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"Come on, I'll walk you home," says Crowley, when he's parked the jeep at the end of the street with Aziraphale's bookshop on it and the Water Music tape has played itself to an end.
"If I've got one," muses Aziraphale, perhaps a trifle sourly considering how well most recent events have gone. Now that the urgency of action has worn off, Aziraphale is feeling a bit shaken up about the whole business. He'd had no idea Up There wanted the world to end as badly as Down There. He is supposed to have even less capacity for disobedience than Crowley – he is an angel, after all, and if angels even think disloyal thoughts they should Fall instantly – but, yet, he's been thinking them all afternoon and he doesn't feel himself sprouting horns yet. It's very odd.
"Yeah, well," says Crowley, breaking into Aziraphale's line of thought. "Let's go see. We don't know whether it's there or not until we observe it... or maybe that was cats? No, wait, if you put a bookshop inside a box of radioactive gas..."
"Whatever are you talking about, my dear?" Aziraphale says testily, and Crowley shakes his head. "Never mind. Just let's go see."
They leave the jeep parked (illegally, of course) and walk side by side down the dark street. It's late at this point and the windows of the shops are dark, but the circle of darkness where Aziraphale's shop should be, possibly is, is darker than anything. There are no police cars or fire trucks surrounding it, but considering the mess on the M-25 all afternoon and how loudly every police officer already there had been calling for reinforcements, that's hardly surprising.
"I think it's still there," Crowley says after the silence between them has slid from awkward to comfortable, and taps his sunglasses when Aziraphale looks at him in surprise. "Night vision. There's more of a shop there than there was when I left it, at any rate."
Aziraphale keeps looking, because the demon's voice sounds oddly shaky, and he's walking as though something is mildly wrong with his legs. But he doesn't say anything until they draw level with his shop and...
"Well?" Aziraphale says, almost afraid to look, to hope. Crowley's voice is bright and a little bit brittle beside him, and his hand is warm on the angel's shoulder as he says, "It's still here. Looks all right from the outside, anyway."
Aziraphale breathes a sigh of relief and opens his eyes. His bookshop is whole and unscorched, the windows dark but unshattered, looking just the way he left it. He grins at Crowley in triumph. "He did it! He sorted it out!"
"Yes, well," Crowley says. He still has a hand on Aziraphale's shoulder, and it's getting heavier and so is his voice. "There's ineffability for you. I'll just leave you to sort out the inside, then. I should really be getting... back...."
"My dear, are you all right?" Aziraphale says in some concern, because Crowley is really sounding terrible. But the demon shakes his head. "I'm... fine. Just a bit tired... used a lot of energy on that bloody car... need to get a good night's sleep..." His grip on Aziraphale's shoulder relaxes, and then he breathes in sharply and folds up, hitting the pavement all at once at the angel's feet. His sunglasses skitter off and land several feet away under the bookshop's open awning.
Aziraphale stares down for a few moments, nonplussed, then extends a foot and pokes the recumbent demon cautiously. Crowley doesn't move a muscle. "Er, Crowley, dear?" Aziraphale quavers. "Are you all right?"
He receives no answer, which is, clearly, his answer in itself. Crowley seems to be completely out for the count. It must have something to do with that flaming Bentley, Aziraphale thinks. Holding something like that together for the length of time it took to drive from London to Tadfield must have taken an enormous amount of energy, even for a supernatural (or sub-, if you preferred) force, and it's been a very long day for both of them even on top of that. A very long week, in fact.
"Right," he sighs, looking down at the unconscious Crowley. "Let's get you inside, my boy."
The bookshop bell jingles merrily as he opens the door with a pointed look and pushes in awkwardly – he's never before had a chance to appreciate how heavy an unconscious, fully-grown man-shaped being can be when hanging over one's shoulder as a dead weight, or at least not in a very long time. He dumps Crowley on the sofa in the back of the shop, then goes back out for the demon's sunglasses and locks up for the night. No sense in being incautious, even on a night like this one.
