Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Present Day, Soho

“Crowley? Is everything alright?” asked Aziraphale, peering at Crowley over the biographies in his arms.

Déjà vu. Émile Boirac described it as an abrupt sense of familiarity that impresses upon the waking state. St. Augustine called it a false memory. Plato, who believed that souls transmigrated from one body to another, might have called it a precognition from another life. 

Crowley was no philosopher. He lacked their verbiage. He knew souls did not migrate. And he never met Boirac or St. Augustine but he had gotten drunk with Voltaire once, which basically made him just as much of an expert on the philosophy of the supernatural as the rest of them.

Plus, you know. Demon. If there was anyone that could speak to what déjà vu was, it was the occult being that had once talked to God Herself and was currently perched on the armchair of a certain angel’s bookshop, sipping from a glass of cabernet sauvignon. What it was — what all the rest of it was (silly words humans gave to things they didn’t really understand, like the big bang theory and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) — was fiction. An imaginary thing. Fiction based on dreams and memories, maybe, but certainly not false memories, and certainly not past lives.

And yet.

And yet, decided Crowley, who had been watching Aziraphale shelve his collection of Ernest Hemingways, thinking of how those words had been turning stubbornly in his head ever since their bus ride from Tadfield, I have been here before.

No, not the part about being in the bookshop, drinking wine, watching Aziraphale — nothing strange about that. This had become their regular Tuesday (and Wednesday and Thursday and all the other days) afternoon routine in the weeks following the not-pocalypse. Aziraphale, minding the shop. Crowley, minding Aziraphale. Evidently the recent exertions had shocked them into such a routine, which was not something Crowley could ever say they had before. They didn’t have routines, they had an Arrangement. Their meetups occurred at random. Crowley thought this — whatever it was, this delicate predictability, perhaps — was their way of dealing with the startling awareness of a new life. And the trauma that followed their old one.

Something else, then, something else was familiar about all this. It scratched underneath the surface of his skin, begging to be picked at like a scab. To expose the wound, to recall what made it.

It was a compulsion, Crowley realized with sudden understanding. That’s what the déjà vu was. 

Is everything alright? Aziraphale had asked just now, voice wobbling over the Shostakovich record playing in the background. No doubt he’d caught the far-off look in Crowley’s eyes.

Crowley wondered — not for the first time — how he ought to feel knowing he could affect the angel in such a way. Stopped in his tracks. Brows furrowed with worry. Come up with something, Aziraphale had pleaded when the ground shook underneath them, or I’ll never talk to you again. It had been a heavy thing, the weight of Crowley’s fear. Laid bare before a bunch of snotty kids and the Antichrist.

But, as Crowley came to realize in the following days, Aziraphale hadn’t meant what he’d said as a threat. Hadn’t meant to strong-arm Crowley into submission.

Aziraphale had meant it as a prayer.

I have been here before, Crowley thought again with resolve. And, like the dozens of other times this moment has happened before, though he did not know how he could possibly know this, Crowley’s wrangled, reckless heart twisted with the certainty of what comes next. “Aziraphale,” Crowley said to wide blue eyes, “I’m in love with you.”

If he had any expectation of Aziraphale’s next words — and he did not, could not possibly conceive of any reaction, had never allowed himself to even imagine — it was certainly nothing close to this.

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said with a rush of breath. “Again?” 

____

2019, Tadfield

When Adam rewrote reality, and the black clouds of Satan’s constitution cleared the airfield, Crowley’s first thought was of the angel.

“Are we...safe?” Aziraphale asked from beside him. Crowley wondered when they had moved toward one another, and who had moved toward who. If he still believed in Her he might have prayed with all the relief he felt. For the briefest of moments he thought he did.

“We’re still here. We’re safe,” Crowley returned firmly, as though he could speak the words into being true.

Aziraphale examined his hands, turned them over. Looked at the sword that had stopped burning. An extension of its owner, like the tail of a dog, that had somehow known all was well and acted without being told. “Because of you,” he said in wonderment. 

Crowley turned to Aziraphale with a start, embarrassed by the gratitude fuzzing Aziraphale’s voice. “Because of Adam.”

“No, my dear boy,” Aziraphale insisted. “You bought us time. Folded us into the cosmic stratosphere. You did that,” he said, and his voice had gone low and very soft, “all because…all because I asked.”

Somewhere in his periphery Crowley was vaguely aware of Madame Tracy and Sergeant Shadwell, of the American woman and her stodgy friend, of Mr. Young and the Antichrist and the other kids, but they may as well have immaterialized with Satan for all Crowley knew. What he did know was the way his useless heart jumped to his throat. The way his mouth had gone dry. The way this moment, held in Aziraphale’s unflinching gaze, pressed upon Crowley like six thousand years of longing revealed for what it was.

Crowley had wanted to say it. Just minutes ago he’d thought he may as well. What better opportunity was there? The ground had shook. He’d fallen to his knees. Looked at the angel, his angel, and thought wildly of how this hadn’t been how he wanted it to end. Not surrounded by strangers, not on a nowhere-Tadfield air base for Someone’s sake. And altogether he’d much rather be alive. But at least Aziraphale was there, at least they could go out together. At least he could call it by name before it all ended.

It was nice knowing you, was what he’d managed instead.

Perhaps something in Crowley’s divine nature had refused to accept it was the end. Perhaps he’d thought they’d have more time together. What did death look like, feel like, to a demonic being that only ever knew forever? It was not something he’d ever contemplated.

But he also hadn’t contemplated living.

And, Crowley realized with some heaviness, now he had to say it.

“Come on, angel,” he said grimly. “Let’s get out of here, yeah?”

____

They slipped away without a fuss — Crowley wasn’t sure if the humans were too caught up in themselves to notice or if it was Aziraphale’s miracle that did it. Certainly wasn’t his own. He barely had the juice to suppress his own nausea when they plodded past what remained of the Bentley. Aziraphale gave Crowley’s elbow a sympathetic pat. 

“We’ll have to take the bus,” Crowley said unnecessarily. He knew Aziraphale hated public buses, their stop-and-go-jerking movements, the way they smelled like traffic exhaust and fabric seats. Then again, Aziraphale also hated the Bentley.

“I always liked the Bentley,” Aziraphale said as though he read Crowley’s mind. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

Crowley didn’t want to discuss it.

Somehow their feet took them to a Tadfield town bus stop and by then night had fallen. Crowley managed to summon a bottle of 1921 Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the bookshop and passed it offhandedly between themselves. Aziraphale had taken to his usual method of coping, which involved neatly splitting the bits that didn’t comport with his idea of ineffability (for one being it was by the grace of the Antichrist and not God that the Earth and all the kingdoms thereof remained standing), tucking them away, and explaining the rest as all part of the Ineffable Plan. Crowley, who had an infinite well of patience for this funny bit of subterfuge, only listened, and watched.

“I’m sure She planned it this way all along,” Aziraphale said, nodding, and Crowley knew that even as he said it, the synapses in his brain were strengthening, aligning themselves with the well-reasoned thought. “She’ll be happy it all worked out as She determined.”   

Crowley hummed. “You sure there’s still a plan?”

“What else is there?”

Crowley’s remembrance of the events from before his Fall were hazy and, truthfully, he didn’t enjoy thinking about them. But, try as he might, there were some things he’d never forget. “She could be testing us. Wind-up the universe, let it run a few thousand years, poke at it with a yardstick now and again just to make sure everything works as intended.”

“Could be,” Aziraphale agreed. “I wouldn’t put it past Her. Though, I don’t see why testing us couldn’t be part of the Ineffable Plan as well.”

“That’s just semantics,” Crowley said, waving his hand (and with it, the Châteauneuf-du-Pape). “If everything Unplanned is Planned, nothing is unplanned.”

It was a well-trodden argument, one they’d had multiple times in the past, banter without bite. Crowley did not often find himself leaning any particular way. He had no insight on the inner machinations of God. He only knew She did not speak to them anymore. He did not know why.

He supposed they both found comfort in this familiar exchange, a teasing back and forth like reading from a script. He wondered how Aziraphale would react if he changed the script. When he changed it, he determined.

The next line was Aziraphale’s: “Quite. I believe that is precisely the point.”

The line after that was Crowley’s: “Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?”

“No use for that now, I suppose. My dear, it’s ineffable.”

And now again, Crowley’s turn. He could respond tartly that if it’s truly so ineffable, how can you be so certain it’s part of the Ineffable Plan? Instead Crowley pictured the shake-up. He pictured the confession. Bleeding out of him, spilling on the bench seat in the space between them: By the way, sort of off-topic, I love you.

And Aziraphale, intaking this with clinical detachment, cutting it like a surgeon cuts a tumor: I don’t think my side would like that. If Crowley was lucky, Aziraphale might take pity on him and have the forethought to look regretful.

There was also, Crowley realized, swallowing around the thickness that clenched in his throat, there was also the we could go off together and we’re on our side. There was also the bandstand. The way the street lights had lit up, spots of wan yellow in the not-yet-dark evening, the way Aziraphale’s white-blond curls and pressed overcoat shone in the night air, the mist of his breath, the twist of the ring on his pinky finger, the there is no our side spat from his lips. There was also the we can run away together, Alpha Centauri.

Crowley opened his mouth. His line. His time. Thought finally he would say it.

“If it’s truly so ineffable,” he said, “how can you be so certain it’s all part of the Ineffable Plan?” 

____

He couldn’t say it.

He could still say it.

“By the way,” Crowley said, eyes fastened to the grab handle of the seat in front of him.

It was hard to stay upright. He might have overdone it with the bus miracle. Aziraphale probably wouldn’t even notice that he’d smoothed out the road to London and gotten rid of the funky bus smell and compelled a Handel aria to play softly over the radio, although that bit was mostly accidental. Still. He hadn’t been able to help himself. By the way, I love you.

Aziraphale stilled beside him.

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut. If he was going to do this, he could hardly do it with eye contact.

“Angel,” he tried again, willing himself to be brave. Thought of the way he held the Bentley together on the M25, the way he felt cooked in an iron skillet. The way this — the muffled darkness of English countryside, the swell of violins — seemed somehow scarier. “Need to say something. Just once.”

He hadn’t meant to leave a silence, but he did, and before he could finish it Aziraphale spoke instead and the words died in Crowley’s throat as quickly as they’d come.

“You don’t need to,” Aziraphale whispered.

Angels. Made perfect in Her image. Unquestioning. Happy to sit with enough. What would an angel know of need? Not like demons, not like Crowley — unsatisfied, spun in motion, wrung with ancient desire. The way Crowley needed was nothing like he imagined Aziraphale felt need, nothing like craving something sweet after a hearty meal or adding a first edition to a collection of other first editions. It wasn’t a thing of dos or do nots or maybe I will, maybe I won’ts: it governed him, it ate first, it was ugly, it was shameful, it laid at the foundations of what he knew himself to be.

The need was physical, a stormy thing, and with it Crowley felt battered. Each sucking breath. Each shaking exhale. The visceral awareness of his surroundings as though he’d pulled the curtains of Time and held it between pointer finger and thumb. The heat from the angel’s skin rolling off him in waves, the achy way Crowley’s heart constricted and jumped, the stimulus of it all — this time, not cooked in an iron skillet, but sizzling in a frying pan, crackling with energy, a live wire, a lit fuse. Awareness of Aziraphale next to him, caught in polite regret. Next to him, like nothing between them had changed.

“I can’t not,” Crowley bit out brokenly. How could Aziraphale still not get it? “I can’t not say it. I thought you were gone. I thought I’d lost you forever. And today, oh God —”

At the mention of Her, Aziraphale stiffened.

“We’d best not have this conversation now, my dear,” he said. “We still don’t know — well. We’re not exactly in the clear yet, if Agnes’ final prophecy is anything to go by.”

Crowley’s eyes snapped open. He turned. “Blast Agnes’ final prophecy,” he said. “You need to hear this.”

“Please don’t,” said Aziraphale, swallowing.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley begged, trying not to lose the thread. Whatever romantic image he’d pictured for this moment had gone, but he had to say it now. He had to.

“I love you,” he said. So desperately. “I’ve loved you since Eden.”

Aziraphale had turned away when he said it, as though struck by the words. Crowley wondered whether it would’ve hurt less to face the rejection outright. For a long time the angel was motionless, looking off somewhere in the distance, and Crowley thought maybe, in his embarrassment, he’d accidentally stopped time.   

“Crowley, please,” Aziraphale finally said, sounding wretched. “Please — we can’t have this conversation.”

Aziraphale was beautiful. He was so gut-wrenchingly beautiful. Did he know? Crowley watched him desperately, searching his face, the slight downward pull of his lips, the way they set in a tight line. The street lights outside flashed odd shadows across his face as they passed, but even then he was beautiful, as the lights rotated on and off his face, as something quite like anguish flickered in his features depending when the shadows hit.

