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Until a few days ago, I hadn’t seen Aziraphale for years. He’d fucked off to Heaven, and the most contact we’d had were notes slipped out by miracle or into the hands of Muriel.
“Crowley, wait for me. Please.”
“Please don’t give up.”
It was the please that made me stop, made me do as he asked. Otherwise, I might have gone off to Alpha Centauri. Alone.
Standing outside the bookshop, I can feel him. That was the worst part of his leaving that day. When he was in Heaven, I couldn’t feel him. For six thousand years, I had felt his presence. Near or far, he was always somewhere, like an extra pulse in my body. The only time it went missing was when the bookshop caught fire, and I fell crashing to my knees, screaming at God and Satan and everyone else who wasn’t listening, cursing them for the loss of my best friend.
He’s back now, but for the life of me I can’t take the few steps that will move me from out here to in there. Because once I do, everything changes again.
No matter how miserable I was, I adapted to his absence. It became familiar and normal. It was my life. But this? This is something new and unknowable.
The burden of being with Aziraphale is something I will have to relearn. And being with him has been a burden, one I carried alone for six thousand years.
At every turn he denied us. From the earliest days when he tormented me by pointing out that I am Fallen (as if that fact had escaped me) to our last encounter when he tried to reinstate me as an angel (as if I ever would), he’s made it clear that I am not good enough as I am—that I am not his equal, that I am not a suitable partner.
I feel him inside the bookshop, waiting, and I long for him as much as I loathe this reunion. Finally, I make it through the door.
“Crowley!” he says as he rushes to greet me, hands outstretched. I stiffen as I feel my heart, useless old thing, start to beat a staccato rhythm in my tightening chest. I put out a hand, expecting a hearty handshake. I can manage that.
What I cannot manage are the arms wrapped around me, crushing me into him, my face in his lavender-scented curls. I try to resist, but cannot help the deep inhale I take, and my body, traitorous human-shaped corporation, relaxes for the first time in years.
Home, it says. We’re home.
“Crowley,” he whispers as his hands rub up and down my back. “My darling.”
My darling?
Aziraphale has never called me anything but my dear, same as he calls everyone from his friends to his barber to the alley cats behind the bookshop. This? This is new.
“Ngt.” Because I am nothing if not articulate.
“Come, come,” he says, taking me by the hand, dragging me to the Chesterfield.
Since when do we hold hands?
I sit in my corner, expecting him to sit primly at the other end. But no, here he comes to sit right next to me.
What is happening? Who even is this?
“Ang—” I start again. “Aziraphale, what is going on?”
He smiles at me, a beaming thing that has always made me mad for him. He knows it. I know he knows it.
“My dear, Heaven is defeated. I am yours.”
“Ngt. What?”
“Yes, darling. I am yours. Well, I have been yours for, oh, six thousand years. But I dare say it hasn’t much felt like it.”
“Not as such.”
He wraps me in his arms and holds me close.
“May I kiss you?
“Course, angel.” What a ridiculous question.
It is everything our first kiss was not. Slow and languorous and full of care.
“Lay your burden down, darling,” he whispers. “Let me carry it. Please. It’s time to come home.”