Chapter Text
Crowley was bent into a checkmark, legs up on the carriage table and his back contorted to fit into the plastic, scrappy seat. His phone was out of battery. It had been for like half an hour, but he wasn’t going to forfeit his new high score in Flappy Bird, so he was having none of it.
“You are missing the scenery,” said Aziraphale, sitting beside him, beside the window. Back straight. Eyes as bright and blue as ever. Ridiculously charmed with the countryside. Which was just sheep, Crowley thought. Sheep and farms and a bit more vertical in places. They’d spent centuries pinging across this country like the ball in an ineffable game of table tennis, constantly moving by foot and by car and—his buttocks still ached in empathy for the past—horseback.
“I’m familiar with the look of sheep.” Crowley did not see the appeal.
“You’re familiar with- with that silly telephone,” said Aziraphale, with enough vehemence to imply that silly was an understatement, but enough familiarity that Crowley knew he’d already been forgiven. Crowley leaned into Aziraphale’s shoulder a little, a reminder: I’m here, remember, I came on this trip for you. The angel smiled, did that little shifting wiggle of his shoulders that showed he was pleased. “I’ll never understand your fascination with that… thing.”
“You’d love it if you gave it a try. I’d lose you forever to Candy Crush.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
Right. Ever since the end-of-the-world-that-wasn’t, Aziraphale had been going rather hard on the whole our side thing. They were still getting used to that. Six thousand years assuming that eventually, the angel would fuck back off to Heaven, and now he couldn’t make jokes even tangential to the topic. It wasn’t a bad thing. Just took some getting used to.
It didn’t require an answer. Just a smile.
The train to Inverness filled quickly. When they’d left Edinburgh, the cheap seats had been nearly empty; each stop let on a character or two, or three, or four. The tables filled first, then the row seats, as the overhead shelving cluttered up with bags and backpacks and market bags full of wrapped presents. ‘Twas the season.
Somehow no one joined their table, no matter how enthusiastically Aziraphale beamed at them, and eventually two new row seats appeared behind them to make up for the ones Crowley was so selfishly hogging. Instead the humans milled around them and talked and gossiped and—
Oh, I think he fancies it, honestly, he just pretends he hates the attention—
—you walk right up to the top and it’s the most beautiful view—
—hi how are you hi how are you hi how are you hi— Relax, darling, just relax, enjoy your trip—
Aziraphale glanced over his shoulder at the last, a poor overstimulated young man and his father, who was doing his best to help but still had to battle against the jostle and hubbub of the carriage. The angel brushed a bit of lint off his jacket. Suddenly father and son found their table to be less chaotic, less alarming.
“Oy. You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Now I’ve got to go and inconvenience someone, even you out.”
“We don’t have to, you know.”
Crowley raised an eyebrow.
“That woman in the… hat is thinking infuriatingly eugenic thoughts, if you’re looking for someone to inconvenience. Have at it.”
“Now you’re just using me,” Crowley complained, but suddenly her cell phone battery was dead, and his was full again. The angel was right, of course. It wouldn’t be any fun ruining someone’s day if they didn’t deserve it just a little bit.
They passed through the country, the low and rolling hills, with the angled sunlight of late December casting golden shadows over the Highlands. Distant pines contrasted against the midday sunset—obsidian arrows against pink and blue and grey. They dipped in and out of tunnels like pens into an inkwell, brief forays into the black. They passed villages—Perth and Pilochry—made of houses from a dozen bygone days, Georgian and Victorian and modern and suburbian and sometimes a dozen at once. Mountains with snowcaps rose on the horizon and fell behind the nearer hills. The grass was yellow with winter, the trees marbled with green and brown.
Crowley had died in Flappy Bird and put aside his phone eventually. Aziraphale had not moved from his admiration of the windows. Crowley sighed and relaxed a little further and his head leaned against Aziraphale’s shoulder.
“Why did you insist on the train, Angel?”
“Other than wanting to ensure we arrived in one piece?”
“Other than that.”
“It’s still here.” No one would overhear them, but Aziraphale’s voice was quiet anyway. “It nearly wasn’t.”
Again, no response required: Aziraphale knew Crowley understood he was only partially talking about the landscape. In the Bentley they’d have been alone together—which was beautiful, perfect, something they would never get tired of. But they would have been alone. Here, they were not alone.
The father and son had been joined by a woman and her small child, and the son was bonding with them over an ipad. A person of indiscriminate gender was tucked against a window, scribbling in a journal and wearing a sweatervest that would make Aziraphale proud. People all around them were drinking coffee and trading holiday plans and moving bags so the trolley could get through and existing. Wholeheartedly and completely here.
The sun had set, but the light lingered, and they hit the snow line—first in the distant hills, then in patches in the dark grass, then a blossoming white spotted with trees. The Highlands rose around them, true mountains now, great slabs of snow and rock with clouds that sank, low and foggy, into the valleys between them. Even Crowley was a little impressed. He relinquished his phone to Aziraphale for the price of exactly one terrible picture that got more of the seats in it than the mountains. When they got home, they’d frame it.
It hadn’t been Crowley’s idea to spend the holidays here. He’d have been happy to stay in Sussex with their usual tradition—cocoa, books, a general disbelief that no one was going to dump holy water all over him—but the angel had been struck with a particular sort of wanderlust lately. So here they were.
Kingussie. Aviemore. Please mind the gap when alighting from this train. The night was spilling like ink into the sky. Stonework gave way to lights nestled in the darkness, villages transformed into scattered diamonds. A man in a red tracksuit got on the train and sat across the corridor, his infant granddaughter in tow. She wore neon pink and curls to rival the angel’s. He held his hands around her, infinitely careful as she tried to learn to walk on a table on the train. She fell—often—but her grandfather caught her, and she had a downright beatific smile. Crowley’s heart warmed and softened at the edges. He took Aziraphale’s hand under the table.
Stars outside, now, a trip down memory lane that came in the form of icicle lights and streetlamps. The universe hadn’t been lit with the neon of a gas station or inflatable Santa Clauses, but somehow the train seemed to be gliding through creation, lost at the beginning of the world.
This is Aviemore. This train is for Inverness. Next stop is Inverness.
Crowley closed his eyes to nap, well aware that Aziraphale would be keenly aware of the evenness of Crowley’s unconscious breath and the closeness of their bodies. He didn’t sleep. Aziraphale was right. There was too much humanity around them not to bask in it a little.
The person in the sweatervest closed their book and they both felt a little pang of heartbreak echo through the car: heartbreak, loss, an echo of a grey day and a bandstand at the end of the world. Some healing loss, some missing piece. It vanished when they smiled at the baby—a smile that rosy could solve any problem in the world, surely—and angel and demon both felt a human identity swell in their chests. Someone squeezed the other’s hand, and then a man in a crew cut started in on a loud phone call in French and the angel’s face furrowed in concentration and Crowley chuckled, because of course Aziraphale was trying to remember enough to listen in.
It earned him a nudge with a rather-entangled-by-now elbow. “Now I thought you were sleeping.”
“We’re nearly there. Don’t have the time.”
“So you’re just watching me, then.”
“You’re entertainment.” In a moment he would get his legs off the table, even, and stretch, and crack his back loudly enough to make everyone around them wince. They’d pull into the station and Aziraphale would insist on enduring a taxi to their cottage, and Crowley would break the pay machines at the barrier to the bathrooms just to get his angel’s stupid enthusiasm out of the air a little, and then they’d both unpack their bags at different times—secretive—since they were currently pretending they hadn’t bought each other gifts.
But not yet.
He could pretend to sleep on Aziraphale’s shoulder for a little bit longer.