The bookshop looks all right at a glance, but though he'd never admit it, Aziraphale isn't especially concerned with old volumes at the moment. He drags a blanket and pillow out from the back room and makes Crowley as comfortable as possible on his ancient, threadbare and overstuffed sofa. He's not one for sleep himself, but he knows the demon is, and Crowley does sometimes stay overnight. He feels a wee bit guilty about being actually prepared for such eventualities, but quashes it – now is not the time – and instead goes and makes himself a cup of milky tea and settles in on the equally ancient armchair next to the sofa to sit it out for the night.
He watches Crowley's face, slack and almost innocent in sleep with his ever-present sunglasses folded on the sofa arm beside him, and thinks how wondrous it is that the demon has stayed so young. Aziraphale himself hasn't quite managed to spend six thousand years on Earth without getting a little bit frumpy, a little bit set in his ways, but Crowley... Crowley still has boundless energy and enthusiasm, Crowley manages to stay cool through six thousand years of fashion while Aziraphale plods on thirty years or so behind the curve, Crowley can still express wonder at the little new inventions of every decade, as a demon who is never supposed to wonder at anything. Aziraphale is old, he feels the weight of centuries in his bones, and he knows Crowley is old too, like dry leaves and little human foibles the same in every generation, but somehow it hasn't dragged him down like it has Aziraphale. Except...
Except that Crowley looks exhausted, and the hollows of his cheekbones and his eyes do look old, old and terrified, and for the first time Aziraphale wonders if it is over, for the two of them, for the angel who dared to question and the demon who disobeyed orders. He at least can hope for divine mercy...
He's only seen Crowley unconscious once before, and that was not pleasant. It's been a long time since he thought about that time, but he remembers it now oh so clearly. He can still see the little details in his mind's eye, the salt circles and the heavy wooden chair with leather straps and the crucifixes (and the marks they'd left, he remembered wondering how something he could touch so freely could do that much damage to someone he'd gotten drunk with only the month before) and the expressions on the anonymous faces of the three men just before they became three little piles of ash, flaming sword or no flaming sword. And, more than all that, he remembers how limp Crowley had been in the chair with his hair hanging over his face and half-hiding the streaks of blood, and how the only way Aziraphale had known he wasn't dead is that demons' bodies burn when they die.
Crowley now reminds him much more than he would like to be reminded of Crowley then. He can't shake the feeling, no matter how many times he tries to remind himself that this is more than five hundred years later and very different and everything is probably going to be perfectly all right. Probably.
He wonders whether Crowley remembers that time too, or if he's blocked it out neatly the way people sometimes do with very unpleasant things which happened to them a very long time ago. He probably remembers just fine, Aziraphale thinks unhappily; supernatural beings don't seem to possess all the little physiological anti-PTSD coping mechanisms which humans do.
Aziraphale worries sometimes about how much Crowley cares about people, how un-demon-like he acts when he thinks no one is watching him. That's what living among humans does, of course, it draws you slowly nearer their halfway point no matter which end you started from, and Aziraphale's had his share of not-quite-holy moments... but angels are allowed spells of divine fury, quite a lot of them in fact if you look at, as it were, The Original. Whereas demons are not allowed spells of demonic mercy, and Crowley, Crowley was never cut out for the real nastiness of Down There, not even back in the Garden. He's going to get in real trouble over that someday, Aziraphale thinks. And then wonders: bigger trouble than they're both in already?
The remains of his tea have coagulated into a milky skin at the bottom of the mug by the next time he remembers that he's holding it. It's maddening how he never gets to finish a cup of tea these days, he thinks as he potters into the kitchen to deposit the mug in the sink.The sun is already threatening to rise over the rooftops, pre-dawn light casting a pale blue and golden glow over everything.
He sighs and heads into the front room of the bookshop to tidy up, if tidying up indeed proves to be necessary – keeping his hands busy is keeping him from panicking, in a low-grade way. His books, when he flicks on the light, all appear on the shelves where he left them, and there are possibly fewer of them stacked on the floor than there were before. If Aziraphale were Crowley, or even just anywhere near up to date on the latest technology, he might just think something about games saved and restarted and universes rebooted not quite from scratch. But since he isn't, he just thinks: Well, thank goodness for that. And then amends that thought to: Well, thank humanity for that.