“Right,” Crowley said, at length, staring at the bright underside of the bus. His voice sounded strange to him, as if it’d come from someone else. Then, again. Crowley said it again. Like the echo of it reinforced him, strengthened his will, turned it to stone. “Right, I understand. It’s okay.”

Three things happened quickly then.

First, Crowley felt the familiar, heavy fold of curtains warp around him — the opening of Time, flooding his senses with aeons of smells and sounds and memories, colours and images, and all at once, and one memory in particular, standing apart, of candles in a bookshop — and he whipped his head, confused, looking for the source of the miracle. It took an alarmingly long time — in reality perhaps only a second — to realize, second, it was Aziraphale’s miracle, Aziraphale pulling downwards, Aziraphale reaching through his metaphysical self for the energy to reshape reality, puncturing the curtain, stabbing, then suturing those same tears, effectual and needle-sharp. The force of it was so great it knocked the breath from him, and, with immense effort, Crowley gasped out, understanding all at once what Aziraphale meant to do, and the enormity of it.

Third, Crowley begged. He begged.

“Angel, please, don’t do this,” said Crowley, though he knew it was already too late. 

“I’m so sorry,” Aziraphale said, and snapped.

____

“By the way,” Crowley said, eyes fastened to the grab handle of the seat in front of him. Feeling vaguely like he’d been in the middle of a thought.

It was hard to stay upright. He might have overdone it with the bus miracle.

Beside him, Aziraphale went still.

It was funny, the way certain things got stuck in your head sometimes. A line from a song or a saying from a movie. Suddenly wedged as if planted there, even when there’d been no trigger to prompt its occasion. Right now, of all things, it was an odd feeling of precognition, which he knew humans liked to call déjà vu.

He'd wanted to tell Aziraphale something. What was it? 

“Don’t freak out when we get to my place and you see what’s on the floor,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale only nodded in acknowledgment, his eyes strangely glassy.

Chapter Text

1999, Soho

There were fewer things in life more pleasant than being the right amount of drunk, in the right state of mind, at exactly the right place and time. Double that feeling when in the presence of present company.

Well. Double everything in the presence of present company. Crowley could barely admit it sober, but here, in the booming underbuilding, pressed on all sides by partygoers and one side by a certain angel dressed in velveteen, the admission was less likely to make Crowley want to jump out of his skin and take a late-night dive in the Thames.

Not to mention the cherry on top: Crowley was very good at his job.

Setting out a temptation required a certain kind of je ne sais quoi — it wasn’t at all like it used to be in the past, a suggestive hiss in an ear or shaking a bag of shekels before some Phoenician with a grudge. Humans had gotten smarter. Angels, too. Nowadays it required setup and exposition, a whole story arc: beginning, rising action, climax, end.

Tonight’s temptation in particular was some of his best work, if he dared say so himself — he was almost the cunning devil he’d led Hell to believe, the one deserving of all those commendations he’d “earned” during the Spanish Inquisition and Great War.

He’d been laying the groundwork for months now. Leaving the radio in the Bentley to chatter on about millennium celebration this, millennium celebration that, whenever the angel sat none the wiser in his passenger seat. Then, he brought the chatter to the bookshop: perfect customers who bought nothing and brought nothing but perfectly pleasant conversations about regency romance novels and sleight-of-hand magic and — oh? Haven’t you heard the buzz surrounding the new millenium?

Gloria Estefan. Multimedia shows. Auckland to Rio. Samba and soca. Satellite link-ups, whatever that meant. Synchronized fireworks lit from the sea.

That alone wasn’t enough. Generally Aziraphale hated noise and hustle-bustle, and his idea of a good time did not usually involve screaming a countdown at the top of his lungs. But what he did like — or at least, could be convinced to tolerate — was the idea of participating in Important Events. Of occasional dabbling in the temporariness of humans, who, braving short lives, made Pride and Prejudice and orchestral music but also lasers and video towers.

(So, Crowley had gotten him appropriately drunk earlier that evening. The hype outside the bookshop grew steadily as the night wore on. “There’s a party,” Crowley said, as if he’d only just noticed.

“We’ve seen plenty of those yet,” Aziraphale parried.

“This one’s different. This one only happens once every thousand years.”

“We’ve also seen plenty of those.”

Crowley pressed on, unperturbed, swimming through the fog of his vision to focus on the thread of the angel’s desire.

“There’ll be fireworks,” he said. “Souvenir postage stamps for your collection. The countdown of a generation.”   

“I do like fireworks,” Aziraphale finally said, which Crowley already knew. Of course he knew. Hook, line, and sinker.

“Come with me, then,” Crowley hissed.)

The key to a temptation was this: the temptee had to want to want it. The desire must begin with them — the heat, the fuel, the oxygen, come together for a fire. Crowley never bothered to tempt when the desire wasn’t already there. In fact, half the fun was finding the right seed, not planting it. Once found, his job would begin: an indirect nurturing, a laying out of pathways the temptee hadn’t even realized were options. Then, the tipover. Occasionally, the subtle, mazy magic Crowley utilized for the occasion wasn’t even needed.

Which, taken altogether, meant —

Meant Aziraphale wanted to be here. Here, pushed up against Crowley, sweat-sticky curls pointed this way and that. Someone had spilled their drink on him right when they’d entered and steam hadn’t even come out of his ears.

They were ringing in the new year together. Like they had a thousand years ago. Like they had a thousand years before that. 

So, there was that, then. Crowley was very good at his job. And Aziraphale wanted to be here.

The syrupy feeling, the one that came bundled with thoughts of Aziraphale that Crowley worked harder than any temptation to suppress, returned all at once, and it coiled tight and warm in his chest. 

“Drink?” Crowley half-shouted, half-mouthed over the music.

“Shots, I think,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley grinned, like a shark.

The two made their way to the bar (slowly, lest they encountered any more open containers of beer swung around by overly enthusiastic cheersings) and took two empty stools in the back corner, which Crowley soundproofed for the angel’s comfort. He ordered for them. Tequila, because he fancied themselves as rowdy young things tonight, or young things insofar as a demon was concerned. He watched Aziraphale down his shot in one swift motion, make a face, and set the glass down like he’d drunk poison and was trying hard not to appear upset about it.

Crowley laughed, moved by the effectual quality of it all.

“Something frou-frou with an umbrella, please,” Crowley called to the bartender, his way of an apology. “Two, actually.”

“I am beginning to think,” Aziraphale started, his voice a muzzy timbre, “that this whole thing has been part of an elaborate plan you cooked up, and I’ve fallen for it.”

Took him long enough to notice. Never one to admit defeat, Crowley merely shrugged. “Actually, I think you started it.”

“How’s that?”

“You kept bringing up steamed pie and jujubes. Kaifeng.” The last turn of millenium. Of course, at the time the Chinese had been following a different calendar, but that’d been irrelevant when they bumped into each other in the midst of a years-long campaign to develop gunpowder and the compass, respectively, and decided to celebrate one thousand years anno Domini with a glass of herbal wine.

“What on Earth does that have to do with anything?” Aziraphale sniffed.

“It’s how I know you’re itching for a rerun,” Crowley said, using his umbrella-pick to stir what the bartender had hoped to pass as drinkable Mai Tai. “When you witter on about the foods you enjoyed most from some bygone time.”

“First, I was not wittering. Second, I was reminiscing,” Aziraphale protested. “It’s hardly the same thing as asking for a rerun.” 

Crowley removed the umbrella and waved it at Aziraphale’s face. “You can admit you enjoy having a celebration to drink around, angel. Certainly less of a vice than drinking for no occasion at all. I won’t judge.”

“Drinking is not a vice. It’s a touchstone of humanity.”

“How about taking shots of cheap tequila in a seedy Soho nightclub? Is that a touchstone of humanity?”

Aziraphale looked around them, affronted. “Seedy? You told me you were taking us somewhere, I quote, ‘quirky and high-concept.’”

Crowley had the grace to look slightly guilty, though he didn’t feel it. He enjoyed making sarcastic quips that occasionally went over the angel’s head, and to be perfectly frank, Aziraphale’s naivete toward human affairs was funny. And often charming. And Crowley liked to provoke it.

“Right. That I did. But some things can be quirky and seedy — look, over there —” Aziraphale followed Crowley’s umbrella to two humans in the other corner, grinding on each another with such enthusiasm Crowley wondered if they should be concerned — “Quirky enough for you?” 

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Oh, that’s — a sight. The poor woman.”

“For my money she’s enjoying what’s happening.”

Aziraphale made a face. “You know what, I rather think you’re right,” he said. “Quirky and seedy.”

“Anyway,” Crowley continued, standing and motioning. “Regardless of who started it, you wanted this. You just didn’t know you wanted it yet. Let’s go, next stop. Lots of ground to cover tonight.”

Aziraphale scrambled to follow, flapping, half-finished drink pushed aside. “Where are we going?”

It’d all been planned out very well, because, after all, Crowley was very good at his job. And Aziraphale wanted to be here.

With him.

“Angel,” said Crowley, raising his voice over the music now they’d left the soundproofing, “have you ever listened to techno music?”

____

Aziraphale had not, in fact, ever listened to techno.

This was a rather obvious truth already known to Crowley, but he so enjoyed leaning into the tour guide role that he’d almost forgotten it. He pictured himself with a three-piece and plastic name tag, a connoiseur of modern nightlife, which — given the way he’d spent the 70s and 80s spinning through American discothèques and pachinko joints — was close to being true.

To our right is the classic nightclub, which you just glimpsed. The nightclub has its roots in New York City — actually, yours truly was there for the opening of the very first nightclub — though it quickly evolved into its many iterations: barrelhouses, cabarets tied to high society, clubs catering to drunkards who just wanted to gamble and hit each other…

Crowley gestured with focused intent. An industrial building with smashed windows loomed before them.

“Techno is…nhmm…” Crowley said, and fuck was this tour guiding business hard when you actually had to say words out loud. “Er, how do I describe this. You know how with Shostakovich, it’s about composition, structure, harmonic progression? Techno is less…less that. Not opposite, just less. It’s more about rhythm, and atmosphere, and feeling.”

Aziraphale swallowed pointedly at the pulsing concrete. “Shostakovich is about all those things too.”

“I did say less, not opposite. It’s probably useless to compare the two.” Crowley pulled the warehouse door open with one heavy yank. “With techno, you’ll want to listen for the subtleties. There’s the repetition, but the subtleties in the repetition is what gives the flavour. There’s layered sounds, changing hi-hat hits, changing structures. It’s hard to explain. In you get.”

Aziraphale stood a few feet from the threshold in a small, queer way that told Crowley he’d become very unsure of the whole idea.

“What do you like about it?” asked Aziraphale.

“Hmm?” asked Crowley.

“I mean. Repetition. Hi-hat. Atmosphere and feeling. That’s what you find enjoyable?”

Crowley pondered. “I suppose, yeah.”

“But is there something about it,” Aziraphale insisted.

Crowley pondered some more. “I guess it’s a way to escape. It’s got this physical quality to it, so in that way it transports you somewhere else, like you’re out of your body, experiencing some alter-universe where you’re simultaneously more connected to humanity and less so. At least in the sense that you feel a bit divine.”

Aziraphale was looking at him oddly. “High praise coming from an actual being of divinity.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. It lets you tap into all that. All the divinity. All the emotion, if you want. Sometimes, none of it.”

“Do you…come here often? To feel the emotion? Or — to not feel it.” 

Crowley wasn’t sure if he could call it often. He enjoyed all kinds of different music and venues. He occasionally left London and its nightlife altogether. But he suspected Aziraphale really cared for the second question, the one that wanted to know how often Crowley sought out the feeling or not-feeling, and Crowley wasn’t sure he was ready to answer yet.

“Once every few years,” Crowley said truthfully in response to the first.

Aziraphale pulled at his ring. Then, nodding, he stepped through the doorway, into the belly of the industrial beast.

____

To the second question, the answer laid in the pounding, strobe-lit center of the floor where Aziraphale stood, a white sunbeam, looking so utterly like he didn’t belong. He’d come out, he’d obliged Crowley’s pleasure, he’d surprised him like always, and he wanted to be here tonight.

____

One techno rave and two neighbourhood house parties later, the two finally made their way to the Thames riverbank for midnight, and Crowley was wondering whether this was the drunkest he’d ever seen Aziraphale. The angel was practically falling over himself in unrestrained glee, and it seemed he’d become more comfortable with certain astonishing, impossible things — that is, light touches to Crowley’s arm, to Crowley’s chest, even leaning into him once, after Crowley had made him laugh so hard he’d stumbled.

It was funny, because Crowley didn’t feel too terribly drunk himself, and he’d had about as much to drink as the angel. Perhaps Aziraphale had become a lightweight in recent years.

