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Crowley only meant to borrow Aziraphale’s charger.
That was all.
Aziraphale had already left for work in a rush, abandoning half a cup of tea on the kitchen counter and muttering something about “an absolutely catastrophic staff meeting,” and Crowley, running on three hours of sleep and sheer caffeine dependency, wandered into Aziraphale’s room to grab the charger from the desk.
The laptop was open.
Crowley wasn’t trying to snoop. Really.
But the screen lit up when he brushed the mouse, and suddenly there they were.
Two Sims standing in an aggressively cosy cottage kitchen.
One blond. One redheaded. Both unmistakably them.
The household name was The Fell-Crowley Family.
Crowley stared.
The blond Sim, wearing a tiny beige cardigan, walked over and autonomously kissed the redheaded Sim on the cheek while romantic music chimed in the background.
Then another notification popped up.
Aziraphale Fell and Anthony Crowley are soulmates.
Crowley nearly dropped the charger.
Because this wasn’t just casual gameplay.
No, apparently Sim-Aziraphale and Sim-Crowley had:
- been married for three in-game years,
- owned six chickens,
- adopted a small white dog named Bentley,
- and recently welcomed a baby called Warlock.
Crowley sat there in complete emotional devastation while pixel versions of them flirted over grilled cheese and then he heard the front door open.
Aziraphale had forgotten his scarf.
Crowley’s brain, which had been doing something complicated and largely useless for several years now where Aziraphale was concerned, achieved a kind of perfect, glassy stillness.
The kind of stillness you got just before a car crash.
There were footsteps in the hall, familiar ones. The slightly hurried shuffle of a man who had already left the flat once today and was deeply offended about having to be in it again.
“Crowley?” Aziraphale called. “Have you seen my, oh, honestly, I was certain I’d put it on the,”
They were closer now. In the kitchen. The sound of a cupboard opening, closing. The murmur of him talking to himself the way he always did when he was flustered, a soft running commentary about scarves and time and the unforgivable inadequacy of London Transport.
“Crowley, dear, are you up? I thought I heard, oh,”
The footsteps were coming down the hall.
Crowley moved.
He didn’t plan to move, exactly. His body just made an executive decision without consulting his higher functions. He lunged for the laptop, slammed it shut with a guilty little clack, snatched up the charger like it was the only thing he’d ever wanted in this room or any room, and turned around with his back pressed against the desk in a posture that he hoped read as casual and not, for example, guilty man at scene of crime.
The bedroom door opened.
Aziraphale was halfway through pulling on his coat. He had a piece of toast in his mouth. His scarf, the absurd tartan one Crowley had given him as a joke that he had then refused to stop wearing, was looped untidily around one arm. His hair was doing the thing it did in the mornings when he hadn’t yet found a mirror, which was to say standing up in soft, betrayed little tufts.
He stopped in the doorway and looked at Crowley. Then at the closed laptop. Then back at Crowley.
He removed the toast from his mouth with a kind of slow, professional care.
“Good morning,” Aziraphale said.
“Hi,” said Crowley. His voice came out roughly an octave higher than he was expecting.
“You’re, ah. You’re in my room.”
“Yes.”
“With my, with my laptop.”
“Yes.”
“Closed.”
“Very closed,” Crowley agreed. “Closed as anything. Closedest laptop in the building.”
Aziraphale tilted his head. It was the librarian tilt, the one Crowley had clocked on day one of being his flatmate three years ago. It was the tilt that said: I am being patient, but I am also a man who has personally catalogued seventeen thousand books and I do not lose arguments about details.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said gently.
“Charger,” said Crowley, and held up the charger. “Mine’s broken. Borrowed yours. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Riveting stuff. Should be a film.”
“Mm.”
“I’ll be off.”
“Mm.”
“Out of your hair. Back to my own room. My own room, which is also in this flat, but is not this room.”
“Crowley.”
“Yes.”
Aziraphale very carefully set the toast down on the dresser. Then he stepped fully into the room, closed the door behind him, which was an interesting choice given that it was his room and Crowley was the one trying to leave it, and leaned back against the door with his hands behind him.
“Did you,” Aziraphale said, in the soft, terrible voice he used for fines on overdue books, “open my laptop?”
“No.”
“Crowley.”
“It opened itself.”
“Crowley.”
“It was already open.”
There was a long pause. A muscle moved in Aziraphale’s jaw.
He had gone slightly pink.
