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Crowley strides across the lawn through the park, workshopping various casual, cool looks to prepare for Aziraphale’s no-doubt joyful reaction when he sees the caramel apple Crowley bears. His ideas of appearing uncaring as opposed to lovesick take a firm seat on the back burner when he comes out along the path near their usual bench.
Crowley cackles. Aziraphale gives him a mulish look.
“Really, as if there’s any cause for that,” he huffs with as much dignity as he can with an infant’s hand slapping at his chin.
“If you’d been here on time this wouldn’t have happened,” Aziraphale tells Crowley when he doesn’t stop grinning. The baby on the angel’s lap happily burbles up a bottle’s worth of milk, and Aziraphale goes faintly green even as he waves a hand over the mess and flicks his fingers up, great bubbles floating off to the child’s delight.
Crowley narrows his eyes at the milkiest bubble, and it blows east on a sudden gust of wind. He cocks a finger at it and pop!
“What is that?” a woman asks loudly. “Ew, did you just get shit on?”
“By what?” a man snaps. “It’s not shit, anyway, it smells like—”
The revelation is buried under the uncomfortable sound of spontaneous regurgitation and Crowley tunes back into Aziraphale, who is looking relieved as the baby has fallen asleep.
“What was it this time, angel?”
“What was what?” Aziraphale asks with a frown.
Crowley gestures. “A human asking you for a favour. Was it looking like a kindly grandpop? Or were you watching the ducks and oozing love that ensnares any mortal?” Or immortal.
Aziraphale flushes and looks down at the child, a small smile tugging at his mouth. “It wasn’t the ducks,” he says.
“The sweater vest, then,” Crowley nods.
Aziraphale sighs and rearranges the baby so it rests against his chest. “It wasn’t anything at all. I was merely sitting here, awaiting your arrival, when the young man approached and asked if I could help by looking after his child for a time.”
“And how long will that be, then?”
“I’m not sure. I hope not much longer. I do hate to ask though, and make it seem as if I don’t want to help.”
“But you don’t want to help,” Crowley points out. “All of your body language is just shrieking how much you don’t want to hold this kid.”
Aziraphale glares down at himself and then at Crowley. “It is not.”
“In several languages, actually. Even Latin. Pig Latin.”
Aziraphale is fighting back a grin and he turns so Crowley can’t see him lose the fight.
“I suppose I wouldn’t have got a straight answer from that young man had I asked,” Aziraphale says after a moment.
Crowley has just miracled a pair of warmer booties on the baby’s feet, fluffy black things with tiny, exact replicas of the Centurion system, and absently asks “why d’you assume that?”
“Well, I doubt he would have been very likely to say ‘I’m on my way to prison and the police car doesn’t have a car seat’,” Aziraphale replies, and Crowley looks up, following the angel’s line of sight to the park exit, where a young man is being led away in handcuffs.
“That’s him?”
The baby burps itself awake, and Aziraphale pats its back and cleans its face.
“My sentiments exactly.”
After a quick stop at the local police station, and forty-seven minutes of waiting around for the baby’s mother to arrive (forty-seven minutes! Crowley had groused, but Aziraphale had sounded scandalized at the mere suggestion of leaving the child in the lobby so wait they did), Crowley holds the door for Aziraphale into Benny’s, and ignores the flutter-kick his dumb drippy heart executes when the angel beams and thanks him.
The hostess leads them to their usual booth in the back, between the kitchen and a window, and sets a bottle of wine on the table she’s surprised to find herself suddenly holding.
“Enjoy your meal,” she tells the wine bottle, frowning at it. It was uncorked and everything.
Crowley fills two wineglasses and passes one to Aziraphale, sipping from his own. He makes a show of scanning the restaurant.
“No babes-in-arms here who may need a bit of angelic soothing, at least,” he says, and grins at the look Aziraphale gives him.
