Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ellen had an excellent poker face.

It was important, in a line of work like this one. She heard all sorts of unbelievable things. Things like, “I want to buy a two-bed property with a garden in London and my budget is £350,000,” or, “I want a quirky historical property with a nice open-concept living-kitchen space,” or “this one would be perfect if the train line weren’t right there, do you think if I wrote the council—?”

She’d gotten better, over the years, at knowing which people were going to require the poker face long before anyone had said anything ridiculous. That was how she was able to flash a quick smile and keep right on talking when this client had sat down in her office and failed to answer a single one of her questions.

The first question had been a softball. Hardly even a question. She was an estate agent in the Brighton office of Savills; she assumed he was looking for properties in Brighton or the surrounding South Downs.

And yet! And yet.

“Whereabouts are you thinking?”

This low-hanging fruit had been met with a contemplative silence followed by a string of chatter that had resulted in no more information than not Oxfordshire. Since she didn’t sell properties located in Oxfordshire, this was not all that helpful.

“Number of bedrooms? Bathrooms?”

“Oh, I don’t know that I want to hem things in just yet,” the librarian said. Mr Fell, he said his name was. Librarian was a guess but a good one—he had elbow patches on his jacket and a general air of dustiness about him. A bit of roundness. “I’d like to keep things—well. Exploratory.”

The door to her office opened suddenly, and an thin streak of black and red oozed into the room. He sat down next to Mr Fell and said, “What’s up?”

Mr Fell bristled, though he tried not to look it. “I told you. I’m going to buy property.” He said it like he weren’t sure if he were pronouncing it correctly, or maybe like he were pronouncing it with capital letters. “Somewhere in the countryside.”

“Not Oxfordshire?”

“We’re in Brighton, Crowley.”

This Crowley looked around, like he were just noticing. He nodded. “So we are.”

Ellen waited for them to introduce him properly, though neither seemed particularly inclined to it. Partner seemed unlikely, since he seemed out of the loop of Mr Fell’s plans, and their ring fingers were both bare. Brother seemed equally unlikely. Old friend, perhaps? Solicitor seemed more—

“Colleague,” Crowley—Mr Crowley?—said suddenly.

Mr Fell cleared his throat. “Well. Retired colleagues.”

Right.

She took a sip of her tea, smiled again at them both, and went back to her notepad. “We were just talking about the number of bedrooms. Are we feeling more in the two to three range? More like five?”

“Definitely need a big bathtub,” Mr Crowley said, leaning back in his chair and doing an impression of the type of man you saw at parties who called himself a consultant but never said what he consulted in. Maybe just Crowley after all. He still hadn’t taken his sunglasses off. “Space to put one, at least.”

“And a library,” Mr Fell added.

“Not in the bathroom, though. She’s asking about bathrooms.”

“Yes, well.” Mr Fell gave a delighted sort of wiggle. “You said one thing you wanted, so I said one thing I wanted.”

Sunglasses snorted dryly. “We all know you want a library.”

“Well, we do now.”

“So,” Ellen cut in. They looked at her like they’d forgotten she was there. “Sorry, I—is this a co-ownership, then? Sort of a business endeavor, or—? Because there are some rules about Airbnbs and that sort of thing in this area, and I’m not sure—”

“No, no, not at all.” Mr Fell smiled, nervous, a little fragile even. “It’s a perfectly legitimate question. I fear I hadn’t thought to, I mean, that is to say, well.”

Mr Crowley looked at him. They seemed to have a conversation all in just their eyebrows. Then he turned back to Ellen and said, decisively, “More like, a post-professional endeavour. Which definitely doesn’t need guest rooms.”

“Crowley! Of course we do.”

“We don’t. What guest are you going to invite over, eh? Gabriel? You want Gabriel down for the weekend, oh sure, pop along, the last time I saw you, you were trying to blip out my very existence, but come on then, I’ll make scones for breakfast!”

“You know I don’t cook.”

“Well, I’m not making bloody Gabriel scones.”

“I didn’t ask you to.” He turned back to Ellen and said firmly, like he were ordering a quick coffee at the Costa downstairs, “One guest room, please.”

Ellen decided her day was full enough without following up on every casual reference to—whatever that had been. No need. She hadn’t even broached the number of bathrooms yet and her tea was already cold. “So,” she said, trying to ask the question delicately. “That’s—two total? Three?”

“Might need extras, though,” Crowley sighed, uncrossing and recrossing his legs. “I’ll need an office, since you’ll be taking up the library.”

“An office? What for?”

Crowley made a complicated gesture with his hands. “For—for my office work!”

“You’re retired!”

“So are you, but you’re getting the whole bloody library.”

“I’m hearing maybe four?” Ellen put in. They’d forgotten she was there again; she could tell by the way Sunglasses nearly fell off his chair. “Bedrooms?”

“Better make it five,” he muttered, and she went on to the next question, which she never did get a proper answer to: budget.

*

Fell made an appointment for the following Wednesday to see the first round of properties. Ellen cleared the entire afternoon.

Again, Fell trotted in, as rosy as a cherub. He’d brought a little tin of rose and pistachio biscuits, which he handed to Ellen with a smile that said he somehow knew that they were her favourites from when she was a child and her nana was still around to make them.

Bit unnerving, that.

Again, Crowley followed after by about ten or fifteen minutes and sauntered in like he’d just happened by. And again, despite having started showing pamphlets and leaflets and portfolio pages to Fell right on time, they still hadn’t managed to get any further than the first property. He slid into the chair next to Fell and, without even looking at the page Fell was studying, said, “No.”

