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Technically, Muriel probably shouldn't have let Crowley turn the backroom of the bookshop into a greenhouse. They just thought, well, no one was using it anyway, and those poor plants were probably tired of being stuck in a car all the time, and what was the harm? Besides, Muriel liked the plants. They were nice to have around. And watching Crowley tend to his plants, as he was doing now, was sort of relaxing. Sometimes.
"It's good that you talk to them, you know."
Crowley jumped, splashed water onto the lovely antique floorboards, and didn't bother to miracle the mess away.
"Watch it! I'll have to stick a cat bell on you—"
"It's supposed to help them grow. Might work better if you were nicer to them, though." Muriel wasn't actually sure what a cat bell was, but they liked cats plenty enough, so they didn't question it.
Crowley kept his attention on his plants as he talked, "They're growing just fine now. How do you even know that?"
"I read it. In a magazine, I think. In the seventies."
Crowley paused, clocked his head the same way humans and dogs do when they're confused, "You weren't even on Earth in the seventies. You didn't even like Earth in the seventies!"
"That's not true!" Muriel gasped, offended by the accusation that they might hold any anti-Earth sentiment, "I've always loved humans! They're God's favorite creations!"
"When you first got here, you thought tea was disgusting."
"Well, food is different. Food is disgusting. It gets your insides all dirty."
"Plants live in dirt."
"Plants don't eat!"
"They eat sunlight."
"Sunlight is the first earthly creation the Almighty made! So plants are basically holy!" Muriel paused, looked up towards the ceiling for a moment, then added, "Unless that's blasphemous. Was that blasphemous?"
"...How would I know?"
"Well, plants are lovely. And humans do such funny things to them. Like bonsai trees. Isn't that so funny? Little tiny trees! Just for decoration!"
"Venus flytraps."
"What?"
"Venus flytraps eat. They eat bugs. Pitcher plants, too." He took a little while to investigate a plant he'd recently repotted, then added, "Something about the soil makes them have to eat bugs."
Muriel considered this. After a silent moment, they concluded, "I don't think I like plants so much."
The exchange knocked around in the back of Crowley's head for a few weeks, never anywhere close to conscious thought. This funny little angel who now lived in Aziraphale’s home apparently snuck gardening magazines in Heaven. Crowley had seen angels do worse. It barely struck him as odd.
Then, while Muriel was watching him drink a glass of wine with all the interest of a brand-new apprentice to a nearly lost art, they opened their God-blessed mouth.
"Mr. Crowley, have you ever kissed someone?"
Crowley coughed into his drink, felt the burn of alcohol in his sinuses. "Don't... Do Not ask me that."
"Okay!" Muriel said, bright and eager as they'd ever been. Strange little angel indeed.
"You're not... You're not keen on learning about kissing, are you?" Crowley had been absolutely certain his days of worrying about having to give some poor soul The Talk had ended the same moment he'd stopped being Warlock's nanny. It hadn't come up then, either. Thank Someone for that.
"Ew! No! That's gross. Like eating."
Crowley considered this. "It's not really anything like eating."
"Humans like it, and they do it with their mouths."
Crowley blinked, "...Right. I'll let you have that, Bee."
"It's just that I don't really... get it. Why humans like it. I thought you might know, because you like eating wine, like humans do."
"They call it drinking when it's liquid."
It was Aziraphale who finally put two and two together. Aziraphale, who spent his own immortal life hiding secrets from Heaven, who had millenia of practice recognizing the mirrors of his own disobedience in the eyes of sharp-witted novelists and discreet bachelors and kind-hearted demons.
Gabriel, known by some as the patron saint of correspondences, communication, and emails, was a very organized man. Aziraphale, known (by one specific demon) as the patron saint of impossible-to-navigate used bookstores, was having a lot of trouble getting used to any method of file organization that made actual sense. He was hunched over Gabriel's desk—his own desk—surrounded by a frankly frightening number of manila folders and muttering to himself about Adamic alphabetical order. Muriel waited patiently for any indication that he'd noticed their presence. It was time for their weekly update about the bookshop and its resident demon. And Earth, also.
