Chapter Text
Aziraphale remembered when there had been such a thing as night.
It had been hundreds of years since the last time the sun had truly set on this part of the Earth. The Flares had done something irreparable to the spin of the planet, and to its axis, and so the sun no longer went down on what was left of the islands.
Aziraphale missed the night.
It was well past Nightfall, now, and a dusk-like haze of dimmer light shone across the landscape. It was midnight, Aziraphale knew, and the sky would only brighten from here. The heat, which was a lingering uncomfortable warmth at this hour, would only intensify until it was stifling.
The days had been longer since the first Flare (that one had done the most damage. Aziraphale still remembered the burning violence of it, the shocking, eerie silence that came after). Twenty-eight hours, give or take a few minutes, for the Earth to make a full turn on its slanted axis. Clocks were split into fourteen segments, and Aziraphale still thought in increments of twelve.
He’d had six hundred years to adjust to it, and he still thought in twelves. Give him another six hundred, maybe he’d get there.
A whistle rang, sharp and clear, through Aziraphale’s glassless front window. He stood from his seat, sliding a finger through the pages of his book, and moved to the door.
The twins were back. They were good company, young and full of hope, with plenty to trade and more than the usual passing interest in Aziraphale’s stories and wares.
“Nice Nightfall,” Aziraphale said by way of greeting, opening the door to let them inside.
“Miserable earlier on though,” said Osian, the taller and more talkative of the two. He settled himself in the shallow pit that Aziraphale had dug in the centre of the room, pressing his back against the relative coolness of the dirt. “Couldn’t get to sleep for ages today.”
“Worse luck for me,” Rhys said. He perched on the edge of the pit, pressing into the cool ground with his toes. He looked up at Aziraphale and wrinkled his nose. “He tosses and turns and makes sure no one else can sleep, either.”
Aziraphale chuckled. He set down his book and fetched some water and a couple of hand-carved wooden cups. Rhys took them with a word of thanks, handing one down to his brother.
“How can I help you tonight?” Aziraphale asked.
“Rhys wants to know about cinemas,” Osian said. “And mum wants some more hair pins, if you’ve got any.”
Aziraphale smiled. “I can help you with both.”
Osian smiled back, a wide and open thing. Rhys’ was smaller, gentler. A match for himself.
“Thanks, Adam.”
Aziraphale turned toward his shelves and boxes, stifling the chill in his spine, the flinch on his face. The new name hadn’t quite settled in, yet. It still felt strange, and he wasn’t sure he’d respond to it if he wasn’t already being spoken to. But it had only been his name for a month or so. He’d get used to it. He always did.
And then in a few years, he would pack up his cart, and he would walk until Adam faded away. Until he became Zachariah, or Aaron, or Arthur, or someone else entirely.
(He was never Aziraphale to anyone but himself. Not anymore.)
The hairpins were in a house-shaped biscuit tin that had long since lost its painted face. He thought it might have been one of the silly seasonal ones from M&S, once.
“Have a look,” Aziraphale said. He handed the box to Osian, who sat up and began poking at the contents with a curious finger. Rhys leaned over his shoulder, somber eyes suddenly bright, mouth hanging slightly open.
It wasn’t often that Aziraphale showed off most of his collection of a specific object, but the boys had become regular customers. Selfishly, he wanted them to have the wonderful and slightly-paralysing feeling of too many choices, of having to pick a gift according to one’s own taste.
Their mother would be overjoyed with their selection regardless of what they chose. Aziraphale was certain of that.
“That one,” Rhys said, poking a finger at a hairpin with a butterfly-shaped piece of silver on the end. Osian picked it up, nodding, and tucked it into his palm.
“They used to come in all sorts of colours, you know,” Aziraphale said. “Butterflies.”
“Really?” Osian looked up from the box of pins. “What colours?”
“Blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple. Anything you can think of.”
“How do you know?” asked Rhys. It wasn’t a question laced with any kind of suspicion or judgment; Rhys’s curiosity was nearly childlike in its innocence.
Aziraphale struggled a bit not to think of Rhys and Osian as children. If pressed to guess, he would have put them at around twenty years old. This certainly would be considered young by most adult metrics, but by Aziraphale’s time-scaling, the twins were practically infants. Aziraphale was aware that this wasn’t entirely fair, and he did his level best to treat them as adults, but still. There was a part of him that couldn’t help but smile at the innocence of it all, and another part of him that wondered if he’d ever been quite that young.
“I saw drawings in a book, once,” Aziraphale said. It was always the easiest lie. Books were rare, but they did exist. “In another Wanderer’s library, in England.”
