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It was raining on the streets of London.
The windscreen wipers of the Bentley swished back and forth, wiping the rain from the windshield as Crowley drove aimlessly through the city.
He had no where specifically he needed to be. He had locked himself in his flat for the last few months, shouted at the plants and orchestrated the fall of a few low-level dictators to pass the time.
But months had passed since… that day and Crowley was bored of being inside.
So he was here. In his car.
But the miserable weather outside matched his mood perfectly and scaring cyclists who veered out of the bicycle lane wasn’t bringing him the same satisfaction it normally did.
The song the Bentley was playing was one he half recognised — something about a nightingale, or a Berkeley Square, or some other absurdly romantic nonsense. He didn't know why the Bentley kept playing it. He had told it, very clearly, on at least four separate occasions, that he didn't want to hear it.
He remembered the last time he had heard it properly. The Ritz. White tablecloths. Aziraphale had been doing that thing he did when he was happy — that small private smile that he didn't know anyone could see, like he was keeping a secret from himself. Crowley had looked away before the angel could catch him looking.
He should have said something then. He'd had six thousand years and he hadn't said it once.
Suddenly the music in the Bentley stopped and spluttered.
“Don't you dare,” Crowley growled at the dashboard giving it a hard look.
The car whined in response, not appearing to be particularly remorseful. And then a rolling strip of milky cream parchment unfurled from the air vent. With a frown Crowley plucked it from the dashboard.
‘Crowley,’ the parchment read in elegant curling script. ‘My dearest friend. I am pained every day for the way we parted. I ache with the thought that I hurt you. I'm sorry-‘
Crowley's fist clenched unconsciously, screwing the small note into a ball within his palm.
It was not the first time Aziraphale had tried to contact him since the angel had abandoned him for heaven. Crowley had first thought he was going insane when Aziraphale’s voice started coming out of the radio in his apartment. The baseball bat had been in his hand before he even realised and the radio was still lying in pieces on the concrete floor of the flat.
The TV, the microwave and the coffee machine had all met similar fates.
But Crowley had thought the Bentley would have known better than that.
Without much conscious thought the paper went up in flames, sending it into the deepest depths of hell where he didn't have to read one more sodding word about how sorry the Angel was. It didn't matter how sorry he was; he still left.
“And you,” Crowley growled rounding on the dashboard. The lights flickered nervously. “Never do that again, do you hear me? I don't want any of his letters or his notes.”
The lights on the dashboard whirled in response.
“I don't sodding care!” Crowley said back. “Send them to someone who does!”
The indicator light blinked once and then once more. Crowley sighed in relief.
“Good. I'm glad we understand each other. Now change this bloody song. It’s depressing.”
-
Crowley was keeping himself busy.
His latest project – the creation of an AI telephone system that sent callers in a loop – was an unmitigated success. Humans were losing their cool, shouting at computers and throwing their phones all over the country. It was one of his best ones yet.
But… even as he watched a passerby throw their very expensive mobile phone against a wall, he felt… hollow.
Maybe he needed to go bigger, he thought to himself as he drove through London. Maybe he needed a change of scenery. There was that look out post camouflaged as a tree up in Northumberland that hell had planted years ago to keep an eye on the roman army barracked there. Maybe he could do something with that. Not only would it piss the powers downstairs off, but it would send the tabloids into a frenzy. That could be fun.
Under his hand’s lazy grip on the wheel the Bentley's engine rumbled in distaste. He scoffed accordingly.
“None of that,” he heard himself say, listless and dull. “You don't get a say in this.”
The Bentley rolled to a stop without his input. Confused, Crowley glanced out of the window and subsequently banged the wheel with force. They were parked outside the book shop.
“You piece of… no! We're getting-” he started up the engine once again, leaning forward in his seat as if to push the machine forward out of London “…away from here. And that is my decision, not yours.”
The car made the same noise again, a deep rumble almost like a whine.
The knock on the glass made him jump hard enough to hit his head on the roof.
Crowley swore colourfully, yanking his sunglasses straight and turning to find Muriel bent awkwardly at the car window, one hand raised in an enthusiastic wave. They were wearing Aziraphale's old tartan scarf, which did not help.
Crowley rolled the window down two inches.
“Mr Crowley!” Muriel said with a large smile. “I thought it was you! Have you come to visit?”
“No,” Crowley grumbled. “I’m just… driving.”
"So you are just driving," Muriel said again, cheerfully. "Past the bookshop?"
"Yes."
"That's nice." A pause. "Mr Aziraphale has been—"
"Don't."