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
“It’s fine,” said Crowley, which was a lie of such breathtaking magnitude that he was personally impressed with himself. “I didn’t see anything. I literally just, I touched the mouse, and then I closed it. I closed it immediately. Practically before it loaded. Honestly I have no idea what was on there. Could’ve been spreadsheets. Could’ve been your tax returns. Could’ve been anything.”
“It was The Sims,” said Aziraphale, faintly.
“Could’ve been The Sims,” Crowley conceded. “Yeah. Sure. In theory.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes for a moment. He looked like a man being made to confront the inevitability of his own death.
“How much did you see,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Crowley.”
“Honestly, Aziraphale, I didn’t, look, it doesn’t matter, I’ll just,”
“How much?”
Crowley opened his mouth, closed it. He considered, briefly, lying. Considered the way Aziraphale would know he was lying, because Aziraphale always knew, because Aziraphale was an antiquarian bookseller who could spot a forged Caxton at thirty paces and also could spot Crowley’s particular brand of bullshit at roughly the same distance.
“The chickens,” Crowley admitted. “I saw the chickens.”
Aziraphale made a small, distressed noise.
“And the dog,” said Crowley.
“Oh God.”
“And, um. Warlock.”
Aziraphale slid, very slowly, down the door, until he was sitting on the floor with his knees pulled up and his face in his hands.
“I want to die,” Aziraphale said, very clearly, into his palms.
“Don’t do that,” said Crowley.
“I am going to die.”
“Please don’t.”
“This is the end of my life. I have had a good run. Goodbye.”
“Aziraphale.”
“I am going to crawl into the river and live as an eel.”
“You can’t be an eel, you don’t have the bone structure.”
“Anthony.”
Crowley’s stomach did a thing. It always did a thing when Aziraphale used his first name, which was approximately three times a year and always under conditions of significant emotional distress.
“Look,” Crowley said. He sat down on the floor too, because Aziraphale was on the floor and it felt rude to be standing. He set the charger carefully aside, like it was evidence in a trial. “Look, angel. It’s not, it’s not a big deal.”
“It is the biggest deal,” said Aziraphale’s voice from his hands. “It is the largest deal that has ever been dealt.”
“You play a video game. So what. Loads of people play video games.”
“That is not the point.”
“What’s the point, then?”
There was a very long silence.
Aziraphale’s ears, the small visible bit of him between his hands and his hair, were a colour Crowley had previously only seen on Christmas baubles.
“I didn’t mean to,” Aziraphale said finally, very small. “I started a household. Just a household. To, you know, to try the new pack. And the game gave me a Sim, and I clicked some buttons, and I, well. I suppose I wasn’t paying enormous attention, and then I, I built a, a little kitchen, and I made another Sim because the first one looked lonely, and,”
“Mm.”
“And then he wandered in, the second one, and he just sort of, of looked like you, you know how it does that thing where you start clicking randomly and a face emerges, and I thought, oh, that’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it, but I, I didn’t want to delete him, because he’d done nothing wrong, and so I, I let him stay, and then it asked me to pick traits, and I,”
“Mm-hm.”
“I picked Romantic,” said Aziraphale, in a voice approaching the inaudible.
“For you or me?”
“Both.”
“Ahhh,” said Crowley, who felt as if a small bird had been released inside his chest.
“And then they started flirting autonomously,” Aziraphale wailed, “and I didn’t do it, Crowley, I really didn’t, I was just trying to get them to cook, and they kept, the game kept making them, and then there was a wedding, and I didn’t know how to stop the wedding, you can’t stop a Sims wedding, Crowley, and then,”
“There were chickens.”
“There were chickens,” Aziraphale agreed, in the voice of a man explaining to a magistrate.
“And a baby.”
“He came in a basket.”
“Right.”
“It was an adoption, Crowley, I want to be quite clear, there was no, there was nothing untoward, the game does it through a service,”
“Aziraphale.”
“And I named him Warlock because I was reading something at the time,”
“Aziraphale.”
“I want to be cremated,” Aziraphale said. “And my ashes scattered somewhere very far from this flat.”
Crowley looked at him.
Aziraphale, sitting on the floor of his own bedroom, in a coat, with toast cooling on the dresser behind him, the morning light catching in his hair, looking like he wanted very seriously to descend through the floorboards into the flat below and apologise to the neighbour for arriving uninvited.
Crowley’s heart, the stupid traitor, did the thing it had been doing for about two and a half years, which was to swell up too large for his ribcage and beat against it as if trying to get out.
He realised he was smiling.
“Angel,” he said.
Aziraphale didn’t look up.
“Angel, come on.”
“Mm.”
“It’s not, it’s actually quite,”
“If you say funny, Crowley, I shall feed you to the eels.”
