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Dan slammed another glass down onto the table just as someone cleared the empty ones again. He wasn’t sure who they were and really didn’t care. His problems at that moment were much more important, thank you very much.
“I never asked to be a demon,” he snarled, or at least tried to, though it came out as more of a whimper. “Jus’ minding my own business an’ oh, here come Lucifer and the guys. Next thing I know I’m doing a bloody million-light-year freestyle dive into a pit of boiling sulfur.”
The thought to miracle himself sober crossed his mind, of course, but that reminded him of all the times he and Phil had done so after a night of drinking. He tried to wipe his tears away from under his sunglasses, giving up after a few failed attempts. A part of him didn’t care if someone saw his eyes, not anymore. Dan had been wearing sunglasses since humans invented the things, right about when they began getting uneasy upon seeing his slitted pupils. Phil had never been bothered by them, never…
And now he was back to Phil. It just figured that the angel would still be all he could think about even when the world was ending and he wasn’t even… around anymore.
“M not drunk enough for this,” he muttered. He didn’t care anymore, wouldn’t care even if Hell came for him at that moment.
There was a change in the atmosphere at that moment, something seeming to shift. Dan shot back another glass. He had just moved to call for another when he saw something that made him pause, especially when he heard a faint echo of his name .
His heart stopped. “Phil? Is that… are you here?”
“I’m not really anywhere,” came the barely-there reply. “I’ve never done this before. Never been discorperated before, actually.”
Dan thought he could see the ghost-like form of Phil, wavering across from him. He reached out for a moment, unable to hold in the helpless sound that escaped from him. The relief he’d felt upon seeing the angel again, alive , was mixed with the despair he’d felt since he’d first seen the bookshop in flames.
Phil smiled, or at least it looked like he did. “Are you alright, bear?” he murmured, ridiculously softly, and Dan’s heart shattered . That stupid nickname, just one silly word, was all it took to ruin any semblance of calm he might’ve had.
“Could be better,” Dan managed to say after a moment. He saw Phil notice the bottles covering the table and winced. He hadn’t… He didn’t want to look so damn helpless in front of the angel. He’d thought Phil had died, that his angel was permanantly gone forever, and now he looked like this when the only person he gave a fuck about was back.
“Dear…”
Dan shook his head, messily snapping his fingers in an attempt to sober up at least a bit. “I’m fine, angel. Just… what’s the plan now?”
He could see the look of annoyance that crossed Phil’s face, the angel raising an eyebrow. “Dan, are you sure you’re alright? Weren’t you going to Alpha Centauri?”
“I…” Dan’s voice cracked. “Stuff happened. I lost my best friend.”
Phil’s expression crumbled as he moved to reach across the table. Nothing happened when he touched Dan's hand, though the demon imagined he could feel some warmth where the angels hand met his. His breathing evened out slightly. Phil smiled.
“Oh, my dear,” Phil murmured with a sigh. “It’s alright now, isn’t it?”
Dan scoffed, gesturing outside. “World’s still about to end, angel. Right now, I haven’t any idea of how to stop it, how to find and stop the bloody Antichrist, or anything. Unless you know something I don’t, we’re not looking very lucky .”
Phil seemed to think for a moment, then brightened up. “Look, there’s a book I really need you to get. It’s in my bookshop. Can you do that?”
“Oh, angel,” Dan murmured, blinking back memories of flames surrounding him for another time. “You bookshop isn’t there anymore. It burned down, angel, I’m so sorry.”
Thunder rumbled outside as Phil’s face fell, crestfallen. He simply stared across the table at Dan as if the demon would tell him it was all a joke he was playing. Unfortunately, no such response came.
“Oh,” Phil whispered helplessly, and the remaining shards of Dan’s heart broke even more. It wasn’t right for his angel to look like that. “All of it?”
Dan reached across despite its uselessness. “Yeah,” he replied softly. “What was the book, Phil?”
“The book the young lady with the bicycle left behind, Marzia I think her name was. The Nice and Accurate-”
“Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, yes!” Dan scrambled for the book he’d shoved in his jacket as one last reminder, just something to remember his angel by if he was well and truly gone for good. He couldn’t help the smile beginning to grow on his face. Here, finally, was something good he could do for Phil, something to give both of them hope.