Muriel blinked. "I only meant—"
"I know what you meant. I don't want to know." Crowley stared straight ahead through the fogging windscreen. "Whatever he's doing up there, whatever grand plan he's got, whatever he's told you to tell me — I don't want to hear it."
Muriel was quiet for a moment. Then: "He didn't tell me to tell you anything."
"Good."
"He said free will meant I had to respect your—"
"Muriel."
"—your wishes and that I shouldn't—"
"Muriel!"
"Yes?"
"Go back inside."
The engine turned over before Crowley had touched the ignition.
-
The Sycamore Tree project had been a success. The tabloids had stirred themselves up into a frenzy over the missing tree and the team downstairs had been livid. Crowley wondered if the public would have cared so much if they had known the tree was actually the skin of a demoted demon sent to earth as a stationary listening post for the Roman centenary forces at Hadrian’s wall who now spent their day reporting on the inane things American tourists said when visiting the wall and sending ants to ruin people’s picnics.
Crowley had returned home on the high of success, only to find that the Dracaena had tried to die whilst he was away.
He was in the middle of berating it at its neighbours for not stepping in when it happened.
There was no notice, no tingle at the back of his mind warning him of something to come, no flash of light or lightening from the sky.
One moment Crowley was admonishing the eucalyptus and the next he was gasping for air as the feeling enveloped him. His knees buckled, sending him to the floor in a graceless sprawl as it ran through him, and over him, and around him.
He opened his mouth in a noiseless scream as he basked in a feeling he hadn’t felt in over 6000 years. A feeling he thought he had forgotten. A feeling he had forced himself to forget because the absence of it was the worse pain that hell could inflict.
Her love.
He was feeling Her love. For the first time since he had fallen.
Absent tears poured down his cheeks, unchecked and uncaring, as he drank it in, like a man dying of thirst. Like sunlight, it poured through his being, shining light on every part of him, even the dark places he tried to hide. But it did not let him shy away. It was relentless and powerful and ruthless. And… God… Crowley had missed it.
The initial wave died down, settling calm and peacefully back in Crowley’s heart, back where it had belonged.
Crowley became aware of himself again; his heaving chest, the tear tracks painting his cheeks and the trembling of his being down to the very core. He took a breath, then another, then another.
He waited, poised on the floor for it to be ripped from him again, but it wasn’t.
Shakily, he held out his hands. They looked no different than they had a moment ago, long and thin, with dirt under his nails from the plants and the slight shimmering of scales along the back. He was still a demon, he could feel that, but something…
Holding his breath against the hope that he could feel bubbling up within him Crowley dipped into Her love, like he used to, like he was made to, and with barely a thought a star – small and fledgling – appeared in his palm.
A small broken laugh escaped his throat, and Crowley could not stop the tears from coming.
-
He didn't know how long he sat on the floor. Long enough for the eucalyptus to stop swaying. Long enough for the star in his palm to fade — though the warmth of it didn't.
He made another, without really meaning to. Then another. Small ones, fledgling things, the kind he used to scatter into the dark just to see what they'd do. He watched them drift and dissolve and felt something in his chest loosen that he hadn't known was tight.
And then the memory came.
Not like remembering something. More like a door opening onto a room that had always been there, which he simply hadn't been able to find.
Before the beginning. Before the Fall. Before he had a name that tasted like a wound.
He had been making stars — something intricate, a cluster he was particularly pleased with — and there had been another presence nearby. Bright and unhurried, watching with the kind of patient attention that most angels couldn't be bothered with. Crowley had been aware of them the way you're aware of sunlight: pervasively, and without quite looking directly.
‘Well it’s very pretty’, the presence had said. Not flattery. Just — observation. Accurate and unguarded, the way only someone genuinely paying attention could manage.
Crowley had looked, then.
And he remembered that he had thought: oh, it's you. As if he'd been expecting them. As if some part of him had known, that this was the one who was going to matter. Her love had sung with satisfaction in his heart and he had smiled.
He hadn't known then what he was looking at. He knew now.
Crowley was on his feet before he'd finished the thought.
-
“Muriel!” Crowley hollered, tearing through the bookshop doors in a frenzy.
Something had happened. Something strange and unthinkable. And there was only one person Crowley could think could be responsible.
“Hello,” Muriel called, appearing much too magically in the middle of the room. “Welcome to A. Z. Fell & Co Bookshop. I cannot sell you any books but-“
Crowley barely stopped himself from grabbing the angel and shaking them. Instead, he skidded to a halt and took a very purposeful and calming breath… which made absolutely no difference to the burning in his chest.
