Chapter Text
Aziraphale had been at Upstairs Advertising for approximately eleven minutes when he realized he'd made a terrible mistake.
Not the job itself – though the jury remained out on that particular verdict too – but rather the cream-coloured cardigan he wore. Everyone else in the open-plan office wore black or charcoal or that peculiar shade of dull grey that suggested they'd given up on colour as a concept sometime around 2019. He, though, looked like he'd wandered in from a very genteel book club.
Which, to be fair, he had. Metaphorically speaking.
The "book club" – or rather his job of twenty years at Farthing & Sons Publishers – no longer existed. It had been good while it lasted: he had been an editor and publishing copywriter, had helped birth fine literary fiction for a dwindling audience of people who still believed books should have deckled edges and cost more than lunch. Redundancy, they'd called it. As if he were a spare part that could simply be removed from the mechanism without consequence.
"Aziraphale Fell?" A young woman with severe platinum bangs and preternaturally pale eyes materialized at his elbow. "I'm Pollution – well, Pauline, but everyone calls me Pollution. Long story. I'll be showing you to your desk."
"How lovely," Aziraphale said, which was possibly not the appropriate response to someone nicknamed after an environmental catastrophe. "And what a, ah, spirited workspace."
Spirited was generous. Chaotic was more accurate. The office thrummed with a particular frequency of anxiety he recognized from his publishing days – that pre-deadline hysteria that smelled of cold coffee and despair. Everywhere he looked, people hunched over monitors with the focused intensity of surgeons or defendants. A man in his twenties was having what appeared to be an emotional crisis over a font choice. Someone's lunch was smoking in a microwave.
"That's the creative department," Pollution said, gesturing vaguely at a cluster of desks that looked like a stationery shop had exploded. "You're Senior Copywriter, so you'll be embedded there. Fair warning: they're all a bit... precious."
"I'm sure we'll get along splendidly."
"Sure," Pollution said, in a tone that suggested she'd seen this particular tragedy play out before. "Your desk is the one with the sad plant. Someone called it Job as a joke and then it became depressingly accurate."
The plant in question appeared to be staging a very slow suicide. Aziraphale made a mental note to give it water. Possibly also counselling.
"And that's –" Pollution showed him a door and lowered her voice to a stage whisper "– the Creative Director's office. Gabriel. He'll want to see you at half nine for your welcome briefing. Don't be late. He's very into punctuality and eye contact and other sociopathic tells."
Before Aziraphale could inquire whether she was joking, the door opened and Gabriel emerged.
He was objectively handsome in an aggressively symmetrical way. Very white, straight teeth. Very purple tie, matching very purple eyes. The kind of man who definitely had a signature scent. He made Aziraphale immediately suspicious.
"Aziraphale!" Gabriel's voice had the projected warmth of a luxury hotel lobby. "Welcome to the Upstairs family! Pollution, has he signed the onboarding documents?"
"He's been here twelve minutes."
"Plenty of time! Aziraphale, we're very excited to have someone with your... mature perspective on the team."
The pause before 'mature' was almost imperceptible. Almost.
"Really going to shake things up with that publishing background. Very literary. Very... words."
"Yes," Aziraphale said carefully. "I do tend to use quite a few of those."
Gabriel's laugh was three seconds too long. "Fantastic energy! Listen, I'm pairing you with one of our best Senior Art Directors for your first project. Crowley – bit of a character, but brilliant when he can be bothered. You'll balance each other beautifully. He's very visual, you're very..." – another fractional pause – "...verbal. It's going to be synergistic."
Aziraphale had been in marketing for exactly thirteen minutes and already despised the word synergistic.
"I look forward to meeting him," he said with polite insincerity.
"Oh, you can't miss him," Pollution muttered as Gabriel retreated to his glass office. "He's the one who looks like he's always plotting manslaughter."
Aziraphale met Crowley at half past ten, in a meeting room that smelled of old sandwiches.