Muriel watched Aziraphale flip through files with the same bright-eyed interest as when they watched Crowley drink wine. They'd seen the word anthropologist once in a book, and Crowley had said it meant a human who studied other humans. Muriel privately thought being an anthropologist would be sort of fun, and that Aziraphale and Crowley acted enough like humans to make good practice for studying the real things.
Finally, Aziraphale looked up, noticed Muriel, sighed, and took off his glasses in such a fluid, natural, human way that Muriel thought he must have practiced the habit for years.
"I don't suppose you would know where the file on human end times predictions would be?"
"Oh!" If it was even possible, Muriel lit up brighter than before, "There isn't one. They're filed individually by human. But you can pull up a list of call numbers in the heresy logs, under 1st Thessalonians 5:2."
As they spoke, Muriel pulled open a filing cabinet drawer from the same nowhere-space where they held their wings and brought out a three-ring binder that weighed about as much as a medium-sized dog. Aziraphale watched them struggle under the weight of the binder until they dropped it on his desk with a dull thud.
"How did you know that?"
Muriel looked at the binder, then back up at Aziraphale, "Well, I'm a scrivener. I'm supposed to know about record keeping."
Aziraphale didn't press. He was used to silent agreements and unspoken conversations. Recognizing your own sins in someone else's shadow had to be enough. Asking for anything more would be asking for a confession.
This was Gabriel's office. Scrivener or not, Muriel wouldn't have reason to know how Gabriel's personal records were kept. Not unless they'd been nosing around in here on their own time. Aziraphale tucked away the knowledge that his new assistant on Earth had their own little rebellious streak.
It ended up being a useful habit. Every time Muriel stopped by, Aziraphale had another file or record or log for them to sniff out. His new office was quickly becoming navigable, and Aziraphale was developing a rough idea of what files Muriel had been pulling based on which ones they found most readily. Quirks of human behavior. Philosophy. The social sciences. Animal husbandry. Actually, a lot about animal husbandry. They'd started going on about horses with so much technical specificity that Aziraphale’s head was left spinning.
The files Muriel passed to Aziraphale were always heavily redacted, the black bars only dissolving when the folder passed into Aziraphale's hands.
Maybe it was refreshing to see another angel who showed any interest at all in learning about Earth. Or learning at all. Maybe it was just something that Aziraphale could ruminate on that wasn't, well, everything else. Whatever the reason, Aziraphale was stuck on learning more about Muriel's little habit. Eventually, despite his best judgment, he found himself looking through Muriel's browser history.
He sat down and waved a hand over their desk, pulling up a shimmering translucent list of every file they'd laid across it over the past thousand years.
Redacted files, yes. That much, Aziraphale had figured out for himself. Then, there were the zoomed-in, blurry photos of magazine and newspaper pages. Muriel must have been observing Earth, reading over people's shoulders, collecting their own little library one screenshotted page at a time.
And on top of all that, the notes. Pages and pages written in the neat, precise hand of a being created for the sole purpose of observing and recording. A new interest every few decades or centuries. Careful records of a single farmer's experiments with citrus breeding spanning fifty years. A valiant attempt at reverse-engineering human music theory with only sheet music to work from. A snippet of a frustrated graduate student's letter to his friend attached to a frighteningly thorough Linear A to English dictionary written entirely by hand.
"...Uh, Mr. Aziraphale? Am I… Am I in trouble?”
Oh, fuck.
Of course Muriel would know when the Supreme Archangel was at their desk. They'd probably been summoned as soon as Aziraphale arrived. Why would anyone be at Muriel’s desk if not to find them, and why would anything Muriel was up to be more important than the Supreme Archangel calling them for a meeting?
And they were horrified. Aziraphale had seen Muriel nervous or startled more times than he could count, but now Muriel looked like a man staring down the gallows.
