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Chapter Text

It wasn’t as though Crowley had never known bad times before. He’d been around more than six thousand years, obviously there had been low points. The fourteenth century, for a start. If ever there had been a bloody waste of a hundred perfectly good years, it was the fourteenth century. Crowley wouldn’t go back to the fourteenth century for anything. He’d drive through a dozen rings of hellfire around London, walk barefoot over miles of consecrated ground, he’d navigate a rainstorm where every tenth drop was holy water before he ever returned to the fourteenth century. 

And yet, on this particular Tuesday as he sat hunched over in a booth in the corner of the grottiest pub he could find, leaning heavily on the bottle of Talisker clutched in his hand and pretending—poorly—to read the newspaper, Crowley found himself recalling those damp and endless years of the fourteenth century with a sort of gentle nostalgia. 

Ah, the fourteenth century, he thought to himself. Those were the days. 

He’d barely even known Aziraphale then. 

A bell over the doorway sounded a cheery little tinkle as the door opened to admit a new patron. Or rather, nothing even remotely of the sort happened because there was no bell over the door. This was very much not the kind of establishment to have a bell over its door, much less one that sounded a cheery tinkle. That was one of its principal attractions, in Crowley’s opinion, the lack of a tinkly bell. Tinkly bells meant something terrible was coming and so when the patron whose arrival it heralded sat down in the seat across from him he did his best to ignore them. 

He failed.

“Good morning to you, Mr Crowley, sir,” chirped the voice of Muriel, former 37^th Order Scrivener and current proprietor of the A.Z. Fell and Co. bookshop. “Wot’s all this then?” 

“You know you don’t have to keep saying that,” Crowley said. “You’re not actually a police officer and even if you were, they don’t really say that. Well, not most of them at least.” 

“I know, sir, but I like to,” Muriel replied. “And I am still wearing the helmet.” 

“Yesss, the helmet.” Crowley forbore to mention that Muriel was hardly fooling anyone in a pure white version of a police constable’s helmet. That would require far too many complicated explanations with which he was in no fit state to grapple and most of which would sail right over the daft angel’s head in any event. Instead he said, “What news?” 

“News?” echoed Muriel.  

Crowley ignored the throb in his temples. “Yes, news,” he snapped. “The news that you have for me. The reason you are here, invading my space and imposing upon my privacy.” Muriel’s expression remained uncomprehending. Crowley abandoned his quixotic attempt at subtlety. “What’s going on in Heaven?” he hissed. 

“Oh, right that news!” Muriel laughed. “I’m so glad you reminded me. It’s big!” 

“Yes, and what is it?” enunciated Crowley, with particular emphasis on the t’s. 

“The Archangel Aziraphale”—Crowley barely suppressed a flinch—“is returning to Earth! And he’s bringing with him… a friend.” 

“Friend?” Crowley snarled. “He doesn’t have friends. I’m his only—” He clamped his jaw shut before the humiliating words could escape. 

I’m his only friend.

Except he wasn’t, though. Aziraphale had made that very plain. Crowley’s devotion, his loyalty, his—he couldn’t even think the word—none of it was reciprocated. One tiny crumb of approbation from the Metatron and Aziraphale had turned his back on a partnership sixty centuries in the making. That was all it took. 

So no, he wasn’t Aziraphale’s only friend or indeed his friend at all. But apparently someone else was. 

“What friend,” he demanded, so harshly that even Muriel looked taken aback.

“I don’t know,” they said, “but whoever he is, he’s important. Heaven is very keen that he should get a nice welcome when he arrives.”

“Oh I’ll ‘nice welcome’ him, all right,” Crowley muttered. 

“What was that, sir?” 

“I said—oh never mind.” It didn’t make sense even in his whisky-addled mind. “What has any of this got to do with me?” 

“Oh! Well it doesn’t? I suppose? But you did ask me to tell you if I heard anything about Aziraphale. And I heard this! About Aziraphale! So I came to tell you.” Muriel’s brow wrinkled. “Was that wrong?” 