Pollution had not been exaggerating.
The man sprawled in his chair like a disdainful cat, all long limbs and acute angles. Black jeans, black shirt, black jacket – was there a memo about the monochrome? – and sunglasses. Sunglasses indoors, in a basement meeting room with all the natural light of a submarine. His bright, auburn hair looked like it hadn't seen a comb since 2018.
"You must be Crowley," Aziraphale said, extending a hand.
Crowley looked at the offered hand for a beat too long, then shook it with the enthusiasm of someone handling a dead fish.
"And you're the new copywriter." His voice had an interesting rasp to it, like he'd spent the previous evening chain smoking. "Publishing, right? Gabriel's very excited about your heritage perspective."
"Aziraphale, yes. And he didn't actually say –"
"He told me you'd bring gravitas." Crowley said 'gravitas' the way one might say herpes. "Also that you use a fountain pen, which is either charmingly vintage or a personality disorder."
Aziraphale glanced down at the Waterman pen in his breast pocket. "It was a gift."
"From the Victorians?"
"From my colleagues. When they made me redundant."
"Ah." Crowley had the grace to look slightly awkward. "Right. Well. Nothing says 'sorry we destroyed your livelihood' like a fifty-quid pen."
"It was eighty, actually, and –" Aziraphale stopped himself. This was not going well. Time to attempt professionalism. "Perhaps we should discuss the brief?"
"Sure." Crowley dragged a battered MacBook toward himself with one finger. "We're pitching for Celestial Cream. Organic oat milk. The client's previous agency made it look like a Renaissance painting throwing up on a milk carton, so they fired everyone and came crawling to us."
"And what's the strategic objective?"
Crowley blinked at him from behind the sunglasses. "The what now?"
"The strategic objective. What are we trying to achieve? Who's the target audience? What's the brand positioning relative to –"
"Christ, you have done research." Crowley leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. "Look. People want oat milk because dairy makes them fart or feel guilty about cows. We make it look pretty and not-insane, they buy it, everyone goes home. Strategic objective: sell the beige liquid."
"Surely it's more nuanced than –"
"It's milk. From oats. There is no nuance. There is no deeper meaning. There's just marketing copy and a pretty picture and someone in Shoreditch paying four quid for alternative milk because regular milk is apparently fascist now."
Aziraphale felt an unfamiliar surge of heat coil within him, a rare and sharp anger that pricked at his usual calm. This. This was why publishing had died. This exact attitude. The aggressive reductionism. The cynicism masquerading as sophistication.
"I think," he said, with the careful enunciation of someone trying very hard not to commit violence, "that every product has a story. Every brand has a soul. Our job is to find it and articulate it in a way that creates genuine connection with –"
"Our job is to shift units." Crowley was scrolling through his phone now, not even looking at him. "Everything else is just expensive window dressing."
"Then why do it at all?" The words came out louder than intended. "If it's all so meaningless, why bother? Why not just print 'OAT MILK: IT’S MILK, BUT NOT' on a white label and be done with it?"
That got Crowley's attention. He pushed the sunglasses up into his hair – his eyes were an unsettling golden-brown, like bourbon in direct sunlight – and regarded Aziraphale with something that might have been curiosity.
"You're really going to be like this, aren't you?"
"Like what?"
"Serious." He said it like a diagnosis.
"I believe in doing good work, if that's what you mean."
"Yeah. That." Crowley pulled the sunglasses back down, a door closing. "Give it six months. You'll either quit or become like the rest of us. Dead inside but with very good taste in overpriced coffee."
"I prefer tea."
"Of course you do." Crowley stood abruptly, gathering his laptop and phone. "Right. I'll do some visual territories, you do some copy territories, we'll present to Gabriel on Thursday and he'll hate all of it and we'll start again. Standard procedure."
"But we haven't discussed –"
"I work better alone. You clearly work better with structure and strategic objectives and other things that don't actually mean a thing. So let's just... divide and conquer, yeah? I'll email you."
