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“Crawly, is it?” Aziraphale studied the face in front of him. Distinct cheekbones, dark red hair, sharp nose, mouth turned down at the corners. The same details he had seen in the surveillance footage in the files, now resolved into a being in front of him.
“Crowley,” the demon muttered.
“Ah.” Aziraphale paused for a moment, to see if he said anything more– sometimes they went on, with an awful lot of titles– but this man-shaped being added nothing. He merely sat there, hands dangling limply in celestial handcuffs (a rather clever invention that drained him of all infernal power), and watched Aziraphale with unwavering intensity in yellow eyes.
Snake eyes. The demons all had animal aspects in some form. This one was a snake, marked by the wriggle of a brand on his face and the slashed pupils of his eyes. It should have been more unnerving, but if Aziraphale was going to be honest, his first impression had been that those eyes looked intelligent.
It was the sort of thought one kept very close to one’s chest. He distracted himself by looking down at the clear tablet.
“Original tempter…” he read aloud, scrolling idly. “Serpent of Eden… It says here you have some information you may be willing to share.”
“Yup,” Crowley said, popping the p enough to stretch the word out into two syllables.
It wasn’t that the demon was unaffected by the circumstances; the lines of tension in his lean body were undeniable. But he did not rant or threaten or attempt to bargain, as they sometimes did. Interestingly, he also did not blink. Perhaps it was a snake trait.
“Information such as the locations of other demons?” Aziraphale prompted.
“Could be.”
“Why would you share that with the enemy?”
Crowley shrugged languidly. “Maybe I’m reformed.”
He made no effort whatsoever to sell the lie, not that Aziraphale would have believed it if he had. This was a tempter, after all. He had some kind of plan. It was simply a matter of ferreting out what he intended.
“You are aware we do not make deals with the devil.” That earned a huff that was almost a laugh.
‘You’re overestimating my rank, angel.”
It wasn’t quite an insult, not spat with venom the way it had been by others, but Aziraphale bristled all the same.
“That’s Principality to you,” he corrected frostily. “I suppose you think you’re going to tempt your way into something?”
Crowley leaned his head back and studied Aziraphale.
“Don’t need to. I have something you want.”
A blatant attempt at temptation if ever there was one. No subtlety at all, these demons.
“Oh?” Aziraphale let the syllable carry the weight of how unimpressed he was.
Crowley nodded once, and raised his shackled hands to tap his temple.
“Knowledge.”
“Very original.” Perhaps he had only the one strategy, Aziraphale mused. As with Eve, so with all others. It had probably worked on humans, but angels were another kind of being entirely.
Crowley finally broke eye contact, raising his eyes aloft to contemplate the ceiling.
“I know what you did with your flaming sword, Aziraphale.”
If Aziraphale were a gifted liar, he wouldn’t have reacted at all to that. He would have kept his cool entirely without batting an eye.
Unfortunately, lying was not his forte. He stiffened like a starched collar.
“Discorporated demons like you?” he offered, trying to sound unbothered and failing utterly.
Crowley’s smile was sharp and toothy. “You gave it away. Eve was pregnant, there were wild animals out there, so you handed it off to the humans. Have I got it right?”
The Serpent of the apple tree. Of course. Aziraphale should have suspected sooner.
“You were spying on me in Eden,” he accused. It made diabolical sense, collecting intelligence on the enemy. Preparing for blackmail, the only sort of communication demons understood. Did Crowley also know that he had lied to the Almighty?
No, better not to even think of it.
“You were almost discorporated during the French Revolution,” Crowley recounted, smirking. “And by Nazis when you tried to play spy.”
“You’ve been watching me.” The very thought incensed Aziraphale. To have every mortifying incident in the last six thousand years logged and catalogued by the enemy, so they could laugh hideously over it and no doubt mock him mercilessly. The archangels were always telling him to be vigilant and reprimanding him for his indulgences. He should have listened.
“Have I? There was a demon with you in that little cell in the Bastille and you simply failed to notice? I waltzed into your bookshop and you didn’t see?”
Taunting him, the fiend. Aziraphale glared.
“I don’t know what sort of evil wiles you’ve used.” The bookshop was a troubling suggestion, as he had always been so careful with his wards. Then again, the demon could have known of the store without ever entering it. He was trying to get under Aziraphale’s skin, that was all.
