I Became The Supreme Archangel To Fix Heaven, But Only My Demon's Kiss Could Save Humanity

The office was a masterpiece of nothingness.

White walls bled into a white floor, which reflected the sterile, white light from a ceiling that had no discernible source. His desk, a slab of polished white material that felt cold and unyielding, was utterly bare save for the single item he had just miracled into existence. It was a simple wooden box with a slot cut into the lid. He had modeled it after one he’d once seen outside a human post office, a quaint, hopeful little thing.

He adjusted the sleeves of his stark white jacket, the fabric stiff and unfamiliar against his skin. He missed his coat. He missed the comfortable weight of it, the faint scent of old paper and dust that clung to the tweed.

A presence coalesced behind him, sucking the non-existent warmth from the air. Aziraphale didn’t need to turn.

“Supreme Archangel,” the Metatron’s voice was smooth, a polished stone with no sharp edges, yet it carried the weight of eternity.

“Metatron,” Aziraphale said, turning in his chair. He gestured toward the desk. “I was just implementing a new initiative. A suggestion box. I thought it might be a wonderful way to, you know, solicit ideas from the angelic host. Improve efficiency, boost morale…” His voice trailed off under the Metatron’s placid, unblinking gaze.

The Metatron glided closer, his eyes flicking to the box for a fraction of a second before returning to Aziraphale’s face. There was no curiosity in the look, only a faint, clinical assessment. “An interesting notion,” he said, the words perfectly pleasant. “But a flawed one. To suggest an avenue for improvement is to presuppose the existence of imperfection.” He paused, letting the statement hang in the silent room. “And Heaven, Aziraphale, is perfect. It has always been perfect. It will always be perfect. That is its nature.”

The dismissal was so complete, so absolute, it left no room for argument. It was not a debate; it was a statement of fact, as immutable as gravity. The suggestion box, Aziraphale’s small attempt to bring a piece of his own gentle, collaborative spirit to this place, suddenly looked ridiculous. A child’s toy in the face of divine, unchangeable order.

“Of course,” Aziraphale murmured, the words feeling like ash in his mouth. “How silly of me.”

“Your heart is in the correct place,” the Metatron continued, the platitude landing like a blow. “You simply need to adjust your perspective from the terrestrial to the celestial. You will, in time.” With a final, serene nod, he was gone, the space he occupied instantly filled with the same sterile white emptiness as before.

A profound, aching loneliness washed over Aziraphale. It was a cold that seeped into his bones, a desolation that the endless, uniform perfection of Heaven only amplified. He stood and walked to the vast window that looked out not on clouds, but on the swirling, silent dance of distant nebulae and infant stars. He stared into the cosmic dark, and the silence of his office became a roar. Oh, how he ached to hear a familiar, drawling voice at his side. ‘A suggestion box, angel? Really? What’s next, a celestial bake sale for the tragically well-off?’ A bitter smile touched his lips. He would have given anything, anything at all, to have someone to complain to. To have him.

Crowley was living in the Bentley. The leather seats, worn smooth over decades of his lounging, were his bed, his sofa, his dining room. He’d tried the bookshop, just once, in the first few days. He had stood on the threshold, key in hand, and the wave of silence that hit him was a physical force. It wasn’t empty space. It was full of Aziraphale’s absence, a presence more solid and suffocating than any ghost. The scent of old books and Earl Grey tea was a torment. He couldn’t breathe in there. So he had locked the door and retreated to the one place that felt like his.

He drove. Mostly at night. He’d blast Queen until the windows vibrated, trying to drown out the silence in his own head, the echo of a final, terrible conversation. I forgive you. The words were a brand on his soul. He’d cruise through the familiar streets of Soho, a phantom haunting his own life, parked for hours across from the bookshop, watching the windows and hating himself for it.

That’s when he started noticing the grey.