“What did he do?” he snarled at the scrivener, curling his hands into shaking fists.
Muriel blinked, tilting their head to the side. “Who?”
“You know who!” Crowley bellowed. “Your interfering Supreme Archangel, that’s who.”
“Umm,” Muriel frowned in confusion. “You said you didn’t want me to talk to you about-”
“I know what I said!” Crowley snapped. “But I am telling you now, you better start telling me what the hell he is up to before I summon Satan himself to rain hellfire down on you and this pissing shop. Now talk!”
Muriel looked at him for a moment, their face blank and calm before it broke out into a wide grin.
“Oh I am so glad you said that because it has all been so exciting and I haven’t had anyone to talk to about it! Well, apart from the other angels but they are all so busy with their new jobs. And I knew you would want to know but Supreme Archangel Aziraphale said that free will meant we had to abide by the wishes of the people on earth and that we couldn’t force them to do things they wouldn’t want to do and I told him you definitely did want to know but he told me that-”
“Muriel!” Crowley ground out, his head a tangled mess of thoughts. “Get to the point!”
“Right,” the angel nodded. “Well, it all started when Metatron invited Mr Fell to become the Supreme Archangel after Gabriel and Beelzebub ran away together because they loved each other which was so romantic. I read about it in some of the books and-”
Crowley growled, letting smoke emit from his shoulders.
“But you know that but already,” Muriel said quickly. “So Mr Aziraphale became the Supreme Archangel which meant that all the other Archangels had to listen to him. And at first they didn’t but, he didn’t give up and then they started to! It was just like that book The Once and Future King!" Muriel exclaimed. "Where Arthur kept trying to make everyone believe in something better and they all thought he was naive at first but then slowly — slowly — they started to see it too. I've been reading a lot since Mr Aziraphale left. He said it would help me understand humans." A small proud pause. "I've read forty-seven books."
The angel seemed to be waiting for some kind of comment. “Great,” Crowley growled. “Is the point coming soon?”
“So we are allowed to come down to earth now!” Muriel exclaimed in delight. “And help the humans. Mr Aziraphale set up some strict rules, and you have to complete the training but then we can come to earth and do what She created us to do. There are so many angels here now. Can’t you feel it?”
And now that Crowley thought about it, he could. There was an undeniably fizzing in the air that only came with divine grace. It moved through him differently than it used to — not past him, the way it had for six thousand years, but through him, catching on something that had just been returned. His breath started coming out in heaves.
“But what…” he stuttered, his mind struggling to keep up. “What about Metatron?”
“Oh Mr Aziraphale got rid of him as soon as he could. He said it was a ‘bad apple’. What does that mean?”
“It’s from Chaucer,” Crowley responded almost mechanically, his mind whirring.
“Oh I’ve read that!” Muriel said with a smile. “Is it like that time you and Mr Aziraphale helped take down the corrupt bishop in Mainz and helped get the Gutenberg Press started so that every human could have books to spread joy?”
“What no!” Crowley sputters, wrong footed. “It wasn’t spreading joy. It was the beginning of mass media, designed to bring turmoil and anger to the human race and… how did you know about that?”
“Oh. Mr. Aziraphale he wrote about it in one of his letters.”
Crowley’s heart lurched. Not in envy. But in… something. Something that was not longing and envy.
“He wrote to you?” he managed to ask.
“No,” Muriel chuckled. “He wrote to you.”
Crowley frowned as his mind took a moment to catch up.
“No… no he didn't. He sent me one note months ago but I haven't…” and then he remembered;
‘Send them to someone who cares’
And suddenly it was hard to breathe
“He sent me letters?” he asked weakly.
“Yes. Loads!” Muriel said with a cherry grin.
“And you read them?”
“Yes. They appeared on my desk. I tried to tell you but I but you said-”
“I know what I said” Crowley snapped whilst his heart tried to beat its way out of his chest. He took a deep breath, trying to calm it. “OK,” he said when he was slightly more in control. “Human lesson; don't read other people's letters.”
Muriel nodded seriously. “Noted.”
“Do… do you do you still have them?”
“Yes of course! You cannot throw things like that away!”
Muriel walked quickly to the back of the shop. Crowley stumbled to follow. They led Crowley to a small piece of blank wall between two bookshelves where a small print of Raphael's Two Angels hung beneath a wall lamp.
“I put them in here,” Muriel said, a key appearing in their hand and a keyhole appearing on the wall.