“You like sushi, misprinted bibles, and Stephen Sondheim.”
“Now, see here-”
“Does your lot still have that one angel, messes with people’s heads?” Crowley interrupted, a strange non-sequitur. “Wossit, the memory one…”
Was he going to try and negotiate Aziraphale’s secrets in exchange for Aziraphale’s memory of the encounter? Out of the question. Even if he were inclined to go along with such a scheme, the amount of paperwork required would be staggering.
“That’s none of your business.”
“‘S what you think.” Crowley leaned forward again. On another entity, Aziraphale might almost have called his expression earnest. “You know what you and I have in common? Our bosses hate us. Yours see your kindness and think you’re weak. Mine think I’m insufferable.”
How dare he! How dare this demon try to spear Aziraphale on the sword of his own secret fears.
“I agree with your superiors,” he snapped.
“D’you know what the difference is? ‘Side from the whole demon thing. The archangels think that you’re bad at your job. Me, I still got commendations.”
So he was gloating, on top of everything else. Aziraphale should have expected it. Even a demon who appeared attractive not totally repulsive still had a personality forged in Hell.
“Is there a point you’re trying to make?”
Crowley’s foot began to tap against the floor. He either wore snakeskin boots on his corporation, or it was another mark of Hell’s stain.
“If one of us were going to be punished, or turned into a better soldier– with a little memory rummaging, say– it wouldn’t be me.”
—
Crowley was a demon of temptation, first and foremost. He had tempted Aziraphale before, to another helping of dessert or a first edition volume that those wankers in Heaven might have viewed as sinful but could be presented in the right light as human knowledge worth collecting.
He had never attempted anything even close to this. It would be the hardest temptation of his career, and the only one to matter. If it failed, he would die.
If it failed, there wouldn’t be a world left worth living in. With Earth the prime battleground for the war, finding Aziraphale had been Crowley’s last hope.
He didn’t have endless chips to cash. He didn’t mind selling out Hastur; that smelly prick got what was coming to him. It was a fair turnabout, as far as Crowley was concerned, for breaking into his flat and hauling him back to Hell right when he was trying to save the day. But for every pyromaniac Duke of Hell, there were a dozen demons for whom evil was just a job, and Crowley wasn’t in any rush to hand them over to Heaven’s tender mercies.
It was like a fairy tale, like Rumpelstiltskin or Scheherazade or one of those other stories humans told themselves in dark times to try and believe that tomorrow would be brighter. He only had so many chances to make Aziraphale remember, and one of them had to work.
There was no alternative.
“Long time no see, angel,” he greeted when Aziraphale returned for a second session. Truthfully, he had no idea how long it had been. He missed his watch. Come to think of it, he missed his sunglasses, his plants, his car– all the trappings that had made Crowley a person.
“I’m back for the rest of your information.” There was no trace of recognition, just a prim, icy angel interrogating a demon. At least Aziraphale’s idea of interrogation was a little more hands-off than some of the others’ must be.
“You’re not very good at negotiating, you know that?” Crowley said. Truthfully, Aziraphale never had been. His fallback in arguments with Crowley had always been to pout and bat his eyelashes until he got what he wanted.
“We don’t negotiate with demons.”
“Right. Got that. Still pretty rude. Could at least offer this demon some tea.” Aziraphale twitched at the mention of the beverage, and Crowley pressed his advantage. He knew his angel, and he knew how to tempt him. “You know what I miss most? Alcohol. Humans did such great things with alcohol.”
Centuries of experiments with the stuff, and an angel and a demon had tried all of them together, lamenting that their respective Head Offices would never understand the appeal. Food had been one of Crowley’s primary strategies in tempt-Aziraphale-to-prevent-the-Apocalypse, and that temptation had worked, even if the rest of the plan had failed spectacularly.
“Heaven is not some sort of speak-easy,” Aziraphale said, articulating the word as if it were the most vulgar slang. He was ridiculous, and Crowley loved him. Shouldn’t that have counted for something? What was the point of being in love if it didn’t cure the curse like in all those stupid stories?
“Châteauneuf du Pape, that’d be the stuff,” Crowley said, as if he were not dying inside, as if his little shriveled black heart wasn’t withering into dust. He was a better liar than his angel. When Aziraphale appeared unmoved, he changed the angle of attack. “Or a tiramisu. You know how long it’s been since I had a proper dessert? Silky mascarpone, the sweetness of cocoa and the bitterness of espresso…”
The longing in Aziraphale’s face gleamed. Crowley had never been much of an eater himself, but he persevered. He had listened to enough of Aziraphale’s avid monologues to hold his own on the subject.
