Chapter Text
Crowley once again found himself standing, for the first time in years, in the middle of the once familiar bookshop. Alone. Only it wasn’t just familiar, it was precisely as he had remembered, from the day he left, for what he thought would be the last time. It was untouched. A thick layer of dust is the only change. Evidence that the bookshop’s once diligent owner had also not visited in all this time. The thought left a hollow, sombre feeling within Crowley.
A few years ago, the idea may have filled him with a sharp pain, deep within his chest. Now any feelings associated with the shop and its once heavenly host were blunt and dull. The old wound opened so many times that the Demon was now numb to its presence.
Crowley had returned; rather begrudgingly, back to this painful place at the request of a certain angel, whom he also hadn’t seen since that fateful day. After all, it was a busy life being the 37th-degree recording angel scrivener.
Although by the look of it; not doing a very good job, Muriel had been left in charge of the shop since the Metatron had appointed its previous owner as the new Supreme Archangel. A notion that once sent a nasty chill down Crowley’s spine, nowadays it barely did anything to dampen the demon’s permanently sour mood.
The bubbly, yet naïve angel, had left a rather vague note under one of the window wipers of the demon’s prized black Bentley. Upon first reading the note Crowley had half the mind to give a one-fingered salute towards the heavenly kingdoms, before throwing the offending piece of paper into the nearest rubbish bin and setting it ablaze, all while exclaiming loudly that ‘if he wasn’t already, he would be damned before he spoke to another angel again.’ But Crowley was a curious creature, and this time, curiosity had gotten the better of him.
So, he listened to the note and followed its instructions; asking him to meet Muriel inside the shop on August 25th, at precisely 14:30. Well it was now 14:48, with no Angel to be seen, and Crowley’s already paper-thin patience growing ever thinner.
The note was a ruse, and little did Crowley know that the actual angel who had requested to meet him had been dead on with his time, but upon seeing the sulking demon pacing through the bookshop window, had been overcome with a sense of warmth and meaning they hadn’t felt in years. The intensity of these feelings stopped the angel in his tracks, and he found himself lacking the necessary courage to make the final steps across the street and into the shop. So instead, he spent the last eighteen minutes staring longingly at what he now truly believed to be the most beautiful of all of God’s creations.
He stared for another two minutes, after which he started to notice steam pouring out of the very cross demon, Aziraphale finally decided to ‘bite the bullet’, as humans would say and made his way into the bookshop.
Taking a deep breath as Aziraphale opened the door to steel his nerves had been a mistake, as quickly as he drew in the stale musty air of the dust-caked shop, he had spurted it back out again in the form of a rather violent coughing fit. One that hadn’t gone unnoticed by the shop's other sole occupant.
Crowley was about ready to leave the bookshop in a steaming mass of fury when a sudden burst of coughing caught his attention. He spun around menacingly, and a string of strong words sat on the tip of his tongue ready to lash out at Muriel for keeping him waiting for so long. The words however became caught in his throat once he’d turned around and took in the source of the coughing. Not expecting to find that it wasn’t Muriel by the door, but in fact, the last being in Heaven, Hell or Earth that Crowley wanted to see.
His blazing, annoyed fury quickly turned cold and dark. Behind his signature sunglasses, Crowley’s eyes narrowed eerily as he stared down the source of all the inner torment that he had suffered all these years.
The angel had barely changed, but that didn’t surprise Crowley. Aziraphale had hardly changed his hairstyle in all the years that Crowley had known him, and his attire in well over one hundred years before that dreaded day, surely even glorious Heaven couldn’t get Aziraphale to part with his favourite coat, and short curly locks.
Recovering slowly, hunched over with hands on his knees, Aziraphale looked up to the sight of the demon; as tall and as handsome as he had remembered, Aziraphale smiled. He pulled himself together enough to take a few shallow steps forward. Crowley took a sharp, guarded step back, and in the angel’s ignorance, he mistook the action as one of disbelief and shock.
They stood there quietly for a while, each taking in the other's presence. One observes the other with a look of awe and regret, the other, emotionless and calculated, the dark frames hiding all intentions behind the owner’s eyes.
“I’m back.” Aziraphale broke the silence, using one of Crowley’s old lines when they had had a disagreement in the past, as a way of breaking the ice. Crowley didn’t respond.
Swallowing back a lump in his throat, Aziraphale pushed on.
“Er, you look well. I see you’re still wearing your hair short.” The angel remarked with a nervous chuckle, hoping, praying that Crowley would soon respond. He was once again met with silence.
“Come now Crowley, surely we can move pas..”
“No!.” Came a curt reply, cutting Aziraphale off. The angel stared in disbelief, his mind wandered briefly back to a high cliff top, where an angel and a demon were surrounded by a small herd of goats.
“No?” He repeated.
“Whatever it is you want, I don’t care, the answers no.” Crowley all but growled.
“I-I I don’t want anything!” Aziraphale exclaimed franticly. Crowley bristled, taking another step back. Alarmed at the negative turn of the conversation, the angel decided to just say what he needed to, afraid that Crowley might leave before hearing him out otherwise.
“Look Crowley, I meant it! I’m back, really, for good!” He rushed out, moving a step closer to the demon for every step he took back, hoping to close the physical distance between them.
“You were right.” Another step. “As much as I tried I could never do anything to change Heaven the way I wished I could.” And another. “Every time I tried, the Metatron or Michael would quickly shut me down.” Another. “They were all suffocating me, in the end, I was nothing more than a glorified signer of paperwork!” Aziraphale shivered, 6000 years and he still couldn’t stand paperwork.