The wall swung open like a door. Beyond the door was a room Crowley had never seen before — which was saying something, given how many years he'd spent in the shop. It was small and low-ceilinged, lit by a single brass lamp that cast everything in amber. Floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets lined three walls, each one neatly labelled in Muriel's careful handwriting. A small wooden desk sat in the centre, covered in a precise arrangement of index cards, a pot of sharpened pencils, and a magnifying glass on a velvet stand. It smelled of paper and beeswax and something else underneath — something that Crowley recognised, distantly and with great reluctance, as home.
“I filed them in chronological order. I made an index,” the Angel exclaimed brandishing a small card from nowhere. “These are the ones that mention the work he's doing in heaven. These are the ones where he complains about heaven. These are all the ones where he explains how much he loves him issues you. There were quite a lot of those.”
Crowley drifted to the first filing cabinet and pulled it mechanically open.
The paper that filled it was the same smooth, milky parchment that had unfurled from the Bentley all those months ago.
He pulled one out of the file. The file divider dated it two days after Aziraphale had gone up.
‘Crowley. I have arrived and it is as I feared and also worse. The Metatron has given me an office the size of a small continent and a diary full of meetings I suspect are designed to keep me occupied and away from anything of actual consequence. I have attended four of them. I intend to miss the fifth.
I wanted you to know I am alright. I imagine you are furious with me still. That's alright. You are permitted to be furious.’
The second letter was dated a week later.
‘I've found the records. Six thousand years of them, Crowley. They knew what they were doing in the Arrangement — every ineffable plan, every thumb on the scale. The Metatron has been filing it all very neatly. I intend to be equally neat about dismantling it.
I told Gabriel what I found. He laughed, which I think means he already knew. I miss him, I find, which surprises me.
I miss you more. Obviously.’
Crowley pulled open another cabinet. And another.
‘I spoke to Saraqael today about the angels who have been here longest. There is so much goodness in them, Crowley, that has been kept shut up and pointed in the wrong direction for centuries. It isn't difficult to redirect it. They want to help. They were made to help. It only took someone telling them they were allowed.
That wasn't me, by the way. That was you. You showed me that, years ago. I'm not sure you knew you were doing it.’
He read another, and another, absorbing Aziraphale’s words like a man seeking water in the desert. Then he found one closer to the end of the pile. The handwriting was less neat here.
‘I have spoken to Her. I know you'll have questions and I have very few answers, but She was — She was kinder than I expected. She said it had taken longer than it should have. She said She was sorry. I think She meant it.
I think I know how to give it back to you. What was taken when you fell. I don't know if you want it. I don't know if it will work. But I am going to try, because I cannot — I find I simply cannot — stop trying to fix the things I've broken. Even when they tell me to stop. Even when they don't answer.
I hope you're eating. You never remember to eat.
Yours, as ever, in every meaning of the word —
A.’
He read the passage twice. Then a third time.
I don't know if it will work.
Crowley pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum, where Her love was sitting quietly, warm and impossibly steady. Like it had never left. Like it was only ever waiting.
Aziraphale had written this not knowing. Had sent it into silence, not knowing if Crowley was even reading. Had spoken to God on his behalf, then written it down and folded it carefully and sent it to a demon who had told his car to bin it.
Crowley sat in Muriel's filing room for a very long time.
-
“Get him down here!” Crowley growled, storming out of the filing room. Muriel looked up from the book they were reading.
“Who?”
“Your Supreme Arch… whatever. Him. Get him here.”
“Ummm…” Muriel wrung their hands. “I don’t think I am supposed to do that unless it is an emergency.”
“This is an emergency!” Crowley seethed, letting his voice deepen and tremble with the burning coals of hell.
Muriel’s eyes widened. They looked at the door, then back at Crowley. Then they clasped their hands together very seriously in front of their chest, closed their eyes, and were perfectly still for about four seconds.
"Done," they said, opening their eyes. "He'll be here shortly. He usually answers straight away."
Crowley said nothing. He stood very still in the middle of the bookshop with his hands in his coat pockets and tried to make his corporation breath.
“Muriel!” a voice called through the towers of books. A voice that caused Crowley’s heart to tighten in his chest and the newly resurrected string of Her Love to sing. “Is everything alright? I heard your call and it sounded…”
And then Aziraphale was there. In front of Crowley. For the first time in months.
He looked… the same. It was the same as always in his fussy waistcoat and his curly white hair and his cherub face. He looked gaunter than Crowley remembered, as if some essential life force had been drained out of him.
Aziraphale had paled when he saw Crowley, his eyes widening and his mouth dropping open.
“Crowley,” he said in wonder, his feet taking a stuttering step forward.
