Work Text:
It was a few weeks after the Apocalypse That Wasn’t, and Crowley and Aziraphale were in St James’ Park. They had been walking around in a sort of chuffed disbelief since their respective trials, still getting used to the fact that they didn’t have to frame hanging out as anything but what it was in order to keep up appearances to their uninterested head offices.
Crowley had rather enjoyed his friend’s new goal of scouring every bakery or patisserie in Zone 1 for the perfect croissant, and was rather touched when he had all but forced Crowley to go to the local garden centre to buy a trellis so that his plants could grow with some direction.
The increased time together was something that Crowley was coming to privately adore. He had realised quite quickly down the line that the last time they had spent so much time together had been before he had Fallen, but that was a time in his existence that he adamantly and actively put energy into not thinking about.
Crowley had realised that those that the Fallen had left behind had forgotten about who demons used to be as soon as he had first spoken to Aziraphale. The angel hadn’t called him by his old name, and nothing about him suggested that he still cared for him. Nothing about Aziraphale had suggested that he knew that he had once loved Crowley.
But Crowley had long gotten over that particular heartbreak. Early on, it hadn’t been unusual for the two to go decades, or even centuries without seeing each other, so Crowley had been in possession of more than enough time to mourn their relationship. And well, influencing humans proved to be an amusing enough hobby once he really put some welly into it, so it’s not like he was without distraction.
And yet.
And yet, Crowley had found these long days spent together in the wake of Tadfield, in the days after what was essentially the Earth’s rebirth, his feelings for Aziraphale were doubling. Or perhaps renewing, or stirring somewhere deep within him and glowing in a way that he had assumed once he had Fallen were reserved for blessed beings.
He had found himself, for the first time in a long , long time, longing for Heaven. But, all things considered, the resurgence of friendship alone with Aziraphale was more than he could have ever asked for.
So, he kept quiet. And he forced himself to be grateful.
At present however, they were sitting languidly on a bench. Or rather, Crowley was sitting languidly and Aziraphale was sitting sensibly. Aziraphale had been looking so much younger recently, with lines of stress few and far between. Though the pair could look ageless, there had been an unmistakable sense of bone-tiredness that had racked the two in the eleven years before they met Adam.
And Crowley was glad that Aziraphale looked well, of course he was. It was just, well. He looked so much like the angel that he had loved so unabashedly all those millennia before. Crowley would be lying if he didn’t admit that some days, when he caught the light in a certain way, he was so beautiful that it hurt to look at him. Like the sun, Crowley mused absently.
Not that Aziraphale would ever know that he had been the inspiration for that particular piece of Crowley’s handiwork.
“You know,” Aziraphale said suddenly. “I am so glad that you were the demon sent to Earth. I don’t think I’d been able to thwart any other demon’s wiles.”
Crowley hummed his agreement.
“I wasn’t best pleased with it at first to be honest, but. Couldn’t have done it without you, angel.” Crowley smiles at Aziraphale, and thinks to himself that he’s never said anything truer.
Aziraphale, on his part, however, seems a little offended by this revelation.
“Why weren’t you pleased at first? You seemed friendly enough in Eden, dear.”
“Well, of course. That’s just etiquette isn’t it.” He shifts uncomfortably on the bench. “Just minding my Ps and Qs, you know. Though I suppose I shouldn’t have been, you know. Being a demon. No, my problem was with the motivations of my lot. In sending me up here.”
“Whatever do you mean, motivations?” Aziraphale has turned towards him slightly, his expression frightfully earnest.
And, oh. Shit. Crowley had certainly not meant to let on anything about motivations. But he had been looking at Aziraphale and at how his rapt attention was fixed on Crowley. It really wasn’t his fault that he had been so preoccupied with something so affectionate.
So really, he couldn’t be to blame if his inhibitions were a little loose.
“Why do you think they sent me up to Earth?” Crowley asks softly. “I was an archangel. They should have given me a more important job. An office downstairs, you know. The whole shabang. I should be next to Beelzebub. I outrank Hastur and Ligur, I shouldn’t be taking orders from them.”