“Quite right,” Fell said, as if he hadn’t just been hemming and hawing over the lack of fireplace in the kitchen. “Too close to Brighton.”

The second was too far away from Brighton. The third, too close to its neighbours—“Not enough privacy for shedding,” Crowley had said, which was such an odd comment Ellen meant to tell her mum about it later that night—shedding what—but she’d forget it before she could.

The fourth didn’t have a library and there was no interest in doing a room conversion. She supposed she ought to have seen that coming.

After three hours, Crowley slunk out of her office as Fell effusively thanked her. Almost suspiciously effusively. Like it were a game, and she were presenting them with a neat little challenge, instead of her job, which she was trying really very hard to do.

He promised to come back the following week. Ellen’s poker face felt pasted on.

*

At first, they were just finicky clients, Fell and Crowley. Bit odd. A little rude, though Ellen could tell it was mostly unintentional and they were just like that. Fell could be invasive; Crowley could be dismissive. But a lot of clients were the same.

By the third appointment, they were strange clients. They had a way of communicating that made Ellen feel like she were missing parts of the conversation, like she’d zoned in and out even though she was concentrating on staying present and could never remember tuning out. Like missing the step at the bottom of the stairs, only everyone you were going down the stairs with had hit it just fine.

Around the fifth appointment, Ellen seriously considered calling the police. Oh, not that one, that reminds me of the time Henry had me imprisoned for eight years, do you remember? and people being destroyed and something about doing ninety miles an hour in central London.

Retired colleagues. Right. Sure. If you could retire from a line of work like that.

Anyway, Fell came in the next week with a box of Turkish delight and eventually the pair went from finicky to frightening and back to mundane again. Just another couple of finicky, impossible clients, who wanted things like every room facing the south and a garden but not a very well-kept garden and historic details but not from the 1860s and honestly, she was nearing the end of her portfolio, her patience, and her sanity.

But here she was once again. Wednesday afternoon.

“Sorry,” she said, rushing to clean up a pile of documents when Fell knocked on the door. This time he had Crowley already with him, which was unusual, and it flustered her a bit, because she’d sort of come to rely on his lateness to give her some buffer time to get everything sorted. “Sorry, I’m just tidying up from the last appointment, do come in. Tea, anyone?”

“Tea would be lovely,” Fell said.

“No,” Crowley said.

She made the tea things. She put out some of the biscuits Fell had brought, a sort of spicy orange chocolate thing from Harrod’s or Selfridge’s or maybe some artisanal biscuit faerie that lived on the moors and only produced three packets of biscuits for sale each year. It was hard to say.

“All right, if you give me just a moment, I do have a few new things to show you—”

“How long have we been doing this?” Fell asked.

Ellen blinked. “Two months, ish?”

“Is that very common? Two months?”

“No,” Crowley snorted. “You’re a terror, Aziraphale.”

She’d heard him call Fell that before. Aziraphale. Sounded more like a sneeze than a name, but it suited him, a bit. As much as any name could suit someone who was maybe a murdering mafia man on the run or was perhaps a librarian who’d been cursed by some ancient text or was perhaps just another wealthy oddity.

“Everyone’s different,” she hedged, ignoring Crowley, and his name suited him just fine. “Some people just take a little longer to settle into the process, and while we do acknowledge that it’s very rare to find a property that suits every single point on a person’s wishlist perfectly, we usually find with time that we can really find the home that will work for both their comfort and their needs.”

She’d read that off the back of a Rightmove advert once. Sounded good though, didn’t it.

Fell hummed consideringly, then he reached out and snagged a page off her desk. A property she’d been showing her last client. “What about this one?”

Ellen shook her head and went back to digging through her stacks. “It doesn’t have a library.”

“Doesn’t it?” He was staring at the page sternly, like a father preparing to reprimand a child.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, with a note of warning.

“Hush, you. I’m quite sure you’re mistaken, Ms. Poole, here, have a look—”

Fell handed the page back to her, and Ellen was so astonished she nearly upended her tea. She’d just looked at this posting an hour ago, and she was sure it hadn’t quite looked the same then. She didn’t remember there being a conservatory, for one. She didn’t remember the stables being converted into a wide, comfortable garage, either. She definitely didn’t remember the gardens being so unkempt or she wouldn’t have showed it to her last client.

And there, written toward the bottom of the property specifications, at the word: Library.

“This was your idea in the first place,” Crowley was muttering. “We agreed we wouldn’t.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you could mean. I’ve stuck to all the terms of our agreement.”

Ellen didn’t bother waiting for a break in their conversation; she knew by now that they could go on like this for far longer than she cared to be party to. “Shall I set up a viewing?”

“No need,” Fell said.

“The pictures are enough, he means,” Crowley drawled. He sat up, unfurling himself from his sprawl like he were putting all the knobs of his spine back in order. “Put in the offer at twenty percent over asking and we’ll see you to sign the paperwork in, say, two weeks?”

“Oh, it’s—this process usually does take some back and forth, and some time for the current occupants to move out, more like four to six—”

“Two weeks’ll be fine.”

“I don’t know that I can pack up the shop in two weeks,” Fell mused.

“You can if it knows what’s good for it,” Crowley said darkly. “We’ve got tea reservations at three, by the way, so unless you were planning to skip the Ritz—” He trailed off, already trailing toward the door.

