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Alpha Centauri was always going to be a little too far-flung to be called home. It wouldn’t have had grass, for one. Crowley would have missed the grass. He would have missed wine. He would have missed trees, he would have missed the ocean. Sussex isn’t a proper runaway, not really, but it has those things, and Aziraphale has followed him -or they followed each other, wherever the idea first started- down here, to the seafront, to the pebbled beaches and scattered showers which are now home.
There have been men who claimed to be planets, claimed to know what it is that holds the stars in the sky -who have reached for it, who have become catatonic in their wonder. Crowley knows what it is to hang the stars and he knows what it is to look up at them from the depths. He knows nothing compares to this, nothing to this place where there is no memory, there is no question of before. There is only the after. The world might not have ended, but all pretence of it being what it was had fallen apart right there on the edges of time, when Aziraphale had sworn humanity above heaven and hell and everything.
The cottage rises on the horizon when he strolls on his walks up from the sea. It never felt like quite as much a purposeful march in London, when he could tread street after street of medieval stone and shining new glass and not know how he ended up in Soho -always, in Soho- maybe stopping in a bakery or coffee shop or cinema on the way. Here, it feels intentional. It must be intentional. Every step on the dewy grass is purposeful, every whisper of his dark clothes against the windless meadow a statement of a persevering existence.
Aziraphale is coaxing the roses into bloom -the first thing he sees. The little spun tufts of his white hair, the neat seams of his coat.
“Slow going, angel?”
He turns; smiles that way he does, that Crowley has convinced himself is reserved for moments like this. “Oh,” he says easily, “not at all. These Barkarole are coming in finely. Yesterday’s little shower must have done them the world of good -look, they’re coming in just the fine colour of your hair.”
Crowley looks down at them dumbly, unfurling under the sun, stems bent towards the angel.
“I suppose-” he cuts himself off, looks up at Aziraphale. “Oh shut up. You’ve done that on purpose.”
Aziraphale straightens himself, scoffs “-well, of course I didn’t. That is what you would call the dangerous waste of a divine act.”
Crowley lets out a breath of a laugh. “I wouldn’t put it past you. Frivolous miracles and all.”
Aziraphale looks at him imperceptibly. “That was then, my dear.” He says simply. “There. Not here.”
Aziraphale knows his books like he knows the varied cities of the planet. He knows stories, he knows their structures and subversions. He’s seen the world. He knows, he knows their story is not a love story. It is not a story of any kind, really, more like... stasis. Simply being. Two creatures moving through time without really walking. That must be the thing that has changed -some consciousness of act that emerged somewhere in the tarmac that broke forth from hell at the end of the world.
There are times -there are times when Aziraphale still wants to, still thinks he can- explain his actions, before. Times when he wants to say that when he left, it was because it seemed that there was no option but to leave. That he didn't know how to stay -that he didn’t know what it looked like. That he was scared to go in blind.
He hopes Crowley can see that -he’s always seen through him, really. In a way he shouldn’t, Aziraphale knows -he knows- he’s come to rely on the presumption that Crowley will always come back. Usually in the form of silence and a bottle of booze.
Again, and again, and again. Metaphorical, unsaid. A hint, a smile, a nudge, a talk-around. A lift home, a thought, nothing but a scrape at the surface of this great elemental light they generate.
These days that scrape manifests itself like this: roses, lilacs. A beautiful house. New wallpaper, and endless march of new furniture for the first few months after they arrived. (They might have resolved to live quieter, but never, never, will Aziraphale go without those comforts. Without a lightness to the space. For every new divan, for the grand piano, Crowley has smiled and watched him rearrange the rooms. In the evenings they sit by the fire, on the floor, close to the heat. They share wine, they watch the flames. Sometimes talking of nothing at all.)
Crowley had asked once (on a particularly drunken night, so deep in Aziraphale’s wine cellar that he hardly had focus or sense in him,) “do you remember much -of before?”
