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Crowley stood in the middle of the garden, hands on his hips, a frown on his face. He hadn’t moved in forty-five minutes, the time it had taken Aziraphale to say his goodbyes to the real estate agent. She was a lovely lady, but a tad stressed, and a smile from an Angel of the Lord was all it took for her to burst into tears and spill all her woes. She left with a hug, a blessing and the intention to get some rest.
Aziraphale closed the door behind her and walked through the empty cottage, a smile on his face. He could easily imagine their possessions mixed together, filling the place with old comfortable couches, glass coffee tables, dozens of the greenest plants in the country and books laying on every surface. But mostly, it would be filled with them, their friendship, contentment, and love.
He sighed happily and joined Crowley, who hadn’t moved an inch. His frown had devolved into a full on grimace.
‘Pray tell, dearest, which one of these poor plants has insulted your good taste?’
‘All of them,’ spat Crowley. ‘They’re nothing but overgrown ferns. None of them worthy of growing in Eden 2.0’
‘Oh, is that what we are calling our home, now? A little bit on the nose, don’t you think?’
‘I’m going to plant an apple tree in the middle and eat every single fruit. You’ll see, Angel, I’m going to make PIES with the fruits of knowledge.’
‘And you keep insisting that you are not a poet, but you have a heavy handed use of metaphors, my love.’
Crowley aimed the grimaced his way and got a quick kiss for his trouble.
‘So, did she stop crying?’
‘Eventually. I don’t think she was meant for such a stressful job, or… such demanding clients.’
‘Not MY fault if the first twenty-seven cottages she showed us were inadequate.’
‘We do have very precise requirements…’
‘I don’t see how hard it could be to find a house with a garden and the space for a couple of books,’ Crowley grumbled, already knowing he lost the argument.
Aziraphale merely had to make a sweeping gesture around them for the demon to sigh.
‘Listen, none of the other houses had enough space for all of your stuff, and don’t even get me started on the ridiculously puny squares of greenery that pretend to be gardens. I mean, this is far from being ideal, but at least it’s got walls.’
They were ancient, stone-made, sturdy, and best of all, ten feet tall. Aziraphale enjoyed the possibility of stretching his wings. Crowley loved the idea of controlling exactly who could get in or out of his garden. As in, no one, ever.
‘I still think we should have held up for a bigger one,’ muttered Crowley. ‘I’m sure that even a miracle won’t be able to fit the entire bookstore.’
‘I’ll place my least favorites ones in the attic,’ shrugged Aziraphale.
‘See? Even you cast aside the least deserving of your children,’ snickered Crowley. ‘How…
Godlike
of you.’
‘There is no need to blaspheme, you serpent. Now, tell me about your plans for Eden 2.0’
And Crowley did. He talked enthusiastically about the trees he would import from every corner of the world and MAKE them grow on British soil. He enumerated flowers, shrubs, venomous plants, fruit trees, and expanded on the tree of knowledge that would take centre stage.
Aziraphale smiled and drank it all.
They moved in with a mix of human resources and celestial miracles. As in, they managed to fit the entirety of Crowley’s flat and Aziraphale’s bookstore in a single moving truck. The movers, very sceptical at first, kept finding space to add more and more boxes of books. Crowley didn’t trust them with the plants, so they made the trip in the Bentley’s back seat, under the very strong worded menace that if any of them DARED to lose a single leaf, they would be thrown out the window for the wolves to devour*.
*The fact that wolves didn’t need to eat plants is not a fact that indoor plants need to know.
Once installed, they did the boring part first, under Crowley’s insistence. ‘If you start on your books we’ll never have a place to sit or eat. We’re doing the couch first, Angel.’ With the help of the movers, most of the essentials had found their place before sundown. When the last chair of the dining room set was placed, Aziraphale turned towards Crowley, who groaned.
‘Don’t do this, get those ridiculous puppy eyes away, you’re going to hurt someone with them. Alriiiiight you can start classifying your books. See you in a hundred years, I guess, nice knowing you and all that.’
Aziraphale gave him an enthusiastic good night kiss and almost skipped towards the first box. Almost every wall of the lower floor was covered with empty bookshelves waiting to be filled with scrupulously alphabetised first editions.
Crowley went upstairs, couldn’t be bothered to find which box contained the bedding, miracled clean sheets on their bed (mostly his bed), and slept.