“I was happy to help,” Aziraphale says, and love him but he manages to keep a straight face as he speaks. “Though I do wish it wasn’t such a common occurrence. It makes me wonder who these people would ask for help if I weren’t there. Resort to…unsavoury individuals.” Aziraphale shudders.
Crowley barks out a laugh. “They wouldn’t ask just anyone. They ask you because you’re you.”
“How do you mean?”
A waiter sidles up at that moment, and jots down their order, and with the same frown as the hostess regards his notepad as he walks away, thinking that half the food isn’t on the menu, but the thought slips from his head as he hands the order over to the kitchen.
“I mean—” Crowley says and waves at Aziraphale’s self. “You radiate peace and love and bloody harmony, don’t you? They see you as a comfort.”
Aziraphale scoffs. “More like any port in a storm, I should say.”
“It’s not just parents needing two minutes of sanity, either,” Crowley goes on. “You can’t sit anywhere on your own without someone coming up to you to pour their heart out or bawl on your shoulder. You walk through a riot and suddenly everyone is finding something less bloody to do. You’re a beacon of-of-of—”
“Tranquility?” Aziraphale suggests.
“Stuffiness,” Crowley declares, lest the angel get a big head, but oh, yes; tranquility, stability, all the other lovely -itys not to mention the warmest hands Crowley has ever felt in his existence, just a few times, on a bony shoulder or hauling him to his feet.
Aziraphale rolls his eyes. “Well, apparently that’s what the humans crave, then.” He says it sarcastically.
“I’ll prove it, since you can’t be arsed to remember the hundreds of instances over the millennia that have already proved it,” Crowley says. He stands and points at a bewildered angel. “Stay put.”
“What are you—” but Crowley rounds the corner and can perfectly imagine Aziraphale’s huff when he’s ignored.
He strides along the bar and pushes his way into the kitchen. “Health inspector,” he tells the few curious heads that pop up at his entrance, flashing a cocktail napkin at them. He grins as hairnets are quietly straightened and the meat and vegetable knives quickly separated.
Crowley positions himself near the doors that lead to the dining room, and has a perfect view of Aziraphale at their table. He allows himself a guilty minute of admiring the angel’s side profile, his fingers laced together in his lap except for when he takes a drink, the white linen napkin pressed to his lips after every sip.
Crowley’s soppy, soft heart melts and makes a general dripping mess of his insides as he watches, actions as familiar to him as the back of his hand, played out before his eyes over thousands of years, countless instances in innumerable taverns and clubs and tents and castles, muddy fields and carved stone houses, his entire existence laid out behind him like an elaborate quilt, Aziraphale woven into every square.
“Mr. Health Inspector, sir?”
Crowley yelps and jumps, turning a furious glare on the woman cowering behind him.
“S-sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Crowley straightens out his dark glasses. “You didn’t. But it’s all right.”
“Um, do you want to check the temps in our walk-ins? Or did you want to see the sterilization first—”
“Actually, this is more of a health structural visit,” Crowley smoothly interrupts. “Here to evaluate the grout—” he presses one long finger round the edges of the window in the door. “So far, so good,” he tells her.
She blinks at his outheld finger. “So…do you not want to see the meat storage?”
Aziraphale has half a mind to go after Crowley, mostly but not entirely certain the demon hasn’t left the restaurant, but the appetizers will be out soon and really, arancini balls are best enjoyed piping hot—
His internal debate is waylaid by the appearance of a man, suddenly standing slightly stooped at the side of the table. Aziraphale offers him a polite smile.
To his horror, the man drops into the seat next to him, and turns a miserable expression on Aziraphale.
“Casey can’t get pregnant,” he tells Aziraphale in a wobbly voice.
“Oh, that’s awful,” Aziraphale says, genuinely moved by the ache in the man’s voice. “Is Casey your wife? Girlfriend?”
The man’s lip trembles. “She’s my ferret,” he gasps, then bursts into tears, and buries his face in Aziraphale’s shoulder.
