A/N: My name is Warg and I'm a really suspicious bastard. I can't be trusted with Mr. Mister references, let alone Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's cops and devils.

ANTHONY J CROWLEY, YOU SERPENT. There was no courtesy ring this time, no little announcement of an LA area code on the caller ID. He hadn't even turned on the radio before the voice boomed over the Bentley's speakers.

"Sssir?" Crowley hissed, trying and failing to swallow his diffidence. Old habits died hard. Besides, he'd rather thought that the Boss would enjoy his surprise; Satan had been sprightly enough in Pepper's video.

A text message popped up on the caller ID screen, and then another over the dash, and another, and another, overlaying the windshield. Crowley tried to tap the brakes, and then smashed the pedal to the floorboard when increasingly heavier touches of a snakeskin boot produced no result. He might as well not even have legs, for all the difference it made to his speed.

Was this how Aziraphale felt? As much as Crowley wished for the support, he was thankful his angel wasn't suffering this panic attack with him. The demon surreptitiously miracled the cars around him a few extra feet apart; he did not need a wreck while getting chewed out by the devil over... complementary gossipy notes about Adam?

"I don't underssstand, sssir." None of the texts appeared to be addressed to him or the Boss, let alone Adam, but Lucifer was entirely too quiet for the way he'd started this call. "Sso a few Britneys think he's cute - they're not wrong, and you haven't been diving into that pool much yourself in the last couple years*. What's the harm?"

*(Aziraphale had made noises upon hearing about Lucifer's wedding, and more when the angel learned that it was mutually loving, to a human, and shockingly monogamous. Who would have thought that a devil known for putting all his efforts into the physical could find the emotional support it had taken centuries for Aziraphel and Crowley to realize they had? The angel needed to be tipped sideways like a whistling teapot, at that frequency. Crowley had happily obliged.)

THE HARM, CRAWLY, IS IN WHO ELSE CAN FIND THESE MESSAGES. The windshield cleared, but the view was not an improvement, even with the sudden lack of rush hour M25 traffic. Ugh, Crowley hated portals. I ALREADY PUT DOWN ONE REBELLION THIS DECADE, AND IF ANYONE COMES FOR ADAM, BEATRICE, OR CHARLIE AGAIN, A RUBBER DUCK WILL BE THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES.

"Not to fret, sir. You and I are the most technologically savvy fallen on this planet or otherwise, and no offense, but you're still like a child in comparison to what most human kids can do. Upstairs is even worse about tech. Maybe some government spooks will catch wind of the Brittany lust, but no harm done, eh? Just pull a few strings at the precinct and it's all swept under the rug with barely even a miracle necessary."

Well, if the Boss was spitting fire fit to drag Crowley and his car across the ocean, the least he could do was sic Newt on any social media posts mentioning Adam. Newton Pulsifer had managed to knock down Wobble's entire European server bank for six weeks when he tried to set up an account. The witchfinder was an unholy miracle in and of himself.

"It isn't just the texts." Crowley winced at the fine black leather wingtip planted on the hood of the Bentley, bringing it to a stop as easily as a toy. Lucifer was angry at him, not the poor innocent car. Crowley thought his Boss respected the sacred bond between a driver and his favorite vehicle. Satan might have offered his stepdaughter her first driving lesson when she was nine, but he'd done it in the Corvette, not the Aston-Martin. Stepping on Crowley's Bentley was just adding insult to injury. "He'll find out that Adam has come to me. Rana already threatened to take my nephew away from his mother before Charlie was even born; what do you think my siblings upstairs will do when they see my boy, nearly two decades old now, with power to rival multiple Principalities? They don't remember that Adam rejected me."

They hadn't remembered Adam, period.

"Ngk. Okay." Crowley peeled his hands off the wheel very slowly, raising them where the Boss could see them. "Okay, ssso there's a potential sssituation. Thought it would be niccce to sssend him to you, but didn't entirely think that one through. Sssorry. Are they already here?" Crowley did not want to leave the relative safety of his car. Not until he could zip instantaneously to the bookshop and pull Aziraphale to Alpha Centauri. No, they'd look for him there. Better try to escape to Betelgeuse; the wonky shape and irregular orbit ought to keep anyone from noticing any sudden movements of light and shadow as a pair of outcast celestials buggered off.