Fell thanked Ellen profusely. Gave her a wink like they shared a secret and promised her her usual Wednesday biscuit delivery would come the following week, even without their appointment, and shook her hand in both of his in the sort of way that felt, for a very brief moment, like being held by something very old and very strong and many, many-eyed.

Then he’s gone.

*

The last time Ellen saw them, she was on her way for a quick sandwich and a coffee and they were standing outside an antique shop three doors down from her office. They’d collected the keys the day before, signed all the papers, and suddenly everything had been in order. It’d taken, by sheer luck and coincidence, two weeks exactly.

She decided not to question it.

“I know it was you,” Crowley was saying as she got closer, lounging on thin air as Fell perused a display of vintage teapots with the intensity of a serious collector.

This time Fell didn’t deny it. “Does it matter?”

“We had an Agreement.” The capital letter was practically stamped into the air alongside the word.

“We agreed to be happy,” Fell pointed out. “Are you happy?”

Crowley’s face twisted. Fell didn’t look at him. Ellen tried to shuffle past as unobtrusively as she could, though she had the sense that Crowley, at least, was perfectly aware of her, and was watching her even when he wasn’t looking at her.

Finally, Crowley said, “You know the answer to that.”

Fell turned to him. Smiled. Even though Ellen wasn’t looking, it was blinding in her periphery, like looking straight into the sun, or a lion’s mouth, or a flaming sword.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

Chapter Text

Thing was: it was a beautiful house.

Craig could see that just through the windscreen, pulling up into the drive the first time. The sort of house his grandad had always been going on about, the kind of houses he’d built his career to work in. He’d had a few projects here and there, sure, but this—this was the whole kit and caboodle. Top down renovation and restoration, with the historic wood mostly still intact, the fireplaces still burning the way they burned when they were built three hundred years ago. The nooks and crannies and leaded glass windows.

Gorgeous from the slate roof to the dirt root cellar.

And the clients were the sort of clients he’d always been after too: people with more money than sense, but who really understood restoration versus renovation and the place each had in a project. These were the type of people who’d hear him chatter on about reclaimed wood from a barn off in Wiltshire and say, no yeah mate, run off, we’ll pay whatever for it. Who looked at wood stains and bathroom tiles and paint chips and weren’t afraid of a bit of colour.

This was no cottage-core modernist reno masquerading as historical. These blokes had done their research.

It was just that they were also both mad as hatters.

Craig had first got the sense that there was something a bit odd about these guys right off at the initial phone call. Fell, he’d said his name was, and at first Craig had just thought, you know, ah yeah, public school type, is what it is.

And he was a public school type, this Fell. Down to his bone marrow. But it wasn’t just poshness clinking around his vowels, though he had plenty of that—it was the sense of age.

Craig liked old things. History and what. Breathing life into things no one else saw the value in anymore. He knew how to look at a thing and see, based on its wear, its use, whether its started to rot or fossilise, how long it’d been sat there for.

Talking to Fell—looking at him, too, now that Craig was here—was like looking through straight down the line to the peat bogs and dusty crevasses of the earth.

Must have been one hell of an old family line. Probably they’d been sitting on their land since the years only had three digits to round them out, keeping with the traditions to match. He wasn’t surprised Fell ended up being a strange one.

He was a bit surprised by how strange, maybe.

*

He started in the library. Tip-top priority, Fell had said, though Craig couldn’t see why. Damn thing looked practically brand new—newer than new, almost pristine, like an art installation. Like it’d been plopped into the house on some bloody wish. Cherrywood paneling, coffered ceiling, hardwood floor, stone-carved fireplace. The lot.

“Of course it all needs restored,” Fell said, twisting his hands. “Stripped, stained, finished, however you do it. Sconces replaced. We’ll call someone out to have the flue cleaned, of course.”

That seemed—excessive was probably the kindest word Craig had. Better than the first word, which was insane.

“Well, I agree about the sconces. Size is off. And I can give you a recommendation for the flue, I’ve got a guy I work with all the time. But the woodwork in here—” He trailed off, giving a tug at one of the shelves. Sturdy as an oak, still, like it had been grown in rather than fitted. “Doesn’t really need any work.”

They went back and forth a bit. Fell insisted; Craig tried to explain that overworking a wood could do more harm than good, particularly a wood with any age to it.

Not that Craig thought any of this wood was much older than a half-second, not matter what Fell believed about it being original to the house. Things like this just didn’t last that long.

“You’re being ridiculous,” a long lean line of sarcasm cut in from where it lounged in the doorway, interrupting Fell’s long, somewhat anxious foray into explaining his line of thought, which Craig was barely following. Hair as red as the cherrywood, sunglasses indoors. Those sunglasses had tilted in Craig’s direction and said, baldly, “Hi.”

Fell grimaced and swatted and generally put on a show with being very annoyed. “Out, Crowley! I’m just standing by the terms of our agreement!”

“Agreement?” Craig asked, when he’d gone.

“He thinks he’s clever,” Fell said, sniffing. “But I’ll win in the end, you’ll see.”

“So’s the place just yours then, or a project you’re doing together, or—”

“Oh, would you look at that.” Fell pointed out the window at nothing. “A—bird.”

In the end, Craig found himself doing the fool’s work on the entire room anyway. Stripping wood down, sanding it clean. Testing different stains until they found one Fell cooed over as if it were an infant child. He felt a bit like an arse about it too, charging them through the nose for useless work, but Craig was a contractor, not an ideas man, and he felt strongly that he was better at collecting a paycheck than talking himself out of one.

When it was done, he stood in the middle of the library and thought it mostly all looked exactly the same as it’d done before.

