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It was a quiet evening. Some ducks were still idly swimming about on the surface of the pond, while the others were… what did ducks do, exactly, at night? Did they sleep? Crowley wasn’t sure. Ducks weren’t the most interesting of creatures, if you were honest with yourself.
These ducks were annoying him, anyway. Yes, it was true that he frequented this pond along with Aziraphale and often fed the little bastards, but the way they were staring at him expectantly was downright irritating.
“Go away, stupid creatures,” he says in a raised voice, making a shooing motion with his hands. Not surprisingly, the ducks have no reaction, being used to him after so long. He sighs heavily, shoving his hands back in his pockets and shifting on his feet.
He was bored, that’s what he was. Bored. And not that type of bored where you’re full of potential, either; the tired type of bored. The Heavenly type of bored.
“Fancy seeing you around, old foe. May I ask what brings you here?”
Crowley smirks to himself, not needing to turn about to identify who had spoken.
“Well, you know me. Love me a little evening stroll.”
“Evening?” Aziraphale says with a reasonable amount of confusion in his voice, slipping in beside the demon on the bank. “It’s past midnight, my dear boy.”
Crowley looks to his watch, brow furrowing. He must’ve been standing there and wallowing for longer than it had seemed.
“Ah. So it is. What are you doing up and about at this time, then?”
“You know that we have no need to sleep. And I’ve never been fond of it, either,” the angel says distastefully. “It accomplishes little other than passing time.”
“Well, if there’s nothing better to do with your time, it’s not too bad to indulge in. It’s just a bit of a break from everything. Very peaceful.”
“I thought peace was the thing that your lot campaigned against.”
Crowley looks to Aziraphale, smiling crookedly at him.
“Have we not stopped Armageddon together? Do you still not have faith in me? We have no ‘my lot’ or ‘your lot’ now, you know.”
Yes, yes, I know. It’s just… difficult to get a grasp of, after so many millennia of working towards the divine.”
“Ah, we never really had any place with the divine. Or with the wicked too, for that matter,” Crowley muses, scratching his chin. “We’re different, you and I. We’re soft.”
Aziraphale chuckles. “Well, you’ve softened, I’ll say that. I doubt that I have.”
“You’ve toughened up a bit. But in a good way.”
“Is there really any way that toughening up as such can be considered good?”
“Well, good and bad are relative terms, as I see it. Nothing’s black and white in the real world, it’s all just muddles of grey. Err, we’ve talked about this before, haven’t we?”
A smile graces his companion’s lips. “Yes, we have. More than once.”
Comfortable silence settles over them. When you’ve known each other for so many centuries, you do tend to run out of things to talk about. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, Crowley thinks. They fit together just as well in their silence as they do in their chatter. Though chatter is often preferable when you’re in such a bored state as he is.
“Y’know, I’ve been thinking about something recently,” he says abruptly, a thought that had been troubling him earlier resurfacing in his mind. “You know how humans get married and have weddings and all that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, it’s all just a bit odd, isn’t it?”
Aziraphale tilts his head in question. “What exactly is odd about it?”
“See, if you want to be with someone for the rest of your life, why bother with those formalities? You should just know, shouldn’t you? Why have a fancy ring or cake?”
The angel shrugs. “Humans like having things to celebrate. I personally find it quite nice.”
“I don’t know, I still don’t get the need for all the paperwork and parties and stuff. I mean, if you really do plan on being together forever, you’d have to have that celebration every day, wouldn’t you? Because you’re not just promising yourself to the other one day in your life, you’re doing it every day. Every hour and every minute, in fact.”
“And every second,” Aziraphale muses. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. But their lives are so much briefer than ours. They don’t live long enough to see things that way. And I wouldn’t doubt that they experience love and such differently to the likes of you and I.”
“Demons aren’t supposed to feel or act on love,” Crowley murmurs, more to himself than anyone else. “Suppose that’s one of my betrayals, then.”
“You feel love?”
Crowley raises an eyebrow. “Well, yeah. I’ve stayed by your side for this long, haven’t I?”
The angel smiles, cheeks pinking. “Ah. Of course.”
Silence falls over the scene once more before Aziraphale breaks it, speaking in a tentative manner.
“Well, see, I was made to love, but only to love those of mine.”
“Yeah, I know the whole deal. I was an angel once too, y’know.”
“Yes, yes, I know. I was just saying… well, those of yours, I was born to detest. So I suppose that’s also… a betrayal of mine, so to speak.”
Crowley’s laugh is soft, tender as the night. “You’d love me, then?”
“I have for a while, my dear.”
Smiling with far too much reverence for a demon such as himself—or ex-demon, as he is now—Crowley reaches to intertwine their fingers. The eerie coolness of his own palms is a pleasant contrast to the warmth of the angel’s, and, just this moment, he decides, was worth everything that they both had given.
They stand together in the moonlight, watching the ducks tirelessly paddle about on the surface of the lake, and boredom has never tasted so sweet.