“I did tell you to do that, didn’t I.” Crowley sighed. He really ought to mind what he said whilst deep in his cups, and not to take laudanum in mixed company. Never mind that any company these days was preferable to his own.

He looked over at the kind, sweet, vacant face of the angel sat across from him and said, “Well, thank you, Inspector Constable, you have discharged your duties admirably.” Muriel beamed. Crowley scowled and looked away. Some company was preferable to his own. “Now piss off.” 

“Yes, sir! Pissing off right away, sir!” chirped Muriel, and when Crowley looked up again they were gone. 

-

The “friend” in question was soon revealed to be none other than the Second Coming. Or so he claimed, and claimed it far and wide. Aziraphale claimed it too, and lent all the considerable weight of his new celestial authority to the support of this man and his rapidly increasing ministry, the crowd of half-witted sycophants who began to follow him wherever he went. Crowley lurked at the back of it one afternoon in Trafalgar Square, as inconspicuous as he was capable of being, listening as the man preached a message of hope and peace and tolerance and love. It was inspiring, or it should have been. 

But Crowley was a demon though and through, despite what Aziraphale had once claimed to believe. Human rhetoric didn’t land on him. He was a demon and what was more he knew Aziraphale—friends or not he knew his angel. Knew him well enough to clock the tension in Aziraphale’s jaw and his shoulders, the lines of strain around his mouth and the carefully neutral expression in his eyes. 

When Aziraphale was happy his face was soft, his eyes eager, his smile bright as the sun. Though his posture remained perfectly correct, the movement of his hands always betrayed his feelings. They would flex and wave and flutter and Crowley would watch them, half-listening to Aziraphale’s chatter, just enough to give an appropriate response, while the rest of his mind imagined those hands doing things to him that would shock the angel to his very core. 

But now, as Heaven’s anointed prophet preached his message of global harmony, Aziraphale’s hands were still. They hung at his sides, limp and unmoving. Not so much as a tug at the waistcoat or smoothing of lapels. It was downright unnatural. It was wrong. 

Crowley’s angel was so miserable he all but radiated it and though Crowley hated him now—yes, hated, he did—one couldn’t simply spend six thousand years having someone’s back then not care at all when they landed themselves in the soup. 

Or at least, he couldn’t, damn it all. 

Chapter Text

It should have been far more difficult to get close to Aziraphale. He was the Supreme bloody Archangel now, thought Crowley crossly, he should have better security. You wouldn’t have caught Gabriel keeping such lax standards. No one would have been able to just walk in on him. 

Yet the bookshop had barely any protections at all and Aziraphale was staying there again, although his prophet, so Crowley’s informants informed him, had a suite at the Ritz. Crowley strode right in through the bookshop door, past Muriel where they sat at attention at the desk and up the winding staircase, down the hall and up to the door of the small sitting room that was Aziraphale’s most private space. 

He draped himself against the doorframe, casually, the very picture of nonchalance, and watched as Aziraphale scribbled away in a leather journal whilst pretending not to notice him. Crowley permitted this indignity for forty-three point seven seconds precisely then he drawled, “Angel.” 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale replied in his primmest tone. He held out for another twelve point nine eight seconds before turning his head. When he did their eyes met, just for the space of time that exists between heartbeats, but Crowley felt the impact of it like an elephant gun to the chest. 

There was a space in his chest, he’d discovered, a hollow little nook just below the ribcage, where he ached whenever particular things happened. When he’d thought Aziraphale was dead, for one. Or when Aziraphale had chosen Heaven over them. Or, more recently, while reading the novels of Jane Austen, purely for curiosity’s sake of course. To really get into the mind of the genius behind the Clerkenwell jewel heist. Who, as it turned out, was rather a dab hand at the old novel writing as well. A woman of surprising talents, that Jane. She got him in the nook every time.  

