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He goes out to the balcony. It’s a warm night; it often is. That's one of the things that drew him to California, when he bought a home across the pond several years ago. It was mostly for work and proximity to useful things and useful people, but the warmth was a personal bonus. He’s known too many cold nights in his life.
Crowley lets out a small sigh, fumbles in his bathrobe pocket for a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. It’s the work of a moment to dig one out and light it up, pull the smoke into his lungs, close his eyes and feel the acrid burn of it. Sometimes a little discomfort is worth enduring.
He opens his eyes again and looks out at the water.
He can’t see it, of course. Can’t see many of the stars either, there’s too much light pollution from the city behind him. New York might have the sobriquet “the city that doesn’t sleep”, but the description applies to all the major cities Crowley’s ever been in, Los Angeles included. From out here he can’t hear much of the nightlife, just a mixed susurrus of traffic, wind, and waves. But there’s enough light to haze the sky even if he's looking away from it into the black. Sort of black.
He drops ash from his cigarette over the edge and tries not to think.
“Thought you quit.”
Crowley’s mouth curls a bit. “I did.”
Lilith walks through the still-open sliding doors to lean on the balcony next to him. Without looking she holds out a hand, and he passes over the cigarette. She takes a long drag and moans. “Fuck, that’s good.”
“Thought you quit.”
Her grin is lopsided as she hands the cig back to him. “I did.”
He chuckles and wraps an arm around her shoulders, kissing her temple as they both look out at a world that’s not really visible from this angle. She leans against him with easy intimacy born of over a decade’s friendship. Just friendship these days, despite what the tabloids like to claim, albeit a friendship that sometimes comes with extras. They’re too alike for more.
It’s still good, though, having someone with whom things are never complicated. It’s not enough for either of them, not in the long run…but there’s nothing wrong with getting a little comfort sometimes. When things are tough, or when you’re just damn tired. When you don’t know what you want or how to get it. When you look into the abyss and it ignores you instead of looking back.
It’s soothing, this: the sound of ocean waves, the warmth of the shoulder resting under his fingers and the taste of nicotine and tar. Familiar.
Lilith plucks the cigarette back out from his mouth. “So,” she says, puffing out smoke that dissipates into invisibility almost at once, “what’s keeping you awake and making you indulge in terrible habits like cancer sticks and ex-girlfriends, hm? Is it Leo?”
He snorts, reaches to steal the cigarette again, but she holds it out of reach. A prize she’ll only exchange for honest answers, and she knows him too well for him to get away with lying. Crowley gives in and goes back to leaning on the balcony, considering his answer. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Four years, just…” He holds up his hand, lets it fall dramatically. “Down the drain.” He turns his head and buries his face in her hair, inhaling. She smells good. She always does, it’s one of the things that initially attracted him to her. Vanilla and cloves, something like that. He should steal her shampoo. He closes his eyes again, swallows hard. “I really thought it’d last this time, you know? I thought we’d work it all out.”
“Yeah.” Her arm wraps around his waist, brushing the silk of his robe over his skin. The touch could be sensual in other circumstances, but right now it’s just soothing. Which at the moment is better. “You’re not the only one who thought that. Half-expected I’d be getting an invitation to a wedding instead of a hookup, to be honest.”
Crowley can’t force out the words So did I. He’d thought about it. Looked at rings, even. Leo hadn’t been completely averse to the idea, the few times they’d drifted towards the subject. Just…distracted. Always distracted, so many ideas, so many things in his head to work on now that they crowded all thoughts of the future out. Eventually there’d been no space for Crowley in there either. “Yeah, well. Shit happens,” he says finally. “Happened. Keeps happening.”
She hands him back the cigarette, which is revealed as a trick to free up her hand so she can flick a finger against his chest. “None of that self-pity, you. You’re an internationally successful musician standing on an ocean-facing balcony on a private condo in California, next to an attractive and really quite unnervingly talented artist, smoking a post-coital cigarette. Not bad for a Scots lad from the streets.”
He chuckles, just as she intended. “You know me too well.”
“Obviously. So what’s really bothering you? You’re not missing Leo, I can tell.”
