Chapter Text
This is a story about multiple dimensions and time travel. You could also say it’s a story about missed connections and heartache; about all that was and all that never would be; about Time and the fleeting nature of it all. But, more importantly, this is a story about a visceral and transcendent love.
Before we begin, though, let’s talk about Time. You know, the thing that’s always chasing you to your grave? One thing we need to note about Time is that it’s non-linear. We perceive the cause and effect, the setup and the breakdown, the rise and fall as natural progressions of one another, but Time is a trickster like that. Somewhere, above the minutiae of life on this planet and in this universe, the relevance of time ceases to exist. The linearity of it becomes a facade. And somewhere, in the higher planes, time is happening everywhere at all points, across all universes and all dimensions, infinitely and all at once.
To understand the significance of Time in this moment – to truly grasp the importance of it’s endlessness – we have to start at “the beginning”. Well, what we perceive as “the beginning” since, really, a fixed beginning is just something we tell our lower-order brains because we don’t get the complexity of circular time. There are actually infinite beginnings and infinite endings. But, let’s just pick one to start.
This particular beginning began when Crowley was 18. A scrawny redhead, Crowley had stumbled frustrated and alone through most of his life so far. He had a family who didn’t care much about him, friends who you could barely call “friends”, and little to no sense of who he was or what he was supposed to be. He had never been in love and wasn’t sure that he ever wanted to be after seeing the hell his parents put each other through.
Crowley was born and raised in London, and he hated every fucking minute it. He hated the mindless noise, he hated the mindless people, and he hated the thick air that infiltrated his lungs and suffocated him. All he wanted was to see the stars and the sky, to feel unadulterated grass between his toes. But, instead he was trapped in a cement-grey nightmare.
When he was 8, before his parents’ marriage went to shit and they got too wrapped up in their own selves to pay him any mind, they took him on holiday to the shores of South Downs. He spent the days building sandcastles and hunting for crabs, and the nights gazing upward to the Milky Way through the canopies of the nearby forest. He loved feeling the trees breathe with him in time and watching the sway of the grass in the breeze, conversing in their own unique language. He wanted to learn how to speak with them, too.
It was a short holiday, but Crowley carried that week with him for the next 10 years, closing his eyes to return whenever the weight of real life became too crushing. That forest near the shore was the only place he ever felt at home. So it’s no surprise that he jumped on the first opportunity to go back the week after he turned 18.
He had just finished secondary school and been accepted into a Horticulture program in the city. Feeling the impending doom of being stuck in the bustling hellscape for another few years, he decided to take the little money he had saved up for a short trip back to the place he loved so dearly.
Now would also be a good time to mention that the other problem with linear Time as we see it is that nothing stays the same. Once something changes, you can never go back. You knock a glass off the table and it shatters on the floor, you can never return the glass to its original form, no matter how much you try. And the problem with forests is that they’re always being destroyed, because humans haven’t yet figured out that to harm a forest is to harm themselves.
But Crowley, forgetting the ways of Time as humans so often do, hadn’t expected it to work so violently against him in the decade he had been missing. He didn’t expect to see open barren fields where there were once ancient trees teeming with life. Nor did he expect the place that once filled him with so much joy to now be desolate and empty. It looked a lot like how he felt inside.
Angry at what had become of his precious forest, he stormed off to the ocean, the one entity he knew couldn’t be stripped from it’s home. He sat at the edge of the tide, dipping his toes in the water, allowing the ebb and flow to wash away some of the hardness in his heart. He saw clusters of crabs he used to catch burrowing into the sand and was grateful to see them alive and thriving.
After an hour or so of just being, he found himself walking along the shoreline. He walked and walked with no direction or purpose. He walked as he felt the land call him and until his mind was empty and his heart was full.
He walked until the sun made its way close to the horizon when a small, off-beaten path to his left caught his eye that his body told him to follow. The path led him into a thin forest with towering trees lining both sides, eventually opening up into a meadow. The meadow was like a dream. Golden hour rays cut their way through the brush, illuminating the leaves a warm yellow. The cooing and chirping birds were as loud as horns blaring in central London and yet soft and soothing to his ears.
This is where I need to be. No where else but here, he thought.
He marveled in this spot for some time, taking in the vibrant colors and the dancing branches that waved their greeting, when he heard a voice on the other side of the meadow calling out.
“Crowley!”
Crowley squinted and saw an older man, maybe in his 50s, running towards him. The subtle oranges and yellows of the meadow made his white hair glow, and his bright smile outshone the sun. It made him look rather angelic, if Crowley actually believed in angels. He acknowledged to himself silently that, objectively, this man was quite good looking, before embracing his concern that there was a strange man approaching him. Alone. In the woods.