It was casual enough to seem idle, but Crowley always did sound so perfectly unceremonious. It did nothing to undercut the matter at hand. Aziraphale hadn’t needed to sober himself. He sat quiet for a moment, stone in his armchair, wishing he could say yes , I remember, I remember you before when your eyes were different and I remember that you were beautiful then too, but there was (there still is, still is,) a big block of insidious darkness where that knowledge should be. Is this how Crowley felt before the fall? He had wondered. Like he was grasping at some dark expanse of unknowing, longing for it to be filled because his faith couldn’t quite light him right to the corners. Because faith wasn’t enough light for all he encompasses, really, all things accounted for?
He wondered if Crowley is capable of believing in anything if not The Plan and God herself. He wondered if his faith might be enough for both of them.
He said, simply- “no, I don’t. I don’t think any of us do, really,” and smiled.
(He supposes:) for Crowley: a mercy. Memory (immortality made a kind act of artistry,) would have been too cruel. The burn was punishment enough.
Now, they drink again -as they do, as they always have. And Crowley, as always, lovely in the dark light, watches Aziraphale as he hides his mouth behind his glass. His eyes are disarming like this, blazing as ever in the dark. Rounded flames. Aziraphale is not as brave as Crowley, not where they are concerned.
But- but.
Every day here it has grown harder than ever for him to remember that he ought to be afraid of Crowley. When in the dark, he generates his own light that is not hellfire (he has tried to think that, he has wanted to believe it,) but something else. Yes -before- he ought to be afraid of this being who had been painted throughout history and across heaven with a cruel spark in his eyes and fire at his fingertips. But century after century the hypothetical pitchfork in his hypothetical claws fell to pieces beside the real veins in his hands, which were blue as any sky and celestial as anything. Now that blood is closer than ever. The image of him from before becomes more disparate by the second. (Not least to mention that Aziraphale’s flaming sword, so favourite an image of the humans, had not been with him since Eden.)
No matter how hard it was, before, he had been able to steel himself against any desire or simple instinct to reach out, to touch, to say anything at all, really, but least of all yes, yes, let’s go off together.
That was before he knew what it was down there. Before Crowley had been up there, come face to face with the stark white emptiness of heaven, sterilised in his absence. It was, most importantly, before he had known what it was to inhabit the body of a demon and not burn but swagger (in a way he knew how, knew like the back of his hand the way the keenest of birdwatchers know migratory patterns of skylarks.)
He couldn’t ever be afraid of Crowley, not if he tried -and maybe he would have met Crowley in heaven, or in hell, or on this earth made-battlefield in another world, things could have been different; but instead they are here, on this planet. There is nothing to fear in a pattern of living he has come to know, that has been six thousand years in the forging.
“I suppose -I suppose we did run away together after all.” It breaks the silence with all the grace of a shattering glass. He thinks -Crowley might have flinched.
“We-” he looks down into his glass. Aziraphale can almost taste the mourning for his sunglasses radiating off him like -perfume. There’s a long pause. “...We did, I suppose," he says eventually. "Didn’t get very far though.”
Aziraphale laughs without humour. “Oh -yes. Very true.”
The silence returns. All of the planned -I’m glad, I’m happy, isn’t it wonderful that we can head about two hours out of London and set up like this so easily, my dear, isn’t it beautiful what we’ve made? seems to fizzle and fly out of the chimney with their ashes.
There is a particular kind of misery in the perpetual wait for something you cannot hope for but cannot help but wish.
Crowley is in their meadow in the bright morning. He has left Aziraphale to the garden, he has agreed to be back in time for lunch. He tears up daisies and almost feels bad at the sight of them limp on the grass, with no choice now but to die, cut off from the earth.
He has always been soft. He knows this. It was softness which coaxed him into rebellion in the first place. He is at his softest now, clearly -he would need nothing, nothing but a word or touch to kneel at Aziraphale’s feet.
The night before, he had thought -he had hoped -he had hoped. I suppose we did run away together after all. But he had still -fallen asleep with this knowing it cannot be like a blanket thick over him. Hoping does no good. Not now. Not-
“Crowley.”