Crowley runs a hand through his hair. “No, I’m not. That’s part of it, y’know? Think it’d be easier if I was. But it all just…burned itself out, and now there’s nothing left, not even regret.” He looks down at the cigarette, over half-smoked now and an all-too-apt metaphor. There’s an idea, he thinks with the part of his hindbrain that’s always looking for ideas for lyrics. No doubt it's been done dozens of times, but still…
He pushes the thought aside for now. “Wanting a change, maybe? Not sure what I’m doing out here anymore.” She opens her mouth and he rushes on before she can be sarcastic at him. “Yeah yeah yeah I know, I know, I’m out here because I wanted to live somewhere warm for once now that I’m unexpectedly successful and wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of my youth, shut it, that’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“Ah, I should have guessed. It’s finally your turn for the inevitable crisis of ‘this city is filled with plastic fake people who do nothing but prostitute themselves to Fame and Celebrity, but it’s all bullshit set up by manipulative corporate bastards and I’m sick of it, let me out so I can do something Real and Meaningful with my life like herd goats in a commune while doing yoga.’”
Crowley’s bent over with laughter before she’s gotten halfway through her spiel. It takes a while to recover enough breath to say, “Something like that. Especially the goats.”
Lilith smirks. “Don’t worry, sweetie. It’s an inevitable part of living here. Besides, it’s not all that bad. It's got the Museum of Jurassic Technology, for one thing.”
“I do like the flower radiographs.” His smile is genuine, and when he bends over to kiss her that’s genuine too. Grateful.
Kissing provides a pleasant diversion for a few minutes, as does the way she unties his robe and slinks her arms around his waist. He’d be happy to abandon the conversation there, fall into the sweet distraction offered by intimacy and sex. It wouldn’t be the first time.
But Lilith has never been one to leave unanswered questions alone. It’s another thing they have too much in common. She pulls back and looks up at him, her eyes keen and focused. “It’s not the temptations of goats either, AJ. What’s really the matter?”
He makes a negative noise and tries to lean in for another kiss, to avoid the subject, but she ducks her head back, her gaze relentless. Crowley groans and lets go, bends over and rests his head on the balcony rail instead, eyes closed.
“Ah,” Lilith says after a long moment. She strokes her fingers down his spine. “Again?”
She doesn’t have to say the name. It’s there now, in the air between them. “Yeah. Again, still, something.”
The admission is quiet enough that it’s impressive she can hear it at all. Lilith grabs him by the waist and pulls him upright again, and Crowley lets himself be pulled. “It’s just so ridiculous,” he complains. “It was years ago. Decades! We were still kids, pretty much. And yeah he was the first one that mattered, and when it was good it was really, really good, but—” He waves a hand in frustration. “Things were hardly perfect, and it ended about as badly as it could have. So why am I still hung up on him?”
Why is that relationship still the standard by which every other love affair is measured?, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to; she knows. She got measured by that standard too, once, and was found wanting.
“Maybe because it was left so unfinished?” It’s quiet, and not the first time she’s pointed this out to him. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting closure, AJ.”
Crowley closes his eyes again, as though his eyelids provide some useful barrier against this topic. “I haven’t talked to him in what, twenty years? It’s about as closed as something gets.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Yeah, well, you’d know,” he snaps.
Lilith winces and looks away, and so does he, guilty. It’s a low blow, because it’s true. It’s another thing they have in common. Lilith talks about her ex-husband only a little more often than Crowley will talk about Aziraphale, but they both have ghosts of the one who got away. The one who pushed them away, more like.
“It’s not the same,” she says finally. He snorts, and she glares at him. “I mean it. Your ex isn’t happily remarried with three kids. Or if he is, he found some magic way of keeping all the tabloids ignorant of it, which is beyond impossible.”
He has to snort at that, acknowledging her point. It’s a long time since Aziraphale was famous enough to get his face plastered on stands outside concert halls and the sides of buses, but that much would’ve gotten out. “I don’t know what he’s doing,” Crowley says instead, as though he hasn’t tracked Aziraphale’s career ever since the internet was invented. Earlier. “He could be.”
“Could be what?”
Crowley swallows, then answers the question under the question. “Better off without me.”
She grabs him in a hug and holds on hard, and he holds back, burying his face in her hair again. “That’s bullshit,” she repeats, muffled against his chest.
“You’re biased.”
“True, lucky for you.” Her arms tighten. “It’s still bullshit. That’s fear talking, and you know it. Doesn’t change the facts.”