Fell had been thrilled. Crowley had laughed.

*

If the library had been strange, the kitchen was downright weird.

First off, they had a hell of a time making decisions about what they were doing in a way that seemed bizarrely argumentative, even though they weren’t disagreeing. Fell emphasized the need for organization. Crowley, glaring, emphasized the need for an extra-large fridge and kept asking about a cheese-specific drawer. Fell triumphantly demanded a potting station. Crowley demanded space for a comfortable sofa, which made Craig do a double-take—he didn’t seem like a terribly comfort-oriented type of bloke—and made Fell gasp like he’d demanded the devil himself take a seat in it.

There was also a long, arduous conversation about the utility of a wine fridge that ended when Crowley, pointing a victorious finger, had exclaimed: “Champagne!”

Neither of them seemed to have any idea where one went about purchasing appliances; eventually Crowley had handed Craig a matte black credit card with no name on it and told him to sort it out himself.

“None of these old appliances plug in, then?” Craig asked, two weeks later, stuffed halfway behind the fridge as he tried to dislodge it to take it down to recycling. Looked like a 70’s install, but he couldn’t figure out the power source. The plug—a perfect normally, perfectly standard plug—lay uselessly on the floor behind it, unattached, but the fridge hummed along anyway. “That a Bluetooth thing?”

“Hm?”

Crowley was keeping company today. Or rather, not keeping company, not quite, because he didn’t look like the type to want to babysit a contractor and after so many weeks in the house already, Craig surely didn’t need one.

“The fridge. It’s working, it’s cold, but it’s not plugged in. Doesn’t seem like a newfangled fridge, but—”

“Oh, that. It’s—” Crowley hesitated. “Nuclear.”

Not exactly confidence-inspiring, was it. Craig let go of the unit and quickly shuffled himself out from behind it. “Sorry, nuclear? You have a nuclear fridge?”

“Erm, yep.”

Craig scratched his head. “I don’t actually know how to properly dispose of a nuclear-operated appliance, mate. I’ll have to do some research on the weekend and get back with you.”

Behind the sunglasses, Crowley’s face did something complicated and panicky. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

And sure enough, the next Monday, the fridge was gone. In fact, all the appliances were. Craig tried to ask what they’d done with them, but Crowley had dodged the question, and instead Fell had wandered in to ask about a heated floor, complete with a lecture about temperature control in cold-blooded animals, particularly snakes, although it was much harder to gauge when the snake was Of A Size, a phrase Fell said with all capital letters.

Crowley had a snake on his face, Craig had noticed. Hard not to notice a face tattoo, really. Bold choice. His grandad would’ve grumbled something fierce about it. Craig opted for small talk instead.

“You guys have a snake, then?”

Fell blanched. “What? No. Of course not. Whyever would you think such a thing? Anyway, I really must go, I have an appointment at three o’clock with the—the farrier.”

Craig looked at his watch. 10:23 a.m. He wondered if Fell even knew what a farrier actually was.

He decided he’d rather not know.

*

It was only Wednesday. Fucking hell.

Craig frowned up at the house, parking the work van and taking a long sip of his coffee. There wasn’t enough coffee in the world for this house. He was going to add a line on his final invoice just for coffee costs.

They’d been through the library. They’d done the kitchen. The mudroom at the back. Retiled the conservatory in a classic Victorian black and white, trying not to eavesdrop as Crowley muttered threateningly to a pothos and a butterfly plant from behind a few parlor palms. Craig had thought about checking just to make sure there wasn’t anything like, buried back there, but he really doubted Crowley could have done anything of the sort with him wandering in and out.

And, you know, when you worked all day with two blokes all alone in their isolated country house, sometimes it was better to just not ask the question.

Anyway. Most of the main floor was done. Craig had been normal on coffee, on the main floor.

Then there was the matter of the upstairs bathroom.

First, he couldn’t get the measurements right. He went into the room. He went out of the room. He went into the room. He went out of the house and looked up at where the room ought to be. He went back into the room.

There was just no way, based on the measurements of the building and the four upstairs bedrooms, that that bathroom was twelve feet across. Just couldn’t be. Couldn’t do it. But every time he went into that room and pulled his tape measure out, that’s what it came down to. Twelve full solid feet.

That just didn’t make any sense.

The plans Crowley and Fell had presented to him didn’t make any sense either. They had drawn a careful diagram of the desired outcome, which included plans for an enormous shower stall with seats and a strange, knee-high rough tile feature that Crowley had said was for exfoliation—sure, if you planned to exfoliate down to the bone—along with an extremely large, special-order sized bathtub and a chaise longue.

It did not include plans for a toilet.

“A toilet?” Fell had asked, frowning, when Craig had brought it up. “Whatever do we want—”

Crowley had elbowed him, hard. “Yes, right. Obviously. Just—wherever you think.”

“The space, though, with all these other features—”

Crowley’d looked at him. He had this way of looking through his sunglasses that made Craig think he ought to start going back to Sunday services. “I’m sure you’ll find it.”

The next time Craig measured, the bathroom came in at eighteen feet.

He went in. He went out. He went back in. He went to church on Sunday for the first time in thirteen years and then visited his grandad afterward, clearing some dead leaves off the stone. He went back into the bathroom Monday morning and measured it again.

Eighteen fucking feet.

The plumber agreed. The lads who delivered the bathtub agreed. The part-timer he brought in to help with some of the tiling agreed. No one else seemed to think it was as weird as Craig did.