Crowley couldn’t help the half step back he took. He hadn’t meant to. And when pain surged through Aziraphale’s face Crowley wanted to take it back. But… he needed… he didn’t know. But he needed answers. Nothing made sense.
For a moment neither of them said anything at all. The bookshop held its breath around them.
Aziraphale recovered first, the way he always did — pulling his composure back around himself like a coat, squaring his shoulders, lifting his chin. His eyes were very bright.
“It’s,” the angel cleared his throat, pulling at the bottom of his waistcoat. “It’s good to see you. Muriel said it was an emergency. Is everything alright?”
“Not particularly, no.”
Aziraphale's eyes darted around the bookshop briefly, as if he were looking for a heavenly trap, or an agent of hell, or a naked amnesiac archangel on his doorstep. Though in the angel’s defence, all of those things had been in the bookshop at one point of another.
“Well… I will help in any way that I can.”
“Oh cut the angel crap Aziraphale,” Crowley sneered with a roll of his eyes.
Aziraphale reared back in shock. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Don’t come down here and start this ‘thou art so holy’ nonsense. It might work with the rest of them, but I have known you far too long to fall for it.”
Aziraphale huffed, loosing some of his haughtiness. “Then what did you want? I am busy you know.”
“Yes. So busy ditching me and running away to heaven the moment we were finally free,” Crowley sneered. He wasn’t sure where the anger was coming from. He hadn’t felt anger when he had read Aziraphale’s letters. But stood here now, with Aziraphale stood in front of him, back in the bookshop in the first time in months… he was suddenly seethingly furious.
Aziraphale stared at him.
"Running away," he repeated. Very quietly. As if testing the words.
"That's what I said." Crowley raised his chin, sensing the danger but he wasn’t going to stop now.
"I see." Aziraphale's voice had gone strange; older and more tired and considerably more dangerous. "Six months. Six months of letters, Crowley. I wrote to you every week."
"Yeah, well." Crowley's jaw worked. "I didn't read them."
The silence that followed was very short and very loud.
"You didn't—" Aziraphale stopped. "You didn't read them."
"No."
Aziraphale absorbed this. His hands, Crowley noticed, had gone very still at his sides.
"So all those months," Aziraphale said, and there was something extraordinarily controlled about the way he was speaking, "that I thought you were furious with me. Ignoring me deliberately. All those months I spent thinking I had finally — that I had pushed you too far and you were done with me." His voice stayed level. Just. "That was because you didn't read them."
"I didn't want—"
"I know what you didn't want," Aziraphale said, and now there was heat in it, real heat, the kind that only comes from something that has been kept down for a very long time. "You didn't want to hear it. You didn’t want to listen to me then. So you didn’t. You didn’t want to come with me. So you didn’t. You didn’t want to hear from me after you…” Aziraphale’s voice cracked and Crowley tried very hard not to react. When he spoke again he was quieter but no less certain. "I did not run away. I made a choice. For you. For us.”
“Don’t try to pull that card,” Crowley sneered taking a step forward. “Don’t try and pretend this was all for me. You wanted to be welcomed back into heaven’s embrace and screw the rest of us you left behind.”
“How can you say that?” Aziraphale asked, aghast. “It was all for you! Do you think I wanted to go back there? To that place with all those people who despised me? Who made me feel…” Aziraphale took a deep breath, shaking his head. “It was for you. It has always been for you.”
“If it was for me, you would have come with me.”
Aziraphale took a desperate step closer. “You look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never dreamed of it,” Aziraphale demanded his watery eyes staring defiantly at Crowley. “You look me in the eye and tell me you’ve not wanted to come… to come home.”
Crowly grit his jaw.
“See!” Aziraphale cried. “You can’t! I know you. I know and yes maybe not all the time and maybe not every day. But you missed being an angel. You missed what that meant and how it felt. And I was given the chance to give that back to you. The thing you’ve always wanted but never let yourself. And I took it. And then… and then you left me.”
“I left you?!” Crowley snarled, taking a step forward. “I wanted to run away with you, I wanted us. I wanted us to be together. And you-”
“I wanted that too! And it would have been in heaven. With us pulling the strings. With you an angel again.”
“So you want to be with me. But only if I’m an angel.”
“No!” Aziraphale wailed. “Don’t you see? I’ve loved you for years. For centuries. Just you. As you are. It’s you who never loved yourself. And I wanted to give that back to you.”
Her Love hmmed at the back of Crowley’s being. It vibrated through his chest and made it feel like something crawling up his throat. He coughed, trying to clear it.