“Which facts?” Crowley laughs, with no humour. “That underneath all the gloss and glitter I’m a sad sack who never got over his first real boyfriend? Bit pathetic, don’t you think? The press would love it.”
“Stop that.” She pulls back enough to look up at him. “AJ. Crowley. Forget the image. We’re not talking about what the rock star wants or is supposed to want. We’re talking about what you want.” She covers his mouth with her fingers before he can protest that he doesn’t know what he wants, which is the entire damn problem. “It’s not important why he still matters to you, just that he does. You could do something about that. It doesn’t have to be dramatic.”
He makes a muffled noise against her fingers, and she rolls her eyes. “Yes, I know you’re all about looking dramatic, but it doesn’t have to be. For fuck’s sake, just look him up next time you’re in London, or wherever he lives now. Stop by, ask him out for coffee. Or tea and cake, whatever you Brits do.” Another muffled sound of protest. “I know it’s a terrible stereotype, you’re a terrible stereotype, shut up. If you miss having him in your life, get him back in your life, even if just a little bit. Because yes, he broke your heart, but you’re also still thinking about him twenty years later.”
Crowley doesn’t answer, instead bending down and burying his face in her neck as her arms slip back around him. She’s right, at least about that last bit. But whenever he tries to imagine meeting up with Aziraphale again—and oh, he has imagined—he can’t make it work. It turns into ridiculous fantasies or fears, nothing possible, nothing real. Not that much about his life feels real these days. “I think it’s time for me to get out of L.A.,” he says finally.
Lilith snorts. “Been telling you that for years, bucko.”
“Yeah, yeah, just because you decided to move to fucking Albuquerque—”
He makes the word drip with derision; she laughs, which was the goal, and prods him in the ribs, which he expected. “You’re not the only one who wanted to get as far away as possible from your overly religious family, you dick, most of us just don’t have the option of hopping continents while we’re at it.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Despite it all he feels lightened by the conversation, some knot untying. “Dagon’s been talking to Beez about getting us into a studio again. Wanted to know if I’d written anything worth looking at lately.”
“Have you?”
He shrugs. It's neither modesty nor denial, just awareness that there's a long road between the initial song concept and what ends up on the album, and that goes double when working with the band instead of on his own. Triple. Quadruple, even. He's had things that stayed as he wrote them and others that evolved beyond recognition, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. “Feels like I'm stagnating out here,” he says instead. “Hastur and Ligur are wankers, but at least they keep me on my toes. And no one slacks off with Beez around.”
Lilith shudders. “Wouldn't dare,” she agrees. Though she and Beez had gotten on well, back in the day. Even before she and Crowley had started dating, when she was just someone brought in to design sleeve art for one of their albums. She sighs a little and tilts her head up to kiss his cheek. “You should go. Spend some time in the studio, see how it goes. You know you get bored and irritable without a project to work on.”
“Yeah…”
“And while you’re at it…” She squeezes his side. “Maybe you can consider looking up Aziraphale. Just to see what happens.”
“And if what happens is my pathetic heart gets crushed to pieces and I lose all my remaining illusions?” he says, only half-teasing.
“Then you come to Albuquerque and spend a month telling me you told me so and filling the air with gloomy invective while I paint you. Portrait of a Fallen Star, With Pears.”
“Always the damn pears.”
“I like pears.”
Crowley smiles to himself. He's heard it before, and not just from Lilith. “I'll think about it.” She raises an eyebrow; he groans and holds up a hand in self-defence. “I will.”
She takes his hand and pushes at it playfully; he folds their fingers together in silent gratitude. Lilith grins wickedly. “Don't give up the condo, though. I don't want to lose out on having a free place to crash in L.A.”
“Which is your real motivation for putting up with all my shit.”
“It absolutely is.”
“Suppose I can't blame you for wanting to get out of bloody Albuquerque—”
“Insult New Mexico one more time and I will fill your bed with cacti.”
“That'd be redundant, it's already got your prickly arse in it.”
“Only for this weekend.”
He huffs and rests his forehead against her hair again. “Thanks,” he says finally, voice low and muffled. “For being here.”
“For prying your head out of your ass, you mean.”
“That too.”
She grins and kisses him, runs her hands over and around his hips, grips his backside. “You’re welcome. And speaking of asses…”
Crowley laughs and follows as she tugs him back in through the sliding doors, turning his back on the night.