“Would’ve liked to see them,” Osian said. He went back to picking through the box of hairpins. “Blue butterflies. And orange ones. Bet they were beautiful.”
“I’m sure they were,” Aziraphale said, a practiced noncommittal answer. “Finding anything else of interest, there?”
“This one?” Osian asked after a moment, holding up a long, brassy pin with a thin line of blue gemstones along the outer edge for Rhys to see. Rhys smiled at it, knocking his knee into his brother’s shoulder.
“Yeah, that one.”
Osian turned back to Aziraphale.
“We’ll take these two. And some of your stories. What do you want for ‘em?”
Aziraphale hummed, considering, as he took the tin back from Osian’s hand and set it back in its place on the shelf. Osian tucked the pins into the pocket of his trousers before crossing his arms back over his bare chest.
“A waterskin,” Aziraphale said. He knew that a man in Osian and Rhys’s village made them, sturdy things crafted from leather and bone. That man had learned from his mother, and she had learned from her father, and so on. Back down the line until the first Flare, when everyone had needed to learn how to live all over again. Aziraphale had bought a waterskin from this village every time he was in this part of Wales for nearly three hundred years.
The village was underground, tucked into a series of tunnels that were dug into the hills. The network of tunnels must have grown over time, because Osian had said there were now nearly a thousand people in the village. There hadn’t been half that number when Aziraphale first came here.
The villagers had called it ‘Tŷ Tywyll’ 1 back then. Aziraphale wondered what they called it now, if it was still their ‘dark house’ hidden there in the curves of the barren hills.
Rhys laughed, a light little thing, and set about unfastening his waterskin from where it hung from a leather cord around his waist.
“Take mine,” he said. He tossed it to Aziraphale, who caught it. “Osian’ll share with me for the walk back. And Harri will have another for me by midday.”
“He’ll think you lost it again,” Osian snickered. “You’ll be picking up sheep shit for a week.”
Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at Rhys, who waved him off.
“I’ll show him the pins,” said Rhys.
“If Mum lets you out of her sight with them. You know what you’re like with things.”
“I’ll be careful,” Rhys insisted.
Aziraphale thought suddenly of his childhood self, sandy-brown curls damp from the rain, mud under his fingernails as he searched through the back garden for Gabriel’s trading card. Gabriel had never let Aziraphale into his room, had expressly forbidden him from touching his things. But the card had a silver border and a picture of a dragon, and Aziraphale had just wanted to use it to hold his place in his book. It wasn’t Aziraphale’s fault that it had slipped between the pages.
“This is why no one gets you nice things, Az,” Gabriel had said, pinching Aziraphale’s ear between his forefinger and thumb. “You lose everything. You’re such a baby.”
Aziraphale had found half of the card a week later, stuck in a clogged storm drain. He’d kept it, had continued to stick it in the pages of various fantasy books over the next decade.
It had burned along with most of Aziraphale’s books.
“Adam?”
Aziraphale opened his eyes, unaware that he’d closed them, and found Rhys now standing in the pit, looking up at him with a furrowed brow.
“Sorry, dear boy,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Lost in thought.”
“You okay?”
“Quite.”
Osian was studying Aziraphale, too, an unusually thoughtful expression on his face.
“Everyone says Cerrdwyr2 are a bit mad,” Osian said, though not unkindly. “Must get, I dunno. Lonely.”
You have no idea, Aziraphale thought.
He made himself laugh instead. “I’d wager that I’m far less lonely than many other people, Osian. I’ve met hundreds of people from all over the islands. I’ve heard thousands of stories. I know people’s dreams, their hopes, their memories. There’s more to Wandering than walking alone.”
“And living alone,” Osian pointed out. “And eating alone, and sleeping alone, and-”
“Osian,” said Rhys, sharper than usual. He looked up at Aziraphale, mouthed ‘Sorry.’
“Being alone isn’t the same as being lonely,” Aziraphale said, even as his loneliness echoed in his chest. “I’ve met more people in the past year than either of you are likely to meet in your entire lives. Unless you fancy a dramatic change of lifestyle, of course.”
“Is it such a bad thing to know a few people, but know them well?” This was Rhys, curious and clever as always, as he walked back across the pit to sit beside his brother.
“Of course not,” Aziraphale said. “It’s a blessing to live the life you both lead. It’s just…” A breath, a heartbeat. “Well. It’s not a blessing everyone has. We all make the most of the cards we are dealt, I suppose.”
Osian said, “Suppose that sounds about right.”
Rhys just hummed, looking at Aziraphale with a softness Aziraphale couldn’t quite place and didn’t have the energy to contemplate. So Aziraphale quieted the protests in his lonely heart, and he smiled at them both.