Crowley sighs and rubs the at frown breaking between his brows. Even though it was something he was so reluctant to say, it felt like a dam breaking. All at once, Crowley felt that he had to, that he needed to let Aziraphale know. Aziraphale had to know. Perhaps this was the culmination of what ‘ our own side’ really meant, perhaps this was the Apocalypse, for Crowley. Aziraphale had to know.
“They sent me up because Above sent you down ,” his voice pressed softly and urgently. “This,” he gestured between them before indicating their wider surroundings as well, “ this is a punishment, angel.”
Aziraphale suddenly drew into himself, put out. He turned away from Crowley and fiddled with his jacket, pulling at it so that it wrapped around him, a barrier.
“Oh, well, if you consider me a punishment, you should have just said so, dear boy.” He spoke only slightly less radiently than he did usually, but Crowley had naturally, by this point, worked out how to tell when he was pissed off. “I would have stopped inviting you over for afternoon tea.”
Crowley scoffs.
“No, you idiot. It’s a punishment because... because-,” he closes his eyes. “It’s a punishment because they know I loved you. Before.” He averts his face away from Aziraphale’s gaze. “And now my job for all eternity is to work directly against you.”
“Oh, Crowley. ”
Crowley holds his hand up, a plea.
“Don’t Aziraphale. Seriously, just… don’t.”
“Crowley, you ridiculous creature,” Aziraphale’s voice is exasperated and, well, fond. And that’s just not right because…
Crowley jerks his head quickly, and meets Aziraphale’s gaze head on this time. His eyes are bright and he’s smiling. It’s gentle and slight and Crowley feels the presence of it warm something that yearns somewhere in his ribcage.
Or, where his ribcage would be if demons or angels had any kind of genuine desire to have regular human anatomy.
He fixes Aziraphale with an incredulous look.
“Did you really just call me ridiculous? That confession took a lot out of me, Aziraphale. Have some compassion, would you?” Crowley rolls his eyes, reluctantly pleased. At least Aziraphale could still stand to sit on the same bench as him. “I have it on good authority that it’s at least thirty five percent of your celestial makeup, come on now, angel.”
“Well, you are ridiculous, Crowley.” Something concerned and mildly heartbreaking flicks onto Aziraphale’s face. “Crowley, my love, in all six thousand years…” he chuckles a little in a way that doesn’t sound amused but more aching, “why on God’s green earth didn’t you tell me that you remembered?”
Crowley stills.
“- I thought… well I had assumed that demons, or er… those who Fell didn’t remember the time before. That’s what they told us, you know. Upstairs. I figured I’d still be polite of course. Make friends with you, tried to make sure you got on okay.”
He pauses in his rambling, and seems to become extremely interested in his nails. Once he had started talking he had looked down at his lap, seemingly unable to meet Crowley’s eyes once he got going, and now he appeared completely incapable of looking up again. When he began speaking again his voice sounded small, and unbearably close to tears in a way that Crowley had scarcely heard before.
“Of course it was difficult. Especially at first. And then whenever you grew your hair out long. That’s how you wore it when you worked Upstairs, do you remember? But I told myself,” he paused, and took a deep shaking breath, “I told myself -- ‘Aziraphale, you had him for millennia before. At least you’re both on Earth,’ I said ‘You can be friends,’ I said, ‘That can be enough. It is enough to be friends.’”
Aziraphale is quiet then, and seems to be focusing all his energy on breathing. Which, Crowley notes absently, isn’t something he really needs to do as an ethereal being but it does seem to be helping him calm down nonetheless.
Crowley rolls his words around in his mouth, but nothing he can think of is worthy of responding to this. He had thought that his confession was game-changing, but the way that Aziraphale is silent, the way he has his fists balled up primly in his lap says something more than Crowley’s meek admission ever could.
