Chapter Text
The power had been out for forty-seven minutes, and Crowley was reaching the limit of what could reasonably be called patience.
He’d tried, genuinely tried, to entertain himself in the dim grey light filtering through the rain-streaked windows. He’d done the washing up by hand, which had felt very noble for approximately three minutes before becoming tedious. He’d reorganised the spice rack alphabetically, then put it back the way Aziraphale liked it because Aziraphale had a system that made no sense but was apparently sacred. He’d even attempted to read an actual paper book, which Aziraphale would have been thrilled about if he’d been home to witness it, but the rain had started coming down hard against the windows and the flat had gone properly gloomy and his eyes had started to ache.
Now he was sprawled on the sofa, one long leg hooked over the armrest, scrolling through his phone with the brightness turned down to preserve what was left of his battery. The mobile network was being patchy. Half his messages weren’t sending. The BBC weather app had loaded once and then refused to update, which struck him as deeply unhelpful given the circumstances.
He just wanted to know when the rain was supposed to let up. That was all. A simple question. The universe seemed determined to make it complicated.
Aziraphale’s iPad was sitting on the coffee table, charged and gleaming and entirely unhelpful given that it was Aziraphale’s and Crowley had a general policy of not touching it. Not because Aziraphale had ever said anything. Aziraphale was, in fact, infuriatingly relaxed about his things. “Oh, just use it, dear, don’t be silly,” he’d say, with that little flap of his hand. But Crowley had developed certain rules about flatmate boundaries that he considered important to maintain, particularly given how things were. How things were being a state of affairs Crowley refused to examine too closely, the way one might refuse to examine a suspicious lump.
He looked at the iPad.
He looked at his own phone, which had now decided to display a small red battery icon.
“Right,” he said aloud, to no one. “Fine.”
He picked up the iPad. It unlocked with his face, because of course Aziraphale had set up his face as one of the recognised faces, “for emergencies, my dear, you never know,” and Crowley felt a brief unhelpful warmth in his chest about that, which he firmly suppressed.
He tapped on Safari. Loading. Loading. The little spinning wheel of patience.
The Wi-Fi was out, of course. Power outage. He’d forgotten that wifi required, well, power.
“Right,” he said again. He turned on the mobile network there, in case it ever decided to work again.
He swiped down to the home screen, frowning. Aziraphale had it organised by colour. By colour. Crowley had stared at this arrangement for nearly six months now and could not get over it. Who organised apps by colour. There was an entire folder labelled “Yellows,” which contained, as far as Crowley could tell, exactly three apps, one of those the Notes app and absolutely no internal logic.
The Notes app would have the weather forecast Aziraphale had clipped this morning. He always clipped things. He had a note for everything, organised in nested folders, and he’d told Crowley with some pride that he’d backed everything up to iCloud “in case of catastrophe, you understand.” Crowley had pointed out that iCloud wouldn’t help in a literal catastrophe like a meteor strike. Aziraphale had said, with great dignity, that he meant a small catastrophe.
Crowley tapped the Notes app.
It opened to the last note Aziraphale had been viewing
Shared Grocery List
Crowley relaxed slightly. This was familiar territory. They shared this note. He’d added things to it himself a few times. Onions, garlic, “the good coffee not the bad coffee Aziraphale buys when he thinks I won’t notice.”
He started scrolling, looking for the weather forecast, which was probably in a different note, but he was here now and he might as well see what they needed from Tesco when the power came back.
The list went on. Standard things. Milk. Eggs. That fancy butter Aziraphale liked. Lemons (3). Bread. Crowley scrolled. Pasta. The kind of pasta Aziraphale insisted was different from the other kind of pasta. Olive oil. More olive oil because they were always out of olive oil. A note in brackets: (Crowley uses far too much olive oil, must mention this gently).
Crowley snorted. He scrolled past.
Then he stopped scrolling because the next entry was not, in fact, a grocery item.
The next entry read:
Crowley looked unfairly pretty in that green jumper today. Should not be allowed.