What an asinine thing it was to fall in love. Crowley pressed the heel of his hand against the ache, as Aziraphale returned his attention to his journal. Obscene, wretched business. He should never have done it. Though to be fair, the thing had been set in motion some millennia before he’d even clocked what it was, and yeah it had taken Maggie and Nina’s blunt advice to get him actually to put a name to the thing and yes, that clever bit of Jane’s about fixing the hour, the spot, the look, the words… in the middle before I knew I had begun…  had made him feel rather better about being so stupidly slow on the uptake, but still.

Asinine. 

Crowley may understand now that he’d been falling in love with Aziraphale for thousands of years, that it had probably been a done deal from the moment Aziraphale confessed to giving away the flaming sword, but he didn’t have to like it. And he definitely didn’t have to let it win. 

“Surprised to find you here,” he said now, firmly ignoring the persistence of the ache. “I’d have thought you’d be taking advantage of your prophet’s suite at the Ritz.” 

“Yes, well.” Aziraphale did not look up from his journal. “That suite was paid for by one of his followers. It’s fitting that he should stay there but I mustn’t take advantage. It’s important to be seen to be humble.” 

“Be seen to be, oh yes quite. Far more important than actually being humble, isn’t it? One must keep up appearances.” 

Aziraphale huffed. “Why are you here, Crowley?” he said waspishly. 

“Oh, you know, just thought I’d pop in for a chat—” 

“I believe we said it all at our last meeting.” 

“—ask after your health, that sort of thing.” 

“Well as you can clearly see, I’m fine. So you can go now.” 

Crowley regarded him through narrowed eyes, a tactic rendered useless by the sunglasses he still wore. “Are you, though?” he asked. 

“Am I what?” 

“Fine.” 

“Of course I am!” 

“Oh? Have you told your face?” 

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean.” 

Crowley ripped the sunglasses from his head and levelled a look, one that even Supreme Archangels would feel in their marrow bones. “Aziraphale, I stood in Trafalgar Square this afternoon and watched you up there behind your prophet with a face like someone had just burned down your favourite Parisian crêpe… er… shop.” 

“It’s called a crêperie,” said Aziraphale, in his terrible French accent. 

Crowley waved the hand that held the sunglasses and re-levelled the look. “Whatever. Point is, you are the Supreme Archangel. Heaven plays by your rules now. This is everything you’ve ever wanted, you should be ecstatic.” 

Aziraphale squirmed beneath the look. “I am,” he said. 

“You’re not. Don’t lie to me, angel. You’re not good enough at it.” 

“I rather think I’ve become quite a talented liar,” Aziraphale retorted. “Your demonic influence on me, no doubt.” 

“Who have you been lying to recently, then?” Crowley demanded. “The Metatron? Your prophet? Yourself, when you tell yourself you’re happy?” 

“I am happy!” 

“No you’re not.” 

“Crowley, please.” Aziraphale’s lip began to quiver. “The very last thing I need right now is for you to—you can’t just come in here and—and—” 

It was the minutest of advantages but Crowley seized it with both hands. “And what?” he pressed. “What can’t I do? Challenge your preconceptions? Shake your complacency? Rile you up? Pretty sure that’s what I’ve been doing for as long as we’ve known each other.” 

“Well, stop it!” 

“No.” 

“Crowley!” 

“No. Talk to me, angel. Tell me what’s wrong.” 

“It’s not—there’s nothing—I—” Aziraphale’s face crumpled. Tears sprang into his eyes. He tried to blink them away but one escaped and rolled down his cheek. Crowley did not stride across the room then to take his angel’s face between his hands and gently wipe that tear away with the pad of his thumb, but only because he had the doorknob clutched in a white-knuckled grip in order to prevent himself from doing precisely that. 