Steeling himself again to look Crowley in the eye, he took in the demon once more. At some point, he had stopped moving backwards away from Aziraphale and had decided to accept his fate at the hands of the angel. A fact that filled Aziraphale with newfound confidence, he closed the distance almost completely and spoke all the words he held deep in his heart.
“And, and I missed you, Crowley. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of you and the life we built for ourselves here on Earth.” Images of cosy nights cuddled together on a sofa in the bookshop and candle-lit dinners at the Ritz filled his mind with love and passion. “The thought of you pushed me to keep trying, to build a better Heaven for the two of us. In the end, I realised it wasn’t enough. I don’t care if Heaven is good or perfect, without you there, it all meant nothing.” Tears streamed down Aziraphale’s cheeks, each word he spoke lifting a weight from both his shoulders and his heart.
With one last deep, shaky breath, and a dopy smile the angel took the final plunge in exposing his true feelings.
“I love you, Crowley.” With one final half step Aziraphale closed the distance between them. Cradling Crowley’s face tenderly in his hands, he pressed a feather-light kiss upon the demon's lips. Aziraphale released a content sigh. He had spent so long replaying the feeling of Crowley’s lips in his mind that Aziraphale had begun to fear that the reality of those lips would be outshone by a mere memory of them. He was wrong. With each fleeting moment of the kiss, the angel rejoiced in having the physical feeling of them once more. So, with every subtle movement of their lips and each tiny caress of Aziraphale's thumb upon the demon's high cheekbone, the Angel poured hungrily 6000 years of repressed admiration and love.
It was Crowley once again who broke away from the kiss first, pulling back slowly, drawing a soft whimper from the angel at the loss of contact. With the loss came a warm acceptance, which Aziraphale recognised as the last of Heaven's cold, suffocating presence draining from him, and was happily replaced with the warm and homely embrace of Crowley. Aziraphale beamed at the feeling.
Fantasies of a quiet life in a small cottage where an angel and a demon could simply exist as an ‘us’ filled his senses. So, with a soft and loving smile, he repeated; with extreme confidence, his soul-accepting confession to the demon who he had slowly come to realise meant more to him than the entire world.
“I love you.”
“Don’t bother.”
Aziraphale’s world shattered.
He stood there in disbelief. Didn’t Crowley understand what he was saying? He loved him. He chose him! He left Heaven for good to be with him, so why, why wasn’t Crowley happy? Wasn’t this what the demon had wanted? For them to be an ‘us’.
Aziraphale just couldn’t understand, but if his mind hadn’t been so full of thoughts of tiny cottages and quiet lives then the angel would have noticed the angst and torment that painted Crowley's body. He would have seen the barely noticeable tremor of the demon's shoulders, so small that only someone who knew Crowley in and out would have been able to tell. Someone who at one point would have been Aziraphale himself.
He would have caught the faint glistening of moisture that hugged the edges of Crowley’s shades, still hiding his true feelings, even from the one whom he once would have dared to bear the deepest parts of his forsaken soul.
But alas, Aziraphale didn’t notice these things, as he was too caught up in his daydreams to notice the reality that he had created. For their last parting had left a permanent scar on Crowley.
He had closed himself to the world and resigned himself to the angel's rejection. So high were the walls that he had built around his heart that any thought of acceptance from Aziraphale left him numb and bitter.
The kiss the angel had initiated, and the promise of something more sent a bolt of lightning through the demon’s system. However, this wasn’t the lightning he had watched about on screen. Where there is a young couple kissing under a canopy; sheltered from a sudden rainstorm, the kiss igniting a spark of fire under their skin and desire in their hearts. No. This lightning hit Crowley like a bucket of ice water was tipped over his head.
While the angel was trying to show the demon that he meant more to him than the flawed system for which they were both created, to Crowley, the confession was nothing more than Aziraphale confirming his deepest fears. That the angel had failed in his attempt to change Heaven and so decided to go back down to earth, back to Crowley, as a last resort. Crowley wasn’t enough the first time around, and now he was nothing more than a backup plan.
A fresh crack formed in Crowley's already crumbled heart. The kiss didn’t bring a promise of a new life together for Crowley, it was a cruel tease of what could have been between them if he was good enough for the angel and a reminder of what he knew they couldn’t have. Not while Heaven was still a threat, and not now that Crowley’s shattered soul was; at least to himself, beyond repair, even by the hands of his once beloved angel.
For years he had craved Aziraphale's love, and a part of him still does, but the demon had just enough self-respect left within him to not sacrifice what little remained of his former self to a being who had only loved the angel he once was, and not the demon he was now.
With no energy left in his broken mind to argue with the angel, Crowley stood emotionless, barely taking in Aziraphale’s stricken expression of the formers weakly whispered rejection.
When he did finally move; he brushed past the angel, so slowly that one might think that the left side of his body was gripping onto Aziraphale, betraying Crowley, begging not to go. He slinked past the mounds of books; a cold déjà vu enveloping them both, as Crowley left Aziraphale standing alone in the bookshop once more.
Only this time, Aziraphale had determined, would be different. He wasn’t going to stand cowardly by and watch his demon counterpart leave again. Aziraphale knew that he couldn’t handle losing Crowley for a second time. Erasure from the Book of Life would be kinder. So he pulled himself out of his shock and despair and chased after the demon.
Only this time it was different, but not in the way Aziraphale had hoped. Instead of finding Crowley leaning against his beloved Bentley as he imagined he would, Aziraphale was greeted by a whimpering car. Abandoned by its owner. Nowhere to be seen.