"No, no, Muriel—"
Tears spilled over in steady streams down their cheeks, "I know it's not my job, I know, and I'm not supposed to touch the confidential files, but they're so interesting and no one else even cares about horses so it's not like I was hogging the files, and I never tried to guess Gabriel's password, except for the times that I did but I didn't even get it right so probably that doesn't count—" Muriel hiccuped so hard it must have hurt, "Oh, I am in so much trouble!"
Aziraphale had never been good at handling crying. When Aziraphale cried, it was alone and silent and he pointedly forgot the whole mess had happened as soon as it was over. When Warlock had cried, Aziraphale pushed the poor kid back to his nanny or his parents as quickly as possible. On the rare occasion a bookshop patron burst into tears, they probably didn't want the stranger behind the counter to bother them anyway. Aziraphale sent them out the door as quickly as possible, gave them a silent blessing, and hoped things worked out. Crowley didn't cry.
But now there wasn't anyone else to handle the sobbing angel standing across the desk. And they really were sobbing. Loudly. A bit gratingly, actually. But pointing that out probably wouldn't help the situation. Someone was bound to hear them, someone who wouldn't be as sympathetic as Aziraphale.
The miracle wasn't really a conscious choice. Just a faint pop, and Aziraphale and Muriel were down in the book shop with a clearly startled Crowley standing between them.
"What the— what are you—" Crowley turned, saw Muriel, and when he looked back at Aziraphale the light behind his eyes had shifted from anger to rage.
"What did you do to them?!"
"Crowley—"
"Mr. Crowley—" they hiccuped again, "I'm in really big trouble and I think I'm a demon now, like you!"
Crowley and Aziraphale both winced at their words. Crowley’s wince quickly turned into an explain this right now glare directed squarely at Aziraphale.
"Muriel, you really aren't in any trouble. Oh, Crowley, would you—"
Crowley laughed and Aziraphale winced harder this time.
"Oh. Oh! Oh, I get it now. You still think I'm going to drop everything to solve your problems for you."
"It's not like that."
"The minute something goes pear-shaped, you think you can still call in your pet demon to do your dirty work and then you can go on being the perfect supreme archangel of Heaven while I clean up your mess, right?"
Aziraphale froze. Was that what he'd done? He hadn't even realized he was going to Crowley until he'd done it. But then, as soon as he'd seen Crowley’s face, he was certain that everything would be fine, that Crowley would know what to do. Did showing up here in front of Crowley by accident even make it better?
Crowley sighed, "One time, Aziraphale. This one time. For Muriel, not for you."
And then Aziraphale was standing in his office. His skin tingled with the capsaicin sting of Hell burning off in Heaven's atmosphere.
That was the first time they'd spoken since…
Aziraphale straightened his coat. Later. He'd deal with this later.
"Bee. Muriel. Listen to me. You're not a demon."
Muriel had calmed down enough to mostly hold a conversation. Or maybe they'd just lost so much water crying wasn't possible any more. Either way, they were huddled under about eight blankets on Aziraphale's couch, holding a teacup full of warm water (for looking at) and hugging a throw pillow that Aziraphale had probably nicked from the Oscar Wilde estate.
"But I disobeyed. I sinned."
They were very insistent on this point. There wasn't a specific rule Muriel could point to that they had broken. Only the bone deep knowledge that they had done something wrong.
"That's okay. People do that sometimes."
"But you said… You told me how you fell…"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"How is what I did any different from asking questions?"
Crowley felt his own shoulders slump. He'd been pointedly ignoring how familiar this conversation felt until this moment. It was impossible not to think about another scared little angel asking Crowley to comfort them through the terrible, unimaginable fate of ending up just like him. He pushed through it. "You had the good sense to keep quiet about it. Just like your prissy new boss."
"Oh." Muriel considered this for a moment, frowned into their teacup. "...That's not really fair."
"No, it's not. It's divine. It's ineffable."
Crowley was going for bitter. He sounded as lost as Muriel.
The bookshop was silent for a little while longer before Muriel spoke again.
"How will I know when I do fall?"
"What do you mean, 'when'?"
Muriel took a deep breath. "I just don't know that I'm a very good angel."
Right. "I wouldn't worry about it."