Crowley’s been snickering to himself for the better part of Aziraphale’s interaction with the sobbing man, but takes pity on the angel when their waiter swoops past with a plate of appetizers. Crowley follows on his heels, and claps the desolate man on the back.
“Do me a favour,” Crowley says, “try one more time.” He's ignorant of exactly what it is that has the man weeping like a willow in public, but he inlays his words with suggestion and want all the same, and the man sits up and blinks at Crowley.
“I will,” he says, and stumbles to his feet. “What’s your name? I wanna name one after you, if it works.”
“Oh,” Aziraphale says, looking pleased, “it’s—”
“Not yours, his,” the man jerks his chin at Crowley, who grins at Aziraphale as he drops back into his seat.
“It’s Angel,” he tells the man, watching Aziraphale puzzle out how to react. He settles for tugging the plate of arancini balls pointedly to his side of the table.
“So,” Crowley says as Aziraphale sets to the task, “what did I miss?”
“The copulation tactics best known for successful reproduction in small mammals,” Aziraphale says after he swallows.
Crowley pauses with his glass before his mouth. “That’s…not what I would have guessed.”
Aziraphale waits until Crowley has taken a drink to add, “it’s sixty-nine, if you were wondering.”
He goes back to eating, ignoring the choking demon across from him.
Crowley parks across the road from the bookshop, and the engine shuts off. Aziraphale turns expectantly to him.
“Coming in? I have a bottle of very fine scotch that just demands company.”
Its moments like this that make Crowley doubly grateful for the fizzling out of the apocalypse. Aziraphale brims with newfound confidence, more sure in his actions and words than before, a spring in his step that had been coiled tightly under the watchful eye and heavy thumb of Heaven.
“Don’t feel obligated, of course,” Aziraphale is quick to add.
Crowley rolls his eyes and throws open his door. “Don’t be daft, what else would I do?”
It’s not what he wants to say, not by far; when he wants to take Aziraphale’s hands, warm and giving under his own, and promise to be by his side for eternity and more, to spend every evening seated around a cozy room together, time stretched out before and after them, a space in every atom for each of them.
Crowley gags on a bit of acidic heartsick and tugs open Aziraphale’s door. He gets out and smiles at Crowley. “You’re being awfully chivalrous this evening.”
“Tell the whole bloody world,” Crowley grumbles. He follows Aziraphale into the bookshop and they get settled, a bottle of very old scotch sitting proud on the low table in front of the couch.
Aziraphale pours them each a measure then holds his tumbler out. “I had a lovely evening,” he says as Crowley lifts his glass.
“To lovely evenings, then,” Crowley says, and they bump glasses. Crowley sips his scotch and smacks his lips appreciatively. “And to getting shitfaced, angel, this is potent.”
Aziraphale drains half his in one go. “Oh,” he says, resting his hand against his forehead. “That is quite rich, isn’t it?”
Crowley tosses the rest of his back and burps against the back of his hand. “Let’s make this interesting,” he says, leaning forward to refill his glass. He tops up Aziraphale’s as well, and the angel eyes him over the rim.
“What did you have in mind?”
Crowley grins.
“Go fish,” Aziraphale slurs. Crowley frowns at him, because that makes no sense, and because Aziraphale is doubling, twin figures of him blurring on the couch beside Crowley.
“The card game?” Crowley asks. He casts about for a deck of cards, then snaps his fingers. The empty space on the couch is suddenly filled with playing cards, all of them jokers, with an apple tree adorning the back.
“Jonah,” Aziraphale shakes his head. “I found him when he left Nineveh. Heatstroke, y’know. Told him to go fishing to get his head back on straight.” Aziraphale turns a bleary look on Crowley. “I didn’t know about the whole deba—debuta—bit with the whale.”
Crowley is trying to figure out how to deal the jokers but looks up with a wobbly grin. “You told Mr ‘Help I Was Eaten By A Whale’ to go fishing to calm down?”
Aziraphale shrugs, and empties his glass for the nth time. “I’d been in Heaven, no one told me what was going on between the Almighty and Jonah.”