“Oh, Crowley,” sobbed Aziraphale, wringing his hands. No longer limp and lifeless at his sides, they were all but blurs of motion, heralds of Aziraphale’s distress. Crowley could have sobbed himself, from the sheer relief of barely seeing them. “It’s all just so dreadful,” Aziraphale went on, and Crowley forced himself to focus. “I don’t know how it happened. I had such marvellous plans for change and for good, but—” 

“But they didn’t correspond to the Metatron’s plans, I’d wager,” said Crowley. “Or God’s probably.”

“No, not to either. I’m little more than a—a figurehead. They make it sound like I’m not, but I am. What’s that human expression? The one they use when someone tells you what you want to hear but has no intention of ever following through?” 

“Lip service?” 

“That’s the one! They’re lip servicing me! They pretend to care about my ideas and want to carry them out, but every time I just find myself doing what they want instead. And as for this Second Coming business, oh. Oh Crowley.” 

Crowley, who had valiantly held back a snicker at lip servicing no longer felt the slightest desire to laugh. “Bad, is it?” 

Aziraphale nodded. His distress was palpable. “You remember the flood?” he asked. 

“Indeed I do.”

“This will be worse. There’s so many more of them now.” 

Crowley’s blood ran cold. “More of what?” he demanded, though he read the answer in Aziraphale’s wide eyes before the words had even left his lips. 

“Humans.” 

“No.” Crowley shook his head. “You don’t mean to say that God… no. No. Not again.” 

“Again. Anyone who doesn’t follow the prophet.” 

“But that’s going to be nearly all of them!” 

“That’s rather the point, I fear,” said Aziraphale miserably. “The idea is that those who remain will be somewhat more… malleable… than the majority of the current population.” 

Crowley felt gobsmacked. He realised he had never fully understood the word ‘gobsmacked’ before but by Satan he did now. “But that’s just… that’s… it’s… Is that really God’s plan?” 

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “Straight from the top. It’s—” 

“If you bloody say ‘ineffable’ I won’t be responsible for my actions.” 

“Terrible, is what I was going to say,” replied Aziraphale. “The plan is terrible.” 

That was—well, it was big. Any criticism of the Creator from Aziraphale was huge. It did nothing though to stem the flood of Crowley’s anger. “And yet here you are,” he spat, “just carrying it out, regardless!” 

“What was I meant to do, Crowley? It’s God!” 

“You were meant to come to me!” Crowley snarled. “You are always meant to come to me!” 

“I didn’t think you’d want to see me.” 

That stemmed the flood. Crowley snapped his jaw shut. 

“After the way we left things. Last time.” 

Crowley had nothing to say to this. There were many things he wished to say but when he tried to summon them no words would come. 

“Do you know what the worst part of all this has been?” Aziraphale asked in a low voice. 

“There’s something worse?” Oh, there were his words. He could have done with those a moment ago. 

“Well, not worse in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but worse for me.” Aziraphale’s active fingers toyed with the cap of his pen. “It’s that up there, I have no one. Ten thousand angels and I’m all alone. Not a single entity on my side. No one to trust. No friends.” He looked up. “No… you.” 

A choked “I—” was all the response Crowley could produce. He cleared his throat then managed, “I’m here now.”   

With deliberate movements, Aziraphale replaced the cap on the pen, set the pen down on the journal, and stood. He drew himself up primly to his very correctest posture and gave the hem of his waistcoat a tug. “I’m not going to do the dance,” he said. “I know you probably think you’re owed it and you’re probably right, but I’m not going to. This is bigger than the dance.” 

“Are you apologising, then?”  

“I am. I’m so dreadfully sorry, Crowley. I was wrong. To trust the Metatron, to expect you to want to go back to Heaven. Not even to consider how such a request must have looked to you. I knew it I think, from the moment you left, and ever since then I’ve wanted… I wanted to tell you… er, that is to show you… Um.” 

“Spit it out, angel.” 

Aziraphale drew a deep breath followed by a short exhale. “Right. I wanted to do this.” 

He crossed the room to where Crowley stood frozen, unable to move an inch, not even if Heaven’s hosts themselves descended from Above and tried to make him. Aziraphale halted, mere inches away but miles too far. His hands fluttered in the scant space between them, hesitating for a moment, then with deliberate care he placed his palms on Crowley’s chest, the right one just above his heart.