"Amenadiel is already here. Uriel and Rana and Azrael have all been here; two made threats, and the third is RaeRae." The Boss reached through a driver's side window that Crowley could have sworn he'd had closed a moment ago and plucked the lock. Lucifer didn't have to do that to open the door, but he was clearly in the mood to strip away every last little delusion of security Crowley might possess. "Every time I leave hell, Michael and Gabriel threaten to send another guard. They're intimidated by Amenadiel, but they no longer trust his judgment. And I can't leave all the demons to shadow RaeRae on earth, even if the experience worked on you. Not two years back, Squee and Dromos started a possession ring and tried to kidnap my infant nephew and groom him below for the throne."

"Squee's the worst. Always hated that guy," the demon offered loyally, rather than think about the sharply opened door to the Bentley or children in hell, especially celestials' children. Thank Go- Sat- thank everything for Aziraphel.

"Pay attention, Crowley," Satan snapped. "I came here, staked my claim, and never bothered to hide who I was and where I lived." Crowley slid bonelessly from his seat and stood with only the slightest slouching hunch to indicate the pain he feared was coming. "I never worried about it until I had a family. They can't touch me, and I feel sorry for anyone who tries to take on Maze or Amenadiel. My nephew is still young enough that we can take shifts to keep him under twenty four hour supervision. The small simian delights in nonsense like school and sleepovers with her fellow prepubescent humans and sci-fi conventions with her grandmother, but on the few days I don't personally see her, she at least checks in with the Douche. Chloe… is quite capable and resilient. I trust her. Doctor Linda and Daniel and Miss Lopez know who to call if they need help. But Adam and his friends just boarded a commercial airliner for Spokane. In coach. Naturally I made sure that they got a seat upgrade, but why Spokane?"

"Warlock," Crowley returned the raw honesty in kind, daring to peek above his shades when the Boss didn't seem to blame him for more than booking with Spirit Airlines. He had more or less been kicked out of the corruption business, but old habits. Besides, the name had amused Aziraphale. "We were actually planning on coming over in about a month and a half's time. Double birthday celebration. Angel wants to do his stage magic routine again, as if it'll go better when the boys are turning twenty instead of eleven.* I think it might be enough to earn a commendation from Beelzebub's department."

*(Warlock Dowling had gone to college on the other side of the whole oversize country to get away from his neglectful, demanding parents, but like his old nanny, he could learn to tolerate mild embarrassment for the sake of the unremitting love a certain "Brother Francis" brought.)

Crowley realized his mistake about the same time Lucifer huffed, just short of forcing yellow eyes upward to meet the sparks of red crackling in his own black depths. "You always treated me like some spoiled, tyrannical child, Crawly. Afraid my Mummy would litigate if the babysitter didn't keep me busy and protect my virtue down in hell?"

"To be fair…" There were many ways to end that sentence, for a serpent tongue with no sense of self-preservation. They all ended in pain.

"Beezy didn't come up with this plot to corrupt innocent human souls alone. Maze wasn't the one who decided that I shouldn't hear of it. I never made them do it, but you pushed them, didn't you?"

"I may have thrown out a few ideas about how to keep you entertained, asked a couple questions," Crowley told his boots. "Never made it very high in the chain of command myself, and you know how Beelzebub can take an idea and run with it." Suddenly he was explaining his role from a much higher elevation, to shoes that were no longer on the ground. He yelped, transforming to snake around Lucifer's arm.

"Well, if you're convinced that you can rule hell better than I, why stay down in the shadows?" In the burning depths of the devil's eyes, Crowley saw Her face as he fell, that same imperious set of Her jaw now on Her son's raw reddened skin, broken jet primaries sticking to Her fingers as he frantically, fruitlessly churned his wings for altitude, and he had six thousand years of regrets to relive on the way down. Why did he ever think that quantity was better than quality when it came to ruining lives? They might choose their own final nails, but all those inconveniences, frustrations, petty squabbles, and microaggressions meant for billions of pushpins to decorate his own coffin.

Then there were the paths regrettably not taken, the words said instead of the ones he meant, the feared "what if"s that had stopped him, and the lies to the lowest office in the land of hell. Lucifer hated lies, and Crowley had said enough to himself, alone.

"'Zzz'aphale," he gasped the name that kept him sane all these millennia, the only being worth clawing his way out of the pit of his own self-destructiveness and petty distractions for again and again until he could see past his sins, the only reason he had tried not to smother himself between memories of the first Adam calling obliviously for Eve's advice and its reckoning today. "Aziraphale," he whimpered again.

"You've stopped hiding your desire. And your weakness." Perhaps assuming a form that was all neck when the Boss wanted to wring one was not the wisest move.