He woke up with the sun to find his Angel in the middle of a literary storm. There were open boxes and piles of books everywhere. Somehow, all the bookstore dust had managed to travel with them. There were only three shelves sporting books, and Aziraphale seemed to be reclassifying what was on there.
‘Oh, you made more progress that I expected!’ said Crowley, kissing his cheek. ‘I thought I’d find you reading the first book you found in the first box you opened.’
‘Don’t be foolish, it was the fourth one. But I merely perused it. No, my trouble is… I don’t know how to arrange everything.’
‘Has the English alphabet failed you? Do you want to go back to Summerian?’
‘No, it’s all fine for now, it’s the subjects that are giving me trouble. Where should the fiction go, in the living room, the dining room or the hallway? I have more space in here, but they would look lovely in the hall, all aligned… And how should I separate the subjects? By century, by country, or should I just mix together all the eras and place them by author name like a ruffian? Psh, what am I saying, I am not some Waterstones employee that can’t differentiate novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth century-’
‘... I’m making you tea and eggs and you’re gonna eat them and chill, alright?’
Once armed with a cup of tea, Aziraphale took the time to breathe. He didn’t need it, but the placebo effect helped cleared his mind. Crowley sat next to him on the couch, burrowing his toes under Aziraphale’s thigh.
‘How did you do it the first time, then?’ asked the Demon.
‘It was simpler when I opened the bookshop,’ sighed Aziraphale. ‘I had five shelves, and all the books were by contemporary British writers. The rest just… grew around it.’
‘Well, you have all the time in the world and no customers in sight,’ shrugged Crowley. ‘For all I care, you could spend eternity changing the disposition of all those books, it’s not like I’m ever gonna need to find one.’
Aziraphale threw him a blinding smile. Crowley blinked and looked sideways, still unused to have such radiance thrown his way.
‘Spending eternity classifying books, with you by my side, seems like a perfect idea.’
Crowley had the intention to start early on the garden, but he’d been distracted by a two-hours long making-out session on the couch. At some point, Aziraphale thought of a possible new classification, gave him a last kiss and pushed him outside, telling him that if he was going to go around tempting people, might as well do it in a passable garden.
Therefore, Crowley found himself in the middle of the backyard, hands on his hips, once again. Except that this time, he was armed with a shovel, shears, and an evil smile.
‘Playtime’s over,’ he said.
The ferns trembled.
The following days were filled with yelling and violence. The kids from the neighbouring area would bike near the cottage, and say that a demon had come to live behind the stone walls. They never knew how right they were.
At some point, Aziraphale left his classification and found his demon in close combat with a rather recalcitrant waifish tree, its roots clinging to the dirt.
‘Alright, dear?’
‘THIS SON OF A BIRCH JUST WON’T LET ME KILL IT!’
‘Just wanted to drop by and tell you I love you!’
‘LOVE YOU TOO!’
The weeks went by and they established a routine. Once the excitement of the first days had passed, they managed to tear themselves away from their respective projects to spend more time together. They came back to sharing meals and soft evenings together. Aziraphale climbed into bed every evening and read the night away, next to a sleeping Crowley. Every morning, the demon woke up to a smile on his Angel’s face. Every day they went back to work, building their home exactly as they wanted it.
The garden was coming along nicely. Crowley’s indoor plants were given a sunlit spot, without any deference to the fact that they were indoor plants. They knew better than to be sensitive to elements, though. Unfit plants were thrown out the walls, where there were WOLVES.
Crowley shopped online and bought hundreds of seeds from all over the globe. He argued with suppliers that YES he wanted a palm tree and it wasn’t anyone’s business how he took care of it. Just to be contrarian he planted it next to a pine.
The demon refused to use any sort of miracling over his plants, he claimed they didn’t deserve the help. But each morning, Aziraphale made sure that the weather would be nice and warm, sunny or softly raining, something a plant would like. Crowley figured it out soon enough, and figured out that Aziraphale didn’t have the smallest idea about what plants needed, because the cacti certainly didn’t need so much rain. Still, he found it endearing, and the cacti grew nicely next to the tomato plants.
Once the planting was done, Crowley started on a gazebo. He didn’t have any sort of experience in anything related to woodwork or, just, building anything ever, but the Angel had seen one and declared it “lovely”, so he was building a gazebo. It ended up weirdly wonky, but Aziraphale had loved it, and they spend many evenings eating there.