Crowley’s brain made a sound like a kettle that had been left on too long.
He stared at the screen.
He stared at it.
Then, because his brain had not finished its slow-motion crash and was still operating on autopilot, his thumb scrolled down.
Need to stop staring at his hands while he cooks. He doesn’t even know he does that thing where he gestures with the knife. It’s going to get someone killed. Probably me. Death by knife-gesturing.
The kettle sound in Crowley’s head was getting louder.
Possibly in love with my flatmate. Inconvenient.
Crowley made an actual noise out loud. A small choked noise. The sort of noise a person might make if they had been politely sipping tea and then suddenly remembered they’d left the bath running upstairs.
He should stop reading. He should absolutely, definitely, immediately stop reading.
He kept scrolling.
Tried to ask him what he wanted for dinner tonight and he looked up from his phone and smiled at me and I forgot what dinner was. The concept of dinner. Gone from my head. He had to remind me. I am a grown man and I forgot what dinner was.
He’s started leaving his sunglasses on the bookshelf when he comes in. Right next to my reading glasses. It’s becoming a little tableau. Two pairs of glasses on the shelf, side by side, looking domestic. I hate it. (I do not hate it.)
The thing where he sings under his breath when he thinks I’m not listening. The thing where he sings under his breath. The. THING. Where. He. SINGS.
Crowley sat down. He had been sitting down already, but his sitting down had been a casual sort of sitting, a sprawl, an attitude. This was a different sort of sitting. This was the sitting of a man whose legs had decided, independently, that they were no longer load-bearing.
Saw him in the kitchen this morning wearing those ridiculous pyjama bottoms with the tiny snakes on them. He says they were a joke present. He wears them constantly. He has had them for at least two years. At what point does a joke present stop being a joke. I have a theory it is when you start wearing them whilst making me coffee on a Sunday morning, which he does, which is not fair.
He brought me biscuits today. Just walked into the bookshop with biscuits. Said he’d been near a bakery. The bakery is forty-five minutes from the bookshop. I am not a fool. (Yes I am. About this. I am an enormous fool.)
There was a long pause in the entries, marked by a blank line, and then:
I think I’m going to have to do something about this. I don’t know what. I have never been good at this sort of thing. The last time I tried to express romantic feelings to someone I was nineteen and I gave him a poem I had written and he laughed and then asked if I had any cigarettes, and we have to remember that I was nineteen and the poem was, in retrospect, quite bad, but the experience has perhaps shaped me somewhat. I should not be thinking about this whilst standing in the Tesco self-checkout area. Why am I writing this in the grocery list. I have several other notes. Why this one.
Oh. Because no one ever reads it but me. Of course.
Crowley closed his eyes. He opened them again, because closing them did not, regrettably, undo the last three minutes of his life.
His mouth had gone completely dry. His hands were doing something stupid with the iPad. He set it down on his lap very carefully, the way one might set down an unexploded bomb, and put his hands over his face.
Aziraphale. Aziraphale. Aziraphale, who made him tea in the morning and corrected his grammar in text messages and once, memorably, had spent forty-five minutes arguing with Crowley about whether a particular shade of blue was navy or midnight. Aziraphale, who lived in their tiny flat in Soho and made too much pasta and read books aloud sometimes, just little bits, when he found a sentence he liked, even though Crowley was usually doing something else and not really listening, except that he was listening, always, every time.
Aziraphale was in love with him.
Aziraphale had been writing this in their grocery list.
Crowley made another small noise behind his hands. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob. The two were uncomfortably close together at the moment.
He had to tell Aziraphale.
He had to tell Aziraphale that he had read this. That he had not meant to. That he had been looking for the bloody weather forecast, of all stupid things, because the power had gone out and his phone was dying, and he’d opened the wrong note and now he knew, and Aziraphale needed to know that he knew, because the alternative was for Aziraphale to continue writing tender humiliating things into the grocery list whilst Crowley sat next to him on the sofa pretending not to be quietly losing his mind.
