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It was a curtain-down, please-take-all-your-belongings-with-you-when-leaving-the-auditorium kind of moment, everybody milling around and saying awkward goodbyes and picking up the pieces, and all Crowley could think of was that he was in pieces, and the only belonging of his that had ever mattered was a burned-out skeleton on the road outside the airbase.
Well, except for Aziraphale. Who was standing beside him, fussing his hands against his waistcoat, smiling nervously at everybody. Not burned out. Not dead, or even discorporated now. But here, alive, ridiculous, beautiful. Not a belonging, though. Not belonging to anyone now. Whatever Crowley’s – ha! English was an absurd language! – longing for him.
The boy Adam was talking to his friends, while his father paced. Exasperation and love poured off that glorious, moustachioed figure. Crowley could not sense love like an angel, but he could recognise that combination anywhere. A perfect, imperfect human parent, grumpy and fallible and devoted, who would never know how much the entire world owed him and his – partner? spouse? wife? – for raising their little hell-son so well.
Aziraphale turned to him. “I suppose we had better head back to London,” he began.
“Um, hey,” said another voice. It was Adam. He had a small and improbably cute hellhound at his side.
“Hi,” said Crowley.
“Hello,” said Aziraphale. “Is, um. Is your father okay? Your human father, I mean?”
“Oh, he will be,” said Adam. “He’ll be very angry for a day or so and then he’ll forgive me and forget all about it.” He smiled, a little shyly. “I just wanted to thank you both, for, you know. What you said. In that place you took me. I couldn’t have made that other… I couldn’t have made him go away if you hadn’t.”
Aziraphale spluttered, “Well, I…”. He stopped for a moment, looked uncomfortably at Crowley, and then said, “My dear child, I should be apologising to you, not being thanked. If it hadn’t been for Madam Tracy, I very much fear I would have...” He broke off, his eyes drawn inexorably to Tracy, Shadwell, and his ludicrously big gun.
“I know,” said Adam. “It’s okay. I understand why you wanted to. You thought it was the only way to save the Earth.”
“Yes, but… but I should have known better.”
“I should have known better,” said Crowley. Aziraphale and Adam both turned to him. “It was my idea, remember. I should have...” He looked down at the tarmac, and felt something horribly like a sob building. “You can’t kill kids,” he muttered.
“Well,” said Adam, “I forgive you, then. Both of you.”
There was silence. Aziraphale had his hand over his mouth. Crowley felt that blessed sob struggling to break out of his flame-scorched throat and transform itself into a scream.
Adam bit his lip. “You… haven’t had much experience in being forgiven, have you? Either of you.”
“No, my dear,” said Aziraphale, softly. “I’m afraid that we have not.”
Adam gave each of them a slightly awkward pat on the arm. “Well, you’d better get used to it. Dog and I want to stay in touch with all of you who’ve helped today, don’t we, Dog?”
Dog, absurdly, barked with enthusiasm. It was clearly about as loyal a servant of Hell now as Crowley was.
“So I’ll be in touch once Mum and Dad let me on the computer again,” continued the boy. “Can I have your e-mail addresses? I mean...” He looked askance at each of them, “I take it you’re not on Insta or Twitter or Facebook or anything.”
Crowley, in a daze, conjured a piece of paper and a pen from the ether, wrote down his own e-mail, and the postal address of A.Z. Fell’s bookshop, murmuring something about ridiculous angels who hadn’t even properly come to grips with the 20th century yet, let alone the 21st.
Adam and his Dog waved a thank-you and ran off to join the sweetly blustering parent.
“My goodness,” said Aziraphale weakly. “I am rather glad that all human children are not that… uncomfortably discerning.”
* * * * *
A corner outside a block of luxury flats in Mayfair. Aziraphale cast angelic yellow eyes on a shiny black vintage car, unburned and ridiculous and beautiful. It looked very much like forgiveness.
Crowley ran soft manicured hands over a set of Richmal Crompton books in a building that in his mind still echoed to flame and fury but to his gaze was as peaceful as the drifting dust motes in the morning light.
“He wasn’t fucking kidding,” he said. “Thanks be to… someone.”
Later – much later, flame and fury and holy water later – they had lunch and then afternoon tea and then went back to Crowley’s flat to talk and drink and get late-night Chinese take-away and then drink some more and then sober up and sit, together, kissing palm to palm, and then lips to lips.
And much later still, in the pre-dawn autumn light, lying wrapped around each other in luxurious black cotton sheets, hands teasing together, as though it were natural, normal, rather than a shattering revelation, Crowley said. “You know who he reminds me of?”