After the gazebo, now that he was a true architect, Crowley figured it was time to make a green house, since winter was approaching. Not that the plants needed it, but it would be nice to have a warm spot of greenery during the harsh months. The cottage grew a glass expansion made of a plethora of mismatched windows, half of them assembled the human way and the other half just miracled together because one day was colder than the others and he grew impatient. Some plants were pretty enough to earn a spot inside, while the others shivered through the harsh winter months but still managed to survive and flourish out of sheer terror.
Aziraphale pushed the couch in the middle of the green house and they spent the winter there, curled around each other, reading and being read to.
Spring came. Crowley went back to his garden with renewed vigor. He added exotic plants and removed the unworthy ones, paved the walkways with flat stones, added arches of roses overhead, two gurgling fountains and three small koi ponds. He found statues of questioning taste and placed them among the greenery. One was in the shape of an angel, which he placed on top of the western wall.
*Aziraphale thought the angel looked lonely and soon found a plush snake to wrap around the angel’s shoulders. Crowley thought it was tacky and insulting, but miraculously, the toy never got wet or mouldy.
And yet, Crowley was still unsatisfied. Aziraphale had long placed his books in his favoured order and was now focused on acquiring more. He perused Ebay on Crowley’s laptop, sitting at the gazebo table and getting distracted by his pacing demon.
‘I assure you, it all looks lovely,’ he tried once more.
‘I don’t want it to look LOVELY,’ he spat, ‘I want it to look PERFECT!’
‘It looks pretty close to the real deal to me. Even better, the real Eden didn’t have those pretty fairy lights or that couch near the rose bushes-’
‘It’s still missssssing ssssomething.’
Aziraphale went to hug him from behind and waited it out.
‘It’s- It doesn’t- I don’t want to- Ssshit.’
‘Just breathe, my darling. I will wait.’
‘I don’t want it to be like the first one!’ he blurted out. ‘I mean- That’s what I wanted at firssst- but the first one sucked, didn’t it? It wasss beautiful, but it wasn’t ours- it was for them- Eve and the guy- and even then they got kicked out! I don’t want thisss- I want- I want-’
He stopped and turned around in Aziraphale’s arms, with a blinding smile.
‘Oh, Angel, I know what’s missing!’
He kissed Aziraphale and left the house abruptly. A moment later, the Bentley’s tires screeched.
Crowley was gone all day, came at night to sleep, and left the following morning. Six days passed like this. Aziraphale wasn’t worried. Yet. Crowley seemed in a good mood, although restless. He still slept and cuddled with Aziraphale and played Candy Crush on his cell phone, so there was that.
In the morning of the seventh day, the silence was broken by the Bentley’s enthusiastic horn playing La Cucaracha. Arizaphale was surprised enough to leave his reading in the middle of a sentence, and went to find his demon.
The Bentley had acquired a trailer, and on that trailer was a boulder. An impressive boulder.
‘Angel, look at it! How big and smooth and flat it is! It will be perfect!’
‘Yes, it is very… big and smooth and flat,’ answered Aziraphale, perplexed. ‘How did you- No, more importantly, how do you intend to bring it in the garden?’
‘Dhu, with your help, of course.’
Crowley and Aziraphale miraculously developed the strength to carry a several tons boulder. They did not, sadly, miraculously develop the wisdom to simply transport it with magic, or have only one of them transport it. Which meant that the following hours were spent trying to coordinate to get a massive boulder through the front door of the house, around the furniture, through the hallway, and through the back door.
When they finally were able to deposit it (over a patch of hydrangeas that were deemed unworthy), Crowley let a satisfied sigh.
‘There. It’s perfect now.’
And before Aziraphale could ask, he removed his clothes, left them in a pile, climbed on top of the flat boulder, laid back and fell asleep, stark naked.
Aziraphale looked at his partner, blinked, and decided not to ask.
When the sun started declining, Crowley woke up with a shiver. He climbed down, put his clothes back on and went to cuddle with the Angel, who was reading on the couch.
‘Good nap, dear?’
‘The best,’ said Crowley, burrowing his head in Aziraphale’s neck. ‘I hadn’t slept on a good boulder in ages.’
Aziraphale hugged him, understanding a bit more about making a home, about building a space and making it yours.
Sometimes the area children managed to climb the tall walls surrounding the garden of the Eden 2.0 cottage (as stated by the mailbox). They could see a luxurious garden with plants from all over the world, statues and ponds and archways.
In the middle, near an apple tree, was a boulder. And on that boulder, a gigantic snake napping under the sun.