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When driving the Bentley through London, Crowley is nervous—makes ‘unnecessary’ stops at the traffic lights, goes under the speed limit, which is all so unlike him. Aziraphale is thankful for it, somewhat, but still worried. He looks at Crowley, goes to say something, but the demon interrupts him.
“You didn’t have to tag along, you know. I could do perfectly fine without you.”
Aziraphale closes his mouth and clears his throat. True, he did ask Crowley to let him go with, insisted even when Crowley tried to deflect, but that was only because he was worried about him. With them now finally comfortable, not having to hide away from Heaven or Hell, he thought it was as good a time as any to finally uncover the mystery of Crowley’s strung-out demeanour every June 6th for the past decade.
“I was just curious. You go to the same shop every year on this day, buy a bunch of things you don’t need—why?”
Silence.
So, apparently, Crowley isn’t in the mood for talking. He floors the gas pedal and swerves around the passing cars and pedestrians so aggressively that Aziraphale has to hold on to something for dear existence and just pray—and keep an emergency miracle on hand—that they don’t hit anything or anyone.
When they finally park, it is in front of an unassuming little shopfront in the recess of an older building, indicated only by a small chalkboard sign as ‘Albert’s Antiques’. Aziraphale perks up—he loves an antique store. Gets even more curious as to why Crowley ventures here.
The demon doesn’t wait for the angel to get out of the car before he gets out himself and stalks inside. Aziraphale huffs. He doesn’t understand what’s got into his old friend, why he’s being so withdrawn and irritated—more so than usual, that is.
When he walks into the store, it looks exactly like one would expect. Much like his bookshop, it’s covered in dust and smells of mould and old wood finish. Unlike the bookshop, it looks much smaller on the inside. There’s a modest collection of old furniture that occupies the left part of the room and a vitrine display on the right: trinkets, tableware, and paperweights. In the far corner of the room—a display of vintage record players and records. It is the piece of inventory that sticks out the most and appears the most cared for and prized.
“Ohhh! It’s you!” the man behind the counter drawls excitedly when he sees Crowley.
That moment, Crowley isn’t the gloomy, anxious one he’d arrived as—he looks at the man with a big, toothy smile and gestures a salute to him. “Good day to you, Albert.”
Contrary to what Crowley would want many to believe, Aziraphale knows he smiles often, but never quite a smile like that. This one’s genuine, warm. Loving, almost. Sometimes Crowley graces him with a smile like that, and it makes the angel’s legs go weak. He never smiles like that at humans.
Maybe this man is a very good friend, Aziraphale concludes. It certainly looks it from the way they talk.
Still, he notices a certain stiffness to Crowley’s movements, an absence of swaying in his hips that’s almost always there. Understanding someone’s gait when you’ve spent six thousand years in their orbit isn’t exactly rocket science—so Aziraphale knows that Crowley normally walks like this when he’s deep in his head and trying to keep his thoughts steady. When he’s nervous.
“Good day indeed!” The man chuckles. “I was starting to think you wouldn’t come today.”
Aziraphale stands a little ways away and looks him over. The human is about sixty, maybe a tad younger; he’s got honey-brown eyes, hair short and wavy—salt-and-pepper where it used to be jet-black in his youth—and a short beard in a state of artistic disarray. He’s worn around the edges, though not any less handsome because of it. If anything, he looks like he’s seen and enjoyed life. He reminds Aziraphale of a well-loved book.
The man turns attention to him and hums in greeting. His voice is a bit husky but boomy and clear all the same—a perfect pitch for a salesman. “Good day to you too, sir! Are you a friend of Mr Crowley’s?”
“Oh, uh, hello. Yes, indeed I am,” Aziraphale answers carefully with a polite smile. “I’m Mr Fell. Wonderful to make your acquaintance.”
He takes a step closer and extends his hand for a handshake, which they exchange together with a few polite pleasantries. Crowley grumbles something under his breath, his mask of friendly chirpiness faltering until he puts it back up the moment Albert looks back to him.
The human straightens up his collar and clears his throat, switching seamlessly to that familiar businesslike posture and tone of voice. “So, gentlemen! What would it be today?”
