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1968. London.
Brrring. Brrring.
Crowley groaned.
Brrring. Brrring.
“Shitting hell.”
The demon uncurled himself from the foetal position, flopping onto his back and giving his brain a moment to catch up with the motion. He’d been eight weeks into what he’d hoped would be at least a four month nap, until that bloody phone had started ringing off of the hook. He tentatively opened one eye, then the other, caught sight of the moon hanging like a yellow orb in the sky.
Brrring. Brrring.
Who the bloody hell rings in the middle of the night anyway? The demon’s mind crackled to life as realisation set in. He’d only bought the phone for one reason. And that one reason was the only being who had his phone number.
Brrring. Brrring.
“Shit. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” Crowley kicked the duvet clean from the bed with all the vigour of a demon who knew he only had four rings left before the call disconnected. There wouldn’t be a second call, Crowley knew that, knew that this call would have taken every inch of courage the angel could drum up. It had been so long, too long, since he had heard Aziraphale’s voice anywhere other than in his dreams. “Don’t hang up, don’t hang up, don’t hang up.”
***
Brrring. Brrring.
Aziraphale sighed.
He held the phone close to his ear, pressed tightly against his skin as if it might help him make contact. It didn’t help. Didn’t summon Crowley to the phone, didn’t convey everything that had led Aziraphale to punch the demon’s number into a startlingly complicated device to break their year-long sabbatical from each other’s company.
They hadn’t planned it, not that the two of them had ever planned any of the situations they’d found themselves in, but Aziraphale had felt every one of the days that he had been apart from Crowley. As if he would ever forget the last time they had seen each other.
The half-second of devastation on the demon’s face.
The cool glow of neon lights against the wet pavement.
The Bentley rounding the corner, stealing Crowley away from him.
He had stood there, and watched, and waited to feel as though he had done the right thing. Always the right thing. But there had only been regret, hadn’t there? A year of it. One year to add onto the thousands that had come before it.
Brrring. Brrring.
Give up, you fool. It’s too late. You pushed him away one too many times.
Aziraphale closed his eyes, chastising himself for the naive belief that Crowley might answer, that the demon might, again, forgive him for needing time. More time. Always needing more time. Isn’t it lucky we have so much of it? Aziraphale thought bitterly, as he lowered the phone back towards its cradle.
And then, as quiet as a dream, he heard a voice.
“Angel, is that you? Aziraphale?”
***
For a moment, Aziraphale could do nothing but smile in the empty room he stood in. The sound of Crowley’s voice, sleepy and curious, was nothing short of miraculous. Oh, it had been too long, far too long, since his name had sounded so sweet in another’s mouth.
Thank you, he wanted to say, if only he could have been brave, thank you for forgiving me. God, I’ve missed you, my love.
Instead, the first words he had said to the demon in a year posed a rather open-ended question.
“Did you hear?”
“Hear what? I haven’t heard anything for two months, angel,” came Crowley’s reply, the low growl of a voice that hadn’t been used for some weeks.
Aziraphale grinned as he cradled the phone in both hands, holding it as tight as a precious jewel. Despite everything, despite the news he was about to break, everything was easier now. It always was when it was the two of them quietly working against everything else.
Crowley cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was tinged with its usual sardonic drawl. “That’s sort of the point of napping, not to hear anything.”
So he hadn’t been involved. Relief pooled in the angel’s heart. He knew what it entailed, Crowley’s…employment contract, as it were. Another of hell’s emissaries must have been sent in his place, sparing Crowley of the guilt Aziraphale knew he would have carried for the rest of his lifetime. That was something, at least.
“There’s, um, there’s been an…incident. All over the news. A big one. One of yours, I believe.”
In the pokey living room of the flat Crowley had never once referred to as home, the demon stood up and peered out of the window, as if he might find an answer looking back at him from the busy streets below. Even at midnight, the city was alive with colour and sound and life. And I was sleeping right through all of it.
It had always been one of Aziraphale’s more infuriating qualities, the fact he could never deliver bad news in a single sentence. Even good news sometimes took a few attempts but bad news? Well, bad news had to be eked out of him slowly, coaxed out with gentle words and…
“I’ve been asleep, Aziraphale! What bloody incident? What have they done now?”
While Aziraphale hmm-d and well-d and there’s-no-need-to-get-angry-Crowley-d in the background, the demon clambered over the coffee table to jab the power button on his television. He jabbed it again. And again. And again. Then he realised it would be an entirely fruitless endeavour trying to get any answers out of the television until morning, given that programming had ended for the day. Still, perhaps the morning news would be broadcast before Aziraphale got to the point of his phone call.
Maybe there isn’t a point, a small, hopeful voice in his chest whispered, maybe he just missed you.
Stop. Crowley shook his head, bringing the phone back to his ear as he leaned against the wall. It’s just a phone call. Don’t do that to yourself, not again.
Not again. Those two words had become something of a recurring phrase over the past six thousand years. Every time he would tell himself not again and every time, without fail, without question, he would fall all over again, the second he laid eyes on Aziraphale. Hadn’t that always been the way, since the very first day of all? Well, Crowley thought, why change the habit of a lifetime?
