Work Text:
It was late. The world had not ended, as scheduled, and halfway to London byway of the Oxford bus, an angel and a demon sat side-by-side. Peering out of the darkened windows, the two of them had begun to work out that Adam, while saving the aforementioned world, had saved a good number of other things too.
“Look at that,” Crowley said, pointing to the flame-free curve of the M25. “Not so much as a sign of hellfire.”
“And there was that mailman, back at the bus stop” Aziraphale added. “Swore up and down he’d been hit by a lorry earlier today, and yet there he stood!”
“The kid’s managed to reset everything, hasn’t he? Ha! I knew we’d make decent godfathers in the end.” Crowley lounged in his seat, a sly smile crossing his lips. “I wonder if there’s an unmelted Bentley somewhere waiting to turn up.”
“Perhaps one with a smaller engine, this time?” Aziraphale teased.
“Not on your life, angel.”
Though no longer aflame, the M25 hadn’t been wholly absolved of incident. The bus hit a spot of traffic so wretched that Crowley almost regretted interfering with the design back in the 70’s. The lines of ominous tail lights ahead seemed to go on for ages, and for the first time in over a century, Aziraphale stifled an actual yawn.
Crowley, who happened to yawn quite frequently, suggested they simply miracle themselves home. Would the home offices really bother objecting, when they’d be coming to finish them off so soon anyway? Indeed, he tried to zap himself straight into his favorite armchair.
But nothing happened.
Frowning, he tried again, and again, without luck. He convinced Aziraphale to try miracleing himself to his favorite sushi restaurant, or the Ritz, but neither of those worked either. They couldn’t even send themselves to the far end of the bus.
The traffic had begun to crawl forward. Aziraphale was attempting (and failing) to miracle his bowtie straight when Crowley let out a groan, hands ruffling through his hair.
“What are you doing?” Aziraphale asked.
“Tried to change my hair. Can’t even do that much.”
“Which style were you going for?” he asked, more out of exhaustion than curiosity.
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought the Bastille…”
“Then thank heaven it didn’t work,” Aziraphale muttered.
Crowley stuck out his tongue. After a moment, a distant sort of pain crossed his face. “You don’t think it’s for good, do you?” He examined the backs of his fingers, as though the answer might be hidden there.
“Can they do that?” Aziraphale wondered. “Take away our abilities? And if they can,” he gestured to the bus driver, still obliviously heading toward London, “why only the introspective ones?”
Crowley brightened. “That’s it! Our powers still work, angel; it’s our corporeal forms that must be the problem.” He snapped his fingers, pointing at the angel suddenly. “Remember Chernobyl? Both of us peetered out after the explosion, something about chemical interference with our human forms. Had to take the long way home.”
“Oh! Oh of course, perhaps you’re right! Our corporations must need to simply recover from the shock of…well, of…”
“Armageddon,” Crowley mused, “yes.”
The bus carried them on, finally squealing to a halt in front of Crowley’s flat. He sauntered up the front steps, fishing keys from his pocket.
“Are you staying then, angel?”
Aziraphale stood at the bottom of the steps. “I don’t think my side would like that,” he repeated.
Crowley shifted on his feet. “Seems unlikely they’d bother coming after us tonight, though, doesn’t it?”
“Even so.”
“Well,” Crowley mused, “if you’re not staying here, why’d you get off the bus?”
Aziraphale’s face fell. “Oh!” He turned as though to run after it, but is was already loping out of sight.
“You actually are tired, aren’t you angel?” Crowley asked, smiling gently. The warmth of his eyes always seemed to find it’s way through the dark glasses, somehow.
Aziraphale swallowed a sudden lump in his throat, and sighed. “I suppose I’ll take a cab. If dead people are alive again, and the M25 isn’t charred…”
“The bookshop might be back too,” Crowley finished.
“It might just.”
“You sure you don’t want to find out in the morning?”
Aziraphale’s smile was pinched. “Better be on the safe side.”
Crowley leaned against the key in his lock. “All right then. Whatever you want.” He smiled again, in a sad sort of way. “Mind how you go, angel.”
“Yes. I—yes, of course.”
Aziraphale wandered down to the end of the road, wandered into the backseat of a cab, wandered to the familiar corner where his bookshop stood—not quite exactly how it had stood for so many years, but close.
Fumbling the lock open, he found that despite the spotless state of the interior, the smell of smoke still hung faintly in the air. He didn’t bother with the lights.