He was halfway to the door when Aziraphale said, "This is going to be a disaster, isn't it?"
Crowley paused, turned. For a moment, something almost like amusement flickered across his face.
"Oh, absolutely catastrophic. See you Thursday, heritage perspective."
And then he was gone, leaving Aziraphale alone in a room that smelled like someone's abandoned tuna sandwich.
Aziraphale looked down at his fountain pen. His eighty-pound redundancy gift.
"Well," he said to no one in particular. "Splendid."
By Thursday morning, Aziraphale had produced twelve different creative headlines and copies for Celestial Cream, each more carefully crafted than the last.
He'd done his research. He'd identified three distinct audience segments. He'd developed a brand narrative around authenticity and tradition and the quiet revolution of choosing better. He'd written copy that read like poetry. He'd created mood boards with clippings from magazines, because he didn't entirely trust the internet.
He'd also barely slept, sustained himself on tea and pot noodles, and had a minor crisis at 3 a.m. about whether sans-serif fonts were destroying civilization.
Crowley arrived at 9:28 for their 9:30 meeting, holding a coffee and the demeanour of someone who'd woken up approximately eleven minutes ago.
"Morning," Aziraphale said, with forced brightness.
"Ngk."
"I've prepared several moods we can review before presenting to Gabriel. I think if we align on strategic direction first, we can –"
Crowley dropped one lonely sheet of paper on the table.
A photograph of a single oat. Beautifully shot in extreme close-up, dramatically lit, on a pure black background.
Below it, in the thinnest possible sans-serif type ever: "Milk. But Not."
Aziraphale stared at it.
Then at Crowley.
Then back at it.
"That's... that's it?"
"Yep."
"One oat."
"Technically thousands of oats died to make this one oat look good, but sure. One oat."
"And three words."
"Five, if you count the two full stops. I do count the full stops. Punctuation is design."
Aziraphale felt a headache building behind his eyes. Possibly a stroke. "You cannot be serious."
"I'm always serious about typography."
"This is –" Aziraphale gestured helplessly at the paper. "This is reductive minimalism to the point of self-parody. It says nothing. It means nothing. It's visual nihilism."
"It's honest." Crowley took a long sip of his coffee. "It's oat milk. I photographed an oat. What else do you want?"
"I want storytelling! I want emotional resonance! I want –" Aziraphale shoved his own portfolio across the table. "I want this."
Crowley flipped it open. His expression remained carefully neutral as he surveyed Aziraphale's work: the pastoral scenes, the serif typography, the copy about heritage and craft and the gentle art of choosing well.
After a very long silence, he said: "This is lovely."
"Thank you."
"For a tea towel."
Aziraphale's eye twitched. "I beg your pardon?"
"It's very pretty. Very... National Trust gift shop. But it's not a brand, it's a funeral programme for the death of the English countryside." Crowley tapped one long finger on a particularly elaborate illustration of wheat. "No one under forty will understand this. And no one over forty buys oat milk. So who exactly is this for?"
"People with taste –"
"People with taste buy the Oatly brand because the packaging's funny and they saw it on Instagram. This looks like it should come with a complimentary copy of the Telegraph and a strong opinion about the Oxford comma."
"I do have strong opinions about the Oxford comma!"
"See, this is what I'm talking about –"
The door opened. Gabriel entered, teeth first.
"Boys! Feeling that synergy? How's the collaboration going?"
Aziraphale and Crowley stared at him with the unified loathing of people who agreed on absolutely nothing except that they were currently in hell.
"Brilliantly," Crowley said.
"Splendidly," Aziraphale added.
"Wonderful! Let's see what you've got."
Gabriel settled into his chair with the confidence of a man who'd never experienced genuine consequences. Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged a look. A long, loaded look that said we are both about to be humiliated and it's entirely your fault.
Aziraphale went first. He presented his narrative, his audience segmentation, his carefully crafted copy. Gabriel nodded along with the engaged expression of someone not listening at all.