“He’s been around too long,” he overhead Crowley saying one night as he packed up his things. He and Fell were standing at the bottom of the stairs, practically nose to nose. “He’s getting suspicious.”

“He’s fine,” Fell insisted. “You’re just paranoid, you old gargoyle.”

Crowley shook his head and threw up his hands, dramatic. “Fine! Fine. Oh, here we are then, if you’ve noticed anything a bit strange around here, do just ignore, nothing to worry about, certainly nothing to call a priest about—”

“You’re being ridiculous. It’s the last room, just let him finish up and then he’ll forget most of this anyway.”

“I don’t know if you’d noticed, angel, but they’re not exactly going to be issuing new bodies to us these days! Just—” A sigh, long and worn. “Be careful, is all I’m saying.”

The tone turned softer; Craig slipped back into the bathroom, heart thumping hard in his chest. He wasn’t sure which part of that he ought to be most concerned about.

Angel, Crowley’d said. That clarified some of it, at least.

He did suppose it was hard to be too terribly threatened by a bloke who called his partner angel.

*

The tile had been laid. The glass shower surround had been installed. The space for the chaise lay open, ready for furniture to be brought in.

The w.c. had been fitted into the surprise extra space and Craig had even managed to not ask a single question about it.

The last thing to go up were the lights above the mirror. Fell had brought them to him, obvious antiques, Victorian era, if Craig had to guess. They weren’t really bathroom material but his grandad would have liked them anyway, Craig thought. Gave the room that last punch of character.

He was installing the last fitting when Fell bustled in, beaming. “Thought you might just be wrapping up.”

Craig nodded. “Just got to flip the switch back on at the electrical box and you’ll be all set.”

“Oh, never mind that. I’m sure Crowley will be taking care of it momentarily. I’ve got scones today—come and have a bit of a cream tea.”

Sure enough, Craig stepped off the bottom rung of the step stool and the lights clicked back on with the sound of a finger snapping. They glowed, lighting up the room. It was a bit more modern than the rest of the house, which was only rational in these days, but really was a gorgeous finish.

“There,” Fell said with a happy sigh. “Just perfect.”

He led Craig back downstairs to the sitting room, where there were two chairs and a little patio table and a cream tea laid out. That didn’t really surprise him at this stage, honestly—Fell seemed extremely interested in excuses to put together a little spread of this or that. Last day on the job might as well rate for one.

“Crowley not coming up to join us?” Craig said, tipping his head at a third empty tea cup on the tray as he dove into the jam and clotted cream. Crowley almost never did, and on the rare occasions he deigned to slouch into the workspace and sit with them, he never ate or drank anyway. An odd duck to Fell’s odd duck, certainly.

“No, he’s having a pout about the begonias in the garden. He’ll come around eventually.”

It was hard to suss out the relationship between these two, Craig thought. They were casual together, comfortable—but they never touched, they never got in one another’s space. They didn’t seem to seek one another out the way Craig’s grandparents had, yo-yoing around one another in the house. Instead they just seemed aware. Like they didn’t have to go looking because they already knew.

But still. Angel.

Like he’d said. Strange.

“How’d you two meet?” Craig asked, trying to sound casual about it.

“Old colleagues.” Fell dabbed at his mouth with a cloth napkin, then started. “No!” He looked alarmed. “I mean, we’re friends.”

Craig raised an eyebrow. He didn’t know a lot of people who restored listed buildings with their old colleagues they forgot they were friends with, but hey, what did he know. “Must be good friends. Not a lot of people who could stomach doing a job like this together. S’why I mostly work alone.”

“Oh, I think we’ve both had our fill of working alone. He’s a bloody pain in my neck, but—” Fell shrugged, took a sip of tea. “It’s nice to have someone who’ll bother to argue with you, I suppose.”

“You didn’t work together before?”

“Opposite sides. At least, they thought so. It all came out in the wash, in the end.”

Age, Craig thought, remembering his first impression. Something in the way Fell spoke about Crowley—it was like a very very long memory of loneliness had settled into his timber frame and had only just been treated, the way Craig treated rot.

“Nice to have someone who cares that much,” Craig said slowly. “My grandad, he was that for me. God, he was a grumpy old bugger. Fought me every day I was in school, fought me about going off to university, fought me about picking up his business. Made me think hard about everything though, so I knew for sure I was doing what I wanted, and then he’d give in, all proud-like, like it’d been his idea all along.”

“Yes,” Fell said, eyes fixed on the window. Craig couldn’t see Crowley through it, but the way Fell said it made it sound like maybe he could. “Sometimes the challenge itself is what it takes, isn’t it? Then you know it’s worth it, when you still want it afterward. When you want it so much you’d fight anything for it.”

“It all comes out in the wash in the end,” Craig agreed. He took another bite of his scone, gestured over the spread. “He loved this sort of thing too, my grandad. Whatever it was, I could always win over some peace and quiet for a while with a cream tea.”

Fell was still studying the window. He hadn’t blinked.

Craig finished off his scone, drank his tea. It wasn’t coffee but it would do. He stood. “Well, thanks for this,” he said, gathering the last of his things. Most everything was out in the van already. “It was a good job. You let me know anytime you need any more work done, yeah? And Mr Fell?”

Fell looked up, coming back to himself with a flush.

Craig smiled. “I’ll let him know you’re in here waiting.”

Chapter Text

Okay, Daniella was pretty sure—like, 99.99% sure, not like all the way sure but pretty sure, pretty pretty sure—that this was going to work.

