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Every other time he’s been asked, Crowley has laughed.
And he has been asked, countless times in countless eras, nations, and languages, in voices ranging from sweet to searching to threatening. Half the time he’s played along, for convenience or to put off an advance or to goad someone nasty into testing him. “Sure.” An easy chuckle. “That’s my angel. We go way back.”
It makes no sense that he can’t laugh when Nina asks. Or rather, suddenly it makes no sense why he’s ever laughed.
He used to laugh because asking whether he and Aziraphale were “together” was like asking whether two bowls of noodles were chivalrous: not only was the answer unclear, it was entirely orthogonal to the point of their being. Sometimes people asked whether Crowley was “interested” in Aziraphale, which was a bit like asking whether a wind chime was tinkling while a tornado ripped down the whole building.
The thing the humans really wanted to know about was the human thing of dating or being in a relationship or having a crush. Small and inconsequential feelings, someone’s body liking the look and smell of someone else’s body, and the two of them getting on for as long as they could before they got sick of each other. Even when humans tried to talk about the bigger feeling—commitment, romance, love—some of them were in and out of that every week! It didn’t come close to explaining the feeling of piecing your own shattered existence back together over six thousand years using another being as the glue.
Right?
Maybe it’s because he’s been thinking so much about humans in love recently, or maybe it’s Nina’s insistence, but suddenly he’s not as certain as he once was that they’re comparing apples to elephants. Maybe he’s just got a very, large, grey, wrinkly apple?
No, that’s ridiculous. Humans who ask this sort of question expect an affirmative answer to mean all kinds of silly things, like sex and anniversaries and shared toothpaste.
“It’s not like that.” That is the correct answer to the real question, the sex and toothpaste question. It’s also not entirely truthful, because they are frequently together, and they are philosophically together on their own side. But how can a mortal understand the impossibility of that strange new possibility? Nina has never felt the cold, dispassionate love of heaven, all-encompassing and all-accepting, eternally placid when faced with the destruction of nebulae and the suffering of humans. And she doesn’t know the greedy groping emptiness of hell, starved for affection and clashing against the very foundation of the universe in hopes of a moment of recognition. Two creatures made of such stuff were never going to… they could never be…
Happy. Settled. Together.
If he really believed that ‘never,’ he would still be laughing. That’s the whole problem. Hadn’t they proved…. Something or other, just a few years ago? Didn’t Aziraphale’s love stick harder to all the things he didn’t want to lose, and didn’t Crowley’s hunger finally start to quiet when he sat and watched his angel eat? Weren’t they moving toward a shade of grey? Another path? Something earthly and delightful?
Humans, you had to hand it to them, were a lot cleverer than demonic or divine beings. Maybe Crowley was wrong, and maybe he and Aziraphale were “together,” or something close to it, and Nina was a caffeinated sage, a coffee shop prophet, seeing the truth Crowley’s mouth stumbled to deny.
“Is the bookseller your bit on the side?”
Nina was an idiot. Humans made everything foolish and inconsequential, even things that were precious, things that should be revered. Aziraphale would never, and he told her so, even if he half-realized he wasn’t helping his case.
Unlike most of the heavenly higher ups, Crowley was there when sex was first being invented. He wasn’t involved with the project team itself—he would have opted for a more practical design, something that looked a bit cooler when you did it—but he had been in the room when the basic concept was introduced. He remembered particularly liking the sort of firework-y brain bit, excited nerves and nice chemicals and all, but in the end the whole concept was patently absurd.
As absurd as drinking wine or eating ox ribs. As absurd as listening to music to calm your nerves or blazing down a highway to excise your pain. He experienced all sorts of absurd things with his nearly-standard-issue human body. Aziraphale too.
He’s lost the thread of this conversation. He’s lost the thread of the sidewalk under his feet. His mind is at the Ritz, in Job’s storm-besieged basement, in a creperie in Paris. He’s on a bus at night with Aziraphale’s hand in his, terrified and elated that the world—that the angel—is still here. He’s being ripped apart by a tornado and he’s suddenly noticed that, yes alright, the windchime is chiming like anything.
“But then again, other people’s love lives always seem so much more straightforward than our own.”
He doesn’t have a *love life*. He has a tortured eternity that he turned into a hard-won period of near peace. He has an angel who calls him and annoys him and infuriates him and most importantly talks to him. He has a feeling, one that he shoves deep down behind his standard-issue but usually empty stomach; a feeling that he used to wear proudly on his face when he stared at the stars and the light and the beauty of creation, but now he knows how dangerous that feeling is.
Humans are clever, making up a language where “love” always goes along with “fall”.
Crowley fell. Of course he did. And maybe he’d misunderstood what humans had been asking him all those years. Maybe it didn’t matter about the anniversaries or the sex or even the toothpaste. Maybe those things were the trappings, not the substance of the question.
He’d thought no mortal being could understand. He’d assumed he was carrying hundreds of odd mismatched emotions and preoccupations, an embarrassing mess of sentimentality and need that would never fit anywhere. Could it be that they were all pieces of one wholly simple puzzle? Could it be that it wasn’t strange to feel exasperated when he was with the angel and adrift when they were apart? That it wasn’t at all mysterious that he found himself involved in schemes he didn’t believe in, situations he’d rather avoid, buying lunches he didn’t care for and doing favors he should have rejected with severe prejudice?
Of course. He did it all for a reason. And the humans had a name for that reason. And unlike the higher ups Above and Below, Crowley knew how to keep up with the times. He wasn’t going to reject an explanation just because the humans had come up with it.
Crowley was in love. Had been for ages.
It did explain an awful lot.
And now that he knew that, maybe it could give him some guidance on what he and Aziraphale should do next. He had some odd bits of ideas buried deep behind his stomach. An alcoholic breakfast. A nice cottage somewhere.
It might take some time—he needed at least a year to process this revelation, and undoubtedly the slow-moving angel would want a full decade to think it through properly—but they could start. After the newest Gabriel drama was sorted, he would start working up the nerve to bring it up. He was sure that he and Aziraphale would sort it all out. After all, they were… something. A team. A group. Group of two.
Humans had a name for that as well, didn’t they?
A couple.