"Right," Crowley croaked against the strain. "Fine. Good. Wonderful. You fixed me." He turned away towards the books, jaw working. "Is that what you did up there? Fixed broken things? Like the broken toy soldiers we are?”
“You’re not broken,” Aziraphale said, voice hard. “And neither was heaven. It just needed help… and someone who cared enough to listen.”
"How very you," Crowley muttered to the bookshelves. "March in and care at something until it improves."
"It worked, as it happens."
"Did it." Not a question. Crowley's hand found the spine of a book, not reading it, just — holding onto something. "The Metatron. What happened to him."
"Gone." The single word was very composed. "I removed him from his position as soon as I had enough of the archangels on my side to make it stick."
"How long did that take?"
"Three months. Two weeks. Four days."
Something about the precision of it made Crowley turn slightly. Not fully. But slightly.
"That fast," he said.
"I had good reason to work quickly," Aziraphale said, and there was something strained at the edges of it that Crowley didn't examine.
"And the angels on earth," Crowley said, pushing on, pushing away from whatever that strained edge was. "Muriel says they're everywhere now. Trained. Consented. No—"
"No divine plans they haven't agreed to. No celestial interference without invitation. No thumbs on scales." A pause. "I had rather a lot of records to go through first. The Metatron had been very thorough about filing everything. I was equally thorough about dismantling it."
Despite himself, despite everything, something shifted in Crowley's chest that wasn't Her love. It was something older. More inconvenient.
"The archangels actually listened to you," he said. It came out slightly incredulous. He hadn't entirely meant it to.
"Eventually." A beat. "I didn't argue with them. I just kept doing what I thought was right until it became difficult to argue with the results."
Crowley was quiet for a moment.
"And Her," he said then, carefully. Quietly. "You said in the letter you spoke to Her."
The silence behind him changed quality.
"Yes," Aziraphale said.
"What did She say." Still not quite a question. Like if he made it a question it became something he actually wanted the answer to.
"She said—" Aziraphale paused, and Crowley could hear him choosing his words with the particular care he reserved for things that mattered. "She said the questions you asked. When you fell. She wanted you to know they were not wrong questions."
Something happened to the back of Crowley's throat.
"Bit late," he said.
"Yes," Aziraphale agreed softly. "She said that too."
Crowley stared at the bookshelves and did not say anything for a while.
"I pressed her," Aziraphale added, almost quietly, as if to himself. "I'm afraid I was rather insistent.”
Crowley let out a breath that was almost a laugh. Almost.
"You were insistent," he said. "With God."
"Someone had to be."
The room felt very still.
Crowley turned around then. All the way. And looked at Aziraphale — really looked, the way he'd been avoiding since the moment the angel had walked through the door — and saw again what he'd noticed when Aziraphale had first appeared. The gauntness. The careful composure that was working slightly too hard.
"Well," Crowley said at last, for lack of anything else. "I hope you had fun."
"I didn't, actually," Aziraphale said primly. "If you must know. It was quite terrible and I wanted to come home every day."
Crowley went very still.
"So why didn't you?"
Aziraphale looked at him. Then away. His hands found the hem of his waistcoat and he straightened it unnecessarily, the way he did when he needed something to do with himself.
"You made it clear that you were not happy with me," he said, carefully. "And I thought — at least up there I could do some good. And maybe—" His voice caught slightly on it, the smallest snag. "Do something right for once."
The silence stretched.
The angel wanted to ‘do something right’. As if Crowley hadn’t had a front seat to six thousand years of it.
He thought about the Garden. The flaming sword, handed over without a second thought to two humans who had just been thrown out into a wilderness. He thought about Job. About Aziraphale planting himself between Crowley and a family of children and refusing to move, despite the permit, despite the orders, despite every authority that said the children were forfeit. He thought about Armageddon. About Aziraphale standing in front of an angel army and dismantling six thousand years of received theology with a few carefully chosen sentences.
"I thought the index was quite good."
Both of them turned with a start from their intense stare to see Muriel emerge from behind a bookshelf.
"The filing system," Muriel clarified, apparently feeling this needed expansion. "Mr Aziraphale sent very detailed instructions from heaven. He wanted everything in order in case someone needed to find something quickly. I think it is very good." A small frown. "I told you so that last time you came to visit, the day after the second tribunal, I think. Or was it the third?"
The quality of the silence changed.
"The what?" Crowley asked, turning his head slowly towards Aziraphale who visibly gulped.
Muriel looked up, apparently sensing something in the air, though not quite sure what.
"The tribunal," they said, slightly more carefully. "When the archangels brought the motion to have Mr Aziraphale discorporated. For insubordination." A pause. "The second one, I mean. The first one was just a formal censure."
