Chapter Text
Crowley was half-prepared for it this time, for the spinning unsteadiness and the creeping feeling he’d come to recognise as nausea after two human lifetimes. But he still landed in that white chair in that white room and bent himself in half, head between his knees, a little extra snake in his spine.
Jesus was waiting for him. From this angle Crowley could see his sandals, and the socks beneath them, and he almost laughed.
“Hello,” Jesus said.
There was the ripple of a miracle and then Crowley smelled cheese and bread and the tang of tomato sauce, and he sat still and breathed for another minute before lifting his head up a little and resting his elbows on his thighs.
Crowley said, “Hey,” and he was struck by the memory of Jesus’s voice, indecipherable in the flash of a moment he’d been here when he shouldn’t have been, of the feeling deep in his chest that the voice he’d heard was the voice of a friend.
He’d been right, then, after all. The Son of God would have been his friend in the universe that came before the one outside those doors. If they’d had time for friendship, if there hadn’t been a great bloody Ineffable Plan.
Jesus nudged the box of pizza across the table. Crowley took a slice and bit into it, chewing gratefully.
“Whisky?” Jesus asked, because he had always known how to be a friend.
Crowley said, “Wine,” because he was learning how to be one, too.
Another wave of that hand, and two stemless glasses appeared on the table. Jesus took one of them for himself, and then he sat back in his chair and waited.
Crowley folded his pizza in half and took another bite and then a third, let his body feel that he was here, now, and waited for it to stop screaming at him that this was wrong.
“I was here, wasn’t I,” Crowley said, because there were lingering unanswered questions from his last human lifetime still bouncing around his brain, and they were morphing quickly now into questions about the mechanics of this, the physics of here, and Jesus nodded. “The room was empty, and I was…”
Crowley cut himself off with a laugh that was slightly hysterical. It wasn’t funny, this feeling in his chest, the memory of that creeping awful dread, but still Crowley laughed.
“I was afraid,” Crowley said. “He was — Anthony — or I was, or. Both. I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesus said quietly.
“I can’t tell if it was him or me,” Crowley said, pushing, suddenly desperate for a clean way to delineate these parts of himself, to compartmentalise each lifetime. He wanted a chart, a filing cabinet, a goddamn rolodex. “Why can’t I tell them — myself, myselves, whatever — apart?”
Jesus’s eyes were, as always, unflinching in their kindness. But he wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t doing that thing he did where he could seem unflappably reassuring. He looked uncertain, too, and Crowley hated that.
“He is always you,” Jesus said, “and you are always him, but also, well. The edges are blurred a bit.”
“Thank you for clearing that up,” Crowley said, flat and dry and with a little bit of a snarl as he tossed his half-eaten pizza slice back into the box. Jesus didn’t deserve this, probably. He’d been trying to help. He’d been trying to let Crowley have a fucking choice.
Aziraphale has the same bad habit, Crowley found himself thinking and that thought wasn’t fair, either, but it was there anyway. Always trying to do the right thing.
“I’m sorry,” Jesus said again. Crowley was beginning to find his sincerity infuriating. “I wish I could explain it to you. I wish I could make it make sense.”
“You could fucking try,” Crowley said, and he was in proper form now, his hackles raised, biting at the words.
“I am.”
“Try harder,” Crowley said between gritted teeth.
Jesus set his wine back on the table next to Crowley’s, which was still sitting untouched. He raised his hands to his shoulders, mounting no defence, and he said, “Okay, Crowley. Okay.”
A deck of cards appeared on the table between them.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Crowley said, deadpan. “A love of impossible games runs in the family, does it?”
That was too harsh. Crowley knew it the second the words left his mouth, but he’d always been sharp-tongued when he felt trapped, when he felt cornered. It was a learned response, a defence mechanism. Something about hurting others before they could hurt you.
Jesus flinched, but he pulled the cards free of their box, split the deck in half, shuffled it. The cards were bent upwards in the middle, v-shaped. Find the lady.
“Do you want me to fight with you, Crowley?” Jesus asked, and that was far too perceptive, that was fucking miles over the line, and Crowley felt flayed open by it.
“No,” Crowley said. A lie. Then, “Yes. I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Jesus said. He was looking at Crowley like he knew him, like he could see the way Crowley was working himself into knots over this, and Crowley was all at once very grateful that he still had his sunglasses.
Crowley said, “I know,” and he couldn’t keep himself from sounding tired.
If he were human, he would have said Sorry. He could feel the word on the tip of his tongue, summoned by the muscle-memory of two Earthly lifetimes.