“I’d kill for a crepe,” he improvised, summoning the familiar internal list of the angel’s favorites. “Or a single malt scotch. Those fruity cocktails with the little umbrellas…”
Aziraphale cracked with the sound of a snap, and a little end table obligingly materialized with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Crowley could have wept from relief. Not only was his angel still a hedonist who’d drink in heaven, he was considerate enough to summon a glass for his captive. A sign that there was still hope, something still recognizably, ineffably Aziraphale buried below the punitive (and very targeted towards certain demons) amnesia.
“Cheers,” Crowley said happily, then reconsidered. “Hard to drink like this, though.”
“I am not unshackling you,” Aziraphale told him sternly.
Fine. Crowley was flexible. He was creative.
He really was, come to think of it, dying for a drink.
“At least pour for me. Ta, I need that.”
The first sip spread through Aziraphale like a soft glow. Crowley wondered if he ever relaxed in Heaven.
“It is quite good.”
“You remember all the places humans made to drink? Taverns and pubs and clubs. So many clubs. There was one– hundred pound club, or something like that– the name’ll come to me. I slept through most of the nineteenth century, but I like to imagine all those toffs getting absolutely sozzled on the same swill as poor folks down the road and thinking it’s different because they’re wearing silk.”
Humans were funny like that. Cruel, incomparably and incomprehensibly cruel, but oh, the things they created.
“They did more than drink,” Aziraphale said softly. At least those memories were intact. (Crowley suppressed a stab of jealousy about that.) “They talked, and danced.”
He risked a direct approach. “Did you dance?”
The response was immediate. Aziraphale’s features hardened again. “No. Angels don’t.”
“Demons do. Terrible at it, of course, but it’s fun. Not very big on fun, Heaven. No dancing, no Shakespeare. Not even the gloomy ones!” Crowley was playing dirty, he knew, but the archangels had started it by rummaging around in Aziraphale’s mind. There was no Earthly experience, no treasured literary icon Crowley wouldn’t bring up if it meant a chance of breaking whatever spell the angel was under.
“Yes, well.” Aziraphale looked down at his hands. The shame was creeping in, which meant Crowley’s window of opportunity was closing.
“Is your lot still able to sense love? Must be everywhere up here, what with Her grace and you all radiating divine love at each other and what have you.” It was a desperate thing to try, but Crowley was desperate. He was ready to gut himself open and put his entrails on display if it brought Aziraphale back to him.
He focused on his heart, or the spot in his chest where he reckoned his corporation might have sprouted one, and tried to project love , pulling through his memories for the moments that shone with it. Aziraphale with a spot of chocolate on his lip. Aziraphale reading in his armchair in a patch of sunlight. Aziraphale doing terrible magic tricks. Aziraphale, Aziraphale, I love you, Aziraphale .
“What about in this room?” he murmured. “Do you feel any love in here?”
Aziraphale clasped his hands together, so like himself and yet so different.
“No. Why would I?”
Crowley slumped in defeat. “Just curious. Big fan of questions, me.”
—
Gabriel’s hand thumped across Aziraphale’s back. It did not feel like praise.
“Duke Ligur! This capture is going to be a boon for our side. Good work on that interrogation.”
“Happy to do my part,” Aziraphale said weakly. He didn’t think he’d done anything at all to pry the demon’s location out of Crowley. They had simply drunk and reminisced. “I do, erm, have one quick question.”
“What is it?” Gabriel’s eyes were stony above his wide smile.
“Can demons feel love, or did they lose that in the Fall?”
The archangel laughed. It was, Aziraphale supposed, an answer.
—
Sitting hurt. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Existing hurt. Sitting was just part of it. Wincing, Crowley tried to adjust positions in the chair to which he had been strapped. (It prickled, a certain low-grade holiness stinging at his skin, but the feeling barely registered anymore.) At least his face had probably stopped bleeding. If the itching was anything to go by, the blood had dried. He had no mirror to check with, and still no sense of time. Heaven was endlessly bright, no shadows to hide in, no nighttime for relief. It could have been days. It could have been weeks.