Crowley looks at the stack of records and the assortment of players. “I’m looking for a new turntable for my collection. Have something interesting?”
Albert walks over to the display and wipes the dust off the plinth and platter of one of his machines. It doesn’t look like he’s often asked about them. They’re clearly not the most popular piece of his merchandise, but, judging by the look on his face, he likes them quite a bit.
“Well, there’s always a Thorens, but I recall selling you one a few years ago, if I’m not mistaken. Bang & Olufsen as well, but it needs some patching up…”
“Hm. I’m looking for something special, Albert. You know me.”
“Right, of course.” The man scratches his chin. “Well, in fact… I recently came to own a Marantz 6300. Mint condition, looks straight off the assembly line. Not a scratch on the lid, but… I’m looking for a hefty price, I’m afraid, if I am to part with it.”
Crowley pretentiously pops open his snakeskin wallet and counts the wad of notes inside. “How much?”
“Seventeen hundred pounds, sir.”
Then replies without a note of hesitation or an attempt at bargaining. “Deal.”
“W-wait, don’t you want to look at it first? Inspect it?” Albert stares back at him, a bit flustered and unbalanced. He waves his hands in the air. Aziraphale sees no wedding band on his slender, spindly fingers—but there are a couple interesting tattoos hiding underneath the cuffs of his grey shirt, old ones by the look of them. A tail of some reptile just peeking out. Snake or lizard.
Crowley shakes his head. “No need. Your shop only sells the finest pieces, Albert, I know that. I wouldn’t be coming back here if it didn’t.”
“Oh, you are much too kind, sir… Alright, let me bring you the player. I keep things like this in the back, as you know. Wait just a moment.”
“Sure, Albert,” the demon smiles again, warmly and candidly. “Take your time.”
Aziraphale watches them with mounting curiosity. There’s nothing odd in the way they interact, he supposes; it’s a normal transaction, albeit an expensive one, but when has Crowley ever worried about money?
But why here? Why this shop, why this man who holds himself around the demon as if he’s known him for a good, long while? Why has Crowley never told him about him? And why does he, this Albert, look almost… familiar, somehow?
Crowley’s eyes follow the man, unblinking, as he disappears behind the door into the back room. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. It feels like he drifts off momentarily, but Albert comes back shortly, and, just as quickly, the demon snaps out of his short lapse of—something. He steps closer to the counter, nods his head in wonderment of the sleek machine, and reaches for the wallet again.
Aziraphale feels a bolt of lightning strike him. He stops in his tracks and stares.
There is a line, a faint one, connecting Crowley and the human. It’s a translucent, celestial string, barely noticeable to the naked eye; it shimmers in the sun like the lightest thread of spider web and runs straight from the solar plexus of one being to the other’s.
He’s never seen anything like it, and he certainly doesn’t know what to make of it.
Crowley is soft when the man passes him the item carefully and their hands touch. Albert adds a couple records to his purchase, free of charge, too, which Crowley doesn’t fight, only thanks him. They swap a few more words—Crowley asks how he’s been, in a way that’s polite without being overly pally—before he reluctantly turns on his heels and heads for the door.
Albert calls out to them. “Have a great day, gentlemen!”
The demon half-turns to him again and smiles—a forlorn, tiny smile now. “Ciao, Albert.”
Aziraphale clumsily stumbles behind him and bows before walking out of the store. He’s still in shock over what he saw earlier, his head abuzz with possibilities, none of which make any sense.
“Crowley?”
The demon jerks the car door open and gets in, stiff like a piece of wood. “Not now, angel.”
Aziraphale presses his lips into a thin, tight line. He joins Crowley in the car and waits, wringing his hands in his lap, still trying to understand what it is that he saw. No conclusion comes to him, and Crowley isn’t providing any, not until they turn onto the familiar street and park in front of the bookshop.
Crowley sighs and lowers his forehead to his hands on top of the steering wheel. “You saw that then, huh.”
It isn’t a question; Crowley obviously knew this would happen. But this hardly clarifies anything.
Aziraphale straightens up, looks at him, almost startled. “I… yes. What does that mean, Crowley?”