Phil’s face lit up. “Look inside, Dan, it’s all in there. The boy’s name, address, everything’s in there. We just have to find him…”
“Before they do,” Dan finished, staring at the worn book in his hands. Sure enough, the notes were all there as Phil had said, written in the angel’s comfortingly messy handwriting. The sight of it brought an odd sense of calm to the demon’s mind. Dan finally felt like he could breath, like he could relax for a moment.
Phil leaned forward across the table with a smile. “I’ve worked it all out, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, Dan.”
“Where are you right now?” Dan ignored the angel, peering forwards as if he could pinpoint Phil’s exact location. “I’ll come get you. I’d find you in any world, Phil. Just… where are you, angel?”
He grimaced, looking away from the demon for a moment. “I’m… Well, I’m not exactly anywhere at the moment, dear. I’ve been discorperated.”
Dan blinked. “Dis… What? How in Heaven did you manage that, you goof ? Get too clumsy, huh?” he attempted a joke, though it nearly fell flat under the circumstances. Phil played at a pout that Dan knew wasn’t real. He’d been making fun of the angel for his clumsiness ever since he’d dropped the flaming sword he’d been given multiple times. Bloody miracle he hadn’t set Eden itself on fire . It had given Dan a conversation starter, at the very least.
“It’s not really my fault,” Phil explained. “That stupid witchfinder almost stepped into the circle I was using to contact Upstairs, you see, and… He sort of backed me into it.”
“Nice going,” Dan remarked dryly.
Phil shook his head, looking remarkably like he had in 1862, cross and yet still caring. “You must get to Tadfield air base,” he instructed, eyes flickering down to the book.
“ That’s where it’s all going to happen, then?” Dan asked, leaning across the table even further. “An air base ? The bloody world is ending at an American air base ?”
The angel shrugged, looking almost… sad. “You’ll figure it out, Dan. It’s all happening quite soon now, actually. I’ll meet you there, I promise. I just need… I just need to find a receptive body to inhabit ."
Dan wasn't quite sure how to respond to that.
"It's too bad I can't share yours," Phil added, an attempt at something that fell rather flat. Dan winced. "Angel, demon… probably explode with our luck, wouldn't we?"
"Not exactly something I'd like to explain to ol' Beelzebub, no.”
Phil laughed, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a way that sent Dan’s heart soaring. “No, I suppose Gabriel wouldn’t be very happy with me either. I think he already thinks I’m rather clumsy.”
Dan scoffed. “Thinks? Angel, you’re the bloody definition of clumsiness incarnate.”
Clumsy was putting it lightly, of course. Most of the scrapes Phil had gotten himself into over the years had been due to some combination of sheer bad luck and the clumsiness that must have been woven into the divine fibers of his being. Dan, of course, had been the one to rescue him from the silly situations.
For Her sake, the idiot had gotten himself nearly beheaded in the midst of the French Revolution because he'd decided crepes would be as delicious as pancakes. Honestly, it had been ridiculous.
Don’t even get him started on the whole Nazis thing. Ridiculous, the whole bloody evening had been.
“I’ll meet you at Tadfield, Dan,” Phil said, pulling him out of his reminiscing. “We’ll both have to get a bit of a wiggle-on.”
“A what ?”
Phil pouted, going so far as to cross his arms across his transparent chest. “A wiggle-on, Dan. I could tell you to hurry your ass up, if that’s more your language.”
Dan scowled. “Got the general idea, angel. ‘M not stupid, just nobody says that anymore. Literally nobody says things like that. Tickety-boo? I mean, really . You only get away with it because you’re bloody adorable .”
“Oh,” Phil murmured. “Really?”
Fuck . Dan had never hated his lack of brain-to-mouth filter more in his existence . Of course, not keeping his mouth shut had been what led to his Fall in the first place, but still . You would think he would have learned to control it six thousand years later.
Phil was fading fast, however, and their time was running out. “Listen, angel, we can talk about this later. Tadfield, you said?”
“Yes,” the angel replied, clearly unsure about something. “The American air base. Be safe.”
