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Aziraphale was sitting in a rather uncomfortable lawn chair, beside the Bentley, in the middle of a field, in the full heat of the August sun. He'd brought along several books, and was trying to concentrate on The Picture of Dorian Gray at the moment, but Crowley's conversation with a portly old man in a derby cap was cutting into his concentration.
"Speed 6 isn't it? My granddad had one like that."
"6 ½ litre actually."
"Well, she's a beaut. Did you do the restoration yourself?" the man asked
"Oh no, all original," Crowley said, a pleased smile on his face.
"I don't believe it."
"Oh, yes. I take very good care of it."
Aziraphale snorted, and Crowley shot him a look.
The man gave a low whistle. "I bet she cost you a pretty penny."
"Twelve-hundred pounds," Crowley admitted, "but, I chose all the best options."
"Oh," the man scoffed. "I should have realized that it was a remake, in this good of nick. Still, she was a steal at that price."
"Excuse me," Crowley demanded, suddenly enraged for no reason that Aziraphale could understand. "What did you say to me?"
"It's nothing to be ashamed of. Not everyone can afford an original. It's still a beautiful car."
"I can afford an original, that's why I bought an original, originally. Are you blind, you fucking philistine? This isn't some kit that a half-wit like you cobbled together in his back shed. This car has been eating up the tarmac and setting bloody land speed records since Queen Elizabeth II was in nappies."
The man raised his hands and started to move away down the line of other parked cars, still clearly not believing Crowley.
Crowley threw himself down into his own lawn chair in outraged disgust. "Wanker," he called loudly after the man.
Aziraphale gave him a puzzled look. "What was that all about?"
"Can't even tell the difference between the speed 6 and the 6 ½ liter when he's looking with his own blessed eyes, and he accuses my car of being a knockoff. Mark my words, that idiot has some mid-seventies Porche 911 parked here somewhere, and thinks he's the king of the bloody carpark. Wouldn't know class if it went down on all fours for him and asked him to call it daddy."
"That's a bit crude."
Crowley rolled his head over to look at Aziraphale, an exaggeration of an eye roll to make up for the fact that his glasses hid his eyes. He raised an eyebrow at Aziraphale's choice of reading material. "The Picture of Dorian Gray? Wilde again, angel? Talk about crude."
"It isn't," Aziraphale said, holding the book to his chest.
"It's all thinly-veiled homoerotic subtext."
"That doesn't make it crude. It's lovely. No one could ever turn a phrase the way that Oscar could."
"Is that your problem? I can't phrase my disparaging witticisms subtly enough for you?" Crowley asked. "What's the point of insulting someone if they don't understand the insult? I think, 'wanker' is about as far as that chuffer's intellect is able to stretch."
"There just isn't any art in it, my dear."
"It isn't supposed to be artistic. It's supposed to make me feel better."
"Ah," Aziraphale said, "and, did it?"
"It did until we started this conversation," Crowley grouched, crossing his arms. "'Spose you knew him then, Wilde? One of your little friends from your dancing club?"
"I knew him." Aziraphale had a fond smile little smile. "Not from the club, but we travelled in the same circles. I never missed opening night of one of his plays, and we dined together on a few occasions."
"Oh, dined together, is it?"
"You know it wasn't like that." Aziraphale said. "I had to do something to pass the time. You may recall that you were in a snit over that business with the Holy Water."
"I wasn't in a snit. You were being unreasonable."
"What do you call taking a fifty year nap then? Talk about being unreasonable."
"I wasn't in a snit," Crowley said. "I'd just bought a new bed. It was very comfortable."
Aziraphale gave him a doubtful look and pointedly opened his book again. "Mmmhmm."
"The Victorians were so dull," Crowley complained. "You make every pleasure a sin against God, and there isn't a lot of temptation a demon needs to do. The humans managed it just fine on their own. You can't enforce that kind of buttoned-up sense of morality, and not expect some next level sinning behind closed doors. And, the hats were just awful."
"I rather liked them," Aziraphale said.
"You would."
"AJ! I've been looking for you everywhere. Can you believe this mess?"
"Archie!" Crowley sprang up from his chair and went to greet the bearded man in a leather vest that was striding over to them. A short woman with a bob of red hair followed in his wake, looking bored. Archie and Crowley clasped hands and there was some good-natured back slapping and complaints about the organizers.