He takes the handful of cards from Crowley and fans them out in front of him, peering down. “All I’ve got are apple trees,” he says loudly.
“You’ve got them backwards,” Crowley tells him, and shuffles through his own handful of jokers.
Aziraphale turns the cards over and frowns. “These are all the same.”
“Pretend they’re different,” Crowley says. “Use your imagination.”
“All right,” Aziraphale nods, and he closes his eyes. “I’m using my imagination. I’m imaginating I’ve already won the game. Awards and acclamations to me.”
Aziraphale opens his eyes and beams at Crowley. “Well played, dear. I enjoyed myself immensely.”
Crowley gathers all of the cards and presses them between his hands. They disappear and he’s left to ponder his scotch.
“How did we end up here?” he asks, wracking his brain in an attempt to remember how they’d gotten to a half-arsed card game on the couch, together, on the couch together! Crowley is simultaneously mad and relieved that its taken him this long to realize Aziraphale is sat beside him, rather than across from him. He’d’ve been a babbling idiot before Aziraphale was too drunk to notice.
“I’ve often asked myself that,” Aziraphale says heavily. He shifts closer to Crowley. “It’s all rather complicated, isn’t it? In a beautiful sort of way.” He looks at Crowley, expression serious. “All the twists and turns.”
“Mmm, I think it was the third refill,” Crowley says, tapping the scotch bottle with his boot.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, and something in his voice pierces the scotch-drunk fog in Crowley’s brain.
“I am very glad you didn’t go to Alpha Centauri.”
“You wouldn’t go,” Crowley says before he’s finished deciding if he needs to sober up. Aziraphale’s mouth twitches down and he looks away. When he next speaks, it’s after a shudder and his words are clearly enunciated.
“No,” he says quietly. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“No no no,” Crowley says quickly, suppressing a groan as he follows suit and expels the alcohol from his system in a painful instant, leaning in to grasp Aziraphale’s elbow. “Angel, I didn’t mean that to criticise, I meant…you know.”
“Meant what?” Aziraphale asks, glancing at him.
“Just—” Crowley hates the way he trips over his words, hates more when he knows what he wants to say but can’t decide if he’s allowed, if he should. “You wouldn’t go, so why would I?”
Aziraphale swallows audibly. “And now?”
“And now?” Crowley repeats dumbly. Aziraphale studiously avoids his gaze, instead looking at the sunglasses abandoned next to the scotch.
“I mean, does that only apply in apocalyptic scenarios?”
Crowley is confused. Crowley does not like being confused.
“Aziraphale, just ask me what you want to ask—”
Crowley does not like being interrupted, but that is exactly what he is when there comes a loud crashing bang from out front. A car horn blares and drones on.
Crowley blinks and Aziraphale is hurrying out the front door, and Crowley follows after a moment, still turning over the odd conversation in his mind as he surveys the carnage out front.
Two cars, one nose-first in the driver’s side door of the other, block the road in front of the shop. Crowley spares a quick glance to the Bentley, sitting without a scratch, and looks for the angel in the crowd.
He finds Aziraphale in the passenger seat of the car that had been struck, and waves a hand to stop the blaring horn. The woman in the driver’s seat is pale, blood stickily coating her head and face, her right arm pinned between her body and the caved-in door.
“Help,” she rasps, a bubble of blood between her lips.
Aziraphale rests a hand against her abdomen, and Crowley can hear the wet squish of bones being set to rights. She gasps deeply and chokes, coughing harshly, but soon settles, breathing easier than before.
“You’ll be all right, my dear,” Aziraphale tells her, voice warm and lovely, like a bathtub of honey, thick and cloying and sweet and wonderful to sink into. “Just a bit of an accident, nothing to worry about.”
Sirens herald the arrival of emergency crews, and Aziraphale sits unnoticed next to the woman as her door is pried off in record time, and her lack of gruesome injuries documented by an astounded paramedic.
