Chapter Text
He doesn’t stay away. He can’t. It hurts to be in the bookshop without Aziraphale, but it hurts worse not to be there at all.
He’s been living out of his car, but the bookshop has still been his home.
Aziraphale was his home.
But the shop’s close.
It’s what he’s got.
He lasts about a week before he starts going through Aziraphale’s things. He buries himself in Aziraphale’s old clothes and he closes his eyes as tight as is demonically possible, as if he could stop the tears from leaking out. He wishes he had Aziraphale’s coat, his favorite coat, the one that would smell like him, would be so imbued with him, and yet, if the only thing Aziraphale has now is that coat… Does it carry memories for him, when he’s without all his sentimental gewgaws? Does he think of Crowley at all, now? Does he think back to that time in Tadfield? Has Crowley’s disastrous confession shed new light on that day and his willingness to cater to the silliest little requests?
He wears Aziraphale’s cologne. He drinks coffee from Aziraphale’s cups and licks his teaspoons. He aches over the lack of him, the way he once felt the sudden and shocking lack of the Host. He craves every piece of him left behind.
And then… he finds the diaries.
“All right.” He groans, holding one in his hands. “If you’re up there– I know you’re up there. Whole problem, isn’t it? You’re up there. Question is, Aziraphale, are you listening? If I call your name, does it matter? Can I even reach you? Look, if– if you don’t want me to read your diary, just come and stop me!”
He waits. Holds it aloft, looking ceilingward. He waits a while.
There’s no sign.
Today was lovely, and it felt as if such a weight was taken from my shoulders, though I had not been aware that I was in misery. I had thought all was ordinary, but then it was as if clouds broke overhead, and the sun shone for me alone. I felt a most perfect peace.
And do you know who was to blame? Oh, I could not possibly tell you!
The date means nothing in particular to him. As much as Crowley would like to fill that teasing blank in with his own name, there’s nothing he can point to that he knows he did. They were both living in London already when this diary was started… but at the time of this entry he hadn’t done a thing for Aziraphale. He’d only gotten back to town, he hadn’t had the chance to do anything for him. He does recognize the date of the next entry not to be a run-down of a particularly good meal he’d had, that one jumps right out. He doesn’t know if he wants to know… but he’s committed himself to this little offense and curiosity has always been his mortal sin.
He reads on.
Crowley and I have fought. It would be wicked of me not to, I suppose, if only it were that kind of fight.
He vexes me sometimes! That is all I mean to say, he vexes me and I wish we had not, but he would not listen to me, and I fear that this idea of his will only end in heartache.
Well… considering how he remembers it, that’s not so bad, really. And the following entries will fill him in on what Aziraphale did, during the time
I’ve been keeping busy, of course, diary. Lots of good works. Unopposed. I’m taking French lessons, keeping busy, you know. I said that, I suppose. Oh, but it has been slow.
Right. He’d taken French, when they’d been… when Crowley had been sleeping off the better part of a century. Been proud of it. Still is– was. Is? Bet the other angels don’t think much of it, they all just decide to know a language and do, more or less. They wouldn’t get the dedication. The point of it. He’d done it the easy way back before French was French, but the modern stuff, he’d…
He’d wanted to keep busy, apparently.
Learning the art of prestidigitation. I’m enjoying it so much. I really do feel as if I’m doing quite well. I only wish
I’ve been to a marvelous party. I couldn’t have liked it less.
Today
There’s quite a jump between entries, after that. From somewhere just before the turn of the century to 1941. He should put the diary down.
He doesn’t.
I am too full of feeling. Crowley! It has been so long and I had feared so much, and diary, he was so gallant.
Here is where I must admit my own foolishness, and I should have been keeping you updated about the whole business, excepting the top secret parts. Suffice to say, there was a spy ring, and I was approached about a number of books
Yeah. Crowley remembers that well enough. He skims a bit, looking for his own name, he thinks that’s understandable. The rest of the whole thing… he doesn’t need the rehash of events, or any of Aziraphale’s feelings about having been fooled. Soppy, naive angel… what are they doing to him now, he wonders, now that they’ve fooled him?
No. Better not to think about that. Looking for a paragraph he features in, that’s what he’s doing.
