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“I’ll give you privacy,” She had said. The garden was beautiful. Crowley was beautiful, standing looking up into the inexplicable sunny afternoon through the branches of the apple tree in the center of the bookshop they had both made a home in, in a way. It was the first moment of quiet and peace Aziraphale had found in a very, very long time. But there was a decision to make.
“So,” Aziraphale started, tense. “What do you want?”
“Me? Why me?”
The former demon had the frantic look of a fox backed into a corner; they had been moments from annihilation. Total nonexistence. For the first time, Aziraphale had truly understood the meaning of the fear of god that humans spoke of. He had been wrong about so many things. He hoped he wasn’t wrong about this.
“Because I only want one thing.” The words felt wrong in his mouth, but he knew they were the truth. He didn’t care about any of the rest of it, just Crowley. “And that’s not what this is about anymore.”
Crowley didn’t look up at him.
“What do you want, Crowley?”
Me. Please want me.
It was a fool’s prayer, but he prayed it anyway.
Please.
“You know what I want.”
Aziraphale could feel the pit forming in his very-human stomach, colder than the abyss of empty space. After all, there was one thing Crowley really wanted, badly enough to challenge god Herself. And it wasn’t him.
“I want a real universe.”
There it was. It was what he had always loved about Crowley, but it still stung. In a real universe, the two of them would never have existed. Would never have met. Never fallen in love or fed the ducks at St James Park or owned a bookshop or a vintage Bentley or gotten drunk or been godfathers to a perfectly normal human child they thought was evil incarnate. In a real universe, the humans he loved so dearly would get to have billions of their own love stories and happy endings and cottages and gardens, but there was no space for two supernatural beings there.
“I want free will to be a real thing.” Each word was a punch to the gut. “People deserve a chance to live in the real world.”
His beautiful yellow eyes were wide and vulnerable and pained.
“Even if there are no angels.”
“No demons.”
“No us.”
Aziraphale struggled to find words, but none came.
“Ever again.”
The grief was unbearable. He turned away, struggling to breathe and fighting back the hot, crushing weight of tears forming just beneath the surface. It was the right choice. Crowley had always been the better of the two of them, but he didn’t care anymore. Just once, couldn’t he be a little more selfish? Couldn’t he want something for himself? For them? Couldn’t he fight, just one more time, for a world with an us?
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asked, sounding so small and sad it broke Aziraphale’s heart open even further.
“Of course you didn’t, you, you-” the tears were spilling over now, faster than he could find the words, faster than he could think.
“Oh, angel.”
The next moment Crowley was holding him, arms wrapped around his shoulders with one hand clutching the back of his neck like a life preserver.
“I want you, Crowley. I don’t-” he took a deep, shaking breath. “I don’t care about the free will and th-th-the real world and all that r-rubbish. Isn’t this real? Aren’t I real?”
He could feel his legs weakening as he spoke, and wordlessly the two sank to the floor of the garden-bookshop, Crowley pulling him closer and bonking their heads together gently as they knelt in the sun-warmed soil.
“You are real,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, I just- I can’t keep living like this. You heard what she said. She only let you love me because it amused her. She found it funny.” His voice was thick with tears and venom in equal measure. “How could we ever know we were real. That being an us was real. If she could get bored and just take you away from me at any moment. I was made to be unloveable. She made me unloveable.”
“Crowley-”
“Angel, if you try to convince me to want that, I will resent you for the rest of our existence. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to feel that way about you.”
Aziraphale took a long, shuddering breath before trying to force the words out.
“Can I just have you for now then?”
“Yeah, we can do that.”
He couldn’t help it anymore. He sobbed loudly, almost violently, shaking and leaning his full weight into Crowley’s arms. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fucking fair. Six thousand years he had been a silly amusement to a god that had taken all his devotion and given him nothing in return. Of course Crowley wouldn’t want to keep living like that, and Aziraphale knew he couldn’t ask him to, but selfishly he wanted to. He would play Her stupid games and win Her stupid prizes and love Crowley every moment of it. It didn’t matter what the former demon said, he knew the love was real because he could feel it, it had been there every day of his time on Earth growing slowly and surely at the heart of who he was. Crowley loved the universe and Crowley loved Aziraphale and Aziraphale loved Crowley. That was the realest thing that had ever happened to him. It may have been the only real thing.
“Do it again,” he whispered, barely making a sound.
“What?”
“Do it again, you silly creature. Kiss me. Or I’ll- I’ll-”
He didn’t have to come up with a threat because Crowley kissed him then, tears and all.
It was tentative and soft and halting as both of them breathed shakily; there was no heat in it, no urgency.
Aziraphale thought back to the last time Crowley had kissed him. It had felt terrifyingly similar. An impossible choice. Trying so hard to do the right thing. He wondered what might have happened if they had taken off for Alpha Centauri after all. They would have winked out of existence when the world went up in a puff of smoke, certainly, but they could have had some happy years. They could have been an us at least for a little while. It’s not like they had made much of a difference after all, and they would have had time.
He sobbed into the kiss with a horrible gasp, but Crowley didn’t pull away, just paused to give him room to breathe. His face was wet and cold and starting to dry sticky in places, and his eyes burned and his whole body ached with the weight of it.
“I’m scared, Crowley.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“The humans always found so much comfort in the idea of there being something else but there’s just… nothing.”
“I had always hoped it was nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was never meant to be anything good for me, angel. Hereditary enemies, remember? Least she could give us was a little peace when it was all over.”
There wasn’t any good response to that. It made sense. It hurt that it made sense.
“Was it really all bad?”
“No it… it wasn’t all bad. Some parts were nice.” He looked at Aziraphale with those big, sad, earnest eyes. “It never stopped hurting though.”
“I’m so sorry, my dear. I never realized.”
“How could you have?” Crowley laughed bitterly. “You weren’t made to.”
Aziraphale pulled him closer till they were just curled up on the warm grass together. They had given up on kissing by, it seemed, mutual accord.
“Do you think they’ll do a better job of it than us?” Aziraphale asked. “The humans, I mean. With their own world to build.”
“I hope so.” He sighed. “It’s not like we set a high standard.”
“That we didn’t. After all, the humans did most of the real work in this universe too.”
“True. I always liked the resilient little buggers.”
Enough to let go of an us for them.
“You certainly did.”