Crowley remains as he is for a good long while. It’s not something he can say easily; it’s a secret he’s kept away for so long, one that not a soul knows anything about. Something that is deathly painful to acknowledge even to himself.
His voice is quiet, hushed when he finally does speak, as if he’s afraid someone might hear. Aziraphale almost gets the urge to look over his shoulder—an old habit. But there’s no one else in the car or anywhere around, just them. “He’s… mine. My kid.” Crowley nearly chokes on the word. It scratches his larynx as it comes out, and he has to cough before he says any more. “‘S why I come here every year, it’s… it’s his birthday today.”
“Wh… what…?” the angel sputters, grabbing onto whatever piece of car interior his hand first falls on, his eyes wide and eyebrows high up on his forehead in an expression of complete and utter stupor. “Y-your… child?”
Crowley averts his eyes. He gets that distant, almost timid look he gets sometimes. “Mhm.”
Aziraphale suspected, of course, when he saw the thread, that Crowley and Albert were connected somehow, but his thoughts went more along the lines of ‘lovers’ (a thought that made his heart constrict with a nasty little sting of jealousy) or ‘companions’ (though he knew for a fact that no kind of human companionship could create such sort of bond), but to think that they could be…
No. No, it was not something he would ever even consider. It was wholly ridiculous to think that Crowley could… Was it?
“B-but– H-how– How can this be?”
“I don’t have to explain to you how babies are made, Aziraphale,” the demon smirks, but his delivery is entirely humourless. “Figure it out.”
Aziraphale can’t help but roll his eyes, but the shock quickly comes back over him again. The cogs in his head turn with a squeaking, rusty noise, too overwhelmed with the gravity of the revelation to be of any use. But he does clumsily realise one thing.
If Albert is in his fifties, then… A different kind of shock grips him. They’re used to having secrets from one another—when you are ‘hereditary enemies’, not supposed to be together or at the very least seen together, some level of secrecy comes naturally. Aziraphale had not told him about who he knew was the real Antichrist, for example, and Crowley had neglected to tell him many things in the past, too, but never, ever, in the history of forever, had Aziraphale thought that he would keep from him the fact that he had a child.
He gasps, and his voice rises a couple pitches too high. “Good Lord, Crowley! Why didn’t you say anything?!”
“What?” Crowley looks at him, dazed at first. His eyes are tired and half-lidded, as if the very idea of having this conversation is a sort of hard labour he bears but hates, like a prisoner. But at the sound of the angel’s voice, his loud protest, they light up like wild, uncontained fires—and then, the fire reaches his throat, and he explodes. “What did you want me to say, angel, huh?! That I had a wild one-night stand with some junkie wannabe rockstar in the 70s, got knocked up, and put the kid up for adoption?! That’s not a story you bring up over a bloody glass of wine, ‘Ziraphale! So, kindly, fuck off!”
That short but loaded burst of flame is enough to make Aziraphale’s tetchiness and feeling of unfairness ebb and die. It's as if Crowley has hit him over the head with something exceptionally heavy, and his brain is buzzing from the trauma.
He cowers a bit when he speaks, makes his voice softer—or, rather, it makes itself softer, unable to gather any sort of force now that his body is trying to recover from the daze. “I… we’re friends, Crowley. I could’ve… I could’ve helped.”
The fire in Crowley isn’t so quick to recede. He spits flames for a little while longer. “With what? I didn’t want this, angel, and I couldn’t keep him, I imagine you damn well know that. It was hard enough hiding the damn pregnancy from Hastur’s nosy mug, or Their Lordship Beelzebub, for fuck’s sake!” But before long, the wildfire is smothered. He lowers his head onto his interlocked hands on top of the steering wheel again and seems to melt like a live wax figure. Aziraphale can swear he sees a couple molten-hot droplets slide down the tip of his pointy nose. “They would’ve… torn that baby to shreds if they knew I had him.”
“Of… Of course. I-I’m sorry, Crowley.”
Aziraphale does not know what more to say. It’s clear that talking about this brings Crowley immeasurable pain. He assumes the memories are likely even worse. To imagine his dearest, oldest friend going through all this in solitude, for so many years, it’s… well, inconceivable, to say the least.
