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He finds himself outside, leaning against a wall with a miracled bottle in his hands. The glass sweats, as do his palms, but there is a deep chill settled somewhere in his stomach, causing him to shiver even in the warmth of early summer. His mouth tastes of vinegar. For the first time in his frightfully long existence, he really does not care.
Not very angelic of me, Aziraphale thinks, slumped in an alley with his hair ruffled and bow-tie undone. His face is blotchy from crying and his throat is hoarse. This is all such a terrible mess. He takes another swig from the bottle, closes his eyes and lets it settle into his teeth and tongue, swallows another sob. His head falls back against the brick behind him. Tears spill down his face and pool on his upper lip, salt mingling with the sour wine. He trembles with the weight of it all; the tide comes in and soaks him to freezing and pulls out just as fast, against nature, leaving him to the cold shock of emptiness.
A shadow passes over his eyelids. He lifts them to find the darkness take the form of a familiar figure.
“I thought you were asleep,” Aziraphale says and hastily wipes his face with the back of his hand. His skin stings.
“Your depression woke me up, angel.”
“I’m not depressed.”
“It’s 11am and you’re sobbing into a bottle of Pinot noir.” Crowley grabs the wine from Aziraphale and stands beside him, peering over his glasses and down his pointed nose at the label. “And it’s not even a good year.”
He lifts it to his lips anyway, takes a hearty gulp and grimaces. Aziraphale watches his cheeks hollow and his eyebrows narrow, watches even as his vision grows blurry again.
“Why are you here, Crowley?” His voice breaks and he looks down, embarrassed. Crowley sighs, a softness soothing the sharp angles of him.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I was under the impression you were still angry with me.” He stares at Crowley’s snakeskin shoes and the bottoms of his fashionable trousers. The demon’s been asleep for over 30 years and he’s still on top of the clothing trends. Aziraphale feels almost hysterical.
Crowley sighs again and places the bottle on the ground, the glass meeting concrete with a clink. Aziraphale holds his breath but cannot hold back the tears. They are teetering on the edge of something here, and he fears one wrong move will send it hurtling over into oblivion. I want you here beside me, he thinks, with a mad and hopeful fervour he thought the court had killed. Gosh, I’m sorry. Please, don’t leave me like the rest of them. Not again. He’s not sure if it’s a prayer or something else entirely.
Crowley takes off his glasses and looks at Aziraphale with something raw and wanting and forgiving.
You made my stubborn heart believe in you.
Crowley lifts his hands, large and pale, and cups Aziraphale’s face like he’s bringing a bloom close, to breathe in the perfume and admire the colour. He brushes away Aziraphale’s tears, leans in and kisses petal-soft eyelids. Aziraphale gasps around a sob, presses his hands up and around Crowley’s neck and holds on desperately.
This made him want to cry. He held his love,
his faithful wife, and wept. As welcome as
the land to swimmers, when Poseidon wrecks
their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves
and driving winds; a few escape the sea
and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine.
Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land.
So glad she was to see her own dear husband,
and her white arms would not let go his neck.
“I’m sorry about Oscar,” he says, low and loving. A wave of grief hits Aziraphale and he clings tighter, his face hidden in the collar of Crowley’s coat.
“How did you know?” Crowley brings up a hand to rub reassuring circles into the angel’s back and Aziraphale’s throat seems to close, each point of contact like fire as his eyes burn.
“I woke up in a daze. Thought the world was ending or something.” The pressure of his hand is comforting and his other arm comes up to curl fingers into the hair at the nape of Aziraphale’s neck. His voice is soothing, the whisper of waves in the shell of his ear. “Went out into the street and some urchin was yelling about the sodomite-socialite-playwright and I thought bloody hell, my angel’s definitely caught up in this one. Got the details from passers-by on the way here… ‘m sorry. Really. About everything.”
About the argument, Aziraphale hears. For leaving you, for not letting you know we’re okay.
(We’re okay.)
