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Aziraphale, his mind whirling with joy and surprise, scarcely feels his feet touch the ground as he practically floats back across the road. He hasn’t had wings for thousands of years and yet he feels as though he could fly. He beams his way into the bookshop.
Maggie and Nina have come in while he has been out, he notices with faint surprise. He sees that Crowley is still there and his happiness threatens to bubble over. He scarcely hears what the two women say as they leave.
“We’re just going,” Maggie says, and her voice has a gravity that pulls on his attention for a moment, before it returns to Crowley. “I’m sure you two have a lot to say,” Nina says, sharply, but not unkindly. The closing door blocks off the sunshine and the way it echoes, dimly, the ineffable, golden light of creation. Aziraphale sighs.
Crowley is pacing, in trapped, tight circles. His sunglasses are on, and Aziraphale feels a faint swell of concern as he rips them off. The demon’s eyes are wide, desperate, wild. “Look. Um. I suppose, I’ve got something to say,” he begins, and Aziraphale feels a gentle rush of affection, a small wave on a calm, sparkling sea. He puts up his hands, his smile turning up the corners of his mouth, I’ve got something to say too. The demon doesn’t notice, his eyes darting to Aziraphale’s face, and away again, his hands wavering through the air like a pair of tired, uncertain wings. “I know we ought to be talking about it. It’s probably best if I start off doing all the talking and you do all the listening. Because if I don’t start talking now, I’ll never start talking.” Aziraphale puts his hands out again, gestures more emphatically, let me speak, Crowley, I have something to say, but unaccountably, Crowley ignores him. The wild desperation on his face grows as his shakes his head, forcing his words out. “Right. Yes. So.”
Aziraphale can bear it no longer, his surge of concern lost in the waves of happiness that continue to break over him. He steps forward and puts his hand out, unable to wait a second longer. “What’s that lovely human expression? Oh yes! Hold that thought.” His joy emerges in a small laugh, and Crowley’s mouth twists, an exasperated curl he recognises from millennia of arguments. He beams. “You see I, oh, I have some incredibly good news. To give you.” His hands unfurl in front of his face, wings preparing for joyous flight.
“Really?” Crowley says, his voice a skeptical rasp.
Aziraphale feels a rush of fondness for the familiarity of the demon’s exasperation. His tongue trips over the words in his eagerness to get them out, and his hands are a flutter of nervous, eager wings. “I um, so I um, the Metatron, you know, I don’t, he’s as bad a fellow, well, I, uh, I think I might have misjudged him. You see, well, Gabriel, obviously, hadn’t worked out as supreme archangel and commander of the heavenly host. And he asked who I thought should take over, now that Gabriel was gone. And I said, Michael?”
His memory flashes back, the humans on the street going about their fleeting, gossamer lives in the sunshine. The Metatron’s hands were almost a pair of great wings, folding.
"Oh, don’t be silly. No no no no. There’s only one candidate who makes even the slightest bit of sense, and that’s you."
“And I said Me?” Aziraphale is pleased with how well his retelling captures his note of pleased surprise. “And he said,” and he’s back in memory, at the table in the sunshine, basking in the light of the undivided attention of someone so close to God Herself.
“Well, yes. You’re a leader, you’re honest, you don’t just tell people what they want to hear. It’s why Gabriel came to you in the first place, I imagine.” Aziraphale can hear gentle, amused sureness in the Metatron’s voice. “She has plans afoot, enormous projects, and I will need you to run them. You are just the angel for the job.”
“I,” Aziraphale stutters, overwhelmed by the intensity of the Metatron’s regard. "I don’t want to go back to heaven. Where would I get my coffee?”
The Metatron’s fingers twist round each other, and Aziraphale is reminded of feathers rustling in a light breeze. “As supreme archangel, you would be able to decide who you wanted to work with. I’ve been looking over your previous exploits and I see in quite a few of them, you formed a de facto partnership with the demon Crowley. Now, if you wanted to work with him again, that might be considered irregular, but it would certainly be within your jurisdiction to restore your friend, Crowley, to full angelic status.”
Aziraphale retells the end of the conversation with a flourish. He fancies he has almost echoed the quiet resonance, the promise, of the Metatron’s final words. Dimly, he registers that as his own human body, his own human-seeming face, has opened like a flower to the sun, Crowley has stilled. Tensed. A warning coil, like the snake he once was. “He said what?”
“He said I could appoint you,” Aziraphale carols, “To be an angel! You could come back! To heaven. And everything! Like the old times. Only even nicer!” The pitch of his voice rises in his excitement, the memory of Crowley as an angel, Crowley the mother of stars and maker of galaxies, his open, joyful wonder at the music of the spheres. You’re gorgeous, Crowley had said, and Aziraphale felt himself numbered among the wonders of the new universe. He laughs aloud with the joy of remembering.