It began with a new coffee shop on a corner that used to house a brilliantly chaotic little bakery. The sign was simple, offensively so: "The Grey Cup," written in a plain, sans-serif font. The whole storefront was painted a flat, uninspired shade of grey. Through the window, he could see patrons sitting quietly, sipping from grey cups. No one was laughing. No one was arguing. They just… were.

He dismissed it. Another fleeting, tasteless human trend. But then another one appeared, replacing a rowdy pub he and the angel had once gotten delightfully drunk in. The pub’s raucous energy was gone, replaced by the same placid stillness. The laughter that used to spill onto the street was silenced.

Then the art started disappearing. A vibrant, sprawling mural of a phoenix on a brick wall near Waterloo, a piece Crowley had always admired for its sheer audacity, was gone. Painted over. A solid, uniform block of grey. A week later, he saw a new "Grey Cup" had opened on the next street over.

The pattern was undeniable. A creeping, monotonous fog was rolling through his city, and at the centre of every patch of it was one of those bland, soulless cafes. The colour was draining out of London, the noise was being muted, the life was being leached away. This wasn't Hell's work. Hell was loud, and messy, and gloriously, passionately vulgar. This was something else. Something quiet, and clean, and utterly terrifying in its efficiency. He parked the Bentley across the street from the latest Grey Cup, the engine humming a low, angry thrum that matched the feeling in his chest. Something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with his world, and for the first time in a very long time, he had no one to tell.

Back at his desk, the suggestion box sat like a monument to his own foolishness. Aziraphale sighed, a sound swallowed by the oppressive silence, and with a flick of his wrist, caused the box to vanish. There was no point. With another, more weary gesture, he summoned the day’s celestial reports. Streams of luminous data materialized in the air before him, columns of numbers and graphs detailing planetary alignments, solar flare activities, and the prayer-to-miracle conversion ratios across countless galaxies. It was all so grand, so cosmic, and so utterly detached from anything that mattered.

He scrolled through the feeds, his eyes glazing over the endless, sterile information. It was a duty, nothing more. A way to fill the silent hours. He was about to dismiss the entire feed when a minor subheading caught his eye, buried deep within the terrestrial monitoring section: Humanity: Ambient Creative Energy (H-ACE). It was a metric he hadn't seen before, likely one deemed trivial by the celestial higher-ups. An accompanying graph showed the global output. For millennia, it had been a vibrant, jagged line, spiking with the Renaissance, with the invention of the printing press, with jazz music, with rock and roll.

But recently, the line had changed. Over the past few months, the jagged peaks had started to smooth out. The line was now trending downward. It wasn't a plummet, not a dramatic fall that would trigger any alarms. It was a slow, steady, almost imperceptible decline. A gentle, downward slope. Beside the graph was an official annotation: Minor fluctuation. Within acceptable standard deviation.

Acceptable.

The word felt like a slap. Aziraphale stared at the gentle slope, and a cold dread, entirely separate from the sterile chill of his office, began to creep up his spine. This wasn't a fluctuation. This was an erosion. He felt it in his very being, a truth that the cold data could only hint at. This was the energy of new symphonies, of scandalous novels, of lovers writing terrible poetry, of chefs inventing new recipes, of children making up stories. It was the very spark he had so cherished in humanity, the beautiful, chaotic, unpredictable essence of them. And it was fading.

An instinct, honed over six thousand years of averting minor and major catastrophes on Earth, flared to life within him. It was a familiar feeling, a prickling sense of wrongness that always preceded one of their adventures. Their adventures.

A pain, sharp and sudden, pierced through his chest. It was a physical ache, a profound, hollow longing that made it hard to breathe. He needed Crowley. He needed his cynicism and his serpent’s eyes that saw the things angels were trained to overlook. Crowley would understand this. He would see this quiet, statistical decline for what it was: an attack. He would have some snide, brilliant, terrifyingly accurate insight. He would know what to do. Standing alone in the heart of Heaven, surrounded by perfect, silent light, Aziraphale had never felt more powerless, or more desperate for the specific, irreplaceable presence of his demon.