“I wasn’t going to say funny.”
“What were you going to say?”
Crowley opened his mouth and closed it again. The thing he had been going to say was sweet, which was such an alarming admission that it briefly stopped his entire central nervous system.
“Charming,” he said, weakly.
Aziraphale lowered his hands. Just a little. Just enough to peer over them with one suspicious eye.
“Charming.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you know. Like. Sweet. Cute.”
“Anthony Crowley does not use the word cute.”
“Anthony Crowley uses it when he wants to.”
Aziraphale lowered his hands fully. He was, Crowley noted with a small private joy, still very pink. The tips of his ears looked like they were broadcasting.
“You’re not,” Aziraphale said carefully, “you’re not, ah. Cross.”
“Cross? With you?”
“With me. For. Well. For. Putting you in my, my game. Without permission.”
“Aziraphale.”
“I do realise it’s a bit, ah, presumptuous,”
“Aziraphale, I have stolen your hoodies. I have eaten your leftovers. I have used your toothbrush, once, in 2023, and I will go to my grave maintaining it was an accident. I am not going to lodge a formal complaint because you put a virtual version of me in a virtual cottage. With six chickens.”
“It was eight, originally,” said Aziraphale, very quietly. “Two of them got eaten by a fox.”
Crowley made a noise that was, embarrassingly, a giggle.
“Was the fox autonomous as well.”
“The fox was an act of God, Crowley, do not joke about it, I was bereft for days, I had to take little Beatrice to the vet,”
“There’s a vet now.”
“There is a vet.”
“Aziraphale.”
“Oh, do shut up,” Aziraphale said, but he was starting, starting, to smile too, in the reluctant way he did when something had been funny for several minutes and his face had finally accepted that fact. “I, I find it relaxing. Don’t look at me. I find it relaxing and the bookshop is a nightmare at the moment and Gabriel is, well, Gabriel, and I needed something where things turned out all right, you see.”
“Things turn out all right in your Sims.”
“Things turn out splendidly in my Sims,” Aziraphale said, with sudden fervour, sitting up a little straighter. “You wouldn’t believe, Crowley, the, the, the household value we have accrued, the,”
He stopped.
“We,” he repeated, to himself, in horror.
“Mm,” said Crowley, who was watching him.
“I mean, they.”
“Mm.”
“It’s a slip. A grammatical slip. I am a tired man.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Crowley, please let me crawl into the river.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because I’d miss you,” said Crowley.
He had not meant to say that.
It came out of his mouth fully formed, easy as anything, the way a thing falls out of a pocket when you bend over. He heard it leave him and he heard it land in the air between them and he watched it sit there on the carpet between his knees and Aziraphale’s, a small, terrible, true thing.
The smile died on Aziraphale’s face. Not in a bad way. In the way that smiles die when something more important is arriving.
He looked at Crowley.
Crowley looked at the carpet.
“Anthony,” said Aziraphale, very softly.
“It’s nothing.”
“It isn’t nothing.”
“Aziraphale, I,”
“Were they really kissing?” Aziraphale said.
Crowley looked up.
Aziraphale was looking at him with an expression Crowley had never quite seen on his face before. Or, no, that wasn’t true. He’d seen it. He had seen it in fragments, glimpses, a fraction of a second when Aziraphale thought he wasn’t looking. The expression Aziraphale wore when he handed Crowley a mug of tea made exactly the way Crowley liked it. The expression he wore when Crowley fell asleep on the sofa during their Sunday film and Aziraphale carefully put a blanket over him. The expression he had worn last winter when Crowley had had the flu and Aziraphale had said oh, my dear and put a hand on his forehead, and they had both pretended afterwards that it had not happened.
That expression. But all of it. All at once. Not hidden.
“Yeah,” Crowley said. His voice had gone hoarse. “Yeah, they were. There was, uh. Music.”
“Was there.”
“Romantic music.”
“Oh dear.”
“Bit of a tell, that.”
“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “I suppose it is.”
They sat there.
Outside, a bus went past. Somewhere in the flat, the radiator made the small, apologetic clanking sound it always did at this hour. The toast was definitely cold now. The scarf had fallen off Aziraphale’s arm onto the floor between them, a soft tartan accusation.
Aziraphale closed his eyes.
“Crowley,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I would like to tell you something, and I would like you not to interrupt me, because I shall lose my nerve if you do.”
“Okay.”