“Think the worst of it is her arm,” Crowley hears one of them say to another. “Shit lucky, that.”
Aziraphale and Crowley stand back as the woman is loaded into an ambulance, then Aziraphale abruptly turns back to the bookshop, pausing to look over his shoulder at Crowley, who hurries after him after one more look at the Bentley.
Aziraphale locks the door behind them, and gives Crowley a bright smile. “That was a bit of excitement, wasn’t it?”
Crowley isn’t fooled for a moment. “What applies in non-apocalyptic scenarios?” he asks, though he is fairly certain he’s puzzled out what Aziraphale had been trying to ask.
“A whole host of things, I’m sure,” Aziraphale deflects badly, and he moves to step past Crowley. The demon mirrors his movement, plants his hands on his hips for added effectiveness.
Aziraphale frowns at him. Crowley frowns back, confident enough in his petulant sulk fits to know he can outlast the angel.
He’s right.
“It was an offhand comment,” Aziraphale says, “made when I was drunk. Even I don’t know what I meant. Silly, isn’t it? Oh well, best to move on.”
He takes a step and Crowley lets him, before reaching out and taking Aziraphale by a shoulder, turning him gently so they face each other.
Crowley digs deep into the well of courage that is usually uncapped when he’s drunk and secure when he’s sober, and douses himself with it.
“I’m not leaving you, angel. Not for anything.”
Aziraphale looks away, lower lip trembling. He nods tightly.
“I just—” he tries but his voice cracks. Aziraphale clears his throat and tries again. “I worry,” he manages after a moment.
“About what?” Crowley asks.
Aziraphale looks down at where he’s got his hands tangled in front of his waistcoat. He watches his fingers fidget as he says, “I worry that you’ll want to move on.”
Crowley frowns and Aziraphale pulls away, but he doesn’t go far, sitting on the edge of his armchair.
“Move on?” Crowley repeats. “From—to— what?”
“You've been restless,” Aziraphale says. He’s keeping his back ramrod straight, his voice perfectly level, but he fiddles endlessly with the gold ring on his last finger. “It’s something I’ve noticed over the centuries, right before a big move from you, and I thought, what if he wants to go farther than he has before? What if he asks me to go with him?”
Aziraphale’s eyes drop to his lap and he adds, “What if he doesn’t ask me to go with him?”
Crowley stares at him. It’s the most open and vulnerable he’s seen Aziraphale, who will bite his lip and pick his nails and worry but never come out with straight talk. At least, not until the failed End Times, when Aziraphale seemed to stand straighter, the yoke of Heaven cast off, and take control of his fate.
Which, from what Crowley can tell, he expects to be devoid of Crowley.
There’s a saying from the cinemas Crowley frequents, when the previews are done and the feature is about to start, and the theatre shakes with blaring music as a voice proclaims Go big or go home!
The advertisers would be happy to know that at least one theatregoer will take their advice to heart.
Crowley stands, looking down at Aziraphale in his chair, trying desperately to pretend he isn’t on the verge of tears. The well overflows.
“I love you, Aziraphale.”
The angel looks up, startled. Crowley drops to his knees in front of him and takes two clammy hands in his own.
“I have been in love with you for as long as I know. There is no moving on from you, because there is no me without you. Nothing I’ve seen or done would mean a lick if you hadn’t been there for all of it.” He squeezes Aziraphale’s hands. “I’m not leaving you. I love you.”
For all the times Crowley has imagined this, all the different reactions Aziraphale might have, he’d never expected the angel to ask wretchedly, “Why?”
Aziraphale looks at him, mouth twisted in an unhappy moue. Crowley is momentarily speechless, and Aziraphale goes on.
“Why would you love me? I have done nothing to deserve that.”
“Angel,” Crowley says, because he has a list of all the reasons he loves Aziraphale, a list he’s been working on for at least three thousand years, since he first learned to read and write. Its been carved on stone tablets, etched on tree bark, painted on walls, scribbled in notebooks, and, most recently, saved as a Google doc.