This was going to solve all their problems.

Well, her problems, at least. She was a pretty good interior decorator but she didn’t think she was qualified to solve all their problems. A lot of their problems she wasn’t even sure how they’d got to begin with. Some of their problems she didn’t think anybody at all was probably qualified to solve.

They were Ezra and Anthony.

Daniella liked Ezra and Anthony as people. As people, they were great fun. Ezra was a sweetheart but also a little catty when you really got him going, and he wore a threadbare waistcoat and a bow tie, which was just genuine enough to be adorable instead of insufferably pretentious. Maximalist Victoriana, she thought, meets dark academia—type of bloke to live in a haunted house and act like everything was plumb normal about it, like that Doctor Who episode with Charles Dickens and the undertaker who was all oh, fudge it, the bodies are alive again.

Anyway, that was Ezra. If it had just been Ezra, everything would’ve been fine.

But no. There was also Anthony.

If Ezra was old books and Persian rugs, Anthony was what you’d get if you put all that into a blender and asked it to be something completely different. Chrome-framed sunglasses. Snakeskin boots. Carefully disheveled hair. He could’ve been 3D printed right out of an advert for a fancy watch—which he had, actually, size of a bloody microwave—and into real life. Sarcastic to the last but also always doing things like leaving massive tips on coffee shop counters, which he said would just make the baristas argue amongst themselves.

Minimalist meets industrialism. He looked like he popped out of an abandoned factory out in Battersea and did it with style.

As people, they were fascinating little studies in the sheer possibility of the strange and unusual and the frankly absurdly wealthy, if Anthony’s £24,000 watch was anything to go by. Not that she looked it up or anything.

As clients, Daniella wanted to clock them both over the head and leave them in the cutlery aisle of Crate & Barrel.

But this was going to work. She was sure of it. Pretty sure.

“All right,” Daniella told them, stopping on the pavement and turning to look at them. “So what we’re going to do here is we’re going to go into this shop, and we’re going to look at things. Just look. There’s no pressure to find the thing, yeah, it’s just about vibes. You find a thing you like, and I just want you to snap a little picture of it and keep on going. Yes?”

Ezra nodded. Anthony didn’t, but that was fine; Anthony usually didn’t respond to much of anything unless Ezra had been the one to say it.

“So take pictures of anything that speaks to you,” Daniella went on. “Fabrics, colours, contrasts, textures. Shapes, even. They don’t all have to go with each other because once again: vibes.”

Ezra raised a hand. “What if we do find the thing?”

This was a trick question. Daniella knew it was a trick question. Anthony, who was grinning like the cat that got the cream and found a great big old diamond in it, also knew this was a trick question.

“No picking. It’s just meant to be an opportunity to explore your own personal styles. Think of it like—like a museum. You can look at things you like, but you can’t touch them.”

“Don’t we need to touch them to know if we like them?” Anthony pointed out, still grinning.

Daniella glared at him in her best approximation of her mum’s Sunday-best-glare. He knew why. “If you must touch them to know if you like a texture or feeling, you can touch them for that purpose only. No purchasing, no stock-piling, no putting things on layaway, no reserving, no—no stealing—”

Anthony was struggling not to laugh. Ezra was taking notes with a pencil on a tiny notepad, though he frowned at no stealing.

“No nothing,” Daniella finished. “Exploratory mission only. Discovery of self. It’s just to get an idea, not to get an object. So take pictures, leave everything else. With your mobile, Ezra,” she added, cutting off his next question. “I know you have one.”

That was probably as good as it was going to get.

“All right then, on with you,” she shooed, and off they went. Ezra scurried like he was worried all the home furnishings were going to get up and walk off without him; Anthony followed at a much more leisurely sashay.

It would be easier to see them, Daniella thought, if they could pull this off. Finding things they liked, seeing how it could all come together, how it could all play out—light and texture and colour and warmth and shine, personalities distilled down into rugs and sofas and coffee cups. Maybe she was a bit of old romantic, but she liked to think of them finding these individual little things and then building them up into one cohesive vision: like making a wish for a life together.

Anthony and Ezra did not seem to make wishes. They made decisions, and the world just sort of—hopped to it.

Like when Ezra nattered on about an old thermos he’d had once, and then spotted it in the window of a second-hand shop as they wandered by. Or when Anthony had muttered that public had gotten awfully peopley lately, and every shop they’d been to the next afternoon had been positively vacant.

Daniella didn’t want them to make decisions today. She wanted pictures and vibes.

She gave it an hour. Took a bunch of her own pictures, obviously, worn leather, rich velvets, darker colours—Ezra wore a pastel palette, but she’d noticed he was just as drawn to the shadows as his counterpart was to light. Some antiques, some newer things. Furniture with little curly accents and shelves with sharp, clean lines. Paisleys and florals and even a bright red porcelain duck something told her Anthony would love, even if he’d never admit it.

Anthony. The same Anthony who was currently approaching her with a gargantuan bag hanging off one arm, emblazoned with the shop name. There was a blanket roll sticking out of one end.

Ezra, for his part, was feigning tremendous interest in a pair matching candles and putting on the same very innocent face that Daniella’s littlest niece wore when she denied eating biscuits immediately before dinner.

“Anthony,” Daniella said, sweet as honey. She nodded at the bag. “Doing some shopping for your mum, then?”

Anthony snorted. “Oh, yeah. Definitely. That’s me and my mum all over. Picked her up some shoe shine for the next time she decides to boot a bunch of us up the—”

“Daniella, my dear girl, do come and have a look,” Ezra interrupted, waggling the candles at her.