Did Aziraphale still think in human time? Or was Crowley the only being left in eternity who counted in twenty four hours?
“Oh, good Lord!”
Crowley bared his teeth. “Is She?”
“What happened to you?”
That at least confirmed that Aziraphale hadn’t known. Crowley shifted in the chair again, seeking relief for the ache.
“Sandalphon. Think he’s really missing Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“How could he? You’ve been giving us information!”
That confirmed something else: that this could hurt even worse, because Aziraphale didn’t care if Crowley was in pain, only that a potential source of intelligence might have been compromised.
Crowley laughed. It didn’t sound like him at all. In fact, it sounded hysterical, like someone going mad. Could a demon go mad? Or was he there already?
“Torture isn’t about information, angel. It’s about power. Reminding you who’s in control.”
Maybe he had been mad all along and he’d just never realized. Maybe his whole history with Aziraphale was a fantasy he had conjured up, the last great feat of the only demon with imagination.
“Heaven doesn’t torture,” Aziraphale said, demonstrating his innate gift for self-delusion. That was one of his greatest skills, convincing himself to turn a blind eye to Heaven’s foibles. Why even use a miracle to mess with his mind, when he would so competently do the job himself?
Go- Sa- Someone , Crowley was tired. He hadn’t slept since the Apocalypse, and he had no way of knowing how long that had been. Every atom of his corporation ached.
“Of course Heaven wouldn’t torture. My mistake. Must’ve just tripped when I landed in that pool of boiling sulfur,” he hissed.
“I could…” Aziraphale’s voice was a hoarse rasp. He cleared his throat. “I could heal you.”
“You what?”
“I can heal you. Of your injuries, I mean, not the…” He couldn’t bring himself to say Fall.
It wasn’t the most articulate response, but Crowley was tired, and in pain, and in love, and also his one constant in a cold and uncaring universe no longer recognized him, so perhaps he could be forgiven for blinking stupidly and saying, “Really?”
Aziraphale wet his lips. He looked distinctly uncomfortable, and slightly ill, which historically would be the point where he started throwing around phrases like fraternization and hereditary enemies and I don’t even like you .
“You can hardly be expected to give any information like this.”
Healing wouldn’t help, in the long run. Crowley only had one name and location left. That was the fucking fairy tale rules of it all, wasn’t it, only three chances to break the spell.
“What if I don’t have any more information?”
“You aren’t thinking clearly through the pain.” Having an argument about it seemed to only be strengthening Aziraphale’s resolve, being the contrarian bastard that he was. “I’ll just heal you and–”
“That’s a very kind thing to do for a demon,” Crowley interrupted. “Careful, or someone might accuse you of caring about me.”
“Hush. You don’t know what you’re saying. Hold still.”
Crowley had been healed by Aziraphale before. After the bomb in the church, he had experienced the cool wash of an angel’s affection on his blistered feet, and in the uncertainty and fear of war that had felt something like paradise.
Crowley’s magic smelled like sulfur and left a smoky aftertaste like burnt matches. This miracle smelled like sherbet lemons and felt bright and stinging at the back of his throat, like taking a deep breath of too-cold air in winter.
The miracle felt like Aziraphale, and that made everything hurt worse.
The itch of drying blood dissipated, as did the soreness of bruised skin. The bone-deep ache of exhaustion remained, as did the prickle of unfriendly holiness in the manacles and chair.
“There, now.” Aziraphale’s smile was a shadow of its former sunshine self. “Isn’t that better?”
It wasn’t, but Crowley knew how he was supposed to respond. He revealed where one of the Erics was hiding out. Not that he had ever had anything personally against them, but they were Legion; one aspect out of a thousand could be disposable.
Aziraphale took note of the information, but he lingered for a moment before leaving.
“Crowley, how do you know so much about my time on Earth?”
It was the perfect opening, yet Crowley couldn’t bring himself to hint as he had in the beginning, all cockiness and false bravado. Nor could he come right out and say because they stole your memories but we’ve been friends for millennia .
The problem with free will was– always had been– choice. Even the most skilled demon could only tempt someone into things they already wanted, at least subconsciously. And Crowley… Well, he wasn’t sure that Aziraphale wanted him.
After all, in the end, who had the angel chosen? Heaven. For all Crowley knew, Aziraphale had asked them to take away the memories.