“Right then. I believe you wanted to hear about cinemas.”
*********
The twins left around daybreak, six hours or so after they’d arrived. They had brought a small, heavy loaf of bread and some goat’s cheese, and Aziraphale had happily shared it with them. He’d made a cup of tea for himself, ignoring the way Osian mocked him for it (“It’s roasting out, Adam, I’ve got no idea how you drink that stuff”) and passed a half-cup to Rhys, who’d agreed to try it for “the experience.” Rhys had pulled a face on his first sip, but he’d diligently finished his portion, even as sweat began to bead across his nose.
Their village was still indeed called Tŷ Tywyll. It wasn’t so dark anymore, apparently: Osian was one of the men in the village who tended the many lanterns and lights. He was, Aziraphale had learned with a small amount of amusement, both a lamp-lighter and a firefighter in almost equal measure, and had sometimes been both at once because of his own mistakes.
Aziraphale wasn’t sure if the twins would be back. He hoped they would; they were smart and curious, and they were better company than he’d grown used to finding. He refused to grow attached to them, of course - attachment didn’t do him any good, it was a recipe for heartbreak and disappointment - but still, he hoped. He hoped for another night of questions and stories, of another morning meal of thick brown bread and tart cheese.
There was a part of Aziraphale that knew it was silly to bother learning the names of his regular customers. He had met many thousands of people over the centuries, and he didn’t remember the names of most of them. But they were with him, for a time, and he wanted to remember them. He wanted to carry them with him - their faces, their stories, and on occasion, their names.
Rhys turned back when they reached the road, hand raised in a wave. Aziraphale waved back, and he watched as both boys pulled their hoods over their heads to shield their faces and shoulders from the blazing sun. It was normal here, and most other places in the islands, to wear as little clothing as possible. Rhys and Osian wore light trousers that ended halfway down their calves, leather sandals, and hoods that didn’t extend much past their collarbones. Other people from their village wore much the same, sometimes with the addition of thin strips of cloth tied around their chests.
Aziraphale was slightly jealous of their ability to walk around with bare skin. He was most jealous on the rare days when he was forced to walk outside during the heat of the day, when he was clad in white robes and a much larger hood that wrapped over his nose and mouth, his hands and feet covered in leather. When he was sweltering beneath his robes, he ached to feel the air against his skin.
He’d never had particularly dark features, Before. His eyes had been a warm honey-brown, and his hair was light. He didn’t usually spend enough time in the sun to get much in the way of a tan, and he’d always been one to burn and freckle rather than turn a lovely golden colour. But the Flare had stripped him of that. He’d never been able to figure out why. He had woken up in the smouldering remains of his bookshop, stumbled his way into the street, and had caught a glimpse of his reflection in a broken window across the road.
He looked like a ghost of his former self, all milk-white skin and too-pale blue eyes, his hair the colour of bleached cotton. The ash and soot stood out against his skin like bruises, and Aziraphale had stared at himself in disbelief until at some point, he’d started to cry.
James had found him then. They hadn’t known each other Before, but they’d met in that silent street and had clung to each other. When James had taken Aziraphale’s hand, Aziraphale had let him. When they’d found a place to sit together, James had told Aziraphale about the man he’d lost, the man he’d loved, and Aziraphale had let him.
Later, when James had kissed Aziraphale with tear-stained lips, when he had wanted to be held and had asked for more because wanted to feel something, anything, Aziraphale had let him do that, too. He’d wanted it, had wanted to feel less alone. To feel alive.
James hadn’t minded the way Aziraphale looked. Instead, he had shown Aziraphale the still-healing burns that were leaving pinkish-white scars on his dark legs, had laughed an empty laugh and said, “I don’t care what you look like, I don’t care what I look like, I don’t care.”
Aziraphale had cared enough for both of them back then.
He’d long since stopped feeling self-conscious about his fair skin, his light eyes, his cotton-puff hair. He’d learned that there were others who’d reacted to the first Flare the same way he had, and he’d learned that they didn’t know why, either. Over the centuries, he’d seen firsthand that this lack of pigment was genetic, that the Flare had changed something in their DNA. He’d long since stopped asking questions as pointless as ‘how’ and ‘why.’
It was the way things were. Somehow, Aziraphale was fireproof. In a world that had a tendency to burst into flames, there were much worse things to be.
Aziraphale sighed, and he flipped the sign on his door to ‘Closed’. He pulled his sleeping mat out from under the table and laid it down in the pit, out of the path of the sunlight that was beating in through the windows. He settled on his mat, hood drawn up around his face, and he waited for sleep.
When it came, Aziraphale dreamed of blue butterflies and salted popcorn, and of night.