He found his decanter of wine, perched a few feet left of where he remembered leaving it. He reached for a glass, but out of habit, there were two.
The bottle sagged in his fingers.
We could go off together!
When Crowley suggested it, back at the bandstand, Aziraphale had told him it was over. Their ‘arrangement,’ their friendship; Aziraphale wasn’t entirely sure what he’d meant, only that it hurt to say the words. Was that really all it took, after everything they’d been through? After everything Crowley had done to keep him safe, for centuries upon centuries? After all the hours and days and years he’d spent worrying over how to keep Crowley from getting into trouble?
I’ll give you a lift, anywhere you want to go.
The angel sagged to his knees on the plush rug (that most certainly had not been blue before, but he hardly cared now). The bottle abandoned, Aziraphale put his face in his hands, willing the knot in his chest to relinquish its hold.
You’re so clever, how can somebody who’s so clever be so stupid!
A dry sob began to overtake him. How foolish he had been, to pursue one sort of good so blindly that he looked away every time a different sort of good showed him love. After Hamlet, after Paris, after the blitz, after everything Crowley had done, why hadn’t he done better in return? He thought of Crowley’s sad smile tonight, how familiar and how heavy it looked. Laden with the weight of all the times Aziraphale had refused him.
When I’m off in the stars, I won’t even think about you!
Stupid angel, he thought to himself. You believed him.
Having little choice in the matter, Aziraphale cried.
~*~
The night cast shadows across the bookshop floor, eerie shapes in a room barely familiar. It was cold; had it always been so cold inside, at night?
You could stay at my place, if you like.
Aziraphale swiped at his eyes. He didn’t know how long he’d have tomorrow, how long either of them would have, before their respective sides came to snuff them out. But he had tonight.
He forced himself up from his knees. He thought of Crowley, lounging about in his cold apartment, alone only because the angel had left him.
He could do better than this. He had to.
Aziraphale’s first instinct to miracle himself to Crowley’s door was dashed, as his corporeal form was still refusing to cooperate. He fumbled through the bookshop door and out onto the street, hoping to spot a cab, but it was deathly quiet and utterly empty.
Except for a lonely, pearl-white Aston Martin glimmering faintly in the streetlamp light.
Aziraphale bit his lip. He immensely disliked stealing, and ordinarily would have engaged in a lengthy battle with his conscience on the darkened street.
Not tonight.
Setting his jaw, Aziraphale snapped a perfectly matching set of keys into existence, slipped into the car, and disappeared at a most unangelic speed into the night.
Perhaps it was possible to do 90 miles-per-hour in Central London, after all. It certainly helped that none of the traffic signals seemed inclined to switch from green.
He couldn’t stop crying, he wouldn’t stop speeding, and there was something about everything that screamed for Crowley to appear beside him.
He fumbled with a radio dial, inadvertently switching on the evening news. That simply wouldn’t do. Another snap of the angel’s fingers and the newscaster’s voice dissolved into the familiar, comforting din of a power ballad.
…And if I say I love you in the candle light; there's no one but myself to blame…
“Oh, Crowley,” he murmured. How had he ever had the strength—no, the weakness—to deny Crowley anything, when he knew better? How had he had the nerve, all this time, to hide behind his stupid sense of duty? How, when all the while his entire world was standing beside him, in a pair of sunglasses and too-tight jeans, quietly caring when no one else did.
And even more quietly, Aziraphale cared back. He cared for Crowley more deeply than all the books and charming restaurants and quirks of humanity across all of history combined. He loved him more than life itself.
He loved him.
The angel wiped a hand across his eyes, looking up just in time to see the light ahead turn red. He slammed on the brakes.
“Oh…fuck!”
~*~
…Oh, how I could love you, if I could let you stay…
It was late. Crowley lounged beside his record player, letting Queen beat out a rhythm that seemed a sensible substitute for a satisfying REM cycle. Instead, the lyrics gave his heart an uncomfortably tight squeeze, and he took a deep swig of wine to make it shut the heaven up.
Sleep, as enticing as it had sounded on the bus, didn’t seem willing to overtake him now. He sat across his sofa in the dark, wondering if Aziraphale had found his bookshop waiting to welcome him or if the stubborn thing had somehow remained a pile of cinders. Where would he go, if the latter? Would he come back here? No, thought Crowley, drinking. Not likely.
A set of tires screeched around the street corner below, accompanied by the steady hum of a very well endowed bit of machinery. Crowley stood up out of instinct.