She gave Anthony a Look which said she was onto him, and turned to Ezra. “At the pictures you took, right? The pictures of the things, and not the things themselves? Pictures. Photographs. Yes?”

Ezra had, at least, taken pictures, and had not simply picked up a bunch of illicit tea kettles. Lots of pictures. Dark blues and burgundies, the spines of old books, delicate bone china, wall hangings with a bit of a medieval flair. A few vases that were a bit of Ancient Rome, the helmet off an old suit of armour.

“Did you take any, Anthony?”

“Ah, well, erm. No.”

“That’s not right,” Ezra said distractedly, unscrewing all the lids off the rest of the candle display and smelling each of them. “I saw you at least once with your fiddly little camera application.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“Did not.”

“Anthony,” Daniella cut in. She made a grabby hand gesture. “Mobile, please.”

Ezra was still elbow-deep in Warm Summer Breeze and Amber Sunsets. Anthony sighed, and handed his mobile over. Daniella studied it for a moment, humming as she tried to control the expression on her face, and handed it back.

There was exactly one picture in the photo gallery. It was of Ezra.

*

All houses had a heart.

The heart was the room where you spent the most time with the other people in it, where you really lived and loved and all that jazz. In Daniella’s house, this room was the kitchen—her sister was always in there cooking something up, kids all over the place, people laughing and shouting, dancing to the radio as Dionne yelled to keep your hands out of the sauce. In her nan’s house, it had been the sewing room. In her last girlfriend’s place, the bedroom.

In Anthony and Ezra’s house, it was going to be the sitting room.

It wasn’t that Daniella had actually asked them. Didn’t bother. She knew what they’d say and she knew they were both liars who couldn’t be trusted to see clearly if the dang lights were all turned on. Ezra’d say the conservatory; Anthony’d say the library. Obvious. And obviously wrong.

They needed more of a neutral space between them, a common ground—somewhere they could meet up, move through, come together after time apart. They each had their own spaces, their own private little retreats, and Daniella had big, modern plans for the conservatory and aged, plush plans for the library to fill those spaces with, but the heart, the centre—it had to be the sitting room.

It came together slowly at first, but it came together.

A rug in a rich, textured brown; a sofa in a warm, mossy green. A massive bit of driftwood, which Anthony had circled for ages at a market down in Eastbourne. Shelves for Ezra’s books; a credenza for Anthony’s record collection. An 1887 quilt rack Ezra had nearly gone to tears over.

And she could see it, then. The way they’d fit here and there—a blanket here, a mass of pillows there. Places they were drawn to. Spots they’d adopt.

It was hard to know, sometimes, what kind of heart she was working with. Ezra and Anthony were hardly joined at the hip; Anthony’d even told Daniella once that they were just colleagues, though Daniella had made a dramatic face about it and he’d had to concede, “All right, friends, then.”

They never reached. They never curled together at tables in coffee shops; they didn’t lay side by side on sample mattresses, testing them out. They never said we in that tone, in that two-as-one kind of voice. They didn’t ring off phone calls with love yous and goodbyes.

But she could see the way they looked at one another.

She wasn’t sure if they thought they were hiding it from her, or if they thought they were hiding it from themselves. They weren’t very good at it, if they were. Or maybe they just weren’t really hiding anything, per se, but they were so used to never saying, to never acknowledging, to speaking euphemisms and riddles and code words, that they forgot how to speak clearly.

Maybe this house was the bid for freedom—for ease, after a lifetime of tension. Daniella wanted to make that for them. She wanted to make the heart one they could allow themselves.

The first time she’d gone round and found them both on the sofa, ensconced on opposite ends, their feet nearly touching in the middle, Daniella knew she’d got it right.

Sometimes that’s what it takes, was all: a soft place to sit in the quiet together.

*

The rest of the house fell into place piece by piece. Dominos, falling into line. Falling very neatly into line.

Falling, sometimes, too neatly into line.

Daniella and Ezra spent an afternoon trying out chaises for the bathroom—why Ezra insisted on a chaise, he never said, but she had a feeling it had to do with Anthony’s string-and-wire joints and the way he moved like a skeleton hanging around a science classroom—but couldn’t find the right one in just the right colour and fabric. Until, that is, the next day, when Ezra had “just wanted to try a place” and had walked in and found what they were looking for as if it were made to order.

When they were working on the kitchen, on all the fussy little bits and bobs which neither Anthony nor Ezra really seemed to know how to use and which was a little alarming sometimes because the idea of people who didn’t know what a peeler was trying to make the sort of gourmet meals Ezra could expound on seemed ill-advised at best, Anthony had expressed, in his roundabout sort of way, an interest in growing herbs in the windowsill. When Daniella had brought him some in these really fantastic white pots, just tiny little sproutlings really, they’d grown into full-grown plants by the next morning.

Things fit in spaces they shouldn’t have fit. There were outlets where there hadn’t previously been outlets. One-of-a-kind pieces just sort of showed up in their paths. People were always offering them really delicious biscuits.

She tried to tell Dionne about it once, eating popcorn right out of the bag late at night, after the kids had gone to bed. “It’s like, they want things to happen, and things just happen.”

Dionne shrugged. “Must just be lucky then, don’t you think?”

“It’s more than luck. Like if you said hey, I wish I would win a million pounds, and the next morning you got a call that you’d won a competition you hadn’t even entered.”