“Ah,” Aziraphale said suddenly, as if he’d only just noticed the river they’d been walking toward for the last twenty minutes. “We’re here.”

“So we are,” Crowley said. “We actually want to head into this bar over here, there’s a rooftop where the view’s better —”

Because of course there was a rooftop. Because he’d been planning this for months now.

The view from the rooftop was perfect. It wasn’t actually built for dining, was instead just a little spot easily accessible via two or three staff-only doors. Aziraphale made several gasps of delight when they reached it, echoing Crowley’s feeling precisely. From here they spotted a whole stretch of glittering skyline: the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower Bridge.

They’d made it just in time for the fireworks, which erupted within seconds over their heads in startling fanfare: a kaleidoscope of blues and reds and whites and golds, rising and dying in the river where they came. Distantly Crowley heard shouts, the clang of Big Ben, the horns from the boats. Aziraphale stood frozen in place, watching.

For the final touch Crowley sauntered over to the HVAC unit in the corner, where he’d hidden a bottle of wine in the cabling a few weeks earlier. He presented the wine to Aziraphale, who took it without realizing what exactly it was, then, realizing, looked incredulously up at him.

“It’s not the same as what we had in Kaifeng,” Crowley admitted. “Honestly, I’m not even sure what we had in Kaifeng. But you’ll like this one. Picked it up when I was in Spain for the coup d'etat. ” Crowley grimaced. “I probably shouldn’t have said that. Not a great memory to attach to the moment.”

“No, this is perfect,” Aziraphale gushed, turning the bottle over in his hands. “I just can’t believe how much thought you put into this evening.”

The little catch in Aziraphale’s breath did not go unnoticed by Crowley, but Crowley had had thousands of years of practice in ignoring what it did to him. “S’nothing,” he said, in a way he hoped came off as indifferent.

Aziraphale’s shoulders slumped. “But you hadn’t even known I would come out tonight.”

Crowley made to sit at the edge of the rooftop, purposely Not Looking at Aziraphale, which became harder after Aziraphale sat beside him. For a while they watched the fireworks in affected silence. From this distance the view became something more — not just the fireworks, but the way they reflected off the water, the way the water reflected the architecture, the way the architecture reflected the architecture across the water.

“Well,” Crowley said at last, “like I said. You wanted this. You just didn’t know it yet. Temptation accomplished.”

Aziraphale nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did. Though I suppose if you’d asked me outright — whether I wanted to have beer thrown on me in a basement, or whether I wanted to acquire whatever the angelic equivalent of tinnitis is from that electronic music — I would have said no.”

“Course. You hadn’t been convinced to the particularities. You were only convinced of the black box that was December 31, 1999.”

“What if the particularities had gone wrong?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well. Say the beer was thrown and the tinnitis acquired. Only it ruined my whole evening, and I went home. What then?”

It was a common thing, temptations gone wrong. It’d happened many times before, especially when Crowley was younger and newer and still figuring out how things worked. “Sometimes it can’t be helped,” Crowley said. “But for the most part, if you followed the right thread of desire, the particularities won’t deter the…er…victim from seeing it through to the end.”

“Ah. I see,” said Aziraphale, though Crowley did not see at all the purpose of this line of questioning. “I imagine much of the job is about getting to the root of that desire.”

“Er.”

“Knowing what others want,” Aziraphale continued, not seeming to notice Crowley’s confusion. “Before they know it themselves.”

“Yeah,” said Crowley, frowning. Aziraphale already knew this. He’d explained it to him before, back in the early days of the Arrangement when he’d had to teach the angel what it meant to effect a temptation. Temptation, angel, sometimes involves doing less and not more. Let the temptee do the heavy lifting — you just show the way. He said as much now.

“I know,” said Aziraphale. “Only it still surprises me, that’s all. How good you are at it. I imagine it takes a remarkable degree of…understanding of the human condition.”

“Been doing my job a long time, haven’t I?”

“I’ve been doing mine just as long and I don’t quite think I have the same level of understanding of humans that you do.”

“Blessings are less complicated,” Crowley said, who remembered very well the starch-clean straightforwardness of them. “You don’t have to pick around the guilt when impressing an image of divine ecstasy.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Aziraphale hummed. “And my targets, that is to say, often make it very clear to me what they want. Forgiveness or strength or understanding or benediction.”   

“Exactly,” agreed Crowley. “No one openly prays to God to sleep with their best friend’s wife.”

“Oh Lord, let us adulter,” Aziraphale joked weakly.

The fireworks had stopped, leaving a lingering smoke. Midnight was long passed. Crowley handed a glass of coup d'etat wine to Aziraphale and, with a clink, they welcomed their sixth millenium together on Earth.

“To Kaifeng, and Bethlehem,” said Aziraphale. “And — I suppose we didn’t celebrate the one before that? Although I remember we’d both been in Jerusalem at the time.”

“To Jerusalem, then. And Thebes. A horrible time, that.” Crowley shuddered.

“And before that was Mesopotamia. The flood,” Aziraphale suggested, as though Crowley could ever forget. “And…to knowing each other. Not just in length, but really knowing.”

Crowley gave Aziraphale a puzzled blink.

“I just mean,” Aziraphale said, staring straight at him with such intensity Crowley felt stared through, “that you knew what I wanted, before I knew it. Tonight. That is to say…you know often…what it is I want.”

Crowley could only blink again, sinking deeper into confusion at the way Aziraphale had shifted the conversation back to temptations. “That’s what we’d just agreed on, isn’t it?” he said, pondering how much he could attribute this strange rooftop conversation to the significant amount of brain fog he and Aziraphale had been building toward all night.

Of course he knew what Aziraphale wanted — he wanted earthly pleasures and he wanted to be tempted into them. He wanted to believe in Her goodness and for the Ineffable Plan to remain Ineffable yet somehow still known. He wanted Crowley’s company but he wanted it wrapped up in plausible deniability, or to align with a greater narrative — distracting the Adversary from doing Evil, or persuading the Adversary into doing Good.

Aziraphale appeared to let go of a breath Crowley hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Quite right,” he murmured. “You’ve always seen through me, Crowley.”

Crowley questioned how exactly true that was. He did know Aziraphale, certainly understood him better than any other living creature in the universe, but there were aspects to the angel that still eluded him, even after all this time. So always didn’t seem like the correct term. At least not a term he deserved.

But Aziraphale seemed to believe it.

At some point Aziraphale had moved up against Crowley, not unlike he’d been doing all night, and they were so close now that Crowley could count each wisp of hair on the angel’s face. Eyebrows pulled lightly together. Peach fuzz on his cheeks. The smell of sandalwood, of wool, of a tavern in Rome, of champagne at the Ritz. There was that look in Aziraphale’s face, the one Crowley knew meant tempt me, I want you to.

To his credit, Crowley did hesitate in this final temptation, although only for a second, and only to reassure himself of what he found reflected in the angel’s eyes.

Breath catching, moving as if a ghost in his own body, or perhaps a ghost that’s floated out of his head into the smoke above, Crowley watched himself, a third-party observer, powerless against what was coming, detached from his own heart, that thumping beat, that mutinous pulse, his warming ears, his open mouth —

A mouth he watched press forward into Aziraphale’s. His lips gingerly against. A question. A fragile thing. Lips meeting lips, the faintest impression of tongue between his teeth. A first kiss. A point of contact between flesh that brought the ghost spilling back into Crowley’s body, wine poured in glass, warmth that started where their mouths met and spread, stopping briefly where Aziraphale had placed one hand on Crowley’s cheek, continuing onward.

The question, do you still feel seen. Do you still feel known?

“No,” Aziraphale said suddenly, breaking away to say it. The cold of night air rushed to fill the space where his warmth had just been. “I told you before, no.”

A thousand incoherent things spun through Crowley’s head, but one was so confounding, so contrasted against the rest, that he could hardly even grasp the hurt that came reeling with the others.

“What do you mean, you told me before?” Crowley asked, his voice barely above a whisper, before the flood of senses overtook him: candles and leather in a bookshop, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Aziraphale pulling downwards then. Aziraphale pulling downwards now. 

Chapter Text

1988, South Downs

Crowley had been trying, with only some success, to grow the garden.

Houseplants were one thing. Crowley could do houseplants. They were mostly portable, and mostly low maintenance, and their maintenance was mostly self-contained. The rattlesnake plant needed well-draining soil, medium light, and high humidity. The monstera needed moderate sunlight, an occasional polishing, and a moss stick to provide support for the stem and moisture through the aerial roots to the upper leaves. He owned a few bird-of-paradises too, which were relatively straightforward in care except when they had spider mites. Crowley placed the plants where he figured they’d be happiest, misted them, watered them, and miracled the rest of it.

An outdoor garden was different. Harder. Even with miracles.

First he had to decide which plants he wanted to grow in the limited space encircling the cottage and how they’d look together when grown. Then he considered England south coast climate, frost dates, soil quality (who knew it mattered how much salt was present in the soil, and what kinds?), and how and when to apply mulch. Learning all this had been surprisingly hard considering his (self-proclaimed) green thumb, and he’d nearly quit altogether when he realized he’d been spending far too much time at the Chichester library poring over books on the science of dirt.

But. What else was there for him? The sting from Aziraphale’s rebuffs held over him like a vice; after 1967, for example, he’d tried giving it a good shake in the Caucasus Mountains, then the Swiss Alps, but nothing could loosen its steely grip. So he’d gone back to the garden, tied back his hair, and scrabbled with his trowel, pretending the dirt was his heart.

He’d actually bought the cottage, which teetered at the edge of Arundel, after his failed Caucasus/Swiss Alps eat-pray-love campaign. It was dumb, really. He’d let himself hope, had pictured the angel learning to make pan rolls and homemade jams while he wrangled peonies, all because Aziraphale had mentioned some time ago how much he liked the area. And they’d gotten stunningly close in the last century, save for his post-1967 pilgrimage, and that decade in the 40s, and all those years before that when Crowley had been sleeping off their St. James’ blowout or looking for the angel during the world wars…

Never mind. The evidence bore otherwise. Really, buying the cottage was not his most levelheaded moment. And, whatever the angel had meant by you go too fast for me, it was clearly the total, complete opposite of that.

He whistled while he worked. He liked giving his hands something to do, as if moving them, pruning shrubs or deadheading petunias, served as replacement for thinking disastrous, traitorous thoughts. It worked, for the most part. And he’d always been good at caring for things, be it children or ducks or plants with mite infestations. He returned here occasionally, pottered around a few months or years, attempted to grow the garden anew. Usually the place was overgrown with weeds and perennials, having been neglected in the foregoing years, but that was alright, it was part of the process. Crowley would dig out roots, trim the blurred edges of the property line, and replant his rose garden.

Eventually he’d give up — that was also part of the process — when he missed the nightlife and the Rolling Stones, when it occurred to him he’d still rather be by the angel’s side in spite of whatever they’d said to one another. Garden half-complete, gloves strewn as though he’d suddenly had the idea and fled, Crowley would return to London, and he and Aziraphale would both awkwardly pretend they were nothing more to one another than a couple of coworkers operating on first-name bases. Then after some time they’d resume whatever they instinctually felt to be a kind of normality, never discussing the years of total silence, until that came to a steaming head when Aziraphale would inevitably tweak out over nothing at all, and say something so unbearably hurtful Crowley could hardly believe it’d been said.

(The last time it’d happened, Crowley decided to plant begonias. The flowers of caution. More recently Crowley had asked if Aziraphale wanted to see a show, catch the latest talk of the West End, and Aziraphale responded: “It’s probably best that we don’t, my dear. In fact, we probably shouldn’t see each other for a while after tonight.” And hadn’t that been something? Indifference with a term of endearment, delivered together in one cruel, brushstroke-quick breath.

“Too much of each other lately, eh?” Crowley said, upon hearing it.

“Well, three times in as many months…”

“The horror. What were we thinking?”

“Don’t know what came over us,” Aziraphale said, and chuckled lightly.

Crowley swirled his wine glass, cool as can be, though his chest did a well-practiced squeeze of disappointment. At least he was used to this dance. Two steps forward, initiated always by him, one step back, initiated always by Aziraphale.

“It’s not what you think, Crowley,” Aziraphale pleaded upon seeing Crowley’s face. He’d no right to plead, Crowley thought. That wasn’t fair. “We’ve just been so very careless, you and I. Perhaps in the future…I’ll make it up to you.”

An olive branch, extended. Ah, Crowley realized, seeing it for what it was. The olive branch had been offered — as it always was — because Aziraphale knew Crowley wanted more, and it was intolerable as an angel to deny Crowley this kindness.

So Crowley only nodded in concession, immediately fled to his countryside cottage to lick his wounds, and bought cyclamen clippings to plant in place of the begonias which had died long ago. Cyclamen, the flowers of diffidence.)