“Because I know you, angel,” he said softly. Because I love you . But that didn’t mean the reverse was true.
Eric was the last name on Crowley's very short list. He had no other cards to play, no other demons to sell out to save his own miserable skin. He could fool Heaven for a little while longer, but the fact was that he had officially outlived his usefulness to them. If he was lucky, they would find a permanent way to kill him. If he wasn’t, he’d end up as smiting target practice for Sandalphon for all of eternity.
He needed protection, insurance, something to ensure that it wouldn’t end like this.
—
Aziraphale had reread Crowley’s file more times than he cared to admit, but no matter how many times he reviewed it, he could not make sense of it.
Crowley himself was unhelpful when confronted with his record. He bragged shamelessly about things Aziraphale couldn’t begin to comprehend, something about selfies and a road with numbers in the name, but when faced with deeds for which he had received accolades– such as, for example, the Spanish Inquisition– he grew surprisingly taciturn.
What kind of demon was prouder of encouraging humanity to photograph themselves than of torment and destruction? What kind of demon just seemed to want a glass of wine and a good chat as payment for selling out his colleagues? What kind of demon didn’t take advantage of an angel’s offer to heal him, even though it was clearly a sign of weakness on the angel’s part?
The only conclusion Aziraphale could draw was that either Crowley was constructing a temptation so convoluted only a master of the game could comprehend it, or he was simply not particularly demonic. He was, instead, quick-witted (if a bit scattered) and easy to talk to, and while he had yet to offer a satisfactory explanation for his seemingly vast well of Aziraphale-related knowledge, his statement of I know you had not felt like a lie. The way he said angel seemed like a term of endearment. After all, hadn’t there been a flash of… but no, that was impossible.
Still, however improbably, the demon Crowley felt more familiar than anything in Heaven. Aziraphale had been privately struggling with resigning himself to an endless future with entities who thought The Sound of Music was the pinnacle of achievement from a small-minded species, and then along came this being who believed in things like dessert and alcohol. Someone else who thought of humans fondly. Someone else who remembered.
It was a tremendous burden, being the only one to remember.
He trusted Crowley, unreasonably and against all evidence. In spite of the fact that this was a demon, Aziraphale couldn’t shake a deep conviction that Crowley would not hurt him.
That was why, when Crowley said that the next hideout required a demonic signature to access, Aziraphale did not follow the prescribed protocol and pass the information along to one of his supervisors.
“I suppose that means we’re going to Earth together,” he said instead.
The Earth was grey now.
While yes, Aziraphale had lived in London, he had spent an awful lot of time under grey skies, this was different. There was no sun up above, no life in the ground, and the buildings had been reduced to ash and sand and rubble. A colorless wasteland, worse than the world had seemed when he had contemplated it from the safety of Eden, because then he had at least known that there was some kind of life out in the wilderness.
He was not so sure now. Humanity was resilient, but the fallout of infernal and celestial warfare had taken its toll.
Aziraphale couldn’t hold inside the deep sigh that welled within him. If only he had thought quicker– if only he had been a better angel– perhaps he could have prevented this.
He could feel the spiritual tether to where his bookshop once had been, now nothing more than a memory of dust.
“I tried to stop it,” he admitted quietly. Crowley was a demon, but he was a demon who had been fond of humanity. Perhaps he would understand what the other angels hadn’t, the enormity of loss. “I tried to save them.”
“I’m sure you did the best you could.”
“It wasn’t enough. All I managed to do was get myself discorporated.”
“How’d that happen?”
Aziraphale looked over suspiciously, but Crowley did not look mocking, merely curious. What harm could there be in telling him, really? It wasn’t as if it were a classified secret, merely a source of embarrassment.
“I was trying to contact Head Office about… something. A human rather rudely interrupted, and in trying to keep them away from the gateway, I ended up stumbling into it myself.” It rankled, having gone in such an ignominious fashion. Aziraphale had been reissued a body for the war, eventually, but it came far too late to do him any good.
“I tried to stop it too.”
“Really?” Aziraphale supposed if any demon were to oppose the end of the world, it would be this one, but that any denizen of Hell had been willing to stand up against their master shocked him.
Crowley shrugged his shoulders, the angle made awkward by the shackles he still wore around his wrists.
“Didn’t make any difference. I got dragged back down to Hell once they realized I was a traitor. Hastur and Ligur took care of the dragging part personally.” He blinked, one of only a few such movements that Aziraphale had witnessed. “I lost my best friend.”
