncertain. “It is his name.” He glanced at Crowley, and then at the hell-hound, and then back at Crowley, and Crowley knew he was trying to figure out how to start a conversation too.
Crowley considered the hound before him some more, because he didn’t want Aziraphale to notice that Crowley had caught him sneaking glances at him. He narrowed his eyes. “Does he have a collar?” he asked, eyeing the hell-hound’s bare neck. “Didn’t he used to have this lovely little black one with a little name tag and all that?”
“Did he?” Aziraphale appeared doubtful. “You want to put a collar on him? Take him for walks around town?”
“If he turns into Dog again,” Crowley said, wondering if he should pet the hell-hound or if he might get his hand bitten off. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t generate a new hand, but he didn’t want to remind the hell-hound how much he enjoyed flesh, or the taste of a demon, whatever that was. He’d heard the rumors of demons being pushed into the hound’s cage, just to make sure he was sufficiently hellish, and they weren’t good rumors. “When did he turn back? How long have you been looking after him?”
Aziraphale cleared his throat, looking sheepish. “He changed the first night I was here. He couldn’t get out through his little door in the door.”
“The door in the door?”
“The door in the door,” Aziraphale confirmed, “The ones for dogs.”
“Right.” Crowley wasn’t entirely sure what Aziraphale was talking about, but he could understand the concept. “And… sorry I don’t think you said how long you’ve been on the job.”
“Four days,” Aziraphale admitted. He was doing that nervous thing with his hands that he always did, sort of poking them about as if trying to pluck words from the air. “I didn’t—I mean, I did think I could handle it, at first. Or, I thought maybe he’d, I don’t know, change back. And it’s not like I’m bad at putting out fires.”
Crowley raised his eyebrows, trying not to visibly react to the knowledge that Aziraphale had been dealing with this for as long as he had and hadn’t thought to call him until now. He missed Aziraphale, charmingly clever, endearingly anxious, and concerningly optimistic. “He’s been setting fires this whole time?”
Aziraphale pointed at the ground, eyes wide.
Crowley blinked. The ground, which had been thin grass scattered with fallen pieces of trees: leaves, twigs, shreds of bark, was burned black all around them, spreading out from where the hell-hound was sitting in a perfectly neat circle. “Huh,” said Crowley. “That’s not good.”
“That’s why I took him out here,” Aziraphale said, gesturing to the forest. “Forest fires are good for forests.”
“Er,” Crowley said.
“But he hasn’t calmed down, not until you came. He doesn’t even sleep.” Aziraphale frowned down at the hell-hound, who gazed back at them both with his empty eyes. Aziraphale’s frown always looked a bit more like a pout, and it was a good thing Crowley wasn’t God, because if he was, Aziraphale would be able to get anything he wanted with that little frown of his. If he were the hell-hound, he’d change back right now.
I missed you, Crowley thought about saying. I wish you’d called me earlier. What if we had dinner at the Ritz again? How does that sound?
What he ended up saying was, “Good thing you don’t sleep, then. We should take him back to the town, maybe see if the Tadfield air’ll do him any good. I’ll just—” He reached for the toy rabbit.
“Oh no, you’d better not—” Aziraphale began quickly, but it was too late.
The hell-hound spotted the hand coming and seized the toy rabbit in his huge jaws, the white ears hanging limply out of his mouth, and growled loudly, and shook his head hard, flinging the white rabbit a few dozen feet away. He leapt at it with another growl, leaving flames in his wake. Each growl also held a significant amount of fire, which caught on the grass as he nosed the toy rabbit and began to tear into it again.
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale sighed, watching without moving, looking exhausted.
Crowley sucked air in through his teeth. “Sorry,” he said, as Aziraphale steeled himself and returned to putting out fires one miracle at a time. He figured this was probably the very best time to say it, since there was an active crisis going on and Aziraphale would probably not hear him. “I missed you,” he said over the crackle of the fire and the growling of the hell-hound. “Lunch would be great.”