The cyclamen were giving him some trouble. They didn’t like direct sunlight, which was hard because the garden was full of it, so he packed them in railing planters against the back stone wall where they’d be well-shaded. They were beginning to brown as well. Crowley snipped the affected leaves and gave the rest a stern look, and by some miracle the cyclamen already looked healthier. He organized the planters in symmetrical rows, stepping back now and again to admire the total effect.

Not too shabby. Maybe I’ll revive the begonias next.

“What are you doing here?” came a voice from behind, and Crowley, startled, dropped the trowel.

It was unusual for Aziraphale to find him. In all their years of knowing each other, Crowley could count on two hands how many times the angel sought him out rather than waiting to be sought.

Aziraphale looked, as always, like no time had passed in the three years since they last saw each other. This had the effect of generating an immediate flame of familiarity, of trust, within Crowley; he’d never determined whether this was an intended quality shared by all angels or just another one of the Aziraphale-isms he’d become endeared to, like bad magic tricks or the way the angel said quite.

He leaned on his haunches and wiped the dirt from his face with the back of his hand, attempting not to let this turn of events unravel whatever amounted to the spun thread holding him together. He thought he’d accidentally rubbed more dirt on his face. “You first,” he said.

Aziraphale swallowed, stepping further into the garden. He looked appreciatively at the wisteria, winding through the arbor; the hydrangeas, umbrella-round, shrubbed in containers by the porch; the small cyclamen heads by Crowley’s shoulders, shoulders hunched in embarrassment, aimed rather unintentionally to make him appear small. Aziraphale walked by the begonias which had died and by the weeds that’d sprung up in place. He walked under the wooden arch where Crowley had once had half a mind to embellish with climbing roses; now, it was threadbare, a stinging reminder of the plans Crowley had for the garden, abandoned and picked up and abandoned over the years.

He looked, and he walked, and he stopped, wavering in spot, as though he’d meant to go further but was held in place, pulled by invisible strings. 

“I’ve been looking for you,” Aziraphale said in a small way. “I thought…”

Crowley chewed his bottom lip. I thought we’d been seeing too much of each other lately, he wanted to say, and he wanted to say it with all the hard-bitten edge he could muster. Instead he said, “That’s new for you,” and he said it gently, so as not to let Aziraphale know he’d hurt him, and that’d been why he’d left.

Aziraphale looked distressed, as though it hadn’t been his decision that’d punctured an otherwise lovely evening at the bookshop three years ago. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“Hard to find me, then?”

“I called the numbers in your ledger. Then I was in correspondence with your property manager for a bit. That led me to some of the bars you frequented, which took me all over South Downs, until I followed a line of gossip to Arundel. Something about an abandoned cottage that was recently repossessed. So yes. Quite hard.”

Crowley hadn’t known Aziraphale to ever make such a degree of effort, not even in biblical times when he’d had to heal the sick or split a sea. He always opted to sit back — sometimes for decades — blending with the locals and waiting for divine intervention to strike.

He also hadn’t known that Aziraphale would even know how to look for Crowley. For one, Crowley was practiced at keeping tabs on Aziraphale, but he was sure the opposite was not true; for another, Crowley had a number of hiding spots he’d never revealed to the angel, which had been useful in avoiding Gabriel or other angels on Earth, and particularly useful in avoiding Aziraphale after the holy water debacle.

It was possible the surprise showed on his face, because Aziraphale next said, “You must know — that is to say. I hadn’t meant to send you off for so long.”

“Worried, were you?” Crowley said, half-challenging, half-genuinely surprised.

Aziraphale hesitated. “Yes. I was,” he said, and Crowley closed his eyes to the way he said it.

“I’m alright, angel,” he said haltingly. “Can take care of myself just fine.”

“I know that. Of course. I just…I didn’t like the way we left our last conversation. I didn’t want you to have to carry that.”

But I did carry it. As he’d carried it before. Cyclamen and begonias and carnations and geraniums. 

Crowley peered at the image of Aziraphale before him, held waveringly on the path, framed by overgrowth. In the aftermath of their last conversation he’d felt curiously devoid of feeling; when he’d come here to work the garden he’d thought he could survive a life without the angel. More fool him. Suddenly he could not remember how he’d ever had that thought.   

“It’s alright,” Crowley said, although he wasn’t sure it was. He picked up the trowel and dug it into the ground. Despite it all — how frustratingly impenetrable he found Aziraphale — he couldn’t help but feel disarmed by the emotion permeating Aziraphale’s voice which he now recognized as worry. 

How did he ever think he could live without this? The enormity of these last years alone in the garden fell upon him like a shock of ice water. How had he managed to suppress it for so long? How had he managed to come here, after Aziraphale, full of irrepressible tenderness, had said perhaps in the future, I’ll make it up to you. Why hadn’t he fought to stay?

“You could have written me,” Aziraphale said, a note accusatorily. “At least to let me know you were alright.”

Crowley nodded. “I could have.” I don’t know why I didn’t.

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t.”

Aziraphale wrung his hands, searching Crowley through his eyelashes. “Well, no harm done. It wasn’t your fault anyway, of course not, I drove you away,” he said, and he sounded nervous when he said it. Yellow eyes like spotlights, him alone on a stage, floundering his magic act. Crowley thought immediately to go to him, go to him, don’t leave him alone in it. “I’m so sorry for it, my dear.”

As if Aziraphale even had to say it. Nodding again, this time in terror and delight, Crowley stood, and finally went to him.

____

“So,” said Aziraphale, after Crowley had invited him in to the cottage he’d bought for him and to flee from him, and after Crowley had realized this was yet another way he’d been disarmed and whittled away until there was nothing left of him but the burnt, oblique edges of his devotion — “Your turn. What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” Crowley replied simply.

“You — live here?” Aziraphale sputtered into the sitting room. Crowley had almost hoped he would look out of place here but the universe, of course, was ever-conspired against him. The angel looked perfectly in-place, sunk in among the cushions, legs pulled underneath a thick blanket. “Crowley, you live in London.”

“Not anymore. Well, I still have the flat that Hell pays for. But this —” Crowley gestured at the exposed brick and low-pitched roof around them — “I bought myself.”

“You bought this place? The human way?” Aziraphale looked impressed.

“Yeah,” Crowley said, although he decided against sharing how he’d obtained the money. “It’s quaint, isn’t it?”

“I…could never have imagined this was your style,” Aziraphale said in wonderment. “I can hardly picture you living here, it’s so — quiet, and slow, nothing at all like you.” As soon as he said it, his eyes whipped over to meet Crowley’s, instantly regretful. “I mean, I suppose you have been living here, so it must be you. I just didn’t know it.”

Crowley, who was not offended at Aziraphale’s shock but rather amused by it, supposed he did look quite odd, a hard-line streak of black against the tassels and florals of couch pillows. He would save them both the embarrassment of telling Aziraphale why “quiet and slow” had been exactly what he’d gone for when he bought the place. He still had a reputation to maintain.

“Mostly I spend time in the garden,” he explained, as if to separate himself from the interior design choices he himself had made.

“Well either way, it’s wonderful, Crowley. You have built-in bookshelves.”

That’d been a remodeling project he’d undertaken in the 60s. The veranda he’d commissioned in the 70s, and the sun room just last year. He was unusually proud of the way he’d cared for this place and how it’d come together.

Demons didn’t own property, or really any kind of material possession, besides whatever was necessary as affectation to complete an assignment. But Crowley had the Bentley, he had his houseplants, and in these last two decades he had the cottage and the garden. He supposed this was what 6,000 years of living Up Above did to someone. Going native and everything.

Then a traitorous thought emerged from the shallows: what else can be mine?

It’d been three years since he last saw Aziraphale. To a demon who’d lived before the Earth was created, who’d lived as an angel in the space before space had begun, three years amounted essentially to the blink of an eye. Their longest stretch of non-communication had occurred between Eden and the flood, or really between the Fall and Eden if you wanted to count it.

That’d been okay, then. Crowley remembered what that’d felt like — wandering from village to village, sleeping away the years in vast desert expanses and waking up with dry mouth that lasted months. The first thousand years on Earth had passed so quickly when the most entertaining parts of it were watching humans discover how to irrigate their crops.

After that, the world expanded, and time began to slow. Humans developed scriptwriting and pottery. Complicated government bureaucracies that gave Heaven’s a run for its money. Algebra. Killing one another for sport. Burying their dead. Crowley began changing the gender or form of his corporation just to try it. He began taking note of one particular angel’s presence in Edom, who he’d then met quite accidentally in Uz.

He did not think of Aziraphale, until all of a sudden he did, and those thoughts suffused through and eclipsed all others — in the sight of church glass the colour of morning sky, in the silhouettes glimpsed across a foggy, medieval landscape. In the hands now cupped around a mug of tea, a touch away from his own, in the way he felt incandescently battered by these thoughts, waves on rock.

Three years had been a drop in the ocean but the days had been long. Crowley had not realized quite how long until now.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale prodded when he saw Crowley lost in thought. “Is everything alright?”

Crowley hadn’t realized it three years ago, though the feeling was intimately known to him, but with a jolt he realized it now. I should tell him, was his immediate thought, because all his thoughts belonged to Aziraphale, all his love. Maybe I will.

“Yeah,” Crowley said, a tad faintly. “Just thinking. Glad you like the built-in bookshelves, but honestly I’ve been missing London recently. Might head back soon.”

“Oh, thank God,” sighed Aziraphale. “I didn’t want to say — I mean, I wasn’t sure. I thought you looked happy here.”

Showed what Aziraphale knew.

“But yes, I quite agree,” continued Aziraphale. “You belong in London. We both do.”

“You don’t like the cottage?”

“What does that matter?” asked Aziraphale, and Crowley felt the awful drop of his stomach, the one he was sure Aziraphale could feel. “Oh Crowley,” Aziraphale said immediately, and there was that olive branch again, dripping with an angel’s pity. “I love it. But don’t you want to be in London?”

I want to be wherever you are. “Yeah. I do.”

I’ll tell him when it begins to hurt, decided Crowley, though he thought already it’d begun to hurt. Knowing and not saying. When I can’t stand not to anymore.

____

1985, Soho

“I love you,” Crowley said into the bookshop, because he could not stand not saying it any longer.

He liked the bookshop in the late evenings. Tonight he liked the bookshop more than usual: Aziraphale, awash with moonlight, sat across him. A familiar haunt.

Then Aziraphale snapped, and Crowley blinked, and the confession was gone.

“It’s probably best that we don’t, my dear. In fact, we probably shouldn’t see each other for a while after tonight,” Aziraphale said. He got up as he said it, fidgeted with his ring, and began to clear the table.

Crowley blinked again. “What did I say?”

Aziraphale looked down at him, his fingers curved tightly over their plates, and said, not unkindly but firmly: “Crowley, you asked if I wanted to watch Les Miserables. Are you feeling quite alright?”

Oh. So he had. And Aziraphale had responded — we probably shouldn’t see each other for a while after tonight. That…hurt. He was sure Aziraphale hadn’t intended for it to hurt, but it did, and the casual way with which it was said stabbed at something vulnerable inside him, the damaged bits he so desperately hid from everyone but Aziraphale, which Aziraphale had not cared to be gentle with.

“Too much of each other lately, eh?” he said, his attempt to brush it aside.

Two steps forward, one step back.

An inevitable consequence, Crowley thought as he left the bookshop later that evening, or just dancing around each other on the spot?

Chapter Text

1967, Caucasus Mountains

“Climb every mountain,” Gabriel once quoted to Crowley, long before mountains had been invented, “ford every stream.”

Even then Crowley remembered thinking it hadn’t particularly seemed like something the Almighty would say. It sounded dangerously close to giving direction, and if there was one thing She did not do, it was that. Then again, what would he know? He had spoken to Her exactly once about the suggestion box idea, and shortly thereafter was sent on a freefall dive into boiling sulpur.

(He had thought, after he’d Fallen, that he’d stopped there. The ground on which he laid. Sweetly solid beneath him the way being thrown through the air was not.

When the storm passed, the Angel of the Eastern Gate lifted his wing, and Crawly blinked against its loss.

“Where are you headed now?” he asked. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” the angel said. “I’m meant to ensure they don’t come back, so I should probably stay here a while longer.” He squinted into the boundaryline where Adam and Eve disappeared. 

“I somehow doubt they’ll want to come back,” Crawly said wryly, thinking of birds braving their first flight, and birds that were pushed.

The angel rubbed his hands together — cold, Crawly noted. Unsure how he knew the word, but sure it was the right one. He’s cold.

The angel said, “You’re probably right about that, although I hate to admit it.”

“There’s no shame in admitting that a demon can be right sometimes,” Crawly said, unaware this moment would be the first of thousands that the angel would play subterfuge, and that Crawly would entertain it.

“I’m certainly not ashamed,” the angel said, although he had used the word hate. “If She meant for you to be, er, as you are. Then She meant exactly for you to be who you are.”