"Did you see Edgar's newest acquisition?" Archie asked.
Crowley craned his head around scanning the rows of cars. "Why? What has he got?"
"Rolls-Royce Phantom," Archie said. "He was tinkering with it all winter. He's going to give you a run for your money in the pre-war class this year. Have the judges been round yet?"
"No they haven't. A phantom?" Crowley sneered. "Show me."
Without a word to Aziraphale, they went off to go scope out the competition, leaving behind the short woman.
"Hello, I'm Penny," she said, offering her hand.
"Aziraphale," Aziraphale said, and set his book aside to shake.
"I'm Archie's wife. They'll be at it all day now." She gestured off in the direction that Archie and Crowley had gone. "No one likes Edgar, on account of him having a new car every year. Plus, he's kind of an arsehole. Mind if I sit? My feet are killing me."
Aziraphale gestured at Crowley's chair, and the woman sat with a relieved sigh. "You must be AJ's partner then."
"I suppose I must be," Aziraphale said.
"Finally let him drag you along to one of these, then? I hope you held out for something good. A bunch of old men standing around in a field waxing their bonnets and drooling over engines," she rolled her eyes. "Not that your AJ is old by any means. He's probably the youngest one in the club."
"Oh, I very much doubt that," Aziraphale said with a little smile.
"Do you want a mimosa?" she asked, producing a thermos and cups from her bag, and filling one for each of them without bothering to wait for Aziraphale to answer. He was perfectly happy to accept in any case.
"How long have you and AJ been together then?" Penny wanted to know.
"Oh, sometimes it feels like six thousand years," Aziraphale answered. He always relished these types of conversations. Depending on the company and the current views on sexual morality, he and Crowley had been mistaken for a romantic couple by the mortals off and on since the very beginning. Aziraphale hadn't been too pleased about it at the start, but as the centuries marched on, and infrequent meetings to discuss business turned into frequent social calls to drink wine and enjoy some familiar company, Aziraphale started to revel in the occasional misconception.
It was nice to pretend for a while.
It was nice to think that things weren't quite so complicated, that they were just a couple of humans in a comfortable, monogamous romantic relationship with all the simple little domestic ups and downs that went along with that.
And, maybe they were moving towards something like that now. It felt like it. Now that Heaven and Hell knew about their… fraternization, there wasn't any point in trying to hide anything. All the feelings he'd been trying to repress for millennia were perfectly safe to air openly.
He just hadn't found the right way to do it yet.
He thought that it would all come out in a blazing storm of passionate admissions of love that night he'd agreed to go home with Crowley. If his life were a proper romance novel, they would have wound up in tender embrace. But, it had just been such a long week. He'd been discorporated. The bookshop had burned to the ground. Crowley was still grieving the Bentley. Then, there'd been the business of worrying over the repercussions, and figuring out Agnes' final prophesy, and the body swap. There just hadn't been time.
After it was over, they had started spending nearly every moment together. Still, Aziraphale hadn't found a way to tell Crowley how he felt, and Crowley had very much made his intentions plain half a century ago.
So, here they were, at a classic car show.
Next week, Aziraphale would drag him along to the farmer's market and then through a few of his favorite antiques shops. Crowley would undoubtedly be just as bored with those activities as Aziraphale was here, but he'd insist on tagging along- just as Aziraphale had made claims that a bunch of people standing around in a field, talking about automobiles, sounded jolly interesting.
He was sure they'd figure it all out eventually. He'd just allow things to progress organically. In another century or two, they might even make it to the holding-hands stage of their relationship. The important thing was that they were together.
That had to be it, surely.
"So, have you and your husband known Crowley long?" Aziraphale asked.
"Going on five years now," she said. "There aren't a lot of pre-war cars in the club, so we're all pretty close. I've heard about you of course. Crowley says you own a bookshop in Soho and don't actually like cars."
"I never learned to drive," Aziraphale admitted. "Crowley tried to teach me once, but it just wasn't for me. I don't even like horses, so I'm afraid the internal combustion engine is right out."
"Opposites attract, I guess."
"You have no idea." Aziraphale chuckled. "But, that's all on the surface. We aren't that different really."
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"That's your man then?" Archie asked as they marched off to find that villain Edgar Robbins and let him know just what they thought of him.
"I wouldn't call him that, but yeah, that's Aziraphale," Crowley said.