He thinks of Oscar, dressed to the nines, tall and strong with a twinkle in his eye. He thinks of Oscar hidden away, beautiful writer’s hands bleeding and stripped of their skin, walls as grey as his sunken face. He pulls back from Crowley and doubles over, puking up wine and little else into the gutter (he hasn’t been able to eat since the trial was reopened). Bile splashes onto Crowley’s trousers and Aziraphale babbles out an apology, words thick with his incessant crying. Crowley merely miracles it away with a flick of his hand, shushing the angel as he crouches beside him and resumes his caress of Aziraphale’s back, stroking up and down his spine.
“There we go. S’okay.” Aziraphale vomits again. His teeth chatter and he feels awfully undignified. “Any better?”
Aziraphale looks up at Crowley, who smiles ever so kindly. He doesn’t break eye contact as he gestures beside him, his fingers tickling the air as the sea-green glass shines crystal clear and wine-dark turns transparent. The irony tastes almost sweet. Mundus inversus indeed.
Crowley grasps the neck and offers it up. His smile does not falter; his hair shines red and his face is honest. Aziraphale exhales, shaking, and takes the bottle. He washes his mouth out, spits, drinks some more, tries not to wretch again.
“Thank you.”
“Let’s get you home.”
Odysseus was melting into tears;
his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman
weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around
her husband, fallen fighting for his home
and children. She is watching as he gasps
and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing
upon his corpse. The men are right behind.
He thinks of Oscar and he thinks of gilded lips and thick fingers and he thinks of how he’d said I’m sorry but I can’t and Oscar had smiled and said Your friend? and Aziraphale had nodded, tight-lipped but relieved.
“I was thinking of you,” Aziraphale says, once he has shut the bookshop’s door behind them and Crowley is reaching to help him out of his coat.
His hands still in the air for a mere moment, before he catches Aziraphale’s lapels and gently eases the coat off his shoulders. “What d’you mean?”
“Gross indecency,” Aziraphale says, “I was thinking of you.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” Crowley bites but there is no malice in his tone.
Crowley hangs up the angel’s outerwear, and then his own, before steering them into the back room. Aziraphale gathers his wits and his words, Crowley’s hand snug against the small of his back.
“I was thinking of us, I mean. And I was thinking about how it’s been nearly 6,000 years, since you kissed me in the Garden, right under God’s nose.”
“Oh.”
“Gross indecency,” Aziraphale echoes and the room feels oddly cold. “He was supposed to be the prosecutor, but they cut him to shreds, tore him open like it was nothing. Like it was justice.”
They settle onto the sofa; the book shelves form walls around them. Walls like in a Garden that was secretly a prison. It took a meeting with a demon for Aziraphale to figure that out.
When the rain had stopped, Crawly had smirked and tempted him with fruit and made him laugh. They had sat on a rock as the humans ambled away into the desert. They were alone except for the buzz of bees and the honeyed birdsong. They did not know the ways of their corporeal bodies yet, the ups and downs and lefts and rights; what was okay, what was not. They held hands and Aziraphale felt divine.
“Can I try something?” Crawly was nervous and Aziraphale decided then that he did not like seeing Crawly nervous.
“Of course, dear.”
Crawly had touched Aziraphale’s face like Eve had taken the apple. The consequences may be dire but one cannot resist. The kiss was sweet and crisp like the apple too. Aziraphale had gasped, let his lips part and open for a demon. He had closed his eyes.
For a moment, he did not feel the stifling stare of a thousand angels, willing him into submission. He was not blinded by the Light of God. The men are right behind.
No, they’re not, he thought, felt a heat run through his body as his arms wrapped firm around Crawly’s neck. They’re Upstairs, far far away, and Crawly is here now, in front of me.
Crawly had pulled away, taken Aziraphale’s hands and held them over his heart.
“Let’s leave this blasted Garden. Go see the sights, check up on the humans. There’s gotta be more to Earth than this.”
Aziraphale hesitated; Crawly kissed his knuckles.
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
He’d never been asked that before.
“To be terribly honest, I… don’t know.”
Crawly seemed to consider this for a moment. The Garden hummed around them and he didn’t let go of Aziraphale’s hands.