Crawly latched on earnestly to this funny little word game. “So you’re saying She meant for me to be right?”

The angel hesitated. He’d backed himself into a corner now. Crawly felt briefly exalted in this emerging victory against an angel of the Lord, in wordplay and in exposing Her fallacies, and wondered how long he ought to lord this triumph over him. The thought did not last because the angel returned with this:

“Yes.” And the angel looked transformed, the way he had when he’d said I gave it away, the angelic outer layer peeled away to reveal a nucleus of warmth beneath. Transformed, at least, to Crawly. “Yes, I suppose She meant for you to be right.”    

So. He had not stopped falling when he’d hit cold earth and sulphur.

He had kept falling after that.)

The mountain range stretched before him, white on white on white sky. Old, like he was, so he supposed there was comfort to be found in their mutual understanding of one another. And whatever these peaks were offering felt something akin to divinity: the furthest on Earth, physically speaking, one could be separated from Hell, or wherever the hell Crowley’s heart was buried underneath the earthen core. The tartan thermos — which had been carefully wrapped in a layer of foil, then placed in a styrofoam cooler — rattled around in his metaphysical pocket.

He had not seen the angel since their conversation in the Bentley and before that, many years ago.

You go too fast for me, Aziraphale had said.

I hadn’t thought I’d been going fast at all, thought Crowley now. But the very fact that Aziraphale had reflected upon — whatever it was that was unfolding between them — surely meant something. To call it “too fast” meant to measure it against things that were “too slow” and things that were “just right,” and Aziraphale hadn’t said “no,” and he hadn’t said “I don’t want this entirely.” If it was speed lying at the heart of the issue, then Crowley could slow down, he was sure of it.

“I am climbing every mountain,” he said aloud to no one in particular. Then, to Someone in particular: “Literally. What does it get me in the end? Do you hear me, Almighty?”

Like usual, She did not answer. But Crowley had not believed in Her for a while now, so he hadn’t expected a response. He continued anyway: “Watch over Aziraphale while I’m gone,” he said, and tried not to sound too broken up about it.

____

In the high-altitude air, thin and clear, Crowley was now certain that he’d felt love for Aziraphale since Eden. He was just not sure when he’d realized it.

That was strange.

He was sure there must have been a turning point. Such a thing was important enough that he would have remembered it. He cast a net over his memories, flipping each over, examining by touch and hand.

____

In Jerusalem, after the crucifixion, Aziraphale knelt outside the walls to pray. Crowley stood some distance away and watched. When Aziraphale was done, he stood up, dusted himself off, and went to Crowley.

“What were you praying for?” asked Crowley.

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand,” said Aziraphale, who must have known that was nonsense but said it anyway.    

“Try me.”

“I really shouldn’t tell you. It’s all a great deal of policy-making from Upstairs.” Aziraphale worried his bottom lip. “But I suppose you’ll be hearing about it soon enough. The current word is that —” his eyes pointed upward and he made a gesture — “She’s decided to forgive all sins. That’s what the crucifixion was about.”

“What? How does that even work? How are they in any way related?”

“The idea is that through Yeshua’s death, he takes on the burden of all punishment and suffering across all time, as substitutionary atonement. If we accept this, and Her, then Her judgment has been satisfied and our sins are forgiven.”

Crowley, who had not really understood the Great Plan for some time now, nor did he believe he even needed forgiving, only said, “How kind.” What’s the catch?

Aziraphale, as though reading his mind, said, “There’s no catch, Craw — Crowley. The Almighty is good. So you see, this is all very exciting.” He looked almost as chipper as the Pharisees, who had surely returned by now to dust off their high ground in the synagogue.

Crowley could not see what was exciting about any of it. In fact, the mood had been rather bleak in the last several hours it took for Yeshua to die, and although it was afternoon, Jerusalem and its surrounding hills was covered in unnatural darkness. Plus he felt suffocatingly hot in his layers. He wanted to hole up in a tavern somewhere and drink away the sultry air. “Sure, I guess. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I could use a glass of something red. Where should we go?”

He had turned halfway and was about to take a step when he felt a tug on his robes. “Crowley,” said Aziraphale, “don’t you understand? All sins are forgiven. All of them.”

Crowley stopped. Considered this. Didn’t understand what Aziraphale was getting at until he caught the meaningful look in the angel’s eyes, then the way they broke away, shyly, to look at the hands clenched in Crowley’s robes. Oh. Oh.

When Crowley finally spoke, it was very gentle. 

“Angel,” he said. “I don’t think demons are included in this policy.”

Aziraphale unclenched his fists and stepped back, as though he hadn’t thought of the possibility. “Whyever not?”

Crowley wasn’t sure how to say it. There were certainly a multitude of harsh words he’d carried in the years since the Fall but none he thought the angel could bear to hear. Demons are undeserving of salvation, he could say. It’s not even possible, it’s built into our makings — or rather, our unmakings. Our very natures are fundamentally unchangeable. We’re unforgiveable. I’m unforgiveable.

“Well,” he said slowly, “think about it. When has any of the Great Plan ever applied to us? Everything is for the humans, we’re just extraneous fodder to help move things along here and there. The universe is their wallpaper. She speaks to them but not us. It’s why Lucifer rebelled to begin with, remember? ‘I am the morning star, I won’t be beholden to mankind,’ and all that — but we are. Beholden, that is.” 

Aziraphale, who seemed to follow this line of logic and looked progressively unhappier in hearing it, bent his head. “Yes…yes, I suppose that does make sense.”

“And,” Crowley rushed on, “Don’t you think we’d’ve heard something if demons were being forgiven? I mean, that’s a huge deal, there are millions of us. Would need to completely rearrange Heaven to accommodate the re-hires. I’m sure the archangels would’ve had something to say about giving up their corner offices.”

This, also, seemed to make sense. Aziraphale could not meet Crowley’s eyes. “Of course, yes. I — I must have misheard, gotten ahead of myself. I’m so sorry to disappoint you.”

There was a time — albeit brief — when Crowley had entertained the idea of being reinstated as an angel. When Hell had been, well, hell. He hadn’t been able to stand it any longer, the noises, the congestion, the awful, bone-aching loneliness. He’d begged Her, the way condemned souls did when they’d regained consciousness and realized where they’d been sent. Honest and ugly begging. He’d called for Her. He’d prayed for his old life back.

That version of himself might have felt as crestfallen as Aziraphale now looked; Crowley knew there was nothing more tragic than the feeling of budding hope, quickly snuffed out. But he hadn’t allowed himself to hope this particular brand of hope in millenia, and in fact had not wanted to be an angel for even longer still. This crushed feeling was Aziraphale’s to bear, and the angel was alone in it.

Still. Even still. He felt preternaturally moved by Aziraphale’s disappointment, though he supposed he could also take offense that Aziraphale had thought he needed forgiveness to begin with. Angels, always so quick to make everything about holy judgment. Try as he might, Crowley knew the offense would not come. 

“Don’t apologize, Aziraphale,” he said. “It’s not becoming of you.”

He was praying for me. Crowley’s unnatural heart skipped a beat.

____

In Kaifeng, shortly after the turn of millenium, Crowley and Aziraphale put a name to their non-interference of each other’s activities: the Arrangement.

Crowley, as usual, wanted more. “Listen, angel,” he slurred through the most pleasant way his mind had turned to soup, “it wouldn’t make sense to just stay out of each other’s way, would it?”

Aziraphale perked up. “Oh?”

“Well, think about it. It’s nice to agree we won’t disrupt the other’s work, but we’re still cancelling each other out either way. My tempting, your blessing — added all up, equals to zero.”

“Mm. Yes, that’s true.”

“I propose we take our Arrangement one step further: not just non-interference, but active intervention.”

“How do you mean?” Aziraphale asked, carefully.

Crowley must be very careful now too. He said the next bit delicately, well-rehearsed to strike the perfect balance between casual (so as not to alarm the angel) and serious (so as to let the angel know this was no joking matter). “We’ll cover for each other. If I’m in an area where we’d both otherwise be, I’ll nip across the city and carry out divine ecstasy for you. In return you’ll do my temptations — they’re easy, I’ll show you later. That way neither of us have to be in the same place at the same time, and it’ll save everyone the time and effort.” 

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, and if Crowley didn’t know better, he’d peg the angel as disappointed, which was — weird. Nervous or holily fearful ought to have come before disappointment. 

Crowley pushed the bowl of jujubes closer, an offer to quell any tension with food. It usually worked. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Aziraphale said, all too fast and all too unbelievable. He popped a jujube in his mouth and chewed.

“Come on,” Crowley egged. “If there’s something I can reassure you on…”

“No, not at all. Only, I don’t know how to tempt, and I’m sure you don’t know how to bless, so I doubt very much this’ll work.”

“Nonsense,” urged Crowley. “Firstly, I do know how to bless. Angel stock, remember? It’s been a while, but I’m sure I can pick it up again. And tempting’s easy, the very thing of it involves doing less and not more. Mostly the temptee does the heavy lifting, you just show the way.”

Aziraphale looked oddly put out by this, as though offended by the insinuation that Crowley would remember how to bless and that he could learn how to tempt. Crowley opened his mouth, then closed it, unsure how to console this particular strain of annoyance.

Fortunately, Aziraphale spoke first. “Alright,” he said. “Fine. Teach me. Then, we’ll never need to see each other again, just as you wish.”

“Just as I —” Crowley sputtered. Oh. There it was, then.

If demons could blush — or rather, if they had any basic processes of human functioning, circulation or respiration or metabolism — Crowley was sure those processes would have acted together in reaction to this. But, and maybe this was a function of his extended time on Earth, or as a result of all the years of sinking deep into his human corporation, Crowley was no regular demon, and had a pulsebeat, which quickened. And he had breath, which stilled. And he had blood vessels that dilated, which did dilate. It became greatly evident his next words had to be chosen even more carefully in the knowledge of what was floating unsaid.

It would not do to say it out loud, this he knew.

He choked out, “But don’t think you’re off the hook from guarding against my wiles. What do you think I’m planning to do with my newly found free time?”

It was a rather obvious and weak attempt at a coverup. And honestly the idea that they would see less of each other with Crowley’s modified arrangement never crossed his mind, so this bit of play-acting was wholly unnecessary. He’d never intended to stop accidentally-on-purpose stumbling into Aziraphale, as captured as he was by Aziraphale’s orbit. And clearly Aziraphale was, to some extent, captured by his in return. But it was something the angel, who looked just as embarrassed as Crowley felt, needed to hear.

Aziraphale nodded curtly. Professionally. He popped another jujube in his mouth, sucking around the tips of his fingers for far longer than necessary, and sod whether demons needed human processes or not, Crowley couldn’t breathe, was going to discorporate regardless — 

“Very well, you fiend,” Aziraphale said. “Teach me how to tempt.”

____

In the early 1600s, Crowley found Aziraphale standing just outside a church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The service was over. William Shakespeare was dead. That familiar tightness in his chest, the one that always came with the death of certain mortals, was back. He watched from afar as humans spilled out of the church and spread out across the path, carrying their grief in dropped shoulders and buckling, white-knuckled movements. How short their lives were.

“Fancy seeing you at a funeral, Aziraphale,” Crowley remarked to Aziraphale’s left.

Aziraphale turned and gave the faintest of smiles. “Crowley,” he said, submitted with emotion, and Crowley wished suddenly he could curl up into the way he said it, bury himself there. “Only for humans I know.”

“Did you know him well?”

“We spent quite a bit of time together in the last decade after I came back from Edinburgh.” Aziraphale leaned toward Crowley playfully (which in actuality looked less like a lean and more like a one degree tilt of the shoulder — he was, as always, reticently stiff). “I was something of a sounding board, helped with the more historical bits in his plays.”

“How lucky for William,” Crowley said, and meant it. He hadn’t seen Aziraphale since they’d crossed paths in the Globe Theatre and felt oddly put out hearing of the angel’s extracurricular activities. “I’m sorry he’s gone.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Aziraphale responded. “At least he’ll live on through his words.”

My dear? That was new. My dear fellow and my dear boy had appeared in the angel’s vocabulary quite some time ago but such endearments never came without qualification. Crowley did his best to breathe around this new bit of information. He thought he maybe had to sit down. “And yours.”

“That’s…very sweet of you to say.”

“Not sweet,” Crowley bit out. “Not a candy.”

The two walked, side by side, no particular destination in mind. In spite of everything, it was a beautiful day. The air smelled as all quaint market towns did — faintly like a river, faintly like baked bread from down the road. Aziraphale was eager to catch Crowley up on the last decade and change of his life and Crowley was eager to listen. He told him about the blessings he had to do (“I watched over a would-be missionary in Grimsby. Followed him around for four years. Four years! Living in Grimsby! It was dreadful.”) and things he’d presumably stored away in the back of his mind, ready at-will to discuss (“So, Galileo. Telescopes. The humans are finally seeing the stars —”) although some things continued to go unsaid ( — finally seeing your stars).