He doesn’t want his voice to shake, he doesn’t want anything that he says to get lost in the air between them, so he takes a leaf from Aziraphale’s book and breathes steadily a few times before speaking.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that you remembered?”
Aziraphale’s words are short and clipped and clearly painful to get out.
“They told us that you didn’t,” he repeats, and Crowley wonders if this is something that Aziraphale has been repeating to himself for going on six thousand years.
“What, me in particular?”
Aziraphale huffs out a laugh despite himself, a sign that steadies Crowley slightly.
“No, you dolt,” he rights himself and meets Crowley’s eyes, finally. “The Fallen, in general. They told us that you would remember the act of Falling but that the time before would be, you know.” He flaps an arm about to illustrate his point. “Hazy.”
“It’s not hazy, angel.”
“No?” Aziraphale’s answering question is more than surface level, and Crowley knows instantly what he’s asking really. Do you remember falling in love with me? Do you remember how our halos used to become one if we stood close together? Do you remember the afternoons we used to spend in the Elysian Fields, before afternoons ever existed?
Do you remember falling in love with me? Do you remember loving me?
“No.” Crowley’s answer is final and sincere. “No, of course not, angel,” he takes a breath again, and reaches his hand out between them, tentatively. “It’s not hazy. At all.”
Aziraphale takes it in his.
“Darling boy,” he begins, “when you said you loved me, before. Did you mean past tense?”
Crowley squeezes Aziraphale’s hand.
“No, angel. I love you. I love you, present tense.”
“I love you too, darling.”
Crowley can’t help but laugh then. A dark, self deprecating sound.
“I can’t believe we’ve spent six thousand bloody years loving each other in silence just because we both thought the other couldn’t remember.”
“Yes, but darling…” Aziraphale smiles in a sort of absentminded way. “Even though I thought you couldn’t remember loving me, I could remember loving you. And every time I saw you, even if decades or even centuries passed,” he says this bit rather purposefully, narrowing his eyes at Crowley, “you would remind me why. And that was enough for me.”
“But it shouldn’t have been. You should have had to settle for enough.”
“You did the exact same thing, Crowley.”
Aziraphale’s voice is firm but warm, and maybe, for the first time in six thousand years Crowley is remembering what it feels like to be loved by Aziraphale. To be loved by something holy. But for thinking this, he chides himself -- he has been loved by Aziraphale for six thousand years. Just as he had loved Aziraphale. He was just too reluctant to open his eyes.
“You know, it’s funny.” Aziraphale says, a while later, on the same bench, though they sat closer to each other now. “I’m also on Earth because of you.”
“How’d you mean? Did they want to punish you for loving something that could Fall?” He asks, only somewhat bitterly.
“No, no they--. Well, they felt sorry for me, I suppose,” the annoyed look on Aziraphale’s face calmed Crowley as he realised what he thought about being pitied in this instance. “She thought that, because I was the only angel that had experienced love, true love, that I should be the one to watch over the humans. Because all angels are beings of love, but I was the only one that knew the love that humans were built to have.”
He looks at Crowley.
“I think they were a bit nervous around me, to be honest. I was too human for Heaven, even before humans were invented yet.”
“Nothing wrong with that, angel.” Crowley makes a point of looking around the park, at all the humans going about their daily business. Women with briefcases going to work and teenagers skiving school to lay, mindless, in the sun spots. “I’m actually quite fond of them, you know. If we’re being honest today.”
“I know you are, darling. I know you are.”
Crowley squeezes his hand before leaning forward to meet Aziraphale in a soft kiss, tender and loving. Though it was their first in six millennia, it was still the most natural thing in the world.
As he pulled away, Crowley reached up to touch the side of Aziraphale’s face, and smiled with a kind of shy instinct.
“I mean it, you know. I really couldn’t have done this with anyone else.”
Aziraphale reaches up to hold the hand cradling his face.
“Neither could I, my love. And I certainly wouldn’t want to, either.”
And though the two beings had survived six thousand years on friendship, and though that had been enough for both of them, they both looked optimistically on the prospect of an infinity of something more.