“I have been,” said Aziraphale, with his eyes still closed, in the careful, ironed-flat voice he used for difficult readings, “I have been quite stupid about you. For some time. Probably since the second week you lived here, when you, you came home with that horrid coffee from the place I don’t like, and you brought me a pastry because you said you knew I liked the pastries even though I disapproved of the coffee. And I, I realised then, I think, that I had become a person who, who quite badly wanted to come home and find you in the kitchen. And I have been, I have managed, I think, fairly well, all things considered, to keep it from being a, a, an issue, between us, because I rather thought you would, you would not want to know, and because I value your friendship more than I value, well, almost anything, and I should not, I should not have liked to lose it. And so I, I made do, with, with our evenings, and our films, and you stealing my hoodies, and your really very irritating habit of putting the milk back with practically nothing in it. And I, well. I made the Sims. So that I could have, ah. The shape of it. Without the risk. Which is, I do see now, very cowardly, and very silly, and I am very sorry.”
He stopped.
Crowley discovered he had been holding his breath.
“You can interrupt now,” Aziraphale said, still with his eyes closed.
“Aziraphale.”
“Mm.”
“Open your eyes.”
“I would really rather not.”
“Angel.”
Aziraphale opened his eyes.
His expression was the bravest thing Crowley had ever seen, and also the most terrified. He looked like a man who had just thrown a very expensive vase off a balcony and was watching it fall.
Crowley said, “I bought the charger I was using last week.”
Aziraphale blinked. “What?”
“The one I said was broken. It’s not. I bought it last week. It works fine.”
“Then why,”
“I wanted an excuse to come into your room.”
“Oh.”
“And I do know you like the pastries from that place. I know you like the almond croissants on Wednesdays and the pain au raisin on Fridays and the apricot ones any day they have them. I know you take your tea with the bag in for exactly four minutes and then you put one and a quarter sugars in it, the quarter is a real measurement to you, Aziraphale, I have watched you do it, you have a tiny spoon. I know your scarf is the tartan one even though you have nicer ones because I gave it to you and you wear it more than the others. I know you read in bed even though it ruins your eyes and you fall asleep with your glasses on and the book on your chest, I know because I check on you sometimes when I get up in the night, I take the book and I put it on the bedside table and I take your glasses off and I put them in the case and I close the door very quietly, I have done this roughly forty times, Aziraphale, I have done it so many times I could do it in my sleep, and you have never noticed, because you sleep like a stone, and I, I have been, I have been just, I have been so,”
He stopped. He was, he realised, slightly out of breath.
Aziraphale was staring at him.
“You take my glasses off,” said Aziraphale.
“Yeah.”
“My, my glasses, you,”
“Yeah.”
“Crowley, that’s,”
“I know.”
“That’s very,”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” said Aziraphale, and his face did something complicated, “oh, my dear.”
And then he did the thing Crowley had been thinking about for two and a half years, which was that he reached across the carpet, and he put his hand on Crowley’s face, just below his cheekbone, his thumb resting in the soft place under Crowley’s eye, and he looked at Crowley as if Crowley were a first edition.
Crowley made a small, undignified noise.
“May I,” said Aziraphale.
“Please,” said Crowley.
Aziraphale kissed him.
It was, Crowley thought distantly, not actually the way the Sims had done it. The Sims kiss had been very tidy. Two perfect pixel mouths meeting with little hearts above them. This was, this was Aziraphale’s mouth, which was warm and which tasted faintly of butter and which moved against his with a kind of careful, astonished slowness, as if Aziraphale were reading a passage he had been waiting his whole life to read and did not want to rush.
Crowley’s hands found Aziraphale’s coat. He clutched at the lapels. He thought, dimly, that he was probably crushing them.
Aziraphale pulled back. Just a little. Just enough to look at him.
“Oh,” said Aziraphale.
“Yeah,” said Crowley.
“Goodness.”
“Yep.”
“That was, that was rather,”
“Yep.”
“I should have done that ages ago.”
“You really, really should have.”
Aziraphale laughed. It was a wobbly, slightly breathless laugh, and it was the best sound Crowley had ever heard, and he wanted very urgently to hear it again.
“I have,” Aziraphale said, “I have a staff meeting.”
“Mm.”
“At ten.”
“Mm-hm.”
“It is, ah,” Aziraphale glanced at his watch, very briefly, with the air of a man performing a duty he resents, “nine twenty-three.”
“Right.”
“I should go.”
“Mm.”
Neither of them moved.
Aziraphale’s hand was still on Crowley’s face. Crowley’s hands were still in Aziraphale’s lapels. The morning sun was, Crowley realised, doing something quite ridiculous through the window, lighting up the dust in the air and the gold in Aziraphale’s hair and turning the whole stupid little bedroom into something out of a painting.