It took a great deal of effort for Crowley to keep his eyes off Aziraphale. This had not changed, and neither had Aziraphale. No wrinkles where there were none before, no crow’s feet where they didn’t already exist. The same affected smile. The same beautiful blue eyes. It was always funny to Crowley that for a fast-moving demon who liked his impulsivities, this familiarity was one of his favourite things about Aziraphale. Something about it all made him — dare he say it, grateful: where Sophocles and Shakespeare were gone, Aziraphale remained.

“Oh — my dear, I’m so sorry,” Aziraphale said, interrupting his own rambly diatribe on the Church of England and the Reformation. There it was again, my dear. “I’ve been talking about myself all day, haven’t I? I haven’t asked about you at all. How have you been?”

Crowley was not particularly interested in how he’d been, having spent the last decade in Spain avoiding the bubonic plague and burning of heretics, but for the sake of conversation decided to humour the question. “You know, same old. Had to pop across the Channel a few times for a temptation. This is actually my first time back in England since 1609. Have you still not been to Spain this century?” Crowley paused to think of one single, pleasant thing he could say about the country. “Amazing things they’re doing with spices there, you’d love the food.”

“If you say so,” Aziraphale said, eager to please. “I’ll have to make a trip.”

“Maybe wait until after the empire falls. Whispers downstairs there’s to be a war soon.”

“Oh, there’s always a war.”

“Really, angel? Such blas é indifference to human suffering,” Crowley tutts.

“Coming from you,” Aziraphale teased.

Crowley raised his hands in protest. “You know I despise all suffering, human or otherwise. I’m a perfect angel.” 

“Or the worst demon,” Aziraphale agreed, nodding.

This had become something easy. Falling in step with each other as if no time had passed. Crowley wondered if one day they wouldn’t have to re-organize these steps, root themselves back where they’d last left off, have a catch-up once every other decade in some public forum but instead be there, really be there, with one another and for one another. Even in Grimsby. Even in Spain. Would they be closer? Would Aziraphale want that?

For one obscene second Crowley wished he was Shakespeare, whose lifeless body was planted beneath the church. Not now, certainly, but before, when he was alive, when he was writing, when he was being advised by an angel to craft aching soliloquys of ancient Rome. Then he thought this was a bit sacrilegious, even for a demon, so he thought decidedly of less sacrilegious things: pushing his lips to Aziraphale’s, burying his hands where he could, moving their legs in tandem until he had the angel woven between him and the earth, the bodies beneath, as if to say you don’t belong to them, you can’t, we may be here for them but you’re here for me.

____

So. No turning point. Only a series of escalating moments he felt himself increasingly altered by.

Maybe the turning point was now. It very well could be.

Crowley said the words aloud for the first time to the uninterrupted expanse of mountainrange, and they felt sluggish and unfamiliar on his tongue, and he knew that it was true, and they were true: “I love him.”

I can’t slow down, he realized once he’d said it. I don’t know how.

Chapter Text

1944, Somewhere in France

Crowley was looking for Aziraphale. It was winter.

He had practice in it, so he wasn’t worried, or not at first. It was always easy to dust off the invisible thread connecting them, and Aziraphale tugged on his end often — magician goes to front lines and won’t stop performing card tricks for the injured, the tension in the line said, or monk-in-training sent home from Thai temple for refusing vegetarian diet. It was always something ridiculous, or ineffectual, or appreciably rebellious; Crowley, who was moved by ridiculous or ineffectual or rebellious things, picked up his end of the line and went anyway.

But something was different this time. 

Crowley moved through sick bays and army barracks, train station canteens and wastelands pocked with blood. He walked for miles and miles across snow and wasteland, until his human corporation groaned and shuddered, until he had to hold himself together with a miracle so powerful Hell would assume he was conducting the reapings himself. He was not, of course, but he did spot Death in the midst of it: a presence at the edge of his periphery, collecting souls from the trenches, blink-and-you-miss-it-and-you’re-dead. Through these trenches Crowley pushed forward. He stopped only once to light a cigarette, touching tip to tongue before handing it to the dying man who’d asked for it; he stopped another time to pick up a brass casing that’d caught his eye, winking up from the war-torn earth. He rolled it between thumb and pointer while he mused, through the despair in his chest, where the fuck Aziraphale was. 

How can I not find you, Crowley thought. The thread was quiet and had been for years. I can always find you.

He supposed he should be grateful that Aziraphale wasn’t here. If Aziraphale wasn’t here, then he was elsewhere, and that was for the best. He imagined the angel curled up in his bookshop, though the last he’d heard, it’d been boarded up. Fine, then he imagined the angel curled up in his boarded-up bookshop. Warm and safe, far from whatever the Hell this was, this hell that was worse than Hell.

Hell never smelled of gunpowder intermingled with piss and shit and sweat and vomit. Walking through Hell wasn’t at all like walking over mounds of imperfectly buried bodies and bodies that weren’t buried at all that ballooned up with gas and popped a week later. Hell was noisy, that was the worst of it, and Hell was hot, but the killing fields were quiet and cold, at least when the gunfire stopped. And Hell was home to demons, but this war was home to humans, and Crowley was terrified of humans.

He walked through a field hospital, past men with blast wounds and shattered limbs and shell shock. He held his breath against the antiseptic. He walked just to walk. Not at the front, then. Not in France. He wouldn’t have gone to Germany. Maybe he left Europe.

I wish you were here, Crowley thought, hating himself for thinking it. Selfish. It was selfish.

But he was a demon. He was allowed to be selfish.

____

The last they’d seen each other, it was 1862. Over eighty years ago.

Crowley had slept for most of it. When he woke up, the Earth was changed. The Wright brothers invented flight somewhere in America. Einstein published his theory of relativity, and Crowley, who had a relative interest in such things, read the articles and understood little of it but thought it sounded about right. He was, for a brief while, excited that the humans had finally turned their attentions to what lay beyond — skies, stars, space, and all that — until they invented machine guns and chemical weapons, and then focused more on killing each other with them.

Crowley looked for Aziraphale during the First War. He had no real intention to say anything to the angel but had half a mind that the End was coming and perhaps they ought to stay in touch, just in case. It was about time for it, it’d been about six thousand years, and hadn’t Revelations mentioned fire and brimstone and the sun turning black as sackcloths made of hair? Then blast the holy water, blast everything else. They ought to head to a different star system, watch the whole thing go down from there. Make some primordial soup on the craters of Proxima b and wait a few millenia for life to restart.

The ear Crowley kept to the ground alerting him of the angel’s whereabouts led him to Paris, where Aziraphale was working as a telephone switchboard operator, then to the Battle of Verdun, where Aziraphale was walking around an army base with an oversized notepad. Both times Crowley did not approach him. He was surprised to see the angel on the frontlines at all and less surprised to see the angel not notice his shadowy presence. Crowley watched Aziraphale speak broken French from afar, thought at least I know where to find him at the end, and made his silent departure shortly thereafter.

Anyway, the End did not arrive, and Crowley received a commendation for the role he did not play in the Great War.

When the second world war came, Crowley had the same thought as before. The End is here. Let’s go off together. Blast the holy water, blast everything else. Crowley headed again to France, thinking naturally this was where Aziraphale would be, and began his search for the angel: in defense plants, at Red Cross meetings. Well, perhaps he was repairing an aeroplane somewhere or leading a trade union. Well, perhaps he was on the killing fields — this was unlikely, but Aziraphale was full of surprises. Crowley pictured him stood in front of Death with his arms outstretched and that cute furrow in his brow.

But there were no signs of him anywhere.

Discorporated? No, I would have felt that, and besides, he’d be back by now. Burned in Hellfire? No, it’s the same, I would have known it.

It had not occurred to Crowley until suddenly it did, in the middle of the hospital hallway, fluorescent lights flickering on and off above his head. The only reason why Aziraphale could not be found or even felt.

Aziraphale did not want to be found.

He’s hiding, Crowley realized, feeling like he’d been kicked in the gut. The strength of such a realization was enough to send him reeling back, dizzied in confusion. He’s hiding from me.

____

In the end, it was pure luck he found the angel.

Once he was close enough, noticing Aziraphale’s energy was like noticing a lit candle in the corner of a dark room. The medical bay was particularly dark, and so the contrast was all the more evident — even when the angel was covered in dirt and leaves and smelled of wet concrete and other things that rain leaves behind, even when he appeared at face value like just another masked medic moving between the gurneys. It was difficult for Aziraphale to blend in, and somehow especially so when he was trying to. He was an angel among men, after all.

“Please don’t be alarmed,” Aziraphale said in his halting French. He moved a hand over a soldier, who only groaned and shifted in his sleep. Besides the bundled bodies laid up in their cots, Aziraphale was the only other being there. He had evidently broken into the hospital to do this. Crowley pictured Aziraphale hurrying through the rain and trenches, picking the locks to the medical bay, cleaning bullet holes in the night. His heart throbbed at the thought.

He stood in the entrance, framed by hallway light behind him. By now the angel would feel him, and at any moment Aziraphale would surely turn and say his greetings. But given their last conversation eighty years ago, and given the way Aziraphale had hid himself from him, Crowley was no longer sure of where they’d left off and where they could pick up, and if Aziraphale even wanted to.

The harsh line of Aziraphale’s shoulders — suddenly tensed at the presence beyond the door — told Crowley everything he needed to know.

He doesn’t want me here.

“What are you doing here,” said Aziraphale.

Crowley took a step inward. He was at a loss, too. He wondered if he should apologize; he knew he had nothing to apologize for; he thought, if anything, Aziraphale owed him an apology just the same for refusing what he’d thought was a sensible request for holy water. But in Crowley’s life there were those who held the leash and those who were tied to the end of it. And he was the one who’d searched so pathetically for Aziraphale all these years, and was clearly violating some unspoken rule by searching for him when the angel didn’t want to be found, and so Crowley rather thought he was in no position to expect — well, anything, really. Apologies or forgiveness.

“I,” said Crowley, unable to bear this feeling of being opened and exposed for the pitiful creature he was.

Even if he’d stumbled upon the angel by accident. He knew there were were no real accidents in this life. He'd looked for Aziraphale for years, and now that he’d found him, it would not do to pretend otherwise. He could not lean against the doorframe acting as though the very sight of Aziraphale did not tear the centre of his heart in two. He could not hide how vulnerable he felt, and was certain he did not want to.

When it was clear Crowley had no further words to say, Aziraphale tried another question. “How did you find me?”

“Circle France for long enough and we’re bound to run into each other, I imagine. Being the last ones still standing and all,” Crowley said. It was an accurate enough answer, though Aziraphale did not look reassured.

“I suppose,” Aziraphale said slowly.

“What are you doing on the frontlines?”

“What does it look like?” Aziraphale made a gesture. “Humans have been growing more… savage in their treatment of one another. I couldn’t sit back and do nothing.”

“You could have,” said Crowley. “Easily, in your bookshop.”

“And do what there, you think?”

“For one, not risk discorporation by gunfire or pneumonia.”

“Oh, I’m very good at avoiding those,” said Aziraphale dismissively. “Anyway, I was growing restless in London, and…” He hesitated and gave Crowley a strange look. “Well, I didn’t think you’d come looking for me so soon.”

Of course it was just like Aziraphale to call reuniting after eighty years of separation 'so soon.'

Then, because Crowley was Crowley and could not help himself, his next words slipped out, unbidden. “Did you — have you been avoiding me?”

Aziraphale balked. There was no other word for it. He looked as white as the sheets on the gurneys, and turned his face to hide it.

“I — Crowley, you must understand —”

Crowley took another step forward. He could not stop. “Why?”

Like watching a train wreck, Aziraphale’s face crumpled into lines, and Crowley could not bear to look away.

“Why?” Crowley repeated softly. He hated that face, he hated what it meant. That he was the seed of this sorrow.

His legs began moving toward Aziraphale before he could process what he was doing.

He weaved between the rows of sleeping men, he tore his glasses off his face. He never stopped looking at Aziraphale, he never stopped looking at Aziraphale who never looked back. On some level he must have known he was headed for collision; on another level he knew there were no brakes to pull anyway. The glasses clattered to the ground.

When they did collide, it was wretched. Crowley made sure of that. He grabbed Aziraphale by the collar of his coat, he thought of kissing that mouth, he thought of crying into it. He slammed their lips together with a force he didn’t know existed inside him. All the centuries of pent-up wanting, everything he wanted but could not have. Whatever it was, it was new, and Crowley was lost to the feeling. 