“Why don’t we go and find out?”
Now, they sit on a sofa and Crowley takes Aziraphale’s hands in his own.
“I love you, you know.” He lifts one hand and kisses the pulse point, feather-light against a paper-white wrist. Always hands, never just about the touching but about the holding. Aziraphale clasps Crowley’s fingers and imagines their veins and arteries joining, imagines the tangle of their selves like each winter night and spring morning and autumn evening over the endless years. Hands and mouths and legs and eyes. The blending and sharing of bodies.
“I love you too.” Aziraphale swallows. Gross indecency. “I don’t really know what to do with myself. We were supposed to summer in France.”
Crowley is kind and lovely. He has missed him so much, almost too much to bear.
“He is not dead, Aziraphale. He can survive two years.”
“Two years of hard labour is practically a death sentence. His reputation is ruined; Constance will soon change her name and what will happen to the children? They shall probably never see their father again.”
He thinks of Oscar, reading aloud from a book of fairy stories, tales of his own devising. He thinks of Oscar and his two young boys, hoisted over their father’s shoulders, kicking their legs in the air with delighted screams.
Be strong, my heart. You were
hounded by worse the day the Cyclops ate
your strong companions. But you kept your nerve,
till cunning saved you from the cave; you thought
that you would die there.
Five years later, in a hotel in Paris, Oscar Wilde receives some visitors.
The first an old friend, a comforting presence though a dull pain seems to have settled into the lines of his face. He somehow looks both much older and far younger than he probably is. Oscar holds his hand as tight as he can, which at this point is not very tight at all. They talk of the past, of the things they have done, people they have met, places they have been.
The second is a friend of his friend, a man all in black with sleek spectacles that hide his eyes. He has a hand on his friend’s shoulder and Oscar understands. He asks how Oscar feels in this moment, lying in this hotel room: is there anything the man can get him? Water or a pillow? He is fidgety and somewhat on edge but Oscar forgives him.
The final visitor stays perfectly in his periphery, not yet offering himself up. Oscar has been expecting him. He does not speak or drift any closer, but soon, Oscar knows. The future could not come any faster.
When his first two visitors leave, he pens a message to Robbie. The final guest gets comfortable.
[...] This is the rule
for mortals when we die. Our muscles cease
to hold the flesh and skeleton together;
as soon as life departs from our white bones,
the force of blazing fire destroys the corpse.
The spirit flies away and soon is gone,
just like a dream.
When all is said and done, Aziraphale and Crowley return to the room where Oscar died.
They move in silence, stripping the walls with hands and tools the human way. Not every prison has bars; some have thick duvets and some have apple trees. All hide the promise of freedom, hide one away from the light.
Aziraphale takes ruffled petals, dyed a silken green, and glues them neatly to the naked walls. They set to work on healing, bury the flowers under new wallpaper, blue as a summer sky. Blue like the sea. Blue like fine china.
They finish and admire their handiwork. Aziraphale cries but he is smiling.
They journey back to London, stand on the ferry and watch the ragged edges of their country grow nearer. Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land. Once in Soho, they retire to bed. They hold each other in the darkness, soft kisses say I’m here and I’m not leaving.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, right now. Just stay with me, my love, for a bit.” There is comfort in knowing someone will take care of you, when all you can do is try not to cry. “Tell me a story. You always make it better.”
Crowley helps him heal, like he always does, and tells Aziraphale the story of a man lost to the sea. A man of many turns, who lost everything, his reputation cracked and ground to fine dust, tossed into the wind. A man who was too smart for his own good, who loved and hated with reckless abandon and was loved and hated with equal ardour. A man who lost himself, but was found again and again and again, in hundreds of languages and millions of mouths.
All things lost to the sea are reborn. History rears its head from the waves and starts anew.
“...it is pleasant to think that, even should the classics be entirely excluded from our educational systems, the English boy will still be able to know something of Homer’s delightful tales, to catch an echo of his grand music and to wander with the wise Odysseus round ‘the shores of old romance.’” - Oscar Wilde