Aziraphale didn’t respond. He was shouting, “Dog, please don’t—oh dear, would you just—”
Good, Crowley thought to himself, I asked. The ball was in Aziraphale’s court, whether Aziraphale knew it or not, and Crowley could breathe easy again, knowing he had done his part. Mostly.
By the time they got the hell-hound to calm down again, even Crowley was sick of fires, and that was saying something. The flames had left dark scorch marks on the trunks of several trees and even more of the grass under their feet was gone. The only thing stopping Crowley from exploding into a ball of lightning was the fear of starting a forest fire—these trees had been through enough and the smoke might overwhelm even Tadfield’s strange spell of perfect weather, especially with Adam out of town. Aziraphale was very carefully petting the hell-hound. He’d started petting the hell-hound right around when they’d gotten him to calm down, and Aziraphale was convinced that if he stopped, the hell-hound would start back up again.
They stared at the hell-hound again.
Crowley said slowly, “Why don’t I go to Adam’s house and find that collar. And you can stay here and pet him.”
“You’re very interested in this collar,” Aziraphale observed, continuing to pet the hell-hound, scratching him behind his ears and watching carefully to see if he liked it. He appeared not to hate it.
“I have a feeling about it,” Crowley told him. He leaned down to look at the hell-hound again. “You stay right here.”
“Come back quickly.” Aziraphale looked at him, and Crowley got the feeling he wasn’t thinking about the hell-hound at all.
Adam’s house was very clearly a household with a teenager for an only child. There were posters up everywhere, things about global warming, space-ships, metal bands. The size of Dog’s tiny little dog bed in the corner of the living room startled Crowley for a moment, before he remembered that Dog was the size of a terrier.
There was a cardboard box of dog-related items beside the bed: dog food, both wet and dry, a coiled leash, and there, lying atop a plastic bag of dog biscuits, was a little black collar that read Dog.
Aziraphale was still petting the hell-hound when Crowley got back, though he seemed to have gotten bored of scratching him behind the ears and had switched to rubbing him under the chin. The hell-hound wagged his tail, leaving stripes of blackened earth behind.
“Collar,” Crowley said, holding up the collar.
“Let’s hope this works,” Aziraphale said, accepting the collar from Crowley’s hands.
Their fingers brushed when he did, and Crowley realized that was the first time he’d touched Aziraphale in a long, long time. Seven months and twenty two days, maybe more. He wanted to do it again and do it more. He’d always wanted to do more than just shake Aziraphale’s hand at the end of a good meal when they parted ways, but the closest he’d gotten was brushing shoulders when he offered to help shelve books beside Aziraphale while the bookshop was closed. Would it work if he just asked, Can I hold your hand? Probably not very well.
“Why do you think this will work?”
“Eeuh?” Crowley asked, looking up quickly—he’d been sort of staring at nothing, and his eyes had ended up somewhere in the vicinity of Aziraphale’s stomach. Maybe it could be construed that he was looking at the hell-hound. It took him a second: Aziraphale was holding up the tiny collar to the hell-hound’s neck, considering it dubiously. “Oh. I dunno. I think he needs to be Dog again.”
He did need to be Dog again.
As soon as Aziraphale began to wrap the collar around the hell-hound’s neck, he shrunk in the blink of an eye, a tiny black and white dog with eyes that glinted red in the light. He fit into the collar perfectly.
“Oh,” said Aziraphale.
“Wow,” Crowley agreed. “You never thought of that?”
Aziraphale got very flustered and nervous again—he was a terrible liar. “Well—no, why would I have thought—it’s just a collar, Crowley, it isn’t an enchanted object or anything, why would I—no. I didn’t think of it.”
“Right,” Crowley said, incurably curious. “I just got a feeling. You didn’t get a feeling?”
“No,” Aziraphale said shortly. He looked at Dog, then at Crowley, then at Dog.