Sometimes, one could look at the surface of still water and know it ran far deeper than the visible. Aziraphale could hear that Crowley’s grief was a deep, consuming pain, cracks in his heart down to the foundation.
(A heart that Aziraphale was increasingly convinced he had, because the mention of a best friend certainly had carried with it… Well, a whiff of love . Lost love, mourning love, but love nonetheless)
“So sorry to hear it.” Aziraphale meant it. Crowley didn’t deserve a hurt like that.
Crowley didn’t look at him. “This way.”
Their destination was, apparently, a flat floating fifteen storeys above the ground.
“Bit ostentatious,” Aziraphale remarked.
“There used to be a building under it,” Crowley pointed out.
“How do we get in?”
“We take the lift.”
Before Aziraphale could object, he had stepped forward and jabbed his finger menacingly at the empty air. There was a faint but unmistakable ding.
Aziraphale considered questioning this, and decided against it. Spaces held memories, after all, and who knew what kind of odd miracles might have been produced by the residual magical eddies still swirling from the battles.
They stood in silence, in the ghost of an elevator, and ascended slowly, smoothly, towards the demonic lair.
“Will we be able to get inside without your powers?” he wondered.
“Yep.” And indeed, the door swung open as Crowley approached. Aziraphale presumed it was detecting some kind of infernal energy signature, although he certainly wouldn’t have warded his own home to work so cavalierly.
The interior was all smokey concrete, with a dim and unidentifiable source of light that caused them both to cast long, strange shadows in the menacing gloom. The word lair had never felt more appropriate.
“Not very cheerful.”
Crowley snorted in response.
In a place of honor on a plinth loomed (for everything in the flat could be said to loom) a statue of two beings with wings and curly hair. The one with red hair had pinned down the one with blond hair, and they were both– Aziraphale peered closer to be sure– entirely naked.
“Good and evil wrestling,” Crowley said, before he had a chance to comment. “Evil’s triumphing, of course.”
Aziraphale hummed thoughtfully. “Are you sure they’re wrestling?”
Crowley coughed and offered up a couple of consonants that failed to resolve themselves into any actual words.
“This way,” he finally managed, and stepped further down the hall, past a couple of pots that may have once held plants (before Earth became so hostile to all forms of organic life). Aziraphale gave the statue another lingering glance before following.
There was a lectern against the wall, topped by a bird with enormous spread wings. It looked terribly familiar, although Aziraphale was certain he had never been to this flat before. It brought something to mind, a dark night, the wail of air raid sirens.
The church, 1943! There had been a lectern just like this, although of course it had been destroyed. Aziraphale remembered the thrill of double-crossing the Nazis, the panic when he realized he had himself been fooled, and then… How odd. There was almost a fuzzy patch in his memory, a sort of badly repaired hole where the next moment should have been. He had used a miracle to protect himself from the explosion, he recalled that. Yet how had he known to do so? Had the whine of the bomb falling tipped him off?
“Recognize that?” He jumped at the low drawl of Crowley’s voice in his ear. The fiend had slithered up to his left side without making a sound.
“Why is it here?”
“Someone must have thought it looked nice.”
“You know what I mean.” Aziraphale turned to face Crowley. He sternly instructed his heartbeat to stop racing, the silly thing. Crowley had no power, not with the manacles on, and even if he did he wasn’t about to hurt Aziraphale. (Why was he so certain that Crowley wouldn’t hurt him?)
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Belief was a tricky thing. Different from faith, though intertwined. Certainly Aziraphale believed that Crowley knew too much about him, to a terrifying degree of intimacy, but he didn’t know what he would believe as an explanation.
Does your lot still have that one angel, messes with people’s heads? Crowley had asked at their first meeting. It had seemed like a non-sequitur at the time…
(Why, when Aziraphale thought of their first meeting, did he think of the sound of rain?)
Aziraphale shook his head. It was a dangerous thing, to be distracted in a demon’s lair, and they had a mission to complete. That was all he needed to focus on.
Crowley brought them to a cavernous, sparsely-furnished room. The primary feature was a desk topped with red marble and a chair that could only be described as a throne. On the wall hung a sketch that Aziraphale recognized as a Mona Lisa.
“This demon of yours doesn’t seem to be at home.”