Dan shot him a grin he hoped was more confident than he felt at the moment. “You don’t have to worry about me, angel. I’m always safe, aren’t I? Haven’t gotten myself discorporated yet.”
Phil sighed. “No, you haven’t.” He paused for a moment as if battling with himself. “We’ll… we’ll get through this, won’t we?”
“Of course we will, angel,” Dan murmured.
Don’t leave me , he wanted to say. Stay , he thought.
He couldn’t say any of that, not now. Not here, not when the world could still end. Not when he could lose Phil faster than he could blink. They wouldn’t take his angel away from him, not again. Not if he had anything to say about it. God Herself could do Her worst to take Phil away, but not even She would be able to.
-
Getting to Tadfield, however, couldn’t have been more difficult. The M25, which had earned him a commendation at the time, blazed with hellfire. With Dan stuck on the wrong side of the whole mess and Phil somewhere on the other (presumably). The demon’s patience lasted approximately five minutes before he pulled into the side lane and raced towards the flickering wall of fire.
Not even a brief visit from the Duke of Hell he hadn’t yet vaporized with holy water did much to stop him. His angel was on the other side of the hellfire, somewhere all alone without him, where anything could happen to him.
“Stay safe, Phil,” he murmured, though to whom he wasn’t really sure. God, perhaps, thought She never listened to him anymore. Whatever higher power would listen at this point.
Dan grit his teeth as he forced the Bentley across the M25, through the raging hellfire as the volume of Freddie Mercury’s voice from his radio reached a fever pitch, and blew past the astonished police officers on the other side.
The next few hours began to run into a bit of a blur. The Bentley, still on flames and held together by nothing more than his belief that it would, roared up to the air base just as the world began to end.
A woman with flaming red hair turned to him when he slammed the car door shut, smiling with a gentle, “Dan, you’re here,” that he could recognize in any form.
“Phil,” he murmured, his shoulders loosening in relief.
The Antichrist, once they had gotten past the rather insistant guard, simply looked at the strange group with wide eyes even as Dan pointed to him and told Phil to shoot him with the blasted weapon the old witchfinder had brought along.
“You shouldn’t be two people,” the boy finally said, looking straight at Phil in the unusual corporation. “You should go back to being two seperate people.”
Phil had barely had the chance to shake out his regular limbs before Dan barreled into him, clutching the angel as tightly to him as he could for a moment. He let go just as the children themselves banded together in a way that seemed like instinct to defeat the recently arrived Horsepeople, as the ground rumbled with a rage that sent spears through Dan’s skull, a feeling as he hadn’t felt since half of Heaven was dragged below the sea of sulphur.
“Listen,” he said once they were safely ensconced in the pocket dimension he’d yanked the three of them into. “Satan himself is on his way and he is not happy. Right now, you’re the only one who can stop this, you’re the antichrist. Got it?”
Phil, shining white wings stretched out behind him, nodded from the boy’s other side. “Reality will listen to you right now. You can still change things, Adam.”
The boy looked around. “I just want to go home and play with Dog, really. Not any of this.”
“Then stop all of this,” Dan instructed as he knelt down to Adam’s level. “Alright? Stop all of this so we can all go home, just like you want to. You have the power to stop Armageddon, Adam, just you. Can you do that? We’re running out of time in here.”
Adam nodded resolutely. “Yes.”
Phil reached over for Dan’s hand as the young Antichrist stepped forwards to face the massive being before him.
He never let it go, not after Adam’s earthly father drove out of the cloud that had been his hellish father, not after the humans had returned to their homes, not after Phil reluctantly returned his old flaming sword to the postman, still remaining clasped together as Dan unlocked his flat door that night.
“Don’t ever leave me again, Phil,” Dan murmured to the angel in his arms as the two of them began to drift off. “No matter how tomorrow goes, what they have in store for us, promise you’ll come back to me.”
Phil glanced up, a soft smile on his lips, and reached up to run his hand through the demon’s curls. “I swear, love. You might get tired of me, I’ll stick to your side well enough.”
Dan let out a quiet chuckle. “Never get tired of you, angel. Not in another six thousand years.”