“I think,” said Aziraphale, “I shall call in sick.”
“You’ve never called in sick in your life.”
“Then I am overdue.”
“Aziraphale.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Oh, that’s, that’s going to be a problem, that is.”
“What is.”
“You calling me my dear. With your mouth. In, in that voice.”
“Is it.”
“It’s going to ruin me.”
“Good,” said Aziraphale, and kissed him again.
It was an hour later, more or less, by the time they made it as far as the kitchen.
Aziraphale was wearing his pyjamas again, having shed the coat and the work clothes underneath it with a kind of relieved finality, like a man being released from a costume. Crowley was wearing one of Aziraphale’s cardigans, on the entirely reasonable grounds that it had been on the chair and he had been cold, and on the slightly less reasonable grounds that he had, at some point in the last forty minutes, become a person who was allowed to wear Aziraphale’s cardigans, and he was going to abuse that privilege immediately.
Aziraphale put the kettle on. Crowley sat at the kitchen table and watched him.
“So,” said Crowley.
“So,” said Aziraphale, with his back to him, getting mugs out.
“Show me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Sims.”
Aziraphale turned around very slowly. He had the expression of a man being asked to read out his own diary in front of a parole board.
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on, angel.”
“No.”
“I want to meet the chickens.”
“Crowley.”
“I want to meet the dog.”
“Crowley, I beg you,”
“Bentley, Aziraphale. Bentley. You named the dog after my car. You absolute...”
“I had to call it something.”
“You could have called it Bartholomew. You could have called it Mr Tibbles. You called it Bentley.”
“It suited him.”
“You’re in love with me.”
“Yes, well,” said Aziraphale, with great dignity, getting the tea down, “now we both know.”
Crowley grinned. He couldn’t help it. His face was doing things without his permission, and he was just going to have to live with that for, he suspected, the rest of his life.
“Show me,” he said again, softer.
Aziraphale put the mugs down. He turned around. He looked at Crowley for a long moment, with that same expression as before, the one that had been hiding in pieces for two and a half years and was now apparently going to be on his face all the time, the absolute menace.
“All right,” he said. “But you have to promise to be nice about it.”
“When have I ever been nice.”
“Crowley.”
“I promise. I’ll be a saint. I’ll be appalling.”
“That is the opposite of,”
“Get the laptop, angel.”
Aziraphale fetched the laptop. He set it on the kitchen table between them, with the wary air of a man bringing a confession to a priest. He opened it. He clicked through to the save file with the resigned dignity of someone heading to the gallows.
The cottage loaded up.
Sim-Aziraphale was in the garden, talking to a chicken.
Sim-Crowley was, Crowley observed, standing on the roof. For reasons known only to himself.
“Why am I on the roof?”
“I have no idea. The game does it. You climb up there and you won’t come down, you stand there for hours and you, you stargaze, even in the daytime, I think it’s a glitch,”
“It’s not a glitch, angel, it’s a personality.”
“Yes, well.”
The notification chimed. The tiny pixel game-Aziraphale, beige cardigan and all, looked up from his chicken.
Aziraphale Fell is feeling Flirty, it said. Suggested activity: Find Anthony Crowley.
The Sim-Aziraphale started toddling determinedly across the garden, looking for him.
Crowley, real Crowley, in the kitchen, turned his head and looked at real Aziraphale.
Aziraphale was watching the screen. He was very pink again. He was trying very hard not to smile, and failing.
“Aziraphale,” said Crowley.
“Mm.”
“The game thinks we’re soulmates.”
“Yes, well. It’s only a game.”
“It says we’re soulmates, Aziraphale. With a little notification. There was music.”
“Mm.”
“Strong opinion from the simulation, that. Very firm. Game’s not messing about. Game has thoughts.”
Aziraphale finally looked at him.
“My dear,” he said. “If you are about to ask me if I want to be your soulmate on the basis that a computer game has suggested it,”
“Yes.”
“Crowley.”
“Is it working?”
Aziraphale looked at him for a long moment.
Then he reached across the table, very carefully, and took Crowley’s hand. He turned it over. He laced his fingers through Crowley’s, slowly, deliberately, as if he had been waiting a long time to find out whether it would feel the way he had been imagining it would feel.
“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “Yes, I rather think it is.”
Crowley grinned at him.
On the screen, two pixel Sims were kissing in front of six chickens and a dog called Bentley, while a baby in a bassinet slept obliviously in the next room, and the music chimed.
It was, Crowley thought, a very good morning.
He was glad he’d come in for the charger.