"Weird name. He isn't anything like what I would have expected."
"Oh, and what would you have expected?"
"I dunno exactly. More of an aging rocker and less of a Cambridge dean, I guess."
Crowley laughed. "I'd love to see his face if he heard you say that. It was Oxford, though he's had the bookshop for a while now." Aziraphale had actually helped to found Oxford and had more puttered around the archives than taught, but there wasn't any sense in splitting hairs.
"Still, not what I'd expect you to go for."
Crowley shrugged.
He couldn't explain to Archie that familiarity didn't breed contempt. It bred a kind of exasperated fondness. How, after six millennia of only having one being on the whole planet that understood you, that you could count on to be alive when you needed him, made all those strange little idiosyncrasies so precious. Just knowing that the mention of attending a birthday party would light him up, and you'd spend the next hour having to endure terrible coin tricks, or how producing just the right burgundy would make him go all soft around the edges, or just watching him enjoy every meal more than anyone has ever enjoyed eating anything in the history of creation. Knowing someone that well was intoxicating.
"What can I say; I like curves," is what he said instead, and gestured at a Jaguar E-type to make a joke of it.
Archie laughed appropriately and they continued on.
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"So, what do you do at one of these things anyway?" Aziraphale asked, feeling a pleasant buzz from Penny's seemingly endless supply of mimosas. "I mean, apart from look at the cars, of course. These people have been here for hours. I can't imagine it takes more than forty minutes to walk around this place and say," here Aziraphale put on a gruff voice, "that's a V-3800 Supercharged Wombat, isn't it? I saw one of those in Switzerland back in 1702. Fine specimen of Bolivian engineering, that is. It's got nothing on the 372.9 litre 38 cylinder Halitzer Iguana W-class, mind you. Now, that's a real car."
Penny seemed to have some sort of fit then, and Aziraphale couldn't for the life of him understand why.
When she had managed to get herself under control and stopped laughing, she said, "Mostly I find someone interesting to talk to and drink champagne with a splash of orange juice. The judges will be around soon now, and then they'll hand out awards and we can pack up and go home."
"Awards? For owning a car?"
"Well, they all put a lot of work into them. Your husband has been the favorite for the pre-war class since before we joined the club."
"Oh, we aren't married."
"Why ever not, if you've been together so long?"
"Well… I don't know… I suppose because he's never asked."
"Why haven't you asked him?"
Aziraphale had never even considered it. There was something interesting about the idea, something that made a bright happy feeling rise up around him. And, it seemed a neat way to go about it after six thousand years. What point was there in courting now? He could just pop the question and have done with it. Besides there were a whole score of human experiences that seemed as though they would be well worth trying, but he was an angel, and he at least felt like he should object to doing those things outside of wedlock. I mean, what would the vicar think? They didn't call them sins of the flesh for nothing.
"I just might at that," Aziraphale said finally.
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"What's this then, Edgar, you knob?" Crowley asked as they approached the Phantom. "Word is you're after my trophy with this bucket of bolts."
"It isn't yours yet, Mr. Crowley," Edgar said, appearing from around the car with a microfiber cloth in his hands. Edgar Robbins was a ferrety little man with eyes just a bit too close together, a pointy nose, and a small chin. "And it won't be this year, not after the judges get a look at my new beauty."
"A Phantom?" Crowley scoffed. "They're a dime a dozen." Crowley glanced under the bonnet and into the interior of the car. "You haven't even got the 4-speed transmission. This is nothing special."
"We'll just have to see if the judges agree. I think you'll find that your reign as champion is over, Mr. Crowley." Edgar was all feigned politeness in a weasely little package.
"In you wildest daydreams, Robbins. Perhaps you'll have better luck next year. Perhaps you'll find something a bit more interesting to apply your particular brand of bondo-bodywork and bad orange-peel painting to."
Crowley turned on his heel and took off, Archie laughing behind him.
"That was brilliant," Archie said when he caught up.
"Yes, but he might have me this time," Crowley muttered. "Hawkins is on the judging committee this year, and you know he doesn't like me."
oOoOoOo
"I think," Aziraphale said to Penny, "that I should like to see this car that has Crowley so worried."
Crowley had returned some minutes before and was busy buffing and inspecting every inch of the Bentley while murmuring sweet nothings to the car under his breath. Aziraphale had seen the way that Crowley treated his houseplants, and had to wonder at the double-standard.