The man caught up to him, breathless and radiant. Crowley looked around the meadow, confused.
“Uh…can I help you?”
“It’s me. Aziraphale,” he panted.
“Azira-wot?”
“Aziraphale,” the man repeated. The smile drained from his face as Crowley stared at him, empty, and garbled out something incoherent.
“You don’t – you don’t know who I am,” panic rising in his voice.
“Sorry, mate. Have we met?”
The blond’s breath started to pick back up as the weight of what was unfolding before him sunk in. He fidgeted his hands in front of him and toyed with the fringes of his waistcoat.
“Apparently not yet… but we will,” he breathed.
“Listen, if this is some joke or something I’m really not in the mood,” Crowley scowled.
“It’s not! It just… it hasn’t happened for you yet.” The strange man whose name was apparently Aziraphale stared at the redhead with pleading eyes. He went to reach for Crowley before catching himself and jerked his hand away.
“I don’t know how much time I have left to explain. I fear not much,” he paced. “I’m a time traveler.”
“Bollocks,” Crowley scoffed and rolled his eyes.
“I know it sounds crazy, but listen. I was born with this, this… ability. I get randomly pulled from my dimension, my timeline –”
“Dimension? Timeline??”
“Please, don’t interrupt me! There isn’t time,” he cried.
Crowley could tell Aziraphale was desperate now and, no matter how crazy this was, he wanted to hear him finish.
“I get pulled from my timeline for an indeterminate length and it’s always here. I’m drawn here and this is where we always meet. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much or it could alter my past and your future. But we are important to one another,” he emphasized. “And I’ve known you since I was, well, since I was about your age.”
Crowley stood in stunned silence for a moment before turning to walk away, “I actually do not believe this.”
Without thinking, Aziraphale grabbed Crowley by the wrist, stopping him in his tracks.
“Please. Please, Crowley. Please trust me. Please trust me like I have always trusted you.”
Aziraphale’s grip burned Crowley’s skin and sent electricity through his veins, standing his hair on end. Looking into his beautiful blue eyes that were on the verge of tears, Crowley felt time stop around them. His heart swelled with a feeling he hadn’t felt since he was 8 years old in that forest at one with the universe. It was a feeling that told him he was no longer alone and that maybe this not-unattractive, rather angelic man was as important to him as he said he was.
“And why on Earth would I listen to some strange old man in the woods,” he nearly whispered, not removing Aziraphale’s hand from his wrist.
“Pardon me, I am not old,” Aziraphale feigned offense.
“Says the guy with the tartan bowtie.”
“Tartan is stylish,” he remarked, adjusting it with both hands. Crowley ached at the absence of Aziraphale’s touch.
“But, if I recall correctly,” he continued, “I probably said something similar to you when we first met.”
“So you age….backwards?”
“Not really. To me, I age normally. Just like you age normally to you. It’s just that our timelines are backwards. We never meet in the right order.”
Crowley was dizzy trying to understand the impossibility of someone knowing his future before it even happened yet, let alone knowing his future in reverse.
“So when I’m fifty, you’ll be…?”
“Twenty-six.”
“And to you, that’s already happened?”
Aziraphale nodded.
“This is too much.”
Aziraphale looked at him with such gentleness and adoration it made Crowley’s knees weak.
“I know it’s a lot to take in. I was in your shoes once, except I was the one actually time traveling, so you can imagine how shaken up I was,” he chuckled.
“This is the first time I’m meeting you,” Crowley started, afraid to ask the question that was the elephant in the room. “So, if our timelines are in reverse...what does that mean for you?”
Aziraphale gave a broken half smile and his eyes welled. Crowley saw a tear silently slip down his cheek, glistening in the warm light of the setting sun. Reaching out, Aziraphale shakily took Crowley’s hand.
“It means,” he swallowed, barely able to choke the words out. “It means take care of yourself, Crowley.”
Giving his hand a squeeze, Crowley looked down. He caught the glimpse of a shimmering solid gold band on his left ring finger. His heart plummeted.
“You have your whole life ahead of you. All I ask is that you savor every wonderful moment of it.”
Crowley nodded, a lump forming in his throat.
“When will I see you again?”
Aziraphale brought his hand to his head, looking unsteady. Crowley could see light coming through his being, like he was fading.
I barely even know you but I don’t want you to go.
Aziraphale’s voice sounded distant, “I can’t tell you details, just…. remember this place.”
Please, don’t go.
“Goodbye, Crowley.”
With nothing more, Aziraphale was gone.
And in the newfound absence of a man he had only met just minutes ago, Crowley felt a hollowness in his chest deeper than he ever had before.