But Crowley didn’t want to face forgiveness, not now. He knew that Jesus’s forgiveness would be bright and beatific and kind, and he knew that he didn’t want it. That maybe he did want it, a little, but also that he didn’t want to be hurt by it.
Paradoxes, Crowley thought as he watched Jesus’s gentle hands play with the deck of bent cards, shuffling them, bridging them together on the tabletop, and impossibilities.
Crowley reached for his cup of wine. Jesus didn’t acknowledge this at all, but it was a practised non-reaction. Crowley could see the concentration in his jaw.
It was good. Syrupy and not too sweet, dense enough that it would always taste slightly warm and have a hint of desert sun.
“Galilean?” Crowley asked, just to break the silence. He knew the answer.
Jesus beamed at him. “Yes.”
“S’good,” Crowley said, both because it was and because he felt like he owed the kid an olive branch.
“Thank you,” Jesus said with his usual blinding sincerity. “I had it once at a wedding.”
“In Cana?” Crowley asked drily, joking, but Jesus was nodding.
“Yes.”
Crowley looked down at the contents of his cup, at the very first recorded miracle of Jesus Christ, performed this time for him, and he tried not to think too hard about why his chest felt a little too tight.
He was spared from it by Jesus laying three cards face-down on the table and saying, “So, here we are.”
Crowley looked at the cards, then at Jesus, then back again.
“I’m not finding the lady,” Crowley said, but he tapped the card on his left with an exhausted forefinger. Habit, maybe, or stubbornness.
Jesus hadn’t shown him the trick, hadn’t asked him to follow the cards, and hadn’t asked him to pick one. This was a game with no way to win, which meant that in keeping with the great tradition of his immortal life, Crowley would be the one playing it.
“I’m not asking you to,” Jesus said softly, but he reached for the card Crowley had touched anyway. “I’m trying to show you something.”
Jesus turned over the card and Crowley was faced with the Queen of Hearts.
“You did that on purpose,” Crowley said.
Jesus laughed, shook his head. Some of his curls flopped into his eyes.
“I didn’t,” Jesus said. “Do you believe me?”
Crowley thought that he shouldn’t, probably. He thought he should be looking for the signs of a game rigged for him to fail.
Crowley said, “Yes.”
Jesus nodded, and he flipped over the centre card. The Jack of Spades. The third card turned to reveal the King of Hearts.
It was only then that Crowley noticed something strange about the cards. The King was white-haired and soft-jawed. There was a bowtie knotted at the base of his cartoon throat.
The Jack had a messy mop of black curls and was holding up a hand that had a wound from several thousand years before the end of the world. And the Queen was red-haired with yellow eyes, Crowley’s own sharp nose on her face.
“I get it,” Crowley said, because Jesus was sitting across from him with the rest of the cards in his hand, looking very impatient while Crowley studied what he’d laid out on the table. He clearly thought he’d done something very clever and was waiting for Crowley to see it, too. “It’s us. You, me, and Aziraphale. I get it.”
Jesus nodded. He dealt a few more cards onto the table. They were blank. Jesus arranged the blank cards into a small pool of white, laid the Queen and Jack and King on top of them.
“The three of us are here,” Jesus said. He waved a hand at the white room, the white walls. “I told you the first time we met here that there isn’t really time in this place. I can’t ever tell you how long you’re here, and I can’t tell you how much time passes while we talk. A minute here might be a hundred years on Earth, or half a second, or both. I didn’t design time, so I don’t really know how it works.”
Jesus looked briefly guilty about this, but Crowley just leaned back in his chair and took another sip of his wine. It tasted like sea salt and mineral-rich soil and too much sun.
“Okay?” Jesus asked.
“Outside of time, the mechanics are wobbly, you’re not really sure what’s up and what’s down aside from that you’re here, and sometimes I’m here, and sometimes Aziraphale is here,” Crowley said. “We might all be here at the same time, except there is no time, so we aren’t. Have I got that right?”
“Pretty much,” Jesus said. He looked a little dizzy and a little proud.
He threw another pool of cards onto the table, on the other end. The pizza box was in the middle, blocking Crowley’s view, so Crowley pulled it towards himself and set it onto the floor.
The new cards were all numbers, but the drawings on each of them were not a part of ordinary suits. There was a nine of flowers, a four of bees, a seven of fish. The ace was a single blazing yellow sun.
“Earth,” Jesus said at the same time Crowley did, and Jesus nodded.
And then Jesus picked up the Queen of Hearts and handed it to Crowley.
“Show me what you think happens,” Jesus said. “When you choose another lifetime.”
Crowley set the Queen down in the playing-card-Earth.
“Okay,” said Jesus. “Not quite.”