"I can show you," she said, springing up quickly. "We can get chips on the way back. There's a stand by the gate."
Aziraphale's slightly drunken tummy had never heard such a grand idea. He stood and offered his arm to Penny. "Lead the way good lady."
When they found the Phantom, Aziraphale could see little that distinguished it from the Bentley. They were both large, black, made of metal, in a similar style, and a design that spoke of no concern for things like fuel efficiency.
He circled the car while Penny kept an eye on the back of the much bemoaned Edgar- where he spoke to another middle aged man a couple of cars over.
Aziraphale considered both his compulsion to make Crowley happy and the ethics behind his action for only a moment as he rounded back to the front of the car, adopted a disinterested air, and very subtly gave a wave of his hand. The hinged hood of the bonnet slammed down over the engine compartment, and Aziraphale made a mock show of being startled as he hurried Penny away.
Edgar was too engrossed in his dissertation on the superiority of English over German engineering, and never even turned around at the sound.
Aziraphale and Penny got their chips and returned to the Bentley in time for the judges to come round and exclaim over the car while Crowley preened.
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There was quite the hubbub some thirty minutes later, when Edgar Robbins had some sort of nervous breakdown, claiming that someone had quite clearly stolen his engine.
The event organizers questioned those parked nearest to Mr. Robbins, and all confirmed that the Rolls-Royce had never had an engine, at least not while at the show. Edgar's demands to know how it had gotten there without an engine were dismissed as inconsequential, and he scrambled to find someone willing to trailer the car home for him.
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Crowley was silent for a long time as he and Aziraphale drove back to London. A small trophy with, 'Best In Class, Pre-War,' inscribed upon it was sitting on the back seat.
"Are you angry with me?" Aziraphale finally had to ask, worrying his hands at the hem of his wool jumper.
"Angry with you?" Crowley repeated. "How could I possibly be angry? Watching Robbins scurry about, red in the face, demanding to know who had stolen his engine, was the funniest thing I've seen in a century."
"Then why are you being so quiet?"
"I was just wondering if the Bentley would have won in a fair contest."
Aziraphale, who had only the very foggiest understanding of anything to do with automobiles, and had no idea whatsoever, didn't even hesitate when he said, "Most certainly, but that fellow, Edgar, needed to be taken down a peg or two."
This seemed to satisfy Crowley, because he smiled and kicked the Bentley up a few notches on the speedometer.
Aziraphale spun the ring on his pinky finger. "I wanted to ask you something."
"Yeah?"
"Well, this might seem dreadfully silly, but I was wondering if you might like to marry me."
Crowley slammed on the brakes, and the Bentley laid down rubber for fifty metres before jolting to a halt. Aziraphale had to put his hand out to stop himself from slamming into the dash.
"What?" Crowley asked, turning to look at Aziraphale.
"It's stupid," Aziraphale backpedaled quickly. "Forget that I brought it up."
"No, it isn't stupid, but, what brought this about? Why now all of a sudden?"
"Well, your friend Penny thought that I was your husband. When I told her that we weren't married, she wanted to know why not. I couldn't really think of a reason, so I thought that it was time that I asked."
"You had a few morning cocktails with someone that you just met, and then decided that you wanted to get married? You didn't even think it over for twenty-four hours. You just figured you'd ask on the way home while I was driving? That's your proposal?"
"Well, I…" Aziraphale looked sheepish. "I thought that if I waited, I wouldn't ever get up the courage to do it."
"But, why?" Crowley asked. "Why do you want to?"
Aziraphale shrugged. "For the same reasons that humans do, I suppose."
"What, for the tax benefits?"
Aziraphale sighed. "You must know how I feel about you, and it's well… a declaration of commitment. It's just a symbol to everyone that we're a pair. That we come together," Aziraphale flushed. "That we're a package deal, I mean."
"Right," Crowley said. "I love you too, angel, just by the way. Since you can't seem to manage to actually say it—even though I've heard you say it about uncooked, dead fish, wrapped in seaweed."
"I love you a lot more than I love sushi," Aziraphale huffed. "I just didn't think that you would actually want to hear me say it."
Crowley's face softened just a bit. "And this wedding, what exactly are we talking about? You know that I can't go into a church without… discomfort, so if you're thinking about flower arrangements, white tuxedos, and whatnot, you can just forget it."