…It's late, or is it just my sickly pride?…
Halfway to the window, he stopped, frowning at the vinyl spinning beside him. It suddenly sounded like it was playing double. Curious, he flicked the needle off to the side. The record slowed, but the echo of the song played on, accompanied by the sound of a car door opening:
…Though I'm crying I can't help but hear you say—
“CROWLEY!”
Crowley closed the distance between himself and the window in two long strides. It was a voice he’d know anywhere.
The angel stood on the pavement below him: behind him, an obscenely gorgeous Aston Martin, parked with what could only be described as ‘reckless disregard.’
Either Crowley regained his ability to teleport in that very moment, or he made it downstairs on his own two legs at a speed that should have been impossible. He flung open the door.
“Angel!” he called. Aziraphale was hurrying down the sidewalk, pale clothes aglow in the streetlight, and out of the open door of the still-running Aston:
…It’s late, it’s late, it’s late, but not too late…
He stormed up to the demon and, inches from him, stopped.
“The answer’s yes,” he stammered.
“The answer to what?”
“Alpha Centauri. The stars. I’ll come with you.” He gasped for a breath he shouldn’t have needed. “I’ll go with you, just like you said. Off together.”
Crowley swallowed. Aziraphale looked deeply shaken (Crowley would think so even if there weren’t a clearly stolen sports car badly parked behind him). He reached out and took his friend by the shoulders.
“Easy now, angel. It’s over, remember? We fixed it, you and I. We haven’t got to go anywhere.”
Aziraphale let the breath back out. “I know. I know that. But you should know, all the same. That I would.”
Crowley felt something catch in the back of his throat. “Come here.”
He tugged the angel into an embrace, and was surprised to feel tears. Aziraphale wasn’t crying now, of course, but he had been. That was the thing about angels and demons. They all possessed a sort of atmosphere; it changed with certain strong emotions like the earth’s changed with weather. The grief of an angel was one of the most palpable, second only to the tallowy glow of hope on a demon. With his forehead buried against Crowley’s shoulder, Aziraphale felt like a quiet street after a thunderstorm, smelled like rain-soaked pavement and petrichor in the air.
“Can I stay with you after all?” he asked, in a very small voice.
Crowley’s heart swelled. “ ‘Course you can.” Over his shoulder, he snapped his fingers, and the car shut and parallel-parked itself. Aziraphale looked relieved.
“Oh, thank you. The keys got stuck.”
“I didn’t know you could drive,” he mused, smiling softly at the angel.
“I really can’t.”
Crowley led him upstairs, and Aziraphale let him keep an arm around his shoulders. Crowley knew he probably shouldn’t, but with the end of the world averted and his angel showing up out of the moonlight in an attractive car, he felt like indulging himself.
They made their way into the shadowy living room, Crowley guiding Aziraphale gently onto the sofa.“What about some tea, angel? Would tea help?”
Aziraphale met his eyes with an intensity the demon hadn’t seen there often. “Better make it wine.”
Crowley smiled, sauntering off to the sideboard to retrieve a pair of crystal glasses and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It poured itself.
“It’s quite dark in here,” the angel mused. “Were you asleep, my dear?”
Crowley swallowed. ‘My dear,’ was simultaneously the loveliest and most arduous phrase to hear from the angel’s lips (not least because Crowley had never quite understood how to allow himself to feel held dear, being a creature of supposedly evil disposition). Every time, all at once, it soothed and it stung.
“Nah, no time for sleep. It’s the last night of our lives, after all.” On sudden inspiration, he snapped his long fingers, and the twenty-or-so black taper candles he kept perched about the room (just to add a touch of macabre, you know) sprang to life.
Aziraphale gasped, his eyes shining. “Oh, those are lovely, Crowley.”
“Flare for the dramatic, you could say,” Crowley said flippantly, taking a sip of wine to stop the deep ache in his chest from showing up on his face. Wherever the angel went, he was cause for light. Crowley might die tomorrow; but tonight, Aziraphale had come back, and now sat in his darkness, glowing. It was almost too much, but more importantly, it was enough.
Crowley perched uselessly by a chair, unable to bring himself to sit this far from the angel and yet afraid to get too close. He snapped his fingers again to restart the turntable, hoping music would help ease the mood.
…The way you love me is the sweetest love around…
Oh for the love of heaven. Crowley threw a pointed glare at Queen.
Aziraphale turned his gaze on him, clearly on the brink of saying something, but dawdling there. The smell of rainwater arose in the air, ominous and close.