Aziraphale made a soft mmpf of surprise. For a moment Crowley held himself against that sound and against those lips that’d made it. There were points of pleasure pulsing in his body that he’d never imagined before. It felt indescribably close to flying: reaching a high point in the sky, tucking the wings against his body, letting the fall take him. Leaning into the weightlessness and the drop of his stomach, hearing the wind blow past his ears, closing his eyes to the vertiginous feeling. Except he was not rushing downwards but in all directions at once, upwards and sideways, and in that moment he was tethered only by the softness of Aziraphale’s lips, but otherwise knew no up, and no down.

Except something wasn’t right. Aziraphale hadn’t moved at all. His lips were a tight line against Crowley’s. He was slack in Crowley’s grip, held up by fists curled in fabric.

Like kissing an empty shell, every agonizing instant of it was wrong. It was all wrong.

What just happened?

Shaking, he let Aziraphale go.

“I,” tried Crowley again. Always starting sentences he couldn’t finish. He searched the angel’s face, desperate for any sign that what happened wasn’t as disastrous as it’d felt.

Aziraphale’s eyes were blinking hard. There were tears at their edges. His fingers had flown up to touch his mouth — perhaps to feel the ghost of the kiss, perhaps to rub it from his lips. They moved up to swipe hotly at the tears, thumbing them away like stains on a countertop.

Crowley could only stare.

He didn’t know what came over him. He just didn’t know how to stop. Why didn’t he stop? Why did he do that?

What have I done?

“I’m so sorry,” Crowley whispered. If he could still save this, if he could salvage anything. This couldn’t be how it ends. If there was a leash that tied him to the angel, let it still be a leash, let it not be cut. Let him trail at the end of it, let it be forever, or let it be one more day. “Aziraphale — I don’t know what just happened, ’m so sorry —”

“No,” Aziraphale said, and he said it in such a singular way that Crowley thought wildly of throwing himself on his knees, of begging for forgiveness.

But then Aziraphale snapped, and the kiss was gone, and the regret was gone with it. 

____

“Did you…have you been avoiding me?” Crowley asked the angel stood before him.

Aziraphale looked as though he’d been struck, and, curiously enough, as though he was on the edge of crying. “No,” he said faintly. “No, it’s not at all what you think.”

“What, then?” Crowley asked, harsher than he intended. It was hard to hold himself back when Aziraphale was standing only a few feet away. If he had the inclination, he could reach out, grab him by the shoulders, shake him until the truth tumbled out like pennies from a money box. “What do I think?”

Aziraphale did not elaborate. The tears finally broke, spilling out over his soft, round cheeks. 

So Crowley did grab him by the shoulders, and slammed their mouths together before he could catch himself in the act. The fervor with which it happened frightened even him. It was like his body reached out to do it before it could be ripped away, knowing it would be ripped away.

It was. It was ripped away.

____

“Have you been avoiding me?” asked Crowley, looking at Aziraphale’s lips and thinking of kissing them. Weird — there were tear stains on his cheeks.

“No,” said Aziraphale firmly.

This time Aziraphale was the one who kissed Crowley.

Then he took it back.

____

“Are you avoiding me?” asked Crowley.

Aziraphale said, “Yes.”

Crowley nodded. There it was, then. There were bells ringing in his ears. He turned to look for his glasses, which he realized had fallen to the ground. He bent to pick them up, and after dusting them with the corner of his jacket, situated them back on his nose where they belonged. They were helpful in the immediate way they shrouded the world in darkness. If it was harder for him to see Aziraphale, perhaps it was harder for Aziraphale to see him.

“Right. Okay,” Crowley said. He cast a look at the humans around them, coiled up in pain and grief, smelling of sickness and unchanged bandages. “I only thought maybe the End was here,” he continued by way of pathetic explanation, “so I came to ask if you wanted to go off together.”

Aziraphale gave a forced smile. Crowley had never seen such an expression on the angel’s face, so the effect of it was disarming. “I don’t think this is the end, my dear,” he said. “Not yet.”

“You’re probably right. Just another one of the humans’ many wars, then.” That I’d foolishly interpreted otherwise, Crowley’s mind supplied. 

It was time for him to go. He’d already overstayed his welcome. The indignity of this strain of heartbreak was too much to handle on its own, much less in front of the angel who lived at the root of it. Best to go and spare them both.

“I’ll come find you later then?” said Crowley. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Then Aziraphale said, in a rush of emotion, like a dam had broke and he could no longer contain the words, “Crowley, I am ready.”

It was an obvious lie, but Crowley let the words soothe him anyway. “Are you?” Crowley asked, and gave a small smile.

When he looked back, he did so over the rim of his lenses. To see Aziraphale wholly, to let the image of him wash over his heart, to have it to carry. Aziraphale was still standing by the gurney of the man he’d been healing. The moonlight that streamed into the room through one half-window seemed to capture only him: the shine of his curls, an overcoat unmarked by earlier signs of his breaking and entering, his hands that’d come together to protect his middle and spin the ring on his pinky finger. He looked real and honest and so impossibly far away.

Aziraphale took a shaking breath. “I am,” he said. “I love you.” 

____

“Are you?” Crowley asked delicately. 

Aziraphale said, “No. You — you’re right, I don’t think I am.”

Crowley nodded. This he already knew, though it hurt all the same to hear it. Still. Still, Aziraphale had hesitated. “See you later, angel,” Crowley said, and took his leave.

Chapter Text

1941, Soho

In the end, they’d been safe after all.

Misdirection is the number one skill of a performer in theatre magic. Rossignol had said it in Aziraphale’s very first class in 1760, then in each class after, then again on his deathbed sometime in the 80s.

It was advice Aziraphale was only happy to effect. After all, he had rather good compartmentalization skills. Well, mostly true. When it mattered anyway. Quite handy when used to mislead himself, or others — Furfur with the photo switch, Crowley with the reveal of the photo switch after they returned to the bookshop. He did feel a slight twinge of guilt in letting Crowley believe this was his last night on Earth (he thought vaguely of the “fuck, shit, fucking shit shit shit” and a string of other expletives stuttered in the car) but the expression on Crowley’s face later — realizing it was, for once, Aziraphale that’d come to their rescue — was worth it.

Aziraphale set his glass down on the table and cast a furtive look at the demon sat across him. “Thank you, again, for the books,” he said, and with all of him tried to convey the depth of how much he meant it.

Crowley only shook his head. “Don’t mention it again, seriously.”

“I know. Only there’s been an awful lot of things gone unmentioned lately.”

He didn’t just mean the last hundred years. He quite thought he meant all the years before that too.

Crowley shook his head again and sipped. “Can’t keep track of what we owe each other these days, anyway.”

“I rather think I owe you more than the reverse.”

“Well, all the more reason not to mention it. Wouldn’t be good caught owing a demon any favours.”

“Depends on the favours, doesn’t it?”

Crowley’s fingers tapped the table. “Look,” he said, meaning stop it.

Aziraphale only scrunched his nose in reply.

Aziraphale had good compartmentalization skills, and this was mostly true. For example: it’d been seventy-nine years since he last saw Crowley, and in those years he did not think of him. Oh, if think meant the way his lungs caught at the sight of church glass the color of honey or the way he subconsciously filed away Significant Events and Happenings in his mind to Discuss With the Adversary Later, then fine, call it what you want, call it thinking. But if thinking meant anything more than that, any greater requirement of conscious thought, then no, Aziraphale did not think of Crowley.

Seventy-nine years was a long time. To a celestial being, a year or decade was but a drop in the ocean, but the days were long. So Aziraphale pushed the thoughts down. Perhaps he’d always known Crowley would find him. Circle him, captured as he was by Aziraphale’s orbit. Or perhaps Aziraphale was captured by his. The thought of it had been, apparently, enough to hold him over in the time that’d passed, and any more was unbearable.

Because, and this was because, and this was not thinking, not at all —

But in these last years alone or working some blessing across the country, the image of Crowley’s disappointed face — the way he’d reeled back when Aziraphale had snapped, the feeling is mutual — had insisted upon Aziraphale like dreams to the sleeping. An obvious lie Crowley must surely have seen through, though painful to hear nonetheless. Then, to have come, hotfooted across the church. Then, the books —

Did Crowley know how much that'd meant to him? He must know.

Maybe this was enough to show him.

Aziraphale took a shuddering breath. Reached his hand across the table, placed it gently over Crowley’s. Two fingers on cold knuckles, the heel of his palm on Crowley’s fingertips.

Crowley stilled under the touch, a helpless spectator of his own body. 

Boldened by the stillness — it was not a no — Aziraphale stood from the table and walked over. Two steps over and he was there by Crowley’s side. He did it with intention, with meaning. He paused only long enough to see himself reflected in wide yellow eyes. He took Crowley’s face in his hands, held the rough of his cheeks in his palms, he thought, how did we go without this for so long? Trading favours, holding out a hand, steps in a dance. What was the next step? Where did it lead?

Kissing Crowley was easy. It came like breath.

He’d never kissed anyone before. He hadn’t thought of how his first would go. He hadn’t thought of being kissed back.

Crowley kissed back. It came like a sigh.

____

When Aziraphale let go, shaking in the shadow of what was forever changed between them, he marvelled at the way the warm touch of Crowley’s lips lingered on his own.  

“Don’t do that again,” Crowley said into the quiet. “Not until you know what for.”

Aziraphale said, “I know what for.”

____

Once, Aziraphale thought he’d uncovered all corners of human pleasure, but moving together in the cover of the bookshop was something entirely different, entirely more. He hadn’t thought pleasure even existed at such a scale, with such a quality. Lips capturing lips, capturing the sighs. They moved backward — Aziraphale couldn’t know who was moving who — falling into the couch. He felt — and he would later reflect often on this — an overwhelming need to touch everything, like the gravity of these six thousand years had finally thrown them together, and wrenched together as they were, they would not come apart.

(Aziraphale recalled watching Adam and Eve the first time: languid at first, each movement leaden with purpose. Then the movements became frenzied, hurried, urgent. 

Later, he asked the demon stood under his wing about it.

“It’s natural,” the demon said without missing a beat. “I imagine demons are more attuned than angels to this kind of stuff, but to me it feels like an ordinary progression.”

“An ordinary progression?” Aziraphale asked, bewildered. It had not occurred to him to describe what he’d witnessed in such terms.

“Yes,” the demon said, “considering what they felt for one another.”

“You felt it too?”

“I feel desire. Part of my job to.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale reflected on this. So demons could feel desire. Was that what it was, rolling under Adam and Eve’s skin? He thought of what else he’d felt when he watched them wrestle about, and what he felt now seeing them leave the garden. He thought of the Almighty, and what the Almighty gave to all Her angels, and of the angel he’d met before the Fall who was now the demon standing beside him. So utterly friendly and un-demon-like Aziraphale could hardly understand it.

Six thousand years later, standing among the ruins of the church, Aziraphale felt Crowley’s love. More than that — he named it.

That’s what it is, Aziraphale thought with a jolt when their hands touched over the handle of the leather bag. He thought of the love he’d always felt since Eden, thrumming steady in the air, a background pulse of light and music. He thought of how he’d attributed it to the humans, or even to himself on occasion, when really it had belonged to Crowley, had belonged to Crowley since always. He’s loved me this whole time.

As I’ve loved him.)

Afterward, breath slowing, Aziraphale broke away from Crowley’s lips to say it. “I’m in love with you,” Aziraphale said. Knowing he was loved back. Knowing he needed Crowley to know he was loved in return.

Crowley paused above him. His eyes widened. His hands, which had been tracing circles on Aziraphale’s chest, rose up to cup Aziraphale’s face. Aziraphale leaned into them, kissing the palm of each in turn, holding Crowley’s gaze. He thought he could melt in the softness of those golden eyes. He thought he could die in these arms. Let me show you how much, Aziraphale thought in tenderness, in truth. My touch and my words and my desire and my love.

Like Adam and Eve in Eden, who’d loved each other in sleep and in waking, who’d been cast out and had held each other in the desert and through the first storm. Like an angel and a demon in Eden, who’d loved each other the same, though all this time they’d never thought to say it.

Crowley had gone very still. His fingers travelled down the length of Aziraphale’s cheek, feather-light in touch.

“Don’t say that,” Crowley said on an indrawn breath, voice barely above a murmur. He looked light and shaky and unsure.

“Why not,” Aziraphale insisted. He ran his hands through the tangle of red above. He liked saying it, and he was a being of it, and anyway, Crowley needed to know. “I lo —”

“Don’t,” snapped Crowley, and swallowed.

Don’t say it, or don’t love you? wondered Aziraphale. The column of Crowley’s throat wobbled and Aziraphale watched it, loving him, every aspect of him. Now that he knew, he didn’t think he could stop, regardless of what Crowley did or did not say.

“You know I,” Crowley said. “You know me. I won’t be able to stop myself from — from moving forward. I’m going to push you, I’m going to want more, I’m not going to be able to slow down. I can’t slow down, not with you. And words have consequences, saying it makes it real, and it’ll put us in danger. I’ll put us in danger.”