Crowley’s felt his nostrils flare. Aziraphale had gone quite still.
"There were two tribunals?" Crowley asked icily.
"Three," said Muriel, and then immediately looked as if they wished they hadn't.
"Muriel," Aziraphale said, with his particular brand of gentle firmness.
"Sorry," said Muriel, in a very small voice. "I thought — I assumed he knew. From the letters. You wrote about the first one."
"I mentioned it briefly," Aziraphale said. "In passing."
"In passing," Crowley repeated.
"It wasn't—"
"And when you went to find Her," Crowley said, keeping his voice very controlled. "When you went outside sanctioned heaven space to find God without permission. What would they have done, if they'd caught you. The archangels."
Aziraphale said nothing.
"Aziraphale."
"It was a possibility," Aziraphale said carefully, "that I would have been — that the outcome could have been—"
"Annihilated," said Muriel, with the earnest helpfulness of someone who did not yet fully understand when helpfulness was not helpful. "Like what almost happened at the end of the— oh." They looked between the two of them. "I am going to go and make some tea," they said, and removed themselves with remarkable speed for an angel who had never previously demonstrated any interest in tea.
The bookshop was very quiet.
Crowley stared at Aziraphale.
Aziraphale looked at the floor, his hands gripped behind his back.
“You were censured.”
“Yes well…” Aziraphale muttered, apparently finding the pattern of the carpet fascinating. “It was only expected. I was kicking up quite the fuss.”
"You could have been annihilated," Crowley said. Flat. Almost conversational. "You went looking for God, in secret, without telling anyone, with no backup, and you could have been annihilated. And you wrote to me about it." His jaw tightened. "In passing."
"I didn't want you to worry."
"You didn't want me to—" Crowley stopped. Something was happening in his chest again and Her love was tapping against him relentlessly. "You could have been gone and I wouldn't have—"
He turned away. His hand found a bookshelf.
"You stupid angel," he said, to the books. "You absolute — why would you do that. Why would you—"
"Because," Aziraphale said, very quietly, behind him. "What they took from you — it wasn't right. It was never right. And I could not—" His voice caught. "I could not stand in front of you again having not at least tried. I could not come back to you with nothing to show for it but — but good intentions. You deserved more than that. You always deserved more than that."
Crowley's grip on the bookshelf tightened.
"And if you'd been annihilated," he said. "What then. What would I have—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
The silence that followed was very long.
Crowley rubbed at his chest again, almost without thinking.
Aziraphale noticed. Of course he noticed. He had always noticed everything, even when he pretended not to.
"Are you alright?"
"Yes." Crowley's hand dropped. He looked at it for a moment, then at Aziraphale. Some muscles moved in his face that felt almost like they were trying to smile. "I just forgot how annoying it was."
Aziraphale stared at him.
"The warmth," Crowley said, with the studied casualness of someone defusing a bomb. "Bit much, really. Very — present. I'd got used to the quiet." He paused, gesturing vaguely at his own chest. "She’s very insistent sometimes.”
For a moment, Aziraphale simply stood there.
And then it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. The angel’s face lit up with a joy so contagious that Crowley could feel Her pleasure at it through his being.
“It worked?” Aziraphale asked in wonder. “It really… you really?”
“Yes,” Crowley said simply.
Aziraphale’s eyes filled immediately, without any apparent effort to stop them, the way Aziraphale had always cried, with complete unselfconsciousness, as if tears were simply the correct response and he saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
“I hoped… I wasn’t sure… She said she would but I didn’t know…”
He took a step forward and then seemed to forget what he'd intended to do with it. His hand came up to his mouth. His other hand floundered sideways, grabbing onto the edge of a bookshelf, and Crowley realised with a sudden sharp attention that Aziraphale was not steadying himself for emotional reasons.
"Aziraphale."
"I'm perfectly—" Aziraphale began, in the tone of someone who was not perfectly anything, and his knees buckled slightly in a way that made the sentence unnecessary.
Crowley crossed the distance between them before he had consciously decided to. His hand found Aziraphale's arm — steadying, firm — and he steered the angel to the big worn armchair by the window with the efficiency of someone who was absolutely not alarmed and was simply being practical.
"Sit," he said.
"I'm fine, I just—"
"Sit down, Angel."
Aziraphale sat. He looked, for a moment, very small in the large chair — thin in the way Crowley had noticed when he'd first arrived, worn at the edges, like something that had been running for a long time on insufficient fuel. The tears were still coming, unhurried and unchecked, and he seemed barely aware of them.