“What’s the matter, angel?” Crowley asked.
Aziraphale sighed deeply, like it required a decision. “Sit with me?”
And Crowley was beside him. He always ended up there, and he always would.
“Soooo,” Crowley drawled, sinking down at a careful distance from the angel’s thigh. “Alpha Centauri? You really would have…you know. Come along.” He said it as though the entire point of an escape to the stars hadn’t been for the purpose of keeping them together.
“I would,” he said. His eye contact was incessant, and Crowley felt like he was squinting at the sun. “That’s been the answer since the moment you asked it, Crowley, and I ought to have said so.”
…But after all this time, the more I'm trying, the more I seem to let you down…
The demon’s fingers were wrapped so tightly around his stemware that he feared it might break, so he hastily set the wine aside.
Aziraphale smoothed his palms around his trousers, working out the right words. “I’ve always been rather afraid of doing the wrong thing, you know. Since the beginning,” he added, needlessly. It was the first conversation they’d ever had, when they met. How could Crowley forget a word of it?
“Still not convinced you can,” Crowley mused.
A look of infuriating tenderness crossed the angel’s face. “Not without help, no.”
Crowley pouted. “Been a bad influence, have I?”
Aziraphale smiled.
“You have made me human,” he said. “In the very best way. You’ve made me whole.”
There was no safe, flippant response that could guard his heart from this. Crowley swallowed a lump in his throat as the words sank in. The angel’s eyes held visible tears, now, and Crowley reached to lay a hand on his arm, to steady the storm. Instead, Aziraphale met his fingers with his own. Crowley let the angel tuck his hand between both of his, taking a steadying breath. The candles flickered as one, replying to an invisible breeze.
“You have been everything, everything to me, for as long as I can remember,” Aziraphale said, and his words fell like water into parched earth. “I thought for so long that we were put here to counteract each other, that I was meant to chase your evil with good, but…but then all you showed me was kindness, truer kindness than I’ve ever known, and…it was all I wanted Crowley. It still is.”
“Aziraphale, I—” Crowley forced himself to bite his tongue. The angel was a sight to behold, the candlelight making visible the radiance that Crowley always saw when he looked at him, even in the dead of night.
“All this time,” Aziraphale said, almost a sob. He tried to laugh away a rolling tear, and Crowley fought every customary impulse to wipe it away. “All this time I was searching for good, and there you were.”
Crowley tried to pull his hand from between the angel’s, so the latter wouldn’t feel it shaking.
“I’m not nearly good enough,” Crowley protested, his voice hollow.
Aziraphale lifted a hand to his face, cradling it gently. “You are my good. Don’t you see, my dear?”
Crowley’s heart ached. His entire being, corporeal and otherwise, felt like it was about to let go and leave his soul stranded in the ether. It was a familiar terror, the same that still woke him at night, once every century or so: the terror from a memory. The feeling of a Fall.
Crowley leaned into the angel’s hand, swallowing the painful, gripping sensation that he was teetering on the edge of a precipice from which there was no going back. But this wasn’t hellfire, not like before. No, the path to this precipice was well-worn, and the view below was the most beautiful he’d ever seen. He’d been wanting to let go for six-thousand years, and this very night, his angel’s eyes lit the way, his lips spelled hope.
…It’s late, it’s late, it’s late, but not too late…
The world was not over, not for one more night.
Crowley let go.
There’s a sort of love that goes unsaid, that transcends the meager expressions of which words are capable. The sort that’s enough, when nothing else in the whole of the world seems to be. The sort that is so all-consuming, so constant, that it cannot possibly be reduced to the plane of the physical alone.
But even in such cases, a kiss is sometimes simply called for.
The angel’s lips were impossible, soft and certain and open floodgates of pure, holy love. He met the kiss like his salvation depended on this, on Crowley’s love; not on the verdict of the fellow angels coming to claim him in the morning. Crowley sank into the angel’s arms, kissing him with the force of a love six-thousand years in the making. It was the closest to salvation he’d ever come, he was sure, and it was all but better than the real thing.
A fraction of an inch slipped between them, only for air, and Crowley felt that he was stifling a sob and a laugh and pain and need all in one choked breath.
“Angel,” he whispered.
“Yes, my dear?”
“I’d tell you that I loved you, if it felt anywhere near like enough.”
Aziraphale felt him shaking and held him tighter in reply. “I love you,” he said firmly. Crowley’s eyes wandered, but the angel guided their foreheads together. “And it’s more than enough.”