"Very literary," Gabriel said finally. "Very... BBC Four. Not sure it's quite premium millennial, you know? Bit too... settled."
Aziraphale's smile hardened into something glacial. "I see."
"Crowley, what've you got?"
Crowley slid the single oat across the table.
Gabriel stared at it. "Is this a joke?"
"It's minimalism. It’s hip."
"It's an oat."
"It's what's in the product. Truth in advertising."
Gabriel's laugh was sharp. "It's not an ad, Crowley, it's a photograph. Where's the aspiration? Where's the lifestyle? Where's the –" he made an expansive gesture " –the feeling?"
"The feeling is oats."
"That's not a feeling, that's a grain."
Aziraphale watched this exchange with the grim satisfaction of someone watching their nemesis also fail. At least they'd crash together.
Gabriel stood, brushed invisible lint from his obscenely purple tie. "Right. Neither of these is working. I need you two to actually collaborate. Find a middle ground. Combine Aziraphale's warmth with Crowley's edge. Make something that doesn't look like it's afraid of the 21st century but also doesn't look like it's given up on joy entirely." He paused at the door. "You've got until Monday. And boys? Make it synergistic."
The door closed.
Silence.
"Your oat was pretentious," Aziraphale said.
"Your moods looked like they had been drawn by Beatrix Potter on ketamine," Crowley countered.
"At least I put in effort –"
"Effort isn't the same as good –"
"– while you clearly rolled out of bed and photographed the first thing you saw –"
"– this from someone who thinks more words make better copy –"
They were both standing now, leaning over the table, close enough that Aziraphale could smell Crowley's coffee and something else, something like expensive soap.
"You are," Aziraphale said with precise fury, "the most cynical, reductive, emotionally stunted creative I've ever had the misfortune to work with."
"And you," Crowley shot back, "are a delusional nostalgist who's going to be absolutely devastated when you realize no one wants to be sold to like it's still 1985."
Another silence. Longer this time.
Then Crowley laughed. A startled bark of sound.
"Christ. We're fucked, aren't we?"
Despite himself – despite everything – Aziraphale felt his mouth twitch. "Comprehensively."
"Gabriel's going to fire one of us."
"Probably both of us."
Crowley collapsed back into his chair, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "Right. Okay. I refuse to work weekends for this hellhole. So we've got only two days to think of something that doesn't make either of us want to commit professional suicide. How do we do that?"
Aziraphale sat down more carefully, smoothing his cardigan. "I suppose... we could try listening to each other."
"Radical concept."
"You could try removing the sunglasses for a start. It's very difficult to collaborate with someone when I can't see if they're actually awake."
"They're a shield. The sunglasses."
"For what?"
"For not making eye contact with people I don't like."
"And do you? Dislike me?"
Crowley considered this for a long moment. Then he pushed the sunglasses up into his hair again. Those unsettling golden eyes met Aziraphale's directly.
"Ask me again on Monday," he said. "If we survive this."
"Fair enough." Aziraphale pulled out his fountain pen, opened a fresh notebook. "Right. Let's start with what we agree on."
"We agree on nothing."
"We both think Gabriel's an idiot."
"Okay. One thing."
"And we both clearly care about the work, even if we have violently different approaches to it."
Crowley tilted his head, considering. "You really believe that? That I care?"
"You photographed a single oat, probably for hours, to get the lighting right. I can see the work. So yes. I think you care. You just don't want to show it."
Something shifted in Crowley's expression. Something vulnerable and quickly shuttered.
"Right then," he said, pulling his laptop closer. "Let's make something that doesn't make either of us completely ashamed. But I'm warning you now – if you suggest vintage typography, I'm leaving."
"And if you suggest getting rid of all the words, I'm staging a coup."
"Deal."
They worked until the cleaner politely asked them to leave at half past nine.
Neither of them mentioned that it was the longest either had cared about anything in months.