Jesus hadn’t asked Crowley to try again, but Crowley did anyway. He snatched up the card and tore it in half, threw one half into the white pile and another into the colours.
Quietly, Jesus gathered the two halves of the playing card in the palm of one hand. He set it back down, whole, on the stretch of tabletop between the two piles.
“It’s more like this,” Jesus said, like he was unafraid of Crowley’s anger. He was a teacher, Crowley remembered. He always had been. “Watch.”
Jesus began to deal again from the deck. Card after card landed face-up on the table between Here and Earth with soft sounds. They were all Queens. Queens of those impossible suits, of flowers and bees and fish and cats and suns and trees and olives and fucking cheese pizzas.
There was an ocean of Crowley-faced cards for a moment, and then Jesus gathered them into a neat little stack. They sat next to the original card, the Queen of Hearts. Jesus moved the King of Hearts over into the nothing-space as well, leaving his own card alone in the circle of blanks.
“When you choose to go to Earth,” Jesus said, “it’s something like this.”
He picked up the top card — the Queen of Flowers — and set it on the Earth side. Another card joined it there, pulled from the remainder of the deck that was still in Jesus’s hand. The King of Flowers.
“Crete,” Jesus said.
“Should use the cards with the cat,” Crowley said softly. “We had one there. Osiris. Little black menace.”
Jesus’s face did something complicated, switching quickly between bemused and affectionate, but he swapped the suit of the cards anyway.
“Crete,” Jesus said again, and Crowley nodded.
And then Jesus gathered the two cards in his hand, tucked each of them beneath the King and Queen of Hearts, and put all four back into the pool of blank cards beside his own. The Hearts were on top, but Crowley could see the edges of the cat-suited cards beneath them.
“That’s when we come back,” Crowley said, and Jesus smiled at him. It was a little tiny thing, like he’d turned down the power on himself.
“Right. Where were you this time?” Jesus asked, and Crowley knew that he knew, but he also knew that Jesus was trying to walk him through this, to include him in the explanation. A hands-on approach.
“Greece,” Crowley said. “Athens.”
Jesus nodded, picked up the Queen of Flowers again, paused for a moment to see if Crowley would object. He didn’t.
“Athens,” Jesus echoed. He drew another card from his deck before setting it down and reaching for the Heart-topped stacks. Carefully, he moved them back into the limbo space, and then he put the King and Queen of Flowers into his little makeshift Earth.
He looked up at Crowley for a moment as if to check that he was still watching, and then he reversed the movement. He tucked the flowers beneath the cats and the Hearts, and then he moved them back to rest on either side of the Jack in the little ring of nothing.
“Which brings us here,” Jesus said. “To now.”
“Or whatever ‘now’ means in a place with no time,” Crowley said, and Jesus laughed a little.
“Right.”
Crowley studied the stacks and piles for a moment. He drank his wine.
“These lifetimes are yours, Crowley,” Jesus said. He had picked up the stack of queens from the centre of the table and was thumbing through them like a flipbook. “There are an infinite number of possibilities for how they might go, and all of those possibilities belong to you.”
Crowley reached for the little stack of Queens in the white space. He looked at the Queen of Hearts and then beneath it at the others. At his two human lifetimes, held safe in his hand, fragile enough to tear.
“It’s turtles all the way down,” Crowley muttered to himself, “or all the way up, I guess.”
Jesus laughed again, and it was fuller this time. “What?”
“It’s a human story from the old universe,” Crowley said. “Imagine that the whole world, the whole universe, is resting on the back of a turtle.”
“Big turtle,” Jesus said.
“Massive,” Crowley agreed. “But that turtle’s gonna need something to stand on, right? Otherwise the whole universe falls down.”
“Okay,” Jesus said, sounding sceptical.
“So what’s it standing on? Another, bigger turtle.”
“Why?”
“It just is,” Crowley said. “And that turtle’s standing on another turtle, and another one, down and down and down. An infinite chain of turtles all the way down, just to support the universe, just to make one thing work.”
Jesus watched Crowley set the small pile of cards back into place, on the left side of the Jack.
“I don’t know whether this version of me is the top turtle or the bottom turtle,” Crowley said. He poked himself in the chest with two fingers, was reassured to find himself solid beneath them. “But either way, I guess it’s just me all the way down.”
Paradoxes, Crowley thought again. All this time looking for answers, and I end up in a place where there really isn’t one.
“It is you,” Jesus said, as though Crowley had finally hit upon what he’d been getting at, and when he smiled at Crowley this time it was like watching the sun come out from behind a cloud. “It always is.”
“And it isn’t,” Crowley said. Not arguing this time. Agreeing in the ambiguity.
“And it is.”
