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“You idiot. We could have been us.”
A few silent seconds passed. Three, to be exact.
During the first, Crowley felt the tears gather, unbidden, traitorous, at the corners of his eyes. He could not fathom why. Ethereal beings were not meant to be shackled to such corporeal betrayals, and yet he made no attempt to quell them. As so often before, the sunglasses veiled his gaze; though this time, they concealed not only their serpentine hue, but also the raw agony rising from deep within him.
Molten desperation coursed through him, for clearly his words had not sufficed. Perhaps they never could. Perhaps he was not enough. Perhaps he - a demon, a fallen outcast, a creature shaped for darkness and malice, ought to concede that he could never, ever be enough for this marvellous creature of light he was so lucky to call his friend.
During the second, the tears did not cease; but they changed their nature, now laced with something sharper, more incendiary. Rage and stinging bitterness. He might have prayed for their cessation, had there lived within him even the faintest vestige of reverence for Heaven.
How could this infuriating, miraculous, impossibly dear angel not see? See that Crowley needed him, needed him more than Heaven needed this angel, needed him more than anything that had ever or ever will.
His hands curled into fists, trembling. Aziraphale had to understand. He simply must. Crowley would not endure it, not again. Not the separation, not the pretending. There had been enough. Enough bending to dictates neither of them had ever truly believed in. (Or so he thought?) He would not listen any longer and he would not let Aziraphale listen, either.
They were deserving of more than this.
The third second was spent in stillness. What words remained to him now, after all that had already spilled from his lips? What language could possibly contain the vast, deafening swell of longing threatening to unmake him where he stood?
Why could he not simply feel, feel, just feel it, too?
Then, in the span of a heartbeat, Crowley’s mind fell silent.
He stared, blinked rapidly, futilely chasing clarity through the blur, and fixed his gaze upon his angel. Later, he would wonder whether any earthly expression could ever do justice to what compelled him then: to cross the distance in two and a half steady strides, to seize Aziraphale by the lapels, to draw him close, so close, and to crash his lips against his with a desperation he had never known.
For a fleeting instant, Crowley thought himself on the brink of discorporation. It was the taste that caught him off guard entirely; Aziraphale was all sweetness, all radiance, like some impossible distillation of divinity itself, honeyed and luminous, so pure it bordered on sacrament: everything he imagined holy water to taste like if he were ever to taste it, but there was no holy water on the angel’s lips. It didn't hurt him, no, it lulled him in the most divine trance.
It was the mixture of them, of sharp and soft, of infernal and celestial, twining together into something darkly incandescent, something that defied all categorization, that threatened to unravel him entirely.
He clung fiercely to his constant, his catalyst, his exquisite iconoclast. So brilliant, and yet so ineffably blind to the most obvious truth of all. Crowley held him close to etch this very moment into his every cell; the first time in all his long existence that he had ever touched another being with his lips.
He discovered that lips were exquisitely sensitive as Aziraphale’s breath, shallow and gasping, trembled against them.
And for one fragile, treacherous instant, when Aziraphale’s hands moved against his back, hesitant, uncertain, tenderly returning the touch, Crowley allowed himself the indulgence of belief. Allowed himself to imagine this was mutual.
Selfish, perhaps. But then again, he was a demon, was he not?
He suddenly felt it, the quiet, inevitable collapse. Felt it slipping through his grasp like desiccated sand, impossible to hold, impossible to reclaim. He wasn't enough. He couldn't convince.
As soon he lets go, there will be nothing left but a solitary, fractured creature, terrified utterly of being left behind once more, just as he had begun to believe he had finally found somewhere he belonged.
Somewhere he might be wanted.
Needed.
Missed.
…loved?
Aziraphale stumbles back as Crowley releases him at last, too quickly, as though the contact had scalded him. It kind of had.
Their eyes meet, and Crowley once more finds himself bitterly grateful for the dark lenses shielding the vulnerability in his eyes.
His angel’s expression is a ruin of itself: tormented, with something perilously close to guilt.
“I forgive you,” he says, his voice unsteady, those gentle lips trembling with the weight of it.
Something in Crowley gives way.
Deep within, that fragile, guarded core, where every thought, every yearning, every forbidden hope has been sequestered, splinters open, spilling its contents into the hollow of his chest.
But nothing escapes him. Not a sound. Not a breath. He forces it down, seals it away.
Because if even a fraction of it were to break free, he is certain - certain - it would set the world alight. His fury, his grief, his love, might well sunder creation itself, might singlehandedly drag it into the very Armageddon Heaven and Hell had so eagerly awaited.
“Don’t bother.”
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At least, he thinks, as his hands clench so firmly into the leather of the steering wheel the Bentley's engine squeals in agony, if they ever were to talk again, there was no going back to pretending.
He had given him everything.
Not enough.
But all he had.