Chapter Text
"Aren't you going to say anything?" Madame Tracy asked incredulously, in her own voice.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, my dear, I forgot to thank you for lending me your corporation. World to save, and all," Madame Tracy replied in Aziraphale's prim voice.
"You still haven't," she pointed out, "but that's not what I meant."
"What did you mean, then?" Aziraphale asked, ignoring the first bit in a way that Crowley would find "worth liking."
"That handsome fellow whose just come strutting along to save the day, when are you going to tell him how you feel?" She began spluttering in a most undignified manner. Ah, that would be Aziraphale, then.
"I don't- that is to say- we're only-" Aziraphale took a breath that he didn't strictly need but which Madame Tracy did (or so he justified it to himself. After all, Madame Tracy had nothing to be blushing so furiously about) and composed himself somewhat. "Crowley knows that he is a very dear friend to me," he said uncertainly. He had said some things he did not mean recently, but Crowley had called him on it, haden't he? And he'd come back for him, too. He couldn't bear to lose Crowley, let alone be the one to push him away.
"But you know that he isn't," Madame Tracy countered.
"Excuse me?"
"You're head over heels for him," she said simply.
"Do lower your voice! He's coming back this way!" Goodness, he sounded like a middle schooler working up the courage to ask his crush to the dance. Madame Tracy pursed her lips. She was fairly certain the flirty demon playing knight in flaming Bentley had feelings for her uninvited guest, but she supposed there was little point in setting them up just in time for the world to end, tragically romantic as that sounded. There'd be plenty of time for that later, so long as this wasn't the End of Times.
- - -
The Apoca-doodle-don't came and went, and Aziraphale had quite forgotten the troubling thoughts he'd overheard in the head he'd shared with Madame Tracy. Madame Tracy, romantic that she was, still turned these thoughts over in her mind from time to time, albeit with more privacy. Matchmaking two oblivious beings in love was trickier than she'd hoped, though the Seargent was some frame of reference as obliviousness went. She decided that, having been possessed (seemed like the other's lot, but what did she know about ethereal politics? Same stock, and all that) and having, she thought, something of a hand in whatever came after, she was entitled to some closure. She couldn't remember much of anything after Aziraphale left her head, his sharp, angelic memory giving way to a dream-like recollection; she couldn't remember the plot of the day, but the vibe stuck around, illiciting an odd feeling landing somewhere between nostalgia and deja vu. Adam felt it might come off rather patronizing if Aziraphale and Crowley found they could not remember the Nah-pocalypse (he was on their side, really, and it wouldn't do to start off with bad blood between them), so Aziraphales memory, housed for a time in Madame Tracy's brain, was crystal-clear. There were few people who could recall a single detail from the Middle of Times (formerly the End of Times), and fewer still who saw it through rose-colored glasses. Madame Tracy couldn't remember much of the actual conflict; the clarity came with memories of the Seargent clinging to her for dear life or a flutter in her hijacked heart at the ridiculous sight of a demon swaggering away from a bonfire masquerading as a car. Even Seargent Shadwell, the most stubborn man alive, had softened some. He left his grungy apartment a couple times a week to eat dinner across the hall with Madame Tracy, to her fading astonishment and growing delight. Surely if a man whose lived on condensed milk and sheer force of will for the entirety of his adult life (which one Private Pulsifer believes may have begun at birth) can change, an angel can work up the courage to tell someone how he feels after six thousand years. Perhaps Aziraphale, like Shadwell, just needed a push. Considering Aziraphale had commandeered her vessel without permission, she supposed she could forgo propriety and invite herself over for tea. She'd stop by Thursday, after... well, no one was quite sure what. An appointment, of sorts. Yes, she mused, Thursday would do nicely.