Crowley kissed him again, unable to think of a more suitable expression for the magnitude of what he felt. The fact was, he could have fallen in love with the angel any number of times. Pick a century; there were moments in every one that spelled out his heart in the letters of Aziraphale’s name. But none had changed him quite like the moment they’d met, on the wall of a garden at the dawn of the world.
It was then, along with mankind, that he’d fallen. For a dazzling smile, and a good heart, and a place out of the rain.
The time passed so inscrutably that it might as well have stopped. Perhaps, in fact, it had. Crowley ran his fingers carefully down the angel’s back, holding him fast, pouring centuries of meaning into his embrace. The love of his life was taking him apart kiss by kiss, inch by inch, and Crowley let him. He felt weakness seeping into his bones, and he welcomed it in.
The candles had burned down, but miraculously the room remained bathed in a golden hue. The scent of warm beeswax and the essence of hope wafted in the air, gently disrupting the leaves of several tentatively gleeful plants.
When, at length, Aziraphale was struck with an unfamiliar need for breath, Crowley released only his lips, clinging close to the rest of him.
“Do you think we’ll die tomorrow?” Aziraphale asked casually. He had his fingers tangled in Crowley’s hair, a process that seemed far more significant than impending doom. He could tase Crowley on his tongue, feel him under his hands, and there was simply no going back from here.
The demon shrugged. “Potentially. Unless we think up another mind-bender in the next few hours, tonight might be the rest of our lives.” The loose-fitting necktie he wore had slipped inside the dip of his shirtfront, and Aziraphale reached to straighten it. Crowley hissed when the angel’s fingers brushed his skin, and Aziraphale watched him.
Carefully, he spread his palm on Crowley’s chest, and Crowley let out a slow, contented sigh. The demon’s hand, which had been at rest on the back of Aziraphale’s neck, twined a handful of his curls into an affectionate tug. This was it. This was everything they’d wanted to say to each other, for all of time.
Crowley nuzzled against his neck, planting enough kisses there to number the stars.
“I’ve got a question, angel,” he growled. Aziraphale giggled when his teeth scraped the base of his ear, down his jaw.
“Anything,” he said.
Crowley tipped his head back, golden eyes alight with mischief, grinning in that impossible way that Aziraphale had never been able to resist.
“Want to spend the rest of our lives together?” he asked.
Aziraphale’s smile was incandescent, the same that had lit Crowley from the inside since the day they’d met. “My eternity is yours.”
~*~
—A Bonus Scene, As It Were—
“How big a miracle do you think it’d take for the Ritz to be open at 3am?” Crowley wondered, trying to ease the last drop from the wine bottle.
Aziraphale grinned, snapping his fingers. “Didn’t you hear? There’s a special event tonight. Sort of a date, 6000 years in the making.”
“That doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Neither do we, darling.”
“Point taken. Excellent. You drive.”
“I can’t drive.”
“You just did.”
“That was different.”
“Well I’m drunk, and it’s too fun to get sober. Wait!” he sat sup abruptly. “What if we miracle each other there, instead of trying to do ourselves?”
Aziraphale considered. “That just might work. All right, get up. Come on, Crowley, I’m dying for a celebratory crème brûlée. That’s it, up you get. Ready?”
“Rrrrready,” Crowley purred, tossing his empty glass across the room for absolutely no reason.
Snap.
“Look, my dear, it worked!” Aziraphale cried, looking from the glowing Ritz sign to the figure beside him.
Except that the figure beside him was him.
Aziraphale felt the wrong clothes on himself before he saw them: black, all black, and impossibly tight.
“What the heaven just happened?” Crowley demanded, only it was Aziraphale’s voice that spoke.
“Oh shit,” the angel muttered, with more delicacy than the voice he was borrowing had ever used on the words.
Crowley’s mannerisms squinted at him. “Is that what I look like? Damn.” He giggled. “I’m hot.”
“This is serious, Crowley! If heaven and hell find out we’ve switched…”
And that’s when it hit him.
“My dear boy,” Aziraphale said, pushing Crowley’s glasses down his nose. “I think I have an idea.”
“About how to untie this bloody collar, I hope,” Crowley mused, tugging the tartan in all the wrong directions.
“About how not to die tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Crowley looked between them, grinning. "Ohhhh. I like your style, angel. But we’d still better get dessert first, don’t you think?”
“What sort of heathen do you take me for?” Aziraphale asked, gesturing meaningfully at his present appearance. He reached for the door. “After you, my dear.”