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The storm had been going on for several minutes when the angel on the wall beside Crawly suddenly spoke. “You won’t… you won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Eh?” Crawly jumped, called out of thoughts that had been dancing pleasantly with the raindrops. “Won’t tell who what?”
“About the sword.” The angel — Aziraphale, that was his name — turned worried eyes on Crawly. “I’d really rather that you didn’t.”
Crawly felt his eyebrows shoot upwards. “You asking me to keep a secret for you, angel?”
“Of course not!” Aziraphale drew back, looking surprisingly upset by what was, as far as Crawly could tell, a simple restatement of what he had just been asked to do. “It isn’t a secret, of course. That would be entirely inappropriate. I am an angel.”
“Figured that out.”
“Which is why it is not a secret,” Aziraphale said primly, although Crawly didn’t completely follow that line of logic. Heaven had no problem with keeping secrets; he should know, after all, as someone who had Fallen for wanting to know secret answers. But Aziraphale was still talking, going on: “It is simply that I would prefer to, er, be able to explain things myself. To make sure I can tell it over properly.”
“Riiight,” Crawly said. “And… what happens when I tell someone else?”
“...Nothing, certainly,” the angel said quickly, but his eyes belied the words, going wide with alarm.
“If I told someone else, I mean,” Crawly corrected himself hastily. “I mean, who would I tell anyway?”
Aziraphale looked scarcely comforted by that amendment. “I’m sure I don’t know.”
Crawly didn’t like the distressed expression on the angel’s face, he found, so he had another try at getting rid of it. “Not that I’m going to tell anyone else! Was just curious. Doesn’t matter, really, because I won’t tell, obviously, you don’t want me to and there’s no reason for me to and anyway I don’t want your face to get all—”
Shut up, he advised himself, and actually managed to shut up before he babbled himself any further into trouble. “I won’t tell,” he finished.
The angel’s expression flitted through several shades of bewilderment, but settled on relief, which in turn relieved Crawly. “Well. I do, er, appreciate that. Thank you.”
Being thanked by an angel felt wrong, so Crawly made an inarticulate sound and stepped closer under the angel’s wing in lieu of having to verbally acknowledge the gratitude.
He hadn’t planned on telling anyone about the sword, anyway, even if the angel hadn’t said anything. Aziraphale hadn’t had to ask. Who would he have told, after all, and why would he have bothered?
But he had asked, and Crawly had answered. So now here he was, keeping an angel’s secret… more than that, being counted on to keep the secret, simply because he said he wouldn’t tell. Having his word taken and… trusted.
Crawly smiled to himself. It wasn’t too bad, sharing a secret with an angel. Or whatever Aziraphale wanted to call it.