He allows himself to ask one more thing. “If, you say, you didn’t want this, then… I mean… Erm… Why didn’t you…?”
Crowley dips his head lower, looks at his flat abdomen, and frowns. “I… noticed too late. The grub was hiding until I was six months along. Felt him wriggling inside, and… Ngk.” He shrugs. “I don’t know, angel. I just couldn’t. Not at that point.”
He recalls that a decision he could and did make instead was to isolate himself until it was all over. He remembers how he locked himself in his Mayfair apartment for months, lying through his teeth about the reasons. How he hid his pregnant stomach, which never quite grew too big—thank someone for that—from his superiors whenever they would come looking for him to make him do his job. How he wept, completely alone, in the backseat of the Bentley after giving birth. How he held his son for the first time. How giving him away was the most difficult decision he had ever had to make.
He just knew that with Hell breathing down his neck, he couldn't be a parent.
He desperately wanted to, but he knew he couldn’t.
So what he tells Aziraphale about the reason why is only the half-truth. It never crossed his mind to get rid of it, nor would it ever. What he ‘didn’t want’ was all the fear, pain, and regret—not the child itself.
Aziraphale watches him, senses the aura of anguish getting thicker around Crowley, and for once, he doesn’t know how to get him out of it. He reaches out. His hand lands gently on the demon’s forearm. Crowley twitches, looks up at him like a wild animal. But he doesn’t shake him off.
The angel is surprised when Crowley decides to continue to speak, voice croaky and tired from the tears that wouldn’t fall.
“When I gave him away, you know, I-I kept an eye on him for ssseveral years… Made sure he went to a good family. And when he was around six, I just… let him go. ‘S far as I know, he had a good childhood. A good life. I hope he did.”
“Let him go?” the angel asks softly.
“Yeah. I stopped watching him. His family moved soon after, as I then found out. I l-lost his trail for years, until I felt it again, y’know, the…”
The little line shimmers before Aziraphale’s eyes again. “The thread…”
“Mhm. And it led me to his store.”
“And you never… told him?”
“What for?” he scoffs, tiredly. “He knows he’s adopted. And he lived a life without me. D’you think he’d be happy that I finally turned up after this many years? Decided to make contact? I don’t think so. Even the thing I do now, visiting him every year at the store, it’s… I know I shouldn’t be doing that. I just can’t keep away.”
“That’s… that’s understandable, my dear. I can tell that… you love him very much.”
“Love him, eh…” Crowley sucks air through his teeth. “Bloody hell I do. You have no idea, angel.”
Aziraphale lowers his eyes and sighs. He does, in fact, have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to love someone with little hope you would ever get to show it. Maybe no hope at all. He might not know parental love like Crowley’s, but if it feels anything like his—a twisting, scorching pain in his chest whenever he’s near the one person he could never admit his feelings to—he knows it’s agonising. He can sympathise. He does.
The horrid pain in Crowley’s body starts to slowly numb him. He raises his head off the wheel, neatens his glasses and hair, and reaches for the handle of the driver’s side door. “Come on. I need a drink.”
The angel nods and squeezes the demon’s arm one last time before taking back his hand. Deep within, his heart squeezes too.
Crowley can’t say that he feels at ease in the bookshop like he usually does, but with the wine pouring, he can’t exactly complain. The alcohol is just the right medicine for his mind—it drowns his thoughts, makes them scatter. So he drinks a little more than he should and drapes himself dizzily across the angel’s sofa. He peers at the angel in his seat in the armchair. It seems he’s being a lot more liberal with his quantities of drink as well.
Which hardly makes for a good time to continue talking about such complicated matters, but—well.
“He l-looks like you, you know,” the angel can’t help mumbling out loud, half to Crowley, half into his half-empty glass of deep Burgundy.
“Yeaaaah, well…” Crowley lets his arm hang off the sofa, his glass on the floor as he plays with the rim of it, not caring much that it could tip. He can always do a miracle if it spills on the rug. “He looks older than me. Always, hic… comments on how I seem to have crrracked the secret of eternal youth.”