Dog was chewing peacefully on the ear of the seemingly indestructible toy rabbit, which was now almost half his size. He kept trying to pin the rabbit to the ground, but his paws would slide off onto the dirt every time he got them settled.
Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I suppose you’ll be leaving, then, now that I don’t need any help.”
Crowley stilled. He had the sudden urge to disappear the collar entirely or to throw it in the fireplace, and to delay all flights indefinitely so that Adam could never return from vacation. “How long is Adam gone for?” he asked, pushing his sunglasses up his nose.
They were both looking very hard at Dog, and very much not at each other. This was fine. This was a fine thing to do. He was a good looking dog—only the best for the Anti-Christ—and he was certainly nothing shabby to look at, if perhaps a little small.
“Three days more.”
“Plenty can go wrong in three days,” Crowley pointed out. “I’m a demon, I should know.”
Dog nosed the toy rabbit onto its back and began sniffing curiously at its dirt-smeared stomach.
Crowley didn’t look to see if Aziraphale was smiling but he could hear the smile when Aziraphale agreed, “Plenty can go wrong in three days.”
Aziraphale and Crowley had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together for three days, watching over Dog and pretending they were worried he was going to change back. They fixed the clearing up to look just like the rest of the forest.
They spent hours in the apple orchard with Dog, they fed him his dry food,his wet food, and perhaps a bit of human food as well, and they took him for walks around town. Once, when they were walking around town, one of the neighbors came and said hi, they didn’t know there was a lovely new couple staying in the Young’s house while they were gone, what were their names?
And neither of them corrected the assumption that they were, as the humans might’ve called them, going steady.
Aziraphale especially liked walking Dog along the streets with the prettiest flower beds, but he always made sure to miracle away any of Dog’s pee. Crowley called that a waste of a miracle every time, but he suspected that just made Aziraphale more determined to do it, because every time Crowley said it, Aziraphale got a fond smile on his face and he’d pick a friendly argument with Crowley on the way home.
Crowley would set a fire in the backyard at night—a very contained one, he promised Aziraphale—and liked to sit in front of the fire with Dog, who watched the flames dance with the same sense of enchantment that Crowley felt when he looked at Aziraphale—and the fire as well—the kind of feeling that said I’m home.
I’ll miss you, Crowley thought. Do you want lunch? Will you call?
Crowley was not going to call. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, what Aziraphale was expecting or what he was hoping for, and he didn’t intend to call and be met with an awkward, oh, sure.
When the morning of the fourth day arrived, they stood on the porch together, watching Dog play in the yard very carefully. It was almost time for the Youngs to get back; their flight home had arrived half an hour ago and they were catching a cab from the airport.
“Well,” said Crowley.
“Well,” Aziraphale agreed.
“I’m going to miss him,” Crowley said, nodding to Dog. Dog had finally managed to chew through the rabbit and was happily tearing it open with his teeth, one stitch at a time, his tag jingling on his collar brightly.
“I’m going to miss him too.”
Dog trotted up to them and dropped the dismembered rabbit at their feet. Then he went into the house through the little door in the door, leaving Crowley and Aziraphale with nothing to look at.
Behind them, the growl of a car engine grew nearer, and then came the sound of Adam’s voice, far off, but distinct. This was goodbye, Crowley realized. The two of them, sitting on the porch and looking at nothing in particular, talking about how much they were going to miss taking care of someone else’s hell-hound.
“I’d like lunch,” Aziraphale told the empty yard before them.
Crowley looked at him.
Aziraphale had that furrowed brow that indicated he was about to start rambling nervously again, and he was still staring very hard at the yard. “I think you said you thought lunch would be great. I mean I could be wrong—you chose a very bad time to say it—but I think that’s what you said.”
“Me?” Crowley said. It was a stupid thing to say. He should have said, yes, I said that, I’d love lunch, let’s do lunch, my treat.
“No, Dog,” Aziraphale said impatiently, “Yes, you. I want lunch.”
“Okay.” Crowley grinned his demon’s grin. “Let’s do lunch.”