“Guess not.”
Crowley didn’t look at all surprised, nor had he seemed concerned about potential danger at any point on their journey. He had known that they would find the place empty.
So why had he brought Aziraphale here?
With his hands still bound together, Crowley grabbed one edge of the drawing’s frame and pulled it away from the wall, revealing a hidden safe behind.
The back of Aziraphale’s neck prickled. “Crowley…”
“Trust me, angel.”
He did, God help him he did, but there were too many shadows on the walls and the lectern itched at a loose thread in his mind and he was alone on a destroyed Earth with a demon that knew too much, and anyone could be forgiven for panicking a little under the circumstances.
Crowley knew the combination. Of course he did. He fumbled a little with the dexterity of hands in manacles, but he didn’t need to search for numbers. This wasn’t some random demon’s hideout, this was Crowley’s flat, his home, or at least it had been until the end of the world.
What horrors did the scion of Hell keep locked away?
Aziraphale watched over Crowley’s shoulder. The safe only held one thing: a tall tartan thermos with a white cap.
“That’s mine,” Aziraphale murmured in disbelief. It had been his, until the 1960s, until…
He had given it away to someone. Who? Why?
Crowley reached into the safe, his fingers long and bare.
“No! Crowley, don’t touch it, it will…” What? Aziraphale had never been here before, had no idea what was tucked away in the confines of the thermos, except that he somehow did. He knew with absolute certainty that it contained holy water. “It will kill you.”
Crowley’s hands froze in mid-air.
“Can you smell holy water from all the way over there?”
“No.”
No, he couldn’t, so how did he know what it was? More importantly, why did he feel so sure that he had been the one to bless the water?
If one of us were going to be punished, or turned into a better soldier– with a little memory rummaging, say– it wouldn’t be me.
“Zakariel.”
“What?” Crowley’s hands still had not moved.
“The Angel of Memory. You asked me what his name was. It’s Zakariel.”
Aziraphale’s mind whirred. Why was Crowley able to recount Aziraphale’s passions and secrets and misadventures? Because he knew Aziraphale. He had not lied.
So the next riddle was, why did Aziraphale not know Crowley?
He had initially assumed it was because Crowley had been hidden or disguised in some way, engaging in a six-thousand-years-long act of subterfuge. If Crowley was telling the truth– I lost my best friend – if a demon really could produce those sparks of love…
Aziraphale thought of the sound of rain. What was it he remembered?
“How did we meet, Crowley?” he asked in a whisper.
“In the Beginning, there was a garden…” Crowley’s tongue flickered for a moment at the corner of his mouth. Unless Aziraphale was mistaken, it looked distinctly forked. “And a wily serpent, and an angel on apple tree duty.”
That went down like a lead balloon .
“I’ve known you since the very beginning,” Aziraphale breathed. Images flashed through his mind. The ark, the cross, Rome, England, France…
A bandstand.
“I should have run off with you,” he murmured.
Crowley flinched. “No, angel, you don’t mean that, you wanted-”
“Hang what I wanted!” The fierceness in Aziraphale’s voice surprised even himself. “They took my memories. Six thousand years of memories! I didn’t- I almost- oh, dear boy, it’s you .”
The memories were still hazy, rippling with static, but Crowley was always there, circling in constant orbit. Circling and loving , if the flashes Aziraphale had been experiencing were anything to go by.
It was all too much. He reached out and pulled Crowley close, throwing his arms around the demon’s thin frame.
“Guh,” said Crowley, intelligently, but his hands fisted in the front of Aziraphale’s coat, squeezed between them, and did not let go.
“It’s you,” Aziraphale repeated, feeling quite damp around the eyes.
“I missed you, angel.” Crowley’s voice was ragged.
“What do we do now? Alpha Centauri?”
“We should get the bloody handcuffs off, for a start.”
“Oh, right! Yes.” Aziraphale blushed and pulled back, blinking rather more rapidly than necessary. “Here.”
He ran a hand along the manacles, feeling for any hidden conditions, but they seemed fairly straightforward. He dissolved them with a snap.
“Are you sure about this, angel?” Crowley rubbed his wrist. “There’s still time for you to go back. Tell them I tempted you into it.”
Aziraphale shook his head.
“I am not leaving you again, my dear. Not for the world.”
—
Even after the end of the world, there can be another chance.