He wanders over to look at his collection of medieval Bible primers and notices – the brown, dusty leather-bound spines of the volumes are now new, shiny dust jackets. And most of them are a lot thinner than they were.
He pulls a book out at random and carefully studies the cover, which depicts a shiny-faced boy and a shiny-coated dog climbing over a shiny-looking fence next to an equally shiny-looking tree underneath shiny yellow title text. Dickie Jones, Boy Adventurer, he reads.
Aziraphale stares off into the middle distance beyond the bookshelf, weighing the book in his hands. He fights the urge to break out laughing, not so much with humor as satisfaction. And... not quite relief, not quite that yet, but almost.
It's going to be all right, he thinks. Heaven help them, it just might be all right.
Crowley makes little pre-waking noises from the other room, the couch groaning as he shifts on it, and Aziraphale flusters quietly for a moment before remembering that Crowley generally sleeps late when he does sleep. Given what he's just been through, it's not unlikely he won't wake up for the next week. Or month. Or year. But even so.
He wanders back to the back room, where Crowley has managed somehow to tangle himself up in the blanket like a complicated brainteaser puzzle made of fabric and lanky limbs. He still looks small and scared, but Aziraphale is coming to realize that Crowley is scared all the time. Maybe they all should be. At least the demon doesn't look quite so exhausted as he did last night, and Aziraphale is willing to consider that good enough.
He watches the sleeping demon for a moment, still weighing the new book absently in his hand, with an expression he would be ashamed of if Crowley were awake. Then he makes up his mind and gestures toward the couch with his free hand. Crowley disappears with a soft thunderclap, leaving the blanket to settle quietly over the space recently occupied by him. The bed in the demon's flat might not be used all that often, but Aziraphale imagines it will be comfortable enough. Crowley likes to pretend he still has dignity – that's how he's survived this long, by bluffing his way up and through at every opportunity – and Aziraphale isn't going to deny him the illusion, not now.
He reshelves the book, folds up the blanket, makes himself another cup of tea, and gets out a notebook to begin cataloguing his new books. No sense in being idle on the first day of the rest of his life.
His telephone rings at 11:05, when he's worked his way around most of the shop and his good spirits over the symbolic meaning of the books has given way to more professional avarice at all the first editions. Aziraphale drags himself away from 101 Things A Boy Can Do and gets to the phone on the third ring. "Hello?"
"Angel?" Crowley's voice is muzzy on the other end, like he's just woken up, which he probably has. "Uhn... you get home all right?"
"Hm?" Aziraphale says, carefully distracted. "Oh, yes. You dropped me off before you drove home."
"Yeah, of courssse, right," Crowley says vaguely. The sheets rustle faintly as he rolls over. "'Course I did."
"Are you all right, my dear?" That's a serious question disguised as a slightly less serious question, and Aziraphale grips the receiver tightly. Not that he expects an honest answer, Crowley being a liar by official job description as well as personal disposition, but the question still stands as a litmus test of sorts.
"What? Oh, yeah, I'm fine," Crowley drawls. "Never been better. Tell you what, angel, let's go feed the ducks."
"St. James? Yes, all right."
"Great. See you there. Ciao-ciao." The line clicks.
Well, Aziraphale thinks, and puts down the receiver carefully. He thinks briefly about PTSD, and tire irons and flaming swords, and late-ish doves. And then he thinks about the collections of mint-condition subclassic literature now gracing his bookshelves. And, yes, about ducks.
He'll sort it out somehow, Aziraphale thinks, He'll make sure it's all right. Or maybe they will, the two of them, if it comes down to them again. Some way or other, it will all work out. Maybe he can't put all his faith in Up There, not anymore, but he thinks he can put it into a certain blond eleven-year-old. Humanity does have a way of making it through.
Aziraphale, Principality and former guardian of the Garden of Eden, angel and part-time rare book dealer, puts his worries back on the bookshelf along with one of his newest literary acquisitions, pulls on his jacket, and goes out to feed the ducks.