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It’s waiting.
There’s a pressure behind his eyes. In his throat. Under his ribs, in his chest where his human heart beats, because that’s what human hearts are supposed to do. It’s pushing up against his soft palate, up through the back of his nasal passages, to the edges of his eyes, to his temples, there on the edge of his human brain, which is supposed to think, because that’s what human brains are supposed to do.
(But his can't. Not right now. Not yet.)
It’s in his lungs when they expand. It’s still there when they contract. It makes them harder to expand, and easier to contract. It makes it difficult to get oxygen. Which human bodies need, to live.
It’s there, it’s everywhere, and it’s waiting.
For what, he’s not sure.
He had sat for a long time in his car, just driving, driving to nowhere in particular, giving it a chance. It didn’t take the chance for some reason, and so he decided to stop driving, conveniently, at a pub, and to go inside and have a drink while he gave it another one, along with a bit of alcohol to maybe help grease the way.
He drank all night, until closing, and still it had waited.
So he drove some more. He drove by their old haunts. To that restaurant the angel liked, just out of town, because he said they had the best wiener schnitzel this side of the Channel. To the museum in that old church, the one that he de-consecrated all by himself just so Crowley could go in with him, so that he could show him an old photograph labeled ‘Fishmongers at Dawn,’ which wasn’t two fishmongers at all, but the two of them one morning when they’d met at a market to discuss a blessing and temptation for the Arrangement. To the town of Tadfield, through the streets, past the old convent and the airbase, and past Adam Young’s house down Hogback Lane. Out beyond, south, to the country lanes and long rolling hills and grassy knolls and the cottage that Aziraphale had pointed to once and mused about how it might look, all fixed up, with a garden of roses out front.
Still, it had waited.
Now he’s back in London. He’s back because he drove there automatically, because he can't think straight, because he can't get any oxygen, because he’s letting his muscle memory rule his body right now and because he doesn’t know where else to go. He’s parked in front of the bookshop, and he’s looking up at it.
Surely, it can’t wait anymore. Surely this will put it over the edge.
He stares at the double doors of the entrance. He sees the sign is set to Open. He sees customers going in and out, and he sees Muriel, smiling, probably giving away books, just giving them out, because they don’t understand how shops work, or how currency works, or how Aziraphale had spent centuries collecting the books that are in there—collecting them, curating them, caring for them—and they’re not for anybody else but him .
“Come on,” Crowley mutters to the thing that is waiting, drumming his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel. Just get it over with. Just get it bloody over with, already.
It doesn’t listen.
Now he’s getting angry. He’s getting pissed off. He’s grinding his teeth together. He’s gripping white-knuckled on the wheel. He's working himself up on purpose, to some extent, because maybe that will help too, maybe any kind of emotion will help, even rage.
It continues to wait.
Maybe he should go back in there, he thinks. Maybe he should shout at Muriel. Maybe he should hurt their feelings, maybe it would make him feel guilty, and maybe that might do the trick.
(He doesn’t want to. He’s desperate.)
He turns to open the door of the car. He glances over his shoulder, out the window, to make sure no one is coming—
(It’s automatic, the way he looks out for people.)
—and that’s when he sees Maggie and Nina in the coffee shop.
They’re smiling. They’re leaning close. They’re looking at something that Nina has spread out on the counter, and their shoulders are touching. Maggie says something and she points, and Nina laughs, and Maggie looks like she’s just been plugged into a blessed electrical socket the way she lights up. Her blue eyes are alight and sparkling with the pleasure of having made the person she cares most about in the world laugh that way.
Crowley’s forehead drops against the window. His hand is still on the handle of the door. He tries to take a breath, but the pressure is too tight, it’s squeezing, and all that he can manage is a gasp, there against the window, where there is barely any air to begin with. He exhales and condensation crowds around his nose, dampening the skin on his upper lip.
It’s not waiting anymore.
Crowley groans into the cold glass. It’s a creaking, guttural sound, like deep cracks splitting solid concrete. He tries to breathe again. He fails. He curls down, his hair scraping over the edge of the door, down in on himself, between the hand that is gripping the door handle and the other hand that is clawing at his chest, at the place where the pressure is greatest, so great that it’s pain .
He whimpers, muffled into his shoulder. He closes his eyes.
Crying is an interesting thing. It’s a physical manifestation of emotion, just like the pressure in his heart and his lungs and his throat and behind his eyes and on the sides of his head. It’s a marvel, it really is, how the line between physical and emotional is so blurred in human beings, how it isn’t really even a line, it’s an integration, you can’t have one without the other. They rely on each other, the physical and emotional, they feed off each other. They live off each other, they cannot exist alone. They help each other.
Crying helps, Crowley knows. He’s done it enough fucking times.
It’s almost a relief when it comes. He sobs into his shoulder, into the space between his body and the door to the car, and it almost feels like rest. Even if it hurts, it feels almost good. Comparatively, anyway. Compared to how he had felt before.
He cries for a while. Loudly, shaking, his face wedged so firmly between his shoulder and the door that he knows his skin will have marks on it later. His eyes will be red, itchy with crusted salt; his nose dripping, mucous coating his lips. He’s not sure why all the leaking is part of the whole deal, but it is, and it’s a comfort now, having been in a body for so long and knowing how these things work. Because he knows what will come after, and it will be some kind of peace.
He hopes. God— someone —how he hopes it will be peace.
And it is, in a way. When he finishes, the following exhaustion is a sort of peace. There isn’t any pressure anymore, for starters. He feels heavy, but heavy the way one feels after a long sleep, waking up slow on a cold winter morning, wrapped up in a heavy quilt with pale gray light coming through the cracks in the blinds. Yes, it’s still the middle of winter. It’s still cold. But at least he has this soft bed to lie in, this calm after the storm, this warm human body with its silly leaking nose and eyes, wrapping him up, like a quilt, like a comfort.
(What comfort does Aziraphale have, now? What does he have, up there, without a body to hold him like this?)
Crowley sits up straight. He runs a hand over his face, wiping off his eyes and his nose with his palm and then with the other hand too, with his fingertips in the drying saltwater under his eyes. He sniffs a few times, and he leans back in his seat. He breathes in deep and he lets it go. Oxygen floods his lungs, his blood, his brain.
"Okay, then," he says. "Alright."
Time to think.