He finds that the drink not only blurs his thoughts, but also soothes his throat a bit. If not the wine, he still spills a little more than he probably would in other circumstances.
“‘S bloody painful, to watch him grow older, y’know? I know that sssomeday he will… Ngk.” He bites his lip, hard, because that thought is way too much, even for his current state. Especially for it. “Humans, eh? They don’t stick around for long.”
“I’m… surprised he ages,” the angel thoughtfully points out. “Or that he doesn’t have any occult powers.”
“Nyeah, n-no, he doesn’t. Maybe there is something, I-uh don’t know, but I never sensed anything weird, nnnot like that witch— eh, Book girl? I guess he took after his other father the most.”
“And that man, did he know?”
The demon throws his head back and lets out a stiff sort of laugh. “Pfft. Naw. The bloke croaked not long after he got me up the duff, so… Welp, there’s thattt. Regardless, I doubt he’d care.”
Aziraphale winces at that and nurses the glass closer to his chest. He doesn’t really want to think about it all, about strangers’ hands touching Crowley, holding him, taking him; or how blasé he talks about them. He knows he’s not a saint himself—he’s touched, been touched. Among the many virtues of the human world, he’s known what sex was. He just always wished that, along with drink and food, he could’ve discovered that virtue alongside Crowley.
He takes a deep breath and sips his wine, scolding himself for that deeply shameful thought. He can’t be thinking about such things when they’re discussing something so important, so deeply tragic. He can’t.
“I do still wish you came to me, Crowley…” he sighs softly, forcing the thoughts out with the same breath. He looks up at the demon; not with pity or sympathy that Crowley doesn’t usually take kindly to, but with something else entirely that’s not quite nameable. Something warm, understanding. There isn’t a trace of disappointment or anger, just that enveloping light, which, like a moth to the flame, Crowley’s immediately drawn to. He can’t look away. His shell cracks.
“I-I know I should’ve, a-angel, I…”
Even a demon can only take so much, and God knows he’s carried more than his wretched soul could ever handle. He’s carried, he’s lost, he’s found again—and now he's borne it all open. He wasn’t alone anymore.
“I was just… so fffucking scared,” he hiccups, and a tear, a treacherous droplet of saltwater rolls down his cheek. He catches it with his hand just before it can fall to the floor. He tips his wine over. “Aw, bugger. Aghh… oh…” He covers his face with both his hands then and just—sobs.
The angel slowly rises from the armchair, steps over the red puddle on the carpet as if it isn’t even there. He sits down on the edge of the sofa, feels the warmth of Crowley’s body on his back.
“I h-hope you know that you no longer have to be scared, my dear,” he whispers, and Crowley sobs a little louder.
“I-I just… Shhhit. I wish it was different, angel,” he manages weakly. His voice shakes, and the fingers covering his face tremble. At the back of his mind, he resents this pitiful act, but he can’t stop the tears from coming. He cannot.
His whole body trembles when the angel lowers a hand to his quaking shoulder. “It s-still can be. Different. You don’t belong to them anymore, Crowley. Y-you can choose your own future now.”
Aziraphale knows he’s quite drunk, and perhaps he only partly understands what he’s really trying to convey with those words, but what he says is true nonetheless. He does believe it can yet be different. For Crowley. Maybe, however unlikely he thinks that might be, for them.
The demon uncovers his face and stares back at him. He doesn’t—believe it can be different, that is. That it can be possible for him to be unequivocally happy, like he wishes he was. To have all the things he’s ever wanted.
He’s still afraid to even acknowledge what those things are. But the angel squeezes his shoulder just that little bit tighter then, and a faint hope blossoms within him.
He wipes his eyes and shakily replies. “Nyeah. M-maybe you’re right, angel.”
From the bottom of his immortal heart, Aziraphale hopes he is. That Crowley can still find what has been so cruelly stolen from him.
And that maybe—just maybe—he can be there with him when he does.
The thing he knows with absolute certainty, though, is that a very special salesman will now begin to miraculously come into possession of the finest antiques, just the ones he wishes for.
Every June 6th.