Aziraphale nodded. “Napoleon,” he said.
There was a pause.
“What?”
“What?”
“Adam reminds you of… Napoleon?”
“Oh, Adam! I thought you meant… never mind. You were saying, dearest. Adam.”
“Well, it’s just… He reminds me of the other one. Yeshua bar Mariam. With the… you know. The forgiveness thing.”
“Forgive them for they know not what they do, yes?”
“Yeah. And here’s Adam, forgiving us for what we nearly did.”
“Rather more mischievous than Yeshua, I suspect, my dear.”
“You should have met that man when he was a kid,” said Crowley, grinning.
“I wish I had.”
“And now here’s the one who’s supposed to be the absolute opposite of him, and he forgives us! And Satan is just going to have to fucking live with it.” And his grin broadened into that of a demon who has just witnessed the coins-on-the-pavement trick work on the greatest Lord of Hell.
“To err is angelic. Or demonic. To forgive, humane,” mused Aziraphale. “You know, my dear, talking of forgiveness, I owe you a number of apologies. A… an almost infinite number, I think. Not least for how much I lied to you over the past few days. You… you don’t have to forgive me for any of it, but...”
“Oh come on, angel, it’s not like I don’t… ugh!” Crowley took Aziraphale’s hand in a firmer grip, and raised it to his lips. Every part of him was sweeter than wine. “It’s not like I don’t know what you went through with… with them. Especially now I’ve been upstairs with them. The Archangel Fucking Gabriel, if you please.”
“Even so, Crowley. I… I should… I am sorry.”
Crowley took a moment to frame his mouth around the words, and then to force the sounds out. How could the unforgivable forgive? It made no sense, but perhaps it did not need to with the Earth still spinning and a soft, ethereal bookseller pressed against him. Absurdity was rather lovely. “Yeah, well… I forgive you, angel.”
“Thank you, dearest.”
“I’ve… oh, Someone knows I’ve been a fucking nightmare to you over the millennia too. I’m sorry, angel.”
Aziraphale kissed Crowley’s forehead. “You really have not, my love. But for those things that there are for me to forgive you for, I absolutely do. Properly, this time. Not like… Not like I was trying and failing to do on the corner by my bookshop the day before yesterday.”
Arms tightened closer. If Crowley wept for a while into Aziraphale’s hair, that was between the two of them.
“We’re going to mess up, angel,” said Crowley. “I mean, humans do in relationships, and if we’re… If we’re together now. In… whatever we’re in. We will. And it’s going to be harder because I’m not sure I’m ever going to believe I’m forgiveable when I do.”
“Oh my love. Oh my dear, precious serpent. We will do our best to treat each other well and when we do not, we will… we will just have to say sorry, and learn. And keep showing each other that we are both forgiveable. Over, and over again.”
“Like humans do. I mean. When they love each other. And when they're... you know. Trying their best. And so on.”
“Like humans who love each other. Exactly.”
“You up for being in touch with Adam, then? If he does e-mail me, I mean?”
“I don’t see why not. Although, on the subject of human children to whom we may owe some apologies...”
“Yeeaah that’s a tricky one. But you’re right. Even if we need to be careful about what we say. I’ll call Warlock tomorrow. Be good to check he’s still alive and kicking and throwing cake at terrible stage magicians… Ow!”
An interlude occurred. It involved teeth, and giggling.
“He pissed off Hastur, you know. Warlock, I mean.”
“Really?”
“Said he smelled of poo.”
“Excellent child. My good influence, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“But yes, you’re right, we should check. And answer questions, if and when he’s ready to ask them.”
Crowley ran his fingertip over Aziraphale’s arm, absently tracing a sigil of love and protection. “You know, I’ve only just realised. You told the Antichrist two days ago that he’s human incarnate, and now we’re… I don’t know. Not human, but just automatically trying to do things like the more decent humans do. And I’m not sure right now if that’s just us, learning and trying new things and being more human, or if it’s God or Adam having a twisted sense of humour. And if it’s one of them I’m honestly not sure which idea is scarier.”
“Well,” said Aziraphale, “She is his grandmother. Sort of. Or was.”
Crowley shuddered dramatically.
“But I think it is just us, dearest. After all,” he added, with a sudden twinkle of dangerous mischief in his eyes, “the ways of humans are...”
“Don’t say it!”
“… ineffa...eek!”
And the sun rose, and, eventually, so did the curtain. And it was a new day.