Dionne grinned, closed her eyes. “I wish,” she said, fervently, laughing already, “that I would win a million pounds, and also that my sister would win a million pounds so she could move out of my house.”

Daniella had thrown popcorn at her, and there’d been a brief, dramatic back and forth that ended with Dionne helping Daniella pick a few kernels out of her hair, still giggling.

“I think they’re magic,” Daniella said, once Dionne had got it all. “They’re like, wizards or something. The Fae, maybe.”

“You don’t think they’re like, dangerous or anything, do you?”

Daniella frowned. She was sure they could be dangerous—Anthony sometimes said things to his plants that were downright bananas—but could be didn’t mean were.

They were just trying to build a home.

“No,” she said. “I think they just want what everyone wants.”

“A million pounds and a pony?”

They both laughed, and then they were talking about other things, laughing about other things, making plans, do you remember and can you believe and do you wanna catch that film this weekend, and yeah, Daniella thought. Anthony and Ezra could have this too.

*

It takes months, but they do it.

The sitting room, the bathroom, the kitchen. The conservatory. The library, the office—Anthony’s got an outrageous throne he wants put in. Another bathroom, which Daniella was pretty sure wasn’t there when she first toured the house.

The guest rooms, upstairs. First one, then a second.

Daniella takes them to coffee shops. Antique shops. Bars. Cocktail hours. She takes them up and down the coast, Dover and Eastbourne and all the little places in Brighton that serve the best sandwiches and the best conversations. She learns that Ezra adores the classics just as much as he adores dime-store novels. She learns that Anthony adores the plants he threatens, and long naps, and that his sunglasses are more for her benefit than his.

She learns that Ezra and Anthony are just pretend. It’s Aziraphale and Crowley who are building this life together.

She doesn’t say anything. Whoever they are, whatever they are, they just want to live.

Then there are just two bedrooms left.

“So is it done?” Anthony asked, watching Daniella fold Ezra’s most recent blanket into its place on the sofa. “Aside from, you know.” He tilts his head toward the ceiling, toward the upstairs rooms.

Daniella shrugged. “Sort of. A place like this is never all the way done, not really.”

He wrinkled his nose at her, scrunching his face all up. “What’s the point of you, if you don’t really finish it?”

It wasn’t the first time Daniella’d heard that. “Depends. Do you want to live in a museum? All that looking, no touching. Never changing. Always moving through the same rooms.” She looked at him. His face was blank in a way that she knew by now meant he was listening very closely. “Or do you want to grow? Let yourselves change? Give yourselves room to breathe?”

Anthony twisted his mouth. It might have looked like a grimace, if you didn’t know him, but Daniella did. “That simple, you think?”

She nodded. “That simple.”

*

She designed the bedroom without them.

It was a risk, of course. She knew, but she didn’t really know—they hadn’t actually said. It could be the biggest mistake she would ever make in her entire career and it could be that this really amazing, fantastic thing they had built will all burn down in the wake of it.

She didn’t think so, though.

Daniella took everything she’d learnt from them and then some. She drew mock-ups and layouts, she spent hours agonising over this colour or that. She ordered curtains and linens and pillows and sent them back, ordered something different. She looked through antique shops and reserved this piece or that when Ezra isn’t looking, and she searched for the clean-lined lamps online from sites Anthony referenced with glee.

Then she piled everything into the back of her project binder and made them both sit down to tea.

“Well, my dear,” Ezra said, scooting a plate of biscuits toward her. “It seems we’ve come to a sort of end.”

“Yeah, just about,” Daniella answered. “Just the last bedrooms upstairs left.”

“Oh, ah,” Ezra hemmed, and “Hm, erm,” Anthony hawed, and finally Ezra gave Anthony the world’s biggest please fix this for me eyes and Anthony sighed, capitulating. “We, erm. We’re going to do the bedrooms on our own, I think.”

Daniella nodded. “Mmhm. And just what are you planning for the bedrooms?”

Oh, but it was kind of fun to watch them squirm.

“Linen,” Ezra said, at the same time Anthony said, “Silk.”

They looked at each other.

“White,” Anthony said, at the same time Ezra said, “Black, I should think.”

“So, nothing,” Daniella summarised. “You’ve made no plans at all.”

Ezra pursed his lips. Anthony scrunched his nose.

“Look,” she said, very carefully putting down her biscuit and looking at them both fully. “I know it’s hard when you’ve had a very long history of not saying anything out loud. But you’re not—you don’t have to hide anymore. Not here, and not with me, and we can talk about how stupid you think I must be after you let me do this one last thing for you two, all right?”

“Probably be a little bit better if you were that stupid,” Anthony said. Crowley said. He was doing that twisty mouth thing again. The one where he was really just trying not to laugh.

“I suppose,” Ezra put in, slowly, “if you already know, it couldn’t hurt to—to say it out loud, sort of.”

He looked at Crowley. Aziraphale looked at Crowley.

“M’not saying anything, angel.”

“You’re not saying no, then, either.”

Crowley made a sound like a cartoon record scratch, and then a sound that wasn’t really a sound. Daniella had heard Dionne make that sound before, tucking her babies into their beds.

“Suppose I’m not, yeah.”

Maybe time stopped for a minute or two. Maybe time didn’t. Maybe time just sat still and quiet for a moment and let two people-shaped beings or wizards or Fae or whatever sort things out. Maybe time was just good like that, sometimes.

When time tuned back in, Daniella didn’t need to be able to see under the table to know that they were holding hands.

“Let’s talk about light, then,” she said.

*