So you can well see how I might be moved. After all these years– oh, I know it’s not even been a century, but still! So slow a span of years!-- it’s so good to know he is still the same Crowley I’ve missed! He won’t be thanked, as you know, or praised, not in so many words. I’ve long known that, but can you blame me for forgetting myself? He was put out with me for it, of course, but not too very put out. He was so very sweet about everything and I
No, this is my personal diary, it isn’t Heaven’s personal diary. And if they get their hands on it, then I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. I won’t omit the truth.
Diary, I love him.
I love him!
Well, what the H– what the H– what the some-bloody-place is that supposed to mean? Crowley sits at the desk frowning down at the page a long moment. Loves him? Loves him? Loves him?
No. Not possible. And he knew then? But he can’t mean it… he can’t mean it romantically. He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t have done what he did, if he– Would he have? They’d have gone off together. If he loved him, he’d have gone off with him, they’d be together now, stretched out on a picnic blanket on an unassuming little planet zipping around a beautiful binary star, and he’d be saying ‘you know, I made that one’, and Aziraphale would be saying ‘yes, I remember, it was very nice, I thought’, and they… Well, he doesn’t know, they’d kiss, maybe. A real kiss, a good kiss, one Aziraphale leaned into and returned. He’d have returned it! He’d have been anything other than broken by the attempt, horrified… horrified to be loved the way Crowley loves him. It’s not the same kind of love, it can’t be.
I am not ashamed of loving him. I could never be ashamed to love him, indeed I am proud to. Diary, I know he is a demon, and I know when he has upset me, I have written unkind things about him before, but you’ll understand those were the product of a moment’s feeling. He couldn’t cut me so deep if it weren’t so.
All these years, hundreds and thousands of years, it must have come so gradual I didn’t know it, or else it happened so long ago the feeling didn’t have a name. Love.
I am not ashamed to love him, only afraid. I will put it down here, though if the wrong eyes see it, I fear punishment. What are the odds of anyone seeing it? But Crowley?
He already fears Hell, and for good reason, no doubt. I did write about what happened in Edinburgh, and he has not told me what occurred after, I only know when next I saw him, he was afraid. And I told you of the fight we had then.
My poor, sweet Crowley, where I may yet Fall, there is only destruction before him if he goes a step too far. And torments unimaginable if he displeases them not quite enough for that, but enough.
What he asked me… I still can’t, I can’t bear the thought. Even before I could name this feeling, I couldn’t bear losing him. Certainly not being the very engine of his destruction! I would go to my own before I could ever bear his. If I could keep him safe by any other means, I would.
He can never know… of course I fear the loss of his friendship if he does not love me, but oh, diary, suppose he does? He could. He might.
And I could be the death of him. I am not so naive to think our association won’t be a threat to him if there are stirrings of trouble in Hell.
I love him, I love him so terribly, and any sign he may love me back thrills me, but they won’t stand for that. Heaven won’t stand for it, of course, but if they knew him as I do, they would understand, he is…
He is better than Heaven.
If I am punished for that, too, I still stand by it. I’ve known it for so long. He loves the world and all the people in it with more Righteousness and Mercy than any angel in Heaven, I know it. He understands the world and loves it, and so I love him.
If it was possible to be together… maybe I could tell him then. I think he cares enough for my friendship not to hold my feelings against me if they can’t be returned, it’s only the danger it would put him in… there’s nowhere we can be with each other but here, and by playing the game. To change the rules now invites danger.
He’s everything to me, though, and if I can never speak of it to anyone, I will write it down here. He is the world to me. We have shared it for so long.
He doesn’t understand. How can Aziraphale have felt all this, thought all this, and still gone with them? How could he have written that he thinks Crowley is better than them, and gone back to them when Crowley was asking him…?
It’s bitter and he wants to scream. He wants to fling the diary across the room, he wants to break things.
He doesn’t. He sets it down, and he gets up from the desk, and he goes outside.
He takes off and he flies until he finds a rock out in the middle of the sea that can’t even be called an island, without even a boat in sight, and then he does scream. He screams and he falls to his knees, and he beats at the ground with both fists until the stone is dented from it, and he tears at his clothes, which were only ever spun out of his own thoughts anyway and can be repaired just as easily. He thinks about not repairing them. He’d kept this shirt, though, he’d been wearing it the night Aziraphale… He’d kept it after that night, when Aziraphale came to see him, and if he hadn’t been in love with him before… But he couldn’t admit it. He could ask for his time and his attention and for favors, and demand the right to do things for him in turn, but he couldn’t call it what it was.