There was not a third mess of cards on the table. There was not a pool of cards emblazoned with nothing but stars, but there could be. Crowley knew that there would be, if he asked Jesus to explain that, too. But he looked at the two pools of cards, at the stretch of space between them, and he decided that he understood. He understood that every chosen lifetime was another maybe, another card drawn from a deck of infinite possibilities.
“Someone should really teach you about a fifty-two-card deck,” Crowley said. He finished his wine and reached to fetch the discarded pizza box from the floor, set it back on the table and opened the top. Jesus reached for a piece and took a bite. “You’ve got way more than fifty-two cards on the table right now, and there’s only supposed to be four suits.”
“I was explaining,” Jesus said through a mouthful of cheese, sounding a little like Aziraphale did when Crowley teased him like this. Exasperated and fond. “I don’t think I could do it, really, with an actual deck. And besides, I only ever really played with three cards at a time, it’s not like I had much time to memorise the contents of—”
“I know,” Crowley said, waving him off with a laugh, “I’m teasing you.”
“Oh,” Jesus said with a little look of surprise. “Thomas used to do that.”
“I’m sure.” It’s what friends do.
Crowley picked up his half-eaten slice of pizza from the box and found it still warm (because of course it was, because Jesus would not have seen a reason for it to go cold). He folded it in half again, took a few more big bites, crunching through the crust.
When he was finished, there was grease and semolina on his fingers. He licked it off.
“So, Athens,” Jesus said. “How was it?”
“Beautiful,” Crowley said. “Hot, a lot of the time. And it was… it was hard, this time. Half of being alive felt like a fight.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Maybe.”
Crowley remembered the way his father’s face would go purple with rage, the way he had scraped and clawed and begged his way into an apprenticeship, the way his hands had turned red with his own blood on that battlefield. He remembered the full-body chills of illness and fever, remembered what it felt like to be low on food or far from water.
And remembered watching the flames of more than one funeral pyre, remembered not being able to look at the last one at all, remembered going home to an empty house.
Crowley didn’t know if Jesus had lost many people while he’d been alive. He’d died at thirty-three. Maybe he’d lost a grandparent or two, or some cousins. His father Joseph, almost certainly. Joseph hadn’t been with Mariam at the hill the day that Jesus had died, Crowley knew that much. Crowley had looked for him.
What do you know about grief? Crowley thought as he watched Jesus drink ancient wine and eat cheap pizza. Are you human enough now to remember how it feels?
It had been all-consuming. He had been sick with it for weeks. But one morning the sun had come up on their half-empty house and there had been a little bird on the bedroom windowsill, and he had rolled over and watched that bird sing. And then he had gone out to the garden that he and his husband had built and grown with their own hands, and he had sat in the sun and he had thought of green eyes and scarred skin and how very brave they both had been. He had sat still and had let the sun make his skin grow warm and make him sweat and make him realise that grief was always, inevitably, a byproduct of love.
“I was a painter,” Crowley said. “In Crete, too. But I painted on wood in Athens. I painted the gods, even though I didn’t believe in them.”
“Did you?” Jesus asked. “Why?”
Crowley shrugged. “Because I wanted to.”
Jesus gave him another wide, bright smile, and Crowley smiled back.
They talked about food, about the festivals, about gold jewellery and tournaments and politics and war. Crowley had promised, after all, to tell the Son of God about the kingdoms of this new world.
When Crowley had finished several glasses of wine and another slice of pizza, he got to his feet. Jesus followed him to the door like a shadow. It was becoming something of a ritual at this point.
Crowley put his hand on the doorknob and turned it, looked down at the planet in front of him and noticed that it was a little fuzzy around the edges from the wine. He huffed a laugh through his nose.
But there was one more question burning in Crowley’s mind.
Turning over his shoulder, Crowley asked, “Can I ask about him? About how he is? I’ve been trying to, y’know, not do that. Thought I might not get an answer.”
“You can ask,” Jesus said. “He always does.”
Crowley let himself drown in that answer for a moment, let himself fail to breathe.
And then, choking, “How is he?”
“He’s fine,” Jesus said. His hand was on Crowley’s shoulder now. Crowley wasn’t sure when that had happened. “He loves you.”
Crowley felt himself shudder, hands pressed against the doorframe to stop himself falling forward, to make sure he could finish feeling this first, feeling this here in the blank white nowhere. He thought of the hundreds of times he’d heard those three words in Athanasius’s voice, in Asanidas’s, in human voices that were always Aziraphale’s voice, that were always Aziraphale.
“I know,” Crowley said finally. His cheeks were wet beneath his sunglasses. “He always tells me.”
And then Crowley stepped forward into space, and he fell.