“Right,” Crowley growls, and Aziraphale’s smile widens. “And you told him just where he could stick it then.”
“Not at all,” he falters, his smile wavering.
“Oh, we’re better than that! You’re better than that, angel! You don’t need them; I certainly don’t need them!” Crowley’s voice has risen to a shout, and he circles away, his steps a tight, angry coil, his voice the dead, dry rattle of a snake about to strike. “They asked me back to hell, I said no! I’m not rejoining their team, neither should you!” He swings back around to face Aziraphale, and his hand flies up. His thumb stabs back over his shoulder, an angry, human gesture he’s seen Nina make, telling a difficult customer to get out at the end of a long day.
Get behind me, foul fiend, Aziraphale remembers, and his smile brightens again. “Well, obviously you said no to hell, you’re the bad guys. But heaven!” He spreads his hands, echoing the way he once spread his wings. “It’s the side of truth. Of, of light. Of good.”
Crowley’s thin lips have drawn back over his teeth as Aziraphale speaks, his thin red eyebrows meeting in a scowl. “When heaven ends life on earth it will be just as dead as if hell ended it.” He spits the consonants at the end of his words. “Tell me you said no.”
Aziraphale’s mouth opens and shuts in helpless surprise, and Crowley steps forward, his gaze locked on the angel’s face. “Tell me you said no,” he pleads, and Aziraphale thinks of the thousands of humans he’s heard in thousands of years on earth, praying for a miracle that will not be granted.
“If I am in charge,” Aziraphale says gently, “I can make a difference.” He intends for his voice to match the surety he feels, but it wavers.
“Oh god,” Crowley groans, the sound ripped out of him, and spins away. He tips his head back. Aziraphale’s eyes follow the line of his throat. The demon swings around to face the angel, shoving his left hand halfway into his pocket, and crushing the fabric in his grip. His right hand flails at his side, and Aziraphale remembers the swan with a broken wing he saw when he walked away from Crowley after an argument in Saint James’ Park, the sheer wrongness of the bent and broken feathers. “Right, okay, Right,” he says. “I didn’t get a chance to say what I was going to say, I think I’d better say it now. Right, okay, yes, so.” He sighs violently and lowers his gaze.
When his head comes up, it is with a jerky mockery of his usual slow and sinuous grace. “We’ve known each other a long time, we’ve been on this planet for a long time. I mean. You and me.” Crowley raises his hand, extends two fingers. Pauses, shifts in a helpless twisting that reminds Aziraphale of a snake trapped in its old skin. “I could always rely on you. You could always rely on me. We’re a team. A group. A group of the two of us. And we spend our existence pretending that we aren’t.” There are tears in Crowley’s voice, but not his eyes, as he looks at Aziraphale. He tips his chin back before he starts speaking again, forcing down the waver in his voice, and his gaze darts across the ceiling and to the side as though he cannot bear to see Aziraphale’s reaction to what he is saying. Crowley swallows hard, and Aziraphale’s eyes fasten, helplessly, on the small snake next to his friend’s right ear. “I mean the last few years, not really.” The clock ticks three times, thunderous in the silence, as Crowley gathers the breath to force out his next words. “And I would like to spend,” but his voice is shaking too hard to keep speaking.
With a harsh growl, the demon clears his throat, looks out the window, sighs. Aziraphale blinks, distracted from his own good news by Crowley’s anguish. “I mean, if Gabriel and Beelzebub can do it, go off together, then we can.” He gestures over his shoulder in a gesture Aziraphale recognises, with a stab of fondness that overcomes his mounting concern, as the one he has used thousands of times to clear their favourite table at the Ritz of diners or dirty dishes. “Just the two of us. We don’t need heaven, we don’t need hell, they’re toxic! We need to get away from them, just be an us!” His ragged voice drops to a whisper and rises to a shout. “You and me, whaddya say?”
Aziraphale shakes his head, desperately, and strides forward. His momentum carries him farther than he meant to go; he’s stepped close enough to Crowley to feel the demon’s breath on his cheek. Crowley, at least, is still remembering to breathe. Aziraphale is sure he hasn’t breathed since Crowley began talking, but he’s pleased to that his voice sounds with its usual resonance. “Come with me! To heaven,” he urges. “I’ll run it; you can be my second in command.” His control of his voice slips, and he discovers why Crowley was whispering, earlier. “We can make a difference,” and the susurration of his words hides the tears in his voice.