Crowley was tempted to panic. He might already be to that point. But if he admitted it, if he called out his angel's name in desperation instead of answer, there was the chance that Aziraphale would follow him halfway around the world and try to take down the devil himself. And there was no sense in risking him when Crowley might be able to do it on his own, so long as he could think. He'd never gotten Lucifer to listen to him, but he'd learned to listen to what Satan wasn't saying. The Goddess must have selected him to "babysit" for a reason. Crowley retained enough optimism beneath his veneer of fatalistic cynicism to think that there was still a way out of this, even if the only way was to distract the Boss and leg it.

"Why'dja sssend hellfire?" Crowley felt as if he had been completely dunked in freezing holy water, still in the guise of the small black viper and forced to leave his mooring to fight a riptide for air. "Coulda usssed bladesss if you'd really wanted usss dead. He'sss not jusst my dessssire, isss he?"

And there was the blow of jealousy, harder than any punch Maze might inflict. Why wouldn't Satan want Aziraphale? The angel was brilliant, well-read in ways that Lucifer would never admit to wishing he was, kind and endlessly sweet, far sturdier than his welcoming softness suggested, and before their fall, the Principality of the Eastern Gate had asked Samael again and again to set his sword aflame. Crowley could only wish the scattered points of starlight he put in the midnight sky were half as radiant as that childlike wonder in Aziraphale's eyes as he'd watched his first favorite magic trick.

"You think I was concerned about him? Please." And yet, Lucifer was unaffected. "You ask dangerous questions, Principality," Satan growled, shaking the serpent dismissively off his arm after six thousand years, or six seconds. Crowley wasn't sure anymore. "One might think you would have learned by now."

Maybe he should have. Aziraphale, despite all logic, despite all the sheer charisma the Boss and his Father oozed, had chosen Crowley. The demon never claimed to be as clear-headed in a panic as his angel, though. He could only wrangle with the next crisis in front of him and flail about through fixing his lesser insecurities later.*

*(And by later, he meant never.)

"Don't call 'im. Leave 'im outta this," Crowley panted from the dirt, still disoriented as he scrambled for a humanoid form. Just because he was afraid he was about to die without seeing his angel and cracked a little under psychic torture didn't mean he actually meant to summon Aziraphale to rescue him, even if the angel had promised that he'd come when Crowley called. "'Isss quessstionss sssaved th' world."

Lucifer shook his head, spotless white wings spread wide for intimidation. They practically glowed, like the sun was behind him, like he was back in the silver city. "I'm not talking to Aziraphale, Crowley. As the doctor recently reminded me, I have a heaven-born celestial lurking in my ranks, and hell requires a celestial to rule."

"No." Reptilian yellow eyes widened, shades left abandoned on the ground.

"I threw my signet ring at Dromos because he was the first one to crawl up and beg me to come back. But you, Crowley, you are worthy."

"No," Crowley protested again.

"You've earned it, Crowley." That smile belonged on the burnt predator's face, not Satan's normal angelic countenance.

"No." His voice was weaker this time, but he had at least established the presence of four of his limbs and pulled them beneath his torso.

"We have great faith in you, Crowley." The tap of the devil's wingtip shoes approached like executioner's drums.

"No." He had the briefest fantasy of sending Hastur to go fetch holy water for Aziraphale's tea, which would surely be more merciful and instructive than Satan was likely to have done to Dromos, but he couldn't.

"This is important, Crowley." Lucifer leaned down, tilting his head to one side as he reached his left hand to his right.

"No." 'Course, the serpent wanted to have a conversation with Dromos and Squee about child-rearing himself.

"This is the big one, Crowley." The ring was silver, with an obsidian stone, and extended towards him.

The faintest "no" sounded from beneath the black wings the demon had wrapped around his head.

"You're the bastard that asks all the uncomfortable questions. You're the arse who tries to modernize hell. You're the cockup who spent eleven years trying to make sure that one human boy got a normal childhood, and when it wasn't even the right boy, you went to rescue him, too." Far as Crowley was concerned, both boys had turned out to be all right. "You're the only angel who tried to protect me on my terms for the first six thousand years after I fell, Kyr-"

"'Crawly' isss far back enough," the whimpering pile of ebony feathers cut him off sharply. Somewhere underneath the throat that had been laid bare was a very long spine.

"Hell needs to be ready for a co-consort that loves humanity and deserves heaven either way," Lucifer said, pressing the ring into the gap where a single yellow eye had dared peek out.

"He deserves better than heaven," Crowley spat back.

