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“Angel? Angel, are you – all right there?”
Aziraphale’s outlined against the nighttime glamour of London, spread out like constellations below Crowley’s penthouse window, the garishness and grime subsumed in a twinkle of streetlamps, the sparkling rivulets of roadways. His shoulders are shaking.
“It’s – it’s –” What he tries to say next sounds like it might be nothing, but it isn’t nothing, it’s the desperate, forlorn utterance of a mouth that can’t form words through the sobs. Crowley’s been on Earth long enough to know too well what that sounds like.
He doesn’t think. He tosses the whisky bottle on the couch cushions, not really caring if he aims right, and before he can think he’s in the place he’s always wanted to be, arms wrapped around his angel, Aziraphale’s head pressed into his shoulder.
Dear Someone, is this how he makes his confession?
“Tell me. What.” There are times when you have to get a mortal to focus, and it takes a calm you don’t always feel yourself, he certainly doesn’t, but isn’t fibbing part of his remit? Check me out, angel, I’m cool as a running brook, me, and Aziraphale’s not, the tears falling onto the thin-skinned inside of Crowley’s wrist are scalding, and he’s trying to talk and only gabbled words come out: “ – so long –” “ – tried so hard –” “ – because I thought –”
“Shh, shh, angel. Take a breath. Tell me what it is.”
Aziraphale trembles and his breath hitches, but no words come out clearly except a soft I don’t and sorry.
“Sod sorry. ‘S’okay.” The angel’s curls are as soft as they’ve always looked, and it’s hard not to move his fingers rhythmically through them, so he goes ahead, stroking one coil of white gold and then another out to its full length and letting it spring back.
“I just –” Aziraphale manages at last, then his voice catches again and he shakes against Crowley’s narrow chest.
“Angel, you’ve got to give me something to work with here. Sit down.” He pulls him to the couch. “Drink.” He was going to use the Waterford crystal, but the neck of the bottle will do.
“It was –” Aziraphale swallows hard. “Just – everything all at once. Looking out over London. It’s like – when you look down from Upstairs, you can see all the cities of the Earth. You wouldn’t have seen it, they did it since – since your time. It was always. I hated being called back, I can say that now. Every time. It was always – they were –” He shakes his head, another gulp of the whisky. “But it was always home. I tried to do what they wanted of me, century after century. We were the Heavenly Host, you see. But I couldn’t please anyone.”
Crowley can’t think of anything kind to say about Heaven, so he waits.
“And now I’ll never – and the shop’s gone, and – I’m not an angel of the Lord any more, I don’t know who I am, I don’t belong anywhere –”
He’s the one who reaches out this time. Finds Crowley’s hand blindly, after brushing his jacket and leaving a handprint of warmth on his thigh.
“Shut it,” says Crowley not unkindly, covering the seeking hand with his own. “Course you do. You’re my angel. You – please me. ‘N’ you belong here.”
Aziraphale almost nods.
“Said it, didn’t I? On our own side now.”
“They’ll come for us,” says Aziraphale in a small voice. “You could’ve been -- somewhere else. I don’t know. Alpha Centauri.”
“And let you have all the fun? Bugger that.”
There’s a watery smile then. “Gabriel’s face was something to see rather.” Aziraphale looks down at their joined hands. “We gave them a good show, didn’t we?”
“Going to give ’em another one,” says Crowley. “And if we make it past tomorrow – it’ll be tomorrow, you know they won’t take long –”
“No. They won’t.”
“Then it’ll be. Just us, figuring it out. Starting over.”
“Do you think it’ll work?”
“Gotta try.”
Aziraphale’s resting against him, and he realises that there’s no confession left to make: it’s huger than he ever could have imagined, and as simple and true as old clothes that fit well, and the patchwork of London’s night-dark green spaces and shimmering streets beyond the windows is like a vista of black holes and galaxies.
“Did I waste all those years?” Aziraphale says wistfully, but more calmly, turning his palm up to mesh their fingers as they did on the bus. (I thought it would be the last time, the only time.) “You were here. You were always here. And I hurt you so many times.”
“Wasn’t wasted if that was how long it took you to get here,” says Crowley, and he’s not sure if he means here in my flat or here in my arms or here, on a side of exactly two.
“Those aren’t just the honeyed words of the serpent, are they?” asks Aziraphale, but a little of his bastard twinkle has come back. “I’m astonished you’ll still have me.”
“You are my beautiful angel,” repeats Crowley. “I’m going to keep saying that until you believe me.”
He takes the cherubic, beloved face between his palms, returns the tentative smile. “And if you don’t –”
Oh. His own voice is catching, too.
“And if you don’t believe that,” Crowley goes on, “believe this,” and kisses him.