“That’s quite alright, my dear,” said Aziraphale. He put his hands over Crowley’s own, then leaned forward to kiss him again. He surprised even himself in saying it. For once he thought they’d gone slowly enough, had been careful enough, and he was ready for whatever came of it.

At this contact Crowley’s mouth opened, welcoming Aziraphale’s own, and they both sank deep into this shared communion: the taste of each other, the small, desperate noises escaping their throats, the feeling of tongue on tongue. Aziraphale wanted to do this forever, wanted to shower Crowley in this, pepper him with kisses, hold him, indulge him, never leave this couch, never leave this bookshop.

“I’m ready to go faster,” Aziraphale said, when he remembered he had the words. “Wherever that takes us.” 

If he thought Crowley could surprise him — and he knew the demon well enough, and was hardly ever surprised by him — this was not a surprise he’d ever thought to encounter.

Crowley pulled back. He said, with a heartbreaking smile, and to Aziraphale’s stunned silence, “I’m not.”

“You’re,” said Aziraphale, mouth dry.

“Not ready,” Crowley finished for him. It was not cruel, the way he said it. “Angel, we almost died today. It could have ended, just like that. Six thousand years of existence and then some, and the first time we see each other in almost eighty years and a stage trick is what does us in? I don’t even know where to begin to process any of this night. And there’s not enough alcohol in the world to help me.”

“Almost did us in,” Aziraphale corrected. Then, accusingly, “But you do love me. I can feel it.”

If Crowley seemed surprised that Aziraphale knew, he did not show it. Instead he said, with a measured, unconcerned laugh, “Yeah?”

“You —” Aziraphale fought through himself to find the right words, then decided there were none. “I — I’m afraid I’m a bit lost, dear boy.”

Crowley pressed his lips to Aziraphale’s forehead. If it wasn’t for how unbearably tender he was being, Aziraphale quite thought he would have fallen apart by now.

“You love me?” Crowley asked.

“Yes,” said Aziraphale immediately, “yes, of course.”

Crowley said, “Then I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything.”

Crowley said, “I need you to take my memory of tonight.”

____

Present Day, Soho

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said with a rush of breath. “Again?” 

Crowley, who had never thought to conceive what Aziraphale would say in return, could not conceive now that this would be it. “What do you mean, again?” he repeated, embarrassed and unsure. That this was what his confession amounted to when it’d sat so heavy on his tongue since Tadfield.

“I,” said Aziraphale, twisting his ring. He had put the biographies down and was walking closer. “No, I don’t mean — that is to say. I just hadn’t expected you to say it so soon.”

“So soon?” Crowley parroted again. His heartbeat was slipping in an uneven rhythm, a slight shift to an off-beat tap. Clenching and unclenching with breath. He watched as Aziraphale’s jaw clench and unclench the same, he tried to relax, tried to swallow down the labored way his chest was wobbling. He couldn’t, not with Aziraphale standing so close, not with that look in his eyes.

Aziraphale was twisting the ring off his finger. It was not a fluid motion. But he did it patiently, looking at it all the while, and there was something like pure, sinking relief in the motion that made Crowley feel quite boneless.

To turn back Time, Crowley had almost wished. To take it back. But something had held him from wishing it.

“You always surprised me,” Aziraphale was saying. “With how often you said it. And it’s gotten more frequent over the years. The last time was just a few weeks ago, in Tadfield.”

The ring finally free from his finger, Aziraphale held out his hand expectantly. Numbly, Crowley took it. What else could he do? He watched as Aziraphale slide the ring up his finger, and had a vague thought that this was an action that meant something to humans. Or perhaps to themselves, too, only he’d missed the memo on whatever it was meant to convey.

Then Aziraphale brought Crowley’s knuckles to his lips. He kissed the ring, now on Crowley’s finger, and when he dropped the kiss, he never let go of Crowley’s hand. “On the airbase, you said we were safe,” he said. “I think I’m inclined to agree with you, my dear.”

Crowley understood immediately.

____

When the ring touched Aziraphale’s lips, Crowley felt as opened up as he’d felt in Tadfield, as he’d felt all the times before but could not remember. Curtains folded into his vision, flooded his senses with memories, and colours and images crested over all else. He felt the afterglow welling inside him with one memory in particular of the bookshop where they’d kissed and Aziraphale had said I’m in love with you and then he’d broken Aziraphale’s heart.

(“It’s just like conducting a temptation,” Crowley had said. “Find the thread of desire, but instead of indulging it, you’ll want to remove the memory of it.”

“Where do I put it?” Aziraphale asked. His voice had gone soft and withdrawn, ever since Crowley had told him what he needed to do. But he’d come resolutely to the task at hand and there was a quirk in his brow that told Crowley all he needed to know. It was a mutual understanding, unsaid between them both. Crowley had not had to goad Aziraphale into it like he would a temptation, but the angel had instead shaken himself from his earlier pliancy and appeared to recognize the severity of the situation at hand. 

“Anywhere you want. Any container would work.”

Aziraphale pondered this by looking briefly around the bookshop. “One of my books, perhaps,” he said, before shaking his head. “No, Crowley, there’s nothing here valuable enough to hold your memory.”

Crowley looked Aziraphale up and down and came sliding to the obvious conclusion. He tapped the ring on Aziraphale’s pinky finger, a gold signet ring with a crest and line of feathers. “This,” he said. “This is fine. I’ve never seen you take it off.”

Aziraphale twisted the ring off his pinky and held it reverently in the middle of his palm as though it already contained something precious. “When do I give it back to you?” he asked. 

Crowley had not thought that far. To be frank he couldn’t imagine a future where he and Aziraphale could ever be safe, not unless they were cleanly cauterized from their respective sides and could somehow still be left alone. And despite what Aziraphale had said — I’m ready to go faster, wherever that takes us — Crowley was staunchly unwilling to be the reason Aziraphale would Fall, or be destroyed entirely. If that was the price to hear the love in Aziraphale’s voice, to hear the words, it was a price he was unwilling to pay.

He decided not to tell the angel this.

“When it’s safe,” he said. “Until then, we’ll continue on as before. Meet in public places, mostly, or the bookshop if we must.”

Aziraphale reached over to squeeze Crowley’s hand. He looked bright and hopeful and trusting. He looked as though the possibility of one day being safe was an event certain to occur and not at all the exception Crowley felt it was. Though perhaps Aziraphale was right to believe it. More unusual things have happened, after all, like six thousand years of unlikely friendship between an angel and a demon who’d originally had nothing in common besides an openness to start — and continue — an enduring conversation.

Then if Aziraphale could believe Crowley in what they were about to do, and Aziraphale could believe in the eventuality of what they would be, then Crowley could believe him in believing in the eventuality. A circle of trust. A one-two step dance. An I trust you to trust me, you trust me to trust you. And so on and so forth.

“I love you,” said Aziraphale, inadequately.

“I know,” sighed Crowley, closing his eyes. “I know.”)

____

The memories settled in Crowley’s mind, falling and melting in him like snow. For the most part his memories belonged to him, only the twist was different — the ending scene, the reason for leaving, one line or two or three. Other memories had been plucked from his mind altogether. He flipped through them like he was possessed, captured by these new understandings he’d viewed through a mirror and could now rotate to watch from reverse.

(One time, Crowley had asked the rise of Aziraphale’s neck that curved over spine, “What are you thinking about?” and the angel had turned and smiled.

“That you shouldn’t have come with me,” said Aziraphale, his voice soft. “I don’t know why you insisted on driving.”

“The train is crap,” Crowley answered without answering, though he knew Aziraphale would be unlikely to agree. “You’d’ve had a miserable time and guess who’d have the pleasure of hearing all about it?”

Aziraphale laughed lightly in agreement. The echo of it rattled pleasantly in Crowley’s brain.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Aziraphale. “Anyway, thank you. I’ve always liked this area and it’s rather nice to explore it by car.”

Crowley, who’d never been and had no opinion of the south coast, attempted to form an opinion now, and looked past the angel’s shoulders out the Bentley as if for the first time. This area of the road had begun to curve around rolling green hills and promontories, and the sea beyond that sparkled like a foamy glass. There was definitely something catching about it, the chalk cliffs, the Brighton seafront, the gulls that held formation above them in perfect stillness. Perhaps they could move out here one day. Get away from the city. They’d circled London for long enough, and Crowley wasn’t especially attached to it or any particular human settlement, having lived everywhere and nowhere for much of his life. There was only one really good reason to stay.

“We should move here someday,” said Aziraphale so suddenly that Crowley thought he’d read his mind.

“We?” Crowley said, trying to sound as nonchalant as he didn’t feel.

Aziraphale had taken these last two lines and tucked them in the ring.)

(Another time, Crowley opened his door to find Aziraphale stumbling drunkenly outside his Mayfair flat. “I love you,” Aziraphale had said. “Forget what I said about being ready to go faster. It doesn’t matter how slow or fast we go as long as we’re going together.”

Crowley blinked.

Then Aziraphale had taken this entire memory.)

(“It’ll be alright,” Crowley had said in 1941 to Aziraphale’s scrunched up face. “We’ve had practice in this already. Cancelling each other out, remember? It’s the same thing, only this time only one of us will know it.” 

“I — I understand, my dear.”

Crowley thought Aziraphale was being very brave, but there were other things he needed to say and he needed to say them fast before this bravery faltered. “Listen,” he said, inhaling shakily and thinking of what he’d felt himself hurtling toward over the centuries, “I’m probably going to confess again. If that happens, you’ll need to remove that memory as well. Wipe the slate clean. Don’t let me confess, don’t let me love you, don’t let me push.”

Aziraphale blinked owlishly. “Crowley, you just said you love me.”

Crowley leaned to kiss Aziraphale’s forehead once more. He rather liked doing it. He wondered when he would do it again, if ever.

“Yeah,” Crowley said into Aziraphale’s salt-sweaty skin, “Why do you think I’m slowing down for once?”)

(“I love you,” Crowley had said on the bus from Tadfield. “I’ve loved you since Eden.”

“Crowley, please,” Aziraphale had returned. “Please — we can’t have this conversation.”

“Right. Right, I understand. It’s okay.” Then the curtains, then the suturing, then the begging.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, and little did Crowley know how much.

Aziraphale had taken this entire memory too.

But then he gave it back.)

____

“Is everything alright?” Aziraphale asked Crowley for the second time that afternoon. The Shostakovich record had finished playing. The tower of biographies on the ground had fallen over.

What a question.

Crowley looked at the angel, feeling as though he’d resurfaced from the ocean having quite forgotten how to breathe. He hadn’t noticed that Aziraphale had come to sit on the armchair beside him, or that Aziraphale was still holding his hand.

With the memories replanted, and the gaps in understanding stitched together, everything finally felt whole. Forgetting the lyrics to a lost song knowing the song existed, then having the words rush back into mind as though they’d never left. The nagging wrongness of something amiss, like whether you turned off the stove or whether you left your wallet in the car, but recovering the instance of wrongness, or returning to correct it. Feeling that you were right but never able to prove it. Being able to prove it. Having the proof to hold.

Thinking you were loved but never knowing it.

Knowing it.

Finally, knowing it.

“Yes,” Crowley said. He thought, for the first time in almost a century, that he really was.

____

Present and Future Days, South Downs

Crowley had been trying to grow the garden.

Houseplants were one thing, but an outdoor garden was harder. He liked a challenge and so poured his efforts into the garden: roses and begonias and petunias and an apple tree.

Three months since the not-pocalypse. Afterwards, trading book clubs and Tadfield trips and wine nights for the quiet comforts of Crowley’s South Downs cottage had been something of a no-brainer. Either way, it was safe — they were safe. 

He remembered coming here again and again over the last century, to dig out roots and revive the begonias. Now he packed soil in planters and applied mulch to flowerbeds and got dirt on his face and was reminded of the familiar beat. Déjà vu, he had been here before. These memories of a past life spilled into each other, these echoes. 

But — and here was the kicker, here was the difference — where there was once an empty shadow, now Aziraphale sat beside him in the shade. Book in hand, half-reading, half-watching Crowley. Wearing the apron from earlier which he’d put on to roll dough. There were traces of flour on it, and on his face, and in his hair. And the other difference was this: Crowley, moving slowly: the garden, the built-in bookshelves, the pan rolls. And Crowley, turning to the angel when the words struck at random, affected by all the things he carried, all the things he’d lost. All the things that were never lost. Everything he always had.

“Angel,” Crowley said. “I love you.”

Aziraphale smiled. With easy lightness, and a small laugh, he said, “I know.” Another shared moment beneath a tree, another moment in the garden. “You’ve told me many times.”

This was no repeat of the past, Crowley knew.

This was a new beginning.

end