The same heart which then leapt, alarmed, into Crowley’s throat and lodged there. 

“You don’t have to, you know,” said Crowley, more harshly than he’d intended. It was difficult to speak with a heart in one’s throat. 

“I know I don’t. I want to.” 

“Why?” Crowley croaked. “What’s changed? The last time you could barely stand to look at me after—” 

“The last time I wasn’t ready. I told you, sometimes you go too fast for me. Also, you’re a demon! It’s against the rules!” 

“And now? I’m still a demon. It’s still against the precious rules.” 

“Sod the rules,” said Aziraphale sharply. His expression shifted into one Crowley had never seen on his face before, determined and very nearly reckless. ‘I don’t care to follow them any longer. I’ve seen how they get made.” 

“That’s turning your back on Heaven, angel.” 

“It is. As you turned yours on Hell.” 

Hope was choking Crowley now, alongside his foolish heart. “So it’s just you and me then.” 

“Yes. You and me.” 

“Against all the rest? Heaven, Hell—” 

“Against them all. On the side of the world.” 

The widest, giddiest grin split Crowley’s face. Surely the most asinine grin that face had ever worn. His heart soared out of his throat to take a few drunken turns around Aziraphale’s head before settling back into his chest, content at last. 

“On the side of the world,” he vowed in return. 

The nervous tension drained from Aziraphale and he smiled too, not a grin on his face but a beam, sunshine bright. They stood like that for a long moment, smiling into each other’s eyes, until Crowley remembered. 

“Angel?” he said. 

“Hmm?” 

“Didn’t you come over here to do something?” 

“Oh!” A tinge of pink crept into Aziraphale’s cheeks. “Yes. Er. Um. I meant to, ah… How do I…” 

“Just do it, love,” Crowley murmured. “Just—” 

He was cut off by Aziraphale’s lips on his. 

His mind went blank, then began to race. He had no idea what to do with his hands. He was intensely conscious of Aziraphale’s flexing against his chest, fingers tapping, but could find no place for his own. They flailed through the air until at last he fixed upon the brilliant strategy of clenching them on the back of Aziraphale’s coat and holding tightly. When he did, Aziraphale made a little humming noise in the back of his throat and moved closer. 

Crowley felt feral. He felt like an inferno, barely contained. He felt that it was high time he introduced Aziraphale to certain other pleasurable activities in which the human body could partake, which did not involve eating or drinking. Or at least not as such. 

The bedroom in the bookshop, he thought, but no, Muriel was downstairs. The Ritz—but the Second bloody Coming was there. His flat was also a no-go; though he’d reclaimed it from Shax his plants would never fear him again if they witnessed the appalling way he would surely behave should Aziraphale ever touch him skin to skin. And of course the Bentley was resolutely out of the question. 

He was just compiling a mental list of London’s posh hotels ranked according to 1) proximity to the bookshop, 2) bedframe sturdiness, and 3) capacity for suiting the tastes of a highly finicky angel, when Aziraphale, with a happy little sigh, ended the kiss. 

Crowley opened his eyes to the sight of his angel, cheeks blooming like roses and eyes aglow. With the tips of trembling fingers he touched his lips, then sighed again. He looked like the sort of thing Jane might write about, all blissful radiance and blushing innocence and definitely not inclined to sneak away for illicit shenanigans, not on the page at any rate. Crowley watched helplessly as all his lustful fantasies disintegrated in the air and fell as dust at Aziraphale’s feet. 

“That was simply lovely,” sighed Aziraphale. “We must do it again sometime.” 

“Oh we shall,” Crowley growled. “Very soon.” 

“Of course, my dear.” Aziraphale gave his chest an affectionate pat. “Just as soon as we’ve saved all of humanity from a terrible fate.” 

“I’ll make a note of it in my diary,” said Crowley drily.