"Sorry," Aziraphale managed. "I don't know why I'm—"
"Because you've been up there for months doing the impossible on no rest and no food and no—" Crowley stopped. Started again, quieter. "And something finally went right."
Aziraphale looked up at him.
"Yes," he said softly. "Something finally went right."
From the back of the shop came the small domestic sounds of Muriel making tea — the clink of cups, the particular sigh of a kettle approaching the boil. The smell of it drifted through, warm and familiar, and Aziraphale's eyes closed briefly at it.
Crowley watched as Aziraphale soaked it in and felt the rightness of the sight soak into him. Like something sliding home that had been missing.
"When did you last have a cup of tea?" Crowley asked.
"I'm not entirely sure," Aziraphale admitted ruefully. "There's no tea in heaven. Or there wasn't. I may have introduced it. I introduced quite a lot of things." He frowned faintly. "Saraqael took to biscuits with some enthusiasm. It became a whole—" He stopped, seemed to register what he'd actually been asked. "Since I left. I haven't had any since I left."
Crowley looked at him for a long moment.
Then he turned towards the back of the shop and called: "Muriel. Two cups."
"Already doing it!" came the cheerful reply.
Crowley turned back. Aziraphale was watching him with an expression that was difficult to look at directly, so Crowley didn't, quite. Instead he moved to the armchair, considered it for a moment, and then settled himself on the arm of it with the particular angular grace of someone who had spent centuries arranging himself in small spaces beside this specific angel.
The chair was warm. The bookshop smelled of paper and beeswax. Outside, London was doing whatever London did, entirely indifferent to the fact that the world had recently been put back together by an angel in a waistcoat who hadn't had a cup of tea in months.
Muriel appeared with two cups, beamed at them both with the uncomplicated delight of someone who had read forty-seven books about human happiness and was now witnessing some, and then disappeared again with admirable tact.
Aziraphale wrapped both hands around his cup. The tears had stopped, or mostly stopped. He looked — not fixed, not entirely, there was still the gauntness and the tiredness and six thousand years of learning to doubt himself — but lighter, somehow. As if something he had been carrying at the back of his shoulders had been set down, just for now.
Crowley sat on the arm of his chair and drank his tea and didn't say anything.
For a while, neither of them did. The bookshop settled around them, sighing quietly, shifting its weight, smelling of things that had been loved for a long time.
Aziraphale turned the cup in his hands.
"I've been thinking," he said, in the careful tone of someone who had been thinking for quite some time and was only now deciding to admit it.
Crowley waited.
"Heaven doesn't need me there every day. It runs rather well on its own now, which is—" a small complicated pause, "—rather the point, I suppose. I could check in. Every few months. Make sure nothing's gone sideways." He looked down at his tea. "Saraqael is very capable. She doesn't need me hovering."
"No," Crowley agreed, to the middle distance.
Another silence. Aziraphale turned the cup again.
"I was thinking," he said, more quietly, "the South Downs."
Crowley went very still.
"There's a— I always thought there was something about the light down there," Aziraphale continued, with the particular studiousness of someone not looking at the person beside them. "And it's not so far. From London. If one wanted to come to London. For the restaurants. Occasionally."
"Mm," said Crowley.
"I just thought—" Aziraphale stopped. "Well. I thought… perhaps if you were amenable…"
Aziraphale stared at his cup. Crowley stared at him.
With a breath, Crowley set his cup down on the table.
"If I remember rightly," he said slowly, "you liked the last thing I built."
Aziraphale's head turned, his eyes wide.
"It was very pretty," Aziraphale said, faintly.
"I think I can build something even prettier." Crowley’s mouth quirked at the edges. "For you."
He reached out and ran his thumb gently across Aziraphale's cheek — just once, just briefly, the softest thing he was capable of — and Aziraphale, predictably, started to cry again.
"Oh, don't," Crowley sighed, with great annoyance, and pulled him in.
Aziraphale went without protest, his face finding the lapel of Crowley's coat, one hand gripping the fabric in a way that suggested he had no immediate plans to let go. He smelled of heaven still — that particular clear cold quality, like air before rain — but underneath it, fainter, was beeswax and old paper. The bookshop. Home.
Crowley held on and looked out through the window at London going about its business in the grey afternoon light, and did not say anything, because he didn't need to.
Her love hummed quietly in his chest.
Outside, somewhere, the Bentley sat parked on the kerb. If anyone had been paying attention — which no one was, because it was London and no one ever did — they might have noticed that it was playing, very softly, something about a nightingale. About a Berkeley Square.
About exactly the right song, at exactly the right time.