He hadn’t even heard Aziraphale approach. He might believe he had glided over if he didn’t look so solid, standing there, backlit by the clouds. Crowley watches him fiddle with his hands. Twist the rings once, twice, three times. Crowley sits up.
“Angel.”
“You look -quite miserable (quite beautiful) there in the grass.”
Crowley shrugs limply. There’s not much use -there’s not much use when you’ve laid all your cards bare. Not much else to say. “I s’pose.”
“...You didn’t come to breakfast.”
Crowley shrugs again. “Wasn’t -hungry. Might be a bit hungover.”
“You don’t get hangovers, dear.”
He almost winces again. “-I wish-” he starts. (I wish you wouldn’t call me that. I wish you’d let me just -wallow- if you won’t kiss me.)
Aziraphale sighs a small sigh, and sits down on the grass opposite him, legs crossed. “-What, dear?” he asks, sounding a little wretched. The sky above them is so bright, Crowley half-spirals. Aziraphale’s iris-whites and creams make him half-look like a daisy himself. His brow furrows.
Crowley sighs. “I wish you wouldn't look at me like that. Just over here fiddling with the daisies. You know me -eternal- tamperer.”
Aziraphale sits quite still. Crowley looks down to the grass. There’s a silence before he looks up at Aziraphale again. He almost says something -he almost says tell me. Tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me, what do you think of me here, sitting in a little ring of perfectly-ruined flowers that you love so dearly. You must think me miserable. Well -I am.
He’s only interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. He looks up. The space between them seems nothing but an inch.
“Right. That’s quite enough of that,” Aziraphale says, and kisses him.
Let there be no guilt, he thinks as he pulls Crowley close. Guilt has plagued me, since the plagues, since they killed the kids at the Ark. What is Gabriel guilty of -vanity, of cruelty? At Armageddon, at our aversion of the apocalypse -that moment was one of the first times in my life that I had felt entirely no remorse. What exactly am I guilty of? Loving the Earth too much? Loving its fruit? Loving in spite of allegiance, in spite of the words of Heaven. In the way that went further than the distant dispassionate manner of those who had not walked streets and seen belly-up corpses and the joy of a human bleeding but alive, alive! Those who had not known -Crowley. Not for all he is.
There is nothing too bright about the sky then. Crowley thinks he might have - sobbed. He kisses Aziraphale back and -oh, there’s a hand at the back of his neck, in his hair- and there is nothing, nothing but the grass beneath them and Aziraphale against him. He’s breathless when he pulls away to -to breathe, to come to some reassurance that this is real.
Aziraphale’s hand is still on his neck. Crowley grasps at the other. Their fingers find each other and it is so warm he feels overwhelmed. For a moment, they look at each other -then Aziraphale smiles. Then he laughs.
“Oh, oh - you look quite startled!” He manages, fingers toying with the shortest hairs at the back of Crowley’s neck. “You -you- oh you must know how I love you.”
And that -yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Crowley stares at him -he must have sobbed now, he must have made some pathetic sound in an attempt to say I -so he kisses him again. Yes.
Since Wessex, they have resisted the home-starved nature of their species; this constant move, this travelling. They have had the impulse to stop. For the tale to unfold from the root and break its bud on the air. To oxygenate, to breathe, to shudder. The sky gives light to their thatched roof on the horizon.
And so-
Crowley supposes it was always going to end up like this: them, in some desperate attempt to leave more of a mark on the earth than empty plates at restaurants around the globe. A home. A cottage. An attempt to have some walls remember them, the human way. Now, the way of lovers. They have seen men try it, they have seen them forgotten or otherwise caricatured beyond recognition by public memory.
No, no. It is the places which remember. It is the cobblestones of Bankside which whisper fond things about William Blake’s profile when you touch them. Human memory is a touchstone. A city, that remembers. The downs -they have a great history under their belt. It is the roses, the daises -it is the grass, the trees, the windows of their kitchen which see their hands joined in the garden, and witness the kisses exchanged over marmalade and toast, and hold, bend, carve out a gentle cavern to remember them by.