It's quite the extensive list.
Before he can expound on any of that, Aziraphale presses on.
“I have denied you, and-and turned you away, over and over.” Aziraphale speaks in a rush. “Anytime you’ve asked me for something, I told you no. Every time,” he says with a watery laugh, and looks at Crowley.
“Do you know, I can count on one hand the times you’ve actually asked me for something? And then I think of all the times you’ve been there for me, helped me, or saved me from my own ridiculous notions, and I feel so ashamed.” He whispers the last word and tugs his hands from Crowley’s to wipe at his eyes.
“I don’t deserve your love. You need someone who will treat you as you deserve, and I’ve failed at that countless times.”
“You know,” Crowley begins casually, “I have this friend. Fabulous guy, nicest you’d ever meet, actually. But he had this overbearing family that just wouldn’t let him alone, y’know? Breathed down his neck, dogged every step, wouldn’t give him a moment alone.
“And the problem,” Crowley says, “or one of several, really, is that they had enough power over him to make sure he didn’t snap back, to make sure he toed the family line.”
He takes Aziraphale’s hands back, uncaring of the damp fingers.
“They taught him that love is something to be earned, to fight for. They made him struggle for every scrap of affection they felt like giving, and they were a tight-fisted lot.”
Crowley presses a kiss to Aziraphale’s knuckles, watching the angel steadily, for all that his heart gasped and shrieked as he spoke.
“I’ve sort of taken it upon myself to show him that he’s good enough, just as he is. That he’s worthy, of everything he’s done. That he’s loved, for exactly who he is.”
Tears stream down Aziraphale’s face, and he’s holding tightly to Crowley’s hands, his own trembling even as they squeeze.
“I don’t—” he begins.
“I love you, Aziraphale. With everything I am. And you deserve it. You always have.”
“I told you no,” Aziraphale cries, and he tries to pull away but instead Crowley leans in, wraps his arms around Aziraphale and holds him close. Aziraphale grabs back, hands fisting in the back of Crowley’s jacket.
“If you mean when I asked you to re-enact King Kong with me when we were in New York in 1947, I do agree with you now,” Crowley promises him. Aziraphale chokes out a laugh and Crowley adds, “I still stand by what I said, you’d make a stunning Fay Wray—”
“How can you be so perfect for me?” Aziraphale asks. He leans back and Crowley lets him, sitting back on his heels.
“I’m not perfect,” Crowley tells him. Aziraphale smiles and reaches to lay a hand tentatively on Crowley’s cheek.
“For me, you are.” He looks down, hand dropping to his lap. “I can’t ever be that good for you.”
“I don’t want you to be good,” Crowley says simply. He holds Aziraphale’s gaze the next time the angel looks up. “Or perfect, or hilarious, or charming or anything but Aziraphale. My angel.”
“But,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley is ready to smash down any further doubts when— “but I am hilarious. And charming.”
He gives Crowley a tremulous smile, and the demon laughs out loud.
“Oh, no, angel, I’ve got all the personality in this relationship. You’re the beauty.”
Aziraphale flushes, and Crowley gets to his feet, pulling Aziraphale with him to sit on the couch.
“Your whole existence, you’ve been there for everyone who needs you,” Crowley says. “Let me be the one there for you.”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale sighs, “you’ve always been the one for me. I am sorry its taken me so long to—”
Crowley shushes him with a finger to his mouth. “Never been a time limit,” he tells Aziraphale. “We’re here now.”
“I do love you,” Aziraphale says. “Desperately. And I think I shall enjoy spending the rest of my existence proving that to you.”
Crowley pulls Aziraphale against his side, relishing in the warmth radiating from the angel.
“If that’s what eternity has in store for us, angel, sign me up.”
"One bloody second," Crowley says eight months later. He glares up from where his head is pillowed on Aziraphale’s lap.
"You can't get pregnant from 69-ing!"