Infinitesimally and incomprehensibly, Cowley has leaned back, and Aziraphale feels the absence of his breath with a sense of loss that surprises him. “You can’t leave this bookshop,” he says, quietly, and Aziraphale’s voice breaks at last. “Oh Crowley,” he says affectionately, his breath catching as he draws it in. “Nothing lasts forever.”
Crowley nods, slowly, as though Aziraphale has said yes to a question he didn’t know he was asking. “No,” he says, and Aziraphale has never seen, and never wants to see again, the look he blinks out of his eyes. Crowley unfolds his glasses and brings them up to meet his lowered face. “No, I don’t suppose it does,” he says quietly, and puts his sunglasses on, inside the bookshop, for the first time that Aziraphale can remember. The peculiarity of it makes him smile, and with a sudden, desperate flash of hope, he wonders if Crowley has understood at last.
The demon lifts his chin, stepping past his angel with a pale shadow of his usual grace. “Good luck,” he says, and turns to go.
Aziraphale’s smile shatters. “Good luck?!” he repeats, in disbelief, and follows the retreating demon towards the door. He cannot have misunderstood this badly. “Crowley! Crowley, come back! To heaven.” Crowley stops, and turns, so Aziraphale can see him in profile, the silver of his tie a faint spark in the gloom. “Work with me! We can be together. Angels!” Aziraphale pleads, raising his hands in supplication. “Doing good.” His voice rises as the demon refuses to turn towards him. “I need you!”
Crowley doesn’t turn, doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t say anything, and Aziraphale is suddenly, viciously, mortified by his own desperation. This cannot be happening. “I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you,” he says sharply, covering his embarrassment in fury. A very human thing to do, but this whole conversation has been entirely too human, when the point, the whole point, is that they could be something else.
Crowley looks at him at last, and even with his eyes hidden by his glasses, his gaze radiates despair. “I understand.” He nods. “I think I understand a whole lot better than you do.”
Aziraphale nods back, attempting to summon the look of merciful lovingkindness an archangel should always have. “Well,” he tries to smile, “Then there’s nothing more to say.” His smile slips from his face, and he swallows, hard.
Crowley points up, and there is a note in his voice Aziraphale has never heard before. He sounds as though he is damned for all eternity, and has just realised that fact. “Listen. Hear that?”
Aziraphale is, abruptly, furious again. How dare Crowley despair, when he isn’t damned and doesn’t have to be. He listens impatiently. “I don’t hear anything.”
“That’s the point.” Crowley’s raised hand shakes slightly, and he lowers it. “No nightingales.”
In the quiet that follows Aziraphale thinks of the moment before the heavens opened and the Flood began, when the earth itself seemed to hold its breath, Crowley’s horror at the Almighty’s wrath still ringing in his ears, his own certainty in divine mercy profoundly shaken.
“You idiot,” the demon says, and Aziraphale thinks that, like the Flood, his existence will forever be divided into a time before, and a time after. “We could have been,” Crowley’s voice catches, “us,” and he can’t bear it, he can’t possibly bear it. He turns away.
There is the sound of footsteps and a sudden rush of motion behind him, like the sweep of a great wing, and Crowley grabs him by the lapels of his coat and slams their mouths together. He makes, he thinks, some small noise of surprise, and then he cannot think. He cannot breathe. He has seen humans kiss, has seen them thrill with love and arise to open to one another, with a benevolent and pleased disinterest. His mouth is most sweet, and he is altogether desirable, was lovely, and nonsense. Then.
Now, Crowley’s mouth is a flash of fire, the very flame of the Lord. His hands tremble over the back of his friend, and he grips Crowley’s shoulder with his left hand to keep his balance, and sets his own mouth against the demon’s, strong as death, and reaches blindly for what should be the edge of the demon’s wing. Crowley steps back so abruptly they both stagger.
Aziraphale’s mouth burns in a way he has never known it could, and for several breaths, he can do nothing more than sob. He has forgotten how to form words, and his first try is a wrecked, garbled noise. It might be anything. It might be the start of the word you. He breathes, wets his aching lips, tries again. “I forgive you,” he manages, at last, his voice trembling.
His eyes cannot leave Crowley’s mouth, his parted lips. The demon sighs and turns away. “Don’t bother,” he says, and Aziraphale’s soul fails him. The bell lets out a violent peel as Crowley jerks the door open, but he closes it so gently its usual sound is muffled.
Aziraphale stands, trying and failing to breathe. He puts his hand to his mouth, touching it in dazed wonder, and that makes everything worse. His hand is not Crowley’s mouth. His lips sting with absence and his thoughts will still not coalesce into words. He sniffs, sharply, and removes his hand from his mouth as the door opens.