“What is it, angel?” he asked, closing his eyes and letting the pleading ache of please never leave me for this long againfill his chest.
“An earthquake,” Aziraphale said finally. “There’s been an earthquake.”
“On the scale of tenuous excuses you’ve had to speak to me, this ranks just below I’ve got an extra bottle of champagne and I just don’t feel up to drinking two.”
“Oh, that was a great day though, wasn’t it?” Aziraphale trilled, leaning into the conversation, all talk of earthquakes and disaster on pause as they tumbled into the ocean of their shared history. “Do you remember the food? Heavens, it was sublime. Those oysters, that pistou soup…I still dream of it sometimes, Crowley.”
As Aziraphale waxed lyrical about the food they had eaten that day a decade previously in St Tropez, Crowley leaned back against the wall and stared up at the ceiling, fighting back a smile. I’ve missed you, angel, I’ve missed this. I was so scared it might be the end of it all when I drove away from you. I waited, you know, for the phone to ring. When a call never came I thought, well, I thought that was it.
“Do you ever wonder if Gabriel watched us that day? Sometimes I think about it, think about how furious he would be if…”
Crowley continued on in his audible daydream about the satisfaction he would find in discovering Gabriel had been forced to watch their private rebellion from a distance, unable to step in, unable to judge them. While he listened to him speak, Aziraphale curled up on the sofa and closed his eyes, pretended that Crowley was right there with him, that they were snuggled up under their respective blankets in the back room of the shop. Perhaps they’d pass a bottle of wine back and forth, laugh until their cheeks hurt, maybe he would feel the weight of Crowley’s thigh pressed against his knee. Maybe, just maybe, he would gather together all the bravery that was left in him and lean into the demon, marvel at the way it felt to kiss him.
Aziraphale shook his head. Stop it. That’s not why you called. “Sorry, where were we? Yes. The earthquake. They’re saying it’s a sign. Doomsday. The end of the world.”
“You think we’d be first in line for a briefing if it was. Why aren’t you there helping to clean up, anyway? Good deeds and all that.”
There was a pause, a little sniff before Aziraphale spoke again, his voice quiet and serious. “My presence was not required.”
“But…” Crowley trailed off, furrowing his brow as he felt darkness dawn on him. They didn’t want him there. A healer. Maybe the best one they have. They didn’t want anybody to be healed. Of course. It was a lesson. One of heaven’s necessary evils. Aziraphale didn’t need him to speak the reason aloud, it must have been eating him alive, knowing heaven would leave humans to suffer for…what? A learning opportunity? It was evil, nothing less, something heaven should never have had the capacity to imagine. But Crowley knew better than most what heaven was truly capable of. The demon sighed, ran a hand through his hair and forced lightness into his voice. “Bit weird, isn’t it, my lot working with your lot? Teamwork, that’s our thing.”
“Mmm. That’s what got me thinking. What if the humans are onto something. What if it is a sign heaven and hell are cooking something up? Together. We know it’s coming sooner or later.”
“Later. It’s always later, angel. It’s not going to be now, is it? Not when humans have just, I don’t know, what have they done lately…invented heart transplants? That would be cruel, cutting them off in their prime.”
Aziraphale pursed his lips. Left his thoughts on heaven’s cruelty unspoken, out of habit rather than loyalty. He wasn’t brave enough to speak his disdain of heaven aloud but that didn’t mean the angel couldn’t be brave in other, smaller ways. He squeezed his eyes closed, as if limiting his vision might also limit his ability to hear the words he whispered through the phone. “I wanted to call you, to hear your voice. Just in case.”
“In case what, angel?”
“In case it was the end. Crowley, I could bear if it the last thing I had said to you was…”
He didn’t need to hear the words. Not again. Crowley shook his head, forced away the memory of Aziraphale’s eyes, cornered and desperate and, perhaps, longing to say yes, for once. But he hadn’t, had he?
You go too fast. You go too fast for me. You go too fast for me, Crowley.
“Don’t, Aziraphale.” And then, because he was a glutton for punishment, he spoke again. “You could come over.”
Not again. Stop. Slow down.
“And if I do, I won’t want to leave. I can’t. You know I can’t. Not yet.”
“I know. I know, angel, but if…if the humans are right, if they are onto something and there’s nothing we can do, will you come here? Whenever the time comes, will you be with me at the end?” There was a pause, the weight of everything they had to bite back hanging between them, and then Crowley forced himself to laugh, to lighten the tone with hypotheticals. “We could grab a bottle of wine, some of those overpriced little cakes you like so much, sit back and wait for the end. We were together at the beginning, it’s only fitting.”
“Sit back and let it happen?”
“What else could we do, angel, just the two of us?”
Aziraphale was silent as he gathered his breath, forever aware that every word he spoke could have the power to change everything. He liked it, to his surprise. “I think, perhaps, my love, we might be surprised at what an angel and a demon can do when they have something to fight for.”
“Us.”
“Us,” Aziraphale breathed, the word quiet but unmistakeable. “I promise, Crowley. You and I, together, at the end of the world.”