What if he could have?
Maybe it wouldn’t change anything. Maybe they’d both just be… afraid, all those years. He’d have only been cagier, Aziraphale more anxious, the both of them circling around this unspoken thing knowing it could doom them both, but…
But what if? What if he’d eased into it better, over the years? What if he’d known exactly what Aziraphale meant, all those times he couldn’t quite say the words, what if he could have shown he got it? What if that kiss could have been… what if it had been anything but goodbye?
He lays down and dangles a hand into the boiling sea– it’s only, at least, boiling very locally, he’s pretty sure any whales had the wherewithal to get the someplace out of Dodge before all the lightning and steam and sulfurous heat. He’d notice if he’d boiled a whale. A seagull gives him a pretty rum look from a safe distance, but that’s fine. Seagulls are naturally aligned with Hell, he thinks.
The bubbly little angel is there, when he gets back to the bookshop. Mercifully not too bubbly, at present. They offer him a cup of tea, he teaches them how to make it. They both just sit there and stare until the cups go cold.
Crowley flops out into a bed he doesn’t think Aziraphale has ever slept in. He doesn’t know how long he’s out for. Not long enough.
And the diary is there, when he does wake. Well, a diary is there. It’s not the same volume, it’s one more recent.
Damn me for a fool, I’ve done it. I swore I wouldn’t, and now I have.
Crowley will be careful, of course. I’ve done the damned thing, so now he has to be. But I am sick with worry. I know what it is to feel truly sick now.
The thing of it is, he was so… he was so, with me, and I could feel him look at me as if he could…
‘I could’, he wants to shout. ‘I did’, even– he hadn’t named it, then. Not out loud, not on paper. He’d seen it, for a moment, and said it was impossible, he should have opened himself to it then. He’d come so close and pulled back too hard, would it have mattered?
Maybe not. Because apparently Aziraphale has loved him all this time, and it didn’t make a blessed difference. He’d gone. Crowley’s alone.
Crowley has asked to see me, and I don’t suppose I should, but I also don’t suppose there was ever any doubt. He’s been very mysterious about it.
It has been a while. Of course my feelings are unchanged, it’s only difficult. But whatever it is he has planned for tomorrow, I’m excited for it.
I’ve stocked sufficient copies, I think, of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I’ve been thinking it would be good, to do some brisk business in new books again, and that it might keep people from looking at my books. It’s just been a while since I’ve kept up with that sort of thing.
I cannot tell him to his face, so I will say it here, but Crowley is simply the nicest and the kindest and the sweetest old thing, and he flatters me terribly.
I don’t know what I think of the mustache. I think he is quite handsome with a neat beard, which he wears now and then when they’re in fashion. I would not say that I dislike it, just that he’s always gone without so it’s very new. Anyhow, he was perfectly lovely yesterday, so that I almost could have pretended… We’re going to the symphony on the week-end. I know it’s not a ‘date’, but diary, it feels very like one.
He remembers the mustache. He remembers the symphony, for that matter. And the picnic where he’d presented the tickets, because things had been so… Things had been off, ever since the bloody holy water, like Aziraphale couldn’t help but look at him and see a smoking puddle of demonic goo. He’d get teary at odd moments and he just needed time to get over it in the end, but Crowley had hated that it was weird and fraught and he’d just wanted to fix it.
They’d both hated the symphony, actually, but then they’d talked all through the night about ones they thought were better, started comparing composers and performances. Argued in that familiar, good-natured way about modern music Aziraphale didn’t like. He’d sold him on a couple modern songs, though most of Aziraphale’s tastes when it did come to modern stuff had been horrible. Soppy stuff, if you could even bring him later than the nineteen-fifties. Hell, if you could bring him later than the eighteen-fifties. But… but that, too, had been familiar, he’d been fond of Aziraphale’s soppy tastes. There were things, too, that they both found downright saccharine.
He sets the diary down with a sigh and rolls over, and tries to sleep.