The Boss only nodded understandingly, not rising from his crouch. "So does she. I've got maybe fifty, sixty years to prepare, and juggle Lux and our cases and watch the kids. The latest case is getting to me, Crowley. They all feel personal, but the timing of this one, so close to seeing Adam for the first time in years… Well."

Lucifer rocked back on his heels, letting out a breath as he drew back those white wings. "The victim's mother was a former child star, fallen from the limelight due to drugs, drama, and underage pregnancy. She tried to keep her kid, but CPS hauled him out of there pretty young, and abandoned him to the shuffle of foster care. Kid was not dealt a good hand. It took the better part of two decades, but she got clean and he found her again. It should have been a happy ending, but they never are in our line of work."

It was possible, as a Soho bookshop awaited supper, but it was rare in either profession.

"The Douche believes the mother did it; there was some attempt at blackmail and money going missing, but we need to explore all avenues."

Slowly, the serpent retracted his own wings from his face, winching them in as he sat up (but still not quite upright) next to the devil. "Could've been some punk the kid was raised with. Or his mother's remaining retinue. Who stood to inherit before he showed up?"

"We'll find out very, very soon." The consultant's voice dropped back down to a foreboding octave, but this was one inevitability that didn't scare his former underling.

"Of course you will. Throw Samael at an obstacle, and one suddenly no longer has an obstacle, just a great bloody Sam-sized hole in one's life," Crowley grumbled as he plucked the ring of office from Lucifer's unresisting fingers.

"I thought 'Crawly' was far back enough," Lucifer echoed him again. He was getting far too much satisfaction out of mocking the past today.

"It is, but you're going to be in charge of reforming heaven in another half-dozen decades and I do not envy you the task. I had my fill on the last attempt," said the new monarch of hell.

"I thought you would push this job back on me as soon as possible." Lucifer stood to attention, still better resembling a pleased angel. Bless white wings and that smug little smile that meant he thought he'd manipulated Crowley into succumbing to his better nature. "Everyone else has."

"Well, you left the cell doors unlocked and asked the inmates what they desired, didn't you?" Crowley brushed the dirt off his jacket as he rose. Couldn't stand to have ash on himself.

"All that's left is for you and Aziraphale to teach them how to earn it." With a curious demon like himself and brilliant as his angel was, maybe the humans could figure out how to winnow themselves, spilling flawed but worthy spirits into heaven to muck up the staid silver city into something less perfect and more worth living in. Maybe they'd turn their own punishment into a paradise down in hell. Maybe they'd surprise him. They had free will, after all.

"That'll take far longer than the seventy years you're spending on earth with your wife and kids. Zero patience, Morningstar, that was always your downfall," Crowley groused.

Lucifer smiled at Crowley like he'd just restored Samael to heaven and given him his Father's blessing. From a devil that had just tried to break him, it just didn't seem right to Crowley. Lucifer could hold grudges for millenia. But he was capable of loving those he cared about that long, too, even if they had a few communication issues to work through first. "Chloe tells me the same."

"I'm not going without some caveats, you understand, and I need time to talk with my angel. He may have his own additions, but," Crowley began counting on his fingers, "we're staying for the boys' birthday and you're protecting Warlock better than your Father or Thaddeus Dowling ever did, or I will treat you like a child. Brian and Pepper are in charge of my plants. They need military discipline and random surprise inspections. Wensleydale and Adam can watch the shop, but they are not to interfere with Aziraphale's filing system. It's imperative that the Father Brown Collection, The Big Book of Astronomy, Paradise Lost, A Boy's Guide to Mischief, The Little Prince, The British Horticulturist Society Encyclopedia, and the Bentley manual stay stacked in that comfy chair in the corner. I was reading those."

"I'm sure you'll find the time somewhere to finish perusing them," Lucifer promised.

Crowley made a stop while he was already in town before miracling the Bentley back to the right side of the pond. The bell tinkled as he opened up the door to the bookshop, and he entered, making sure its Closed sign stayed where Aziraphale had left it up.

"Everything all right, dear? You were gone a long time for the fish and chip shop around the corner - is that sushi?" The angel finally looked up from his book to see the takeout bag Crowley had placed on his side table and the serpent himself knelt on one knee before him.

"California rolls," Crowley confirmed. "Innovate hell with me, Aziraphale?" He presented the signet to his king.

"Well, this is a bit of an embarrassment," his angel murmured, patting down his pockets instead of answering directly. "Seems you beat me to the punch." Aziraphale withdrew a ring box and slipped out of the chair into Crowley's arms. "I was still planning on how to take over."

No matter what stage of it they were at, falling angel or rising demon or sauntering revolutionary, it was good to have a project.