He has successfully swallowed a sob when the Metatron enters, but turns away to hide his face and wipe his eyes.
“How did he take it?” the Metatron asks and Aziraphale scrubs his eyes with his hand, fiercely. You idiot, echoes in his ears.
The Voice of God politely ignores Aziraphale’s distress, which calms the angel more than any attempt at comfort would do.
“Uh. Not well,” he replies with composure, and a laugh that might even be partially genuine. Not well is, after all, actually quite a humorous way to describe a conversation in which Crowley managing to take the cherished, never-spoken dream of Aziraphale’s heart: that they could, together, make heaven what it ought to be; smash it; and then grind the pieces into something beyond recognition or repair by kissing him.
The Metatron responds to the joke with a friendly, philosophical expression, and wanders through the shop. Aziraphale feels his heart lift slightly. “Ah, well, always wanted to go his own way,” the Metatron says, looking around at the shelves. “Always asking damnfool questions too,” and this is so painfully accurate it startles a laugh out of Aziraphale. “Right. Ready to start?”
His voice is still friendly, with the ineffable, inexpressibly comforting reassurance of eons upon eons of divine authority behind it, and unaccountably, Aziraphale finds himself backing away, Crowley’s voice echoing in his ears. You’re better than that.
“I, but, I,” he blinks, swallows, is pleased he can manage to keep his voice steady before the Voice of Heaven. “My bookshop.”
Something flares in the Metatron’s eyes. “Ah, yes, well for now, I’ve entrusted it to Muriel.” He turns and points to the window, where the angel, still in their touchingly improbable police garb, waves enthusiastically. Muriel looks so young, and so eager, that Aziraphale feels his heart lift. “So it’ll be in good hands.”
And yet, Aziraphale still finds himself walking away from the Metatron; his feet have unaccountably carried him to stand in front of the clock, where Crowley stood when he pleaded for them to run away together. “But, uh,” he gabbles, memories of the demon’s words breaking over his head like waves.
“Anything you need to take with you?” the Metatron presses.
“No. Nothing I can think of,” Aziraphale begins, and the memory of Crowley’s mouth on his threatens to drown him. He looks out the window, sees a car that looks so like the Bentley his heart stops in his chest. “I think I—” he begins, and breathes. Crowley left, after everything Aziraphale offered him. After everything he said. I need you.
Crowley left, and he has the chance to put Heaven to rights. He straightens his coat and smiles at the place that has been home of his heart for the happiest centuries of his existence. “Nothing at all.”
The Metatron walks around the corner with Aziraphale towards the Dirty Donkey and the lift to Heaven. He speaks while they walk, and looks straight ahead, so Aziraphale deliberately turns neither to the right nor the left, and does not let himself look for the car that could be the Bentley.
“Well, I can’t think of a better angel to wrap things up,” Metatron says jovially, and Aziraphale feels a warm sense of satisfaction unfurling within him. He will set Heaven to rights, so help him God. “And to set into motion the next step in the Great Plan.”
Aziraphale faces the Metatron, keeping his eyes on the other angel’s face, deliberately suppressing the instinct to look for and greet the shopkeepers and regulars of what is no longer his neighbourhood. “Um, yes,” he smiles, and feels unaccountably nervous. When heaven ends life of earth, he hears Crowley spitting, and squashes the memory before he remembers the rest of the sentence. “You mentioned that. Can I know what it is?”
“Well,” the Metatron says, and the word is oddly drawn out, as though he is distracted by catching sight of something behind him. “It’s something we need an angel of your talents to direct. An angel who is familiar with how they do things on earth. We call it the second coming.” The Metatron turns, and walks into the open elevator. He lifts his eyebrows in invitation.
Aziraphale turns his head for a last look back before he can prevent himself. The car that looks like the Bentley, is indeed the Bentley. He can just pick out the fact that the back seat is overwhelmed with plants. Helplessly, his eyes fasten on Crowley who stands, one arm resting on the roof of the car, one hand shoved into his pocket, watching him. He expects Crowley to respond—a sarcastic wiggle of his fingers to wave goodbye, a dramatic turning of his back, but the demon simply stares across the street at Aziraphale with a focused regard that the angel can feel like hands grabbing the lapels of his coat.
He breathes, and smiles at the Metatron, and steps into the elevator. The Metatron presses the button, and an ineffable voice says “Doors closing. Going up.”
Aziraphale swallows something impossibly between a sob and a laugh, and inhales deeply as the elevator goes up. He is the Supreme Archangel and he will make a difference.