He had to tell Aziraphale that he had been in love with him for approximately two years.
That was the other thing. That was the thing he had not been examining.
He took his hands off his face. He picked up the iPad again, because he needed to do something, anything, and there was a small voice in his head, a sensible voice, that was suggesting he simply close the app and pretend none of this had happened. He could find another way to learn about the weather. He could ask a pigeon. He could go outside and look at the sky.
He did not close the app.
He scrolled to the top of the note, because he had skipped past the actual grocery list portion in his initial scroll and he wanted to verify, somehow, that he had really seen what he had seen. That this was real. That his hands were not, for example, hallucinating from low blood sugar.
It was real. Lemons (3). Bread. (Crowley uses far too much olive oil, must mention this gently.)
Crowley exhaled, slow and shaky and then, at the bottom of the screen, a small grey shape appeared.
Of course, right at this moment the mobile network decided to work again.
A typing bubble.
Three little dots making his heart beat too fast.
Aziraphale was editing the note. Right now. From the bookshop.
Crowley stopped breathing.
The dots pulsed
Text appeared, slowly, in Aziraphale’s careful punctuation:
Need to remember to pick up more of those biscuits he likes. The Italian ones. Cannot remember what they’re called. Must look. He pretends he doesn’t care about biscuits and then eats half a tin in one sitting.
Crowley made a sound. He was making a lot of sounds today.
Also: paprika. Smoked, not sweet. He had Words about it the last time.
Crowley laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came out wet and slightly hysterical.
Hope the power’s come back on for him. He sulks when he can’t charge his phone. It is, frankly, adorable. (I would never tell him this. He would die.)
Crowley pressed his fist against his mouth.
The dots pulsed again. There was a long pause. Crowley imagined Aziraphale at the counter of the bookshop, the till in front of him, the shop iPad propped up against a stack of books, the rain coming down outside the windows of A. Z. Fell and Co. Aziraphale with his reading glasses pushed up on his head, frowning gently at the screen, thinking.
Going to talk to him tonight, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Coward.
Crowley stared at the screen, at him typing.
His hands were shaking. His hands were actually, physically shaking. He’d thought that was something that happened in books.
He thought, very carefully: Right.
Then he thought: You absolute coward, Crowley. You enormous, slithering, useless coward. You have been in love with him since the second week he moved in, and you have not done a single thing about it, and now he is writing love notes about you into the bloody grocery list and you are sitting here making sounds.
Do something about it.
He looked at the cursor at the bottom of the note and took a breath.
He started typing.
Need: biscuits (the Italian ones, Amaretti), smoked paprika, the proper olive oil not the supermarket nonsense.
He thought for a moment. He typed: Also, Aziraphale: I’m reading this.
The little three dots disappeared.
There was a long, terrible silence inside the flat, which was strange because Crowley was alone in it, and silences are usually only terrible when there’s someone else there to share them with. The rain was still hammering at the windows. Somewhere, a long way off, a car alarm was going.
The typing bubble did not return.
Crowley waited. He waited for what felt like an entire geological age. The dots did not come back. The cursor at the bottom of the note blinked at him, gently, patiently, like a small accusatory eye.
He thought, oh God, I’ve broken him.
He thought, I’ve broken him, and he is going to come home, and he is going to be unable to look at me, and we are going to live in this small flat together as ghosts of ourselves, and it will be entirely my fault for picking up his bloody iPad to look at the bloody weather.
He thought, I have to fix this. He has to know.
He started typing again. His hands had stopped shaking. They had passed through shaking and out the other side into a strange, calm, deliberate place.
I was looking for the weather forecast. The power’s out. My phone is dying. I opened the wrong note. I am very sorry. I would say I stopped reading but I didn’t, I read all of it, and I am still sorry but mostly I am writing this because if I do not write it now I will lose my nerve and then I will spend the rest of my life being a coward about it.
He took another breath.
Aziraphale. The green jumper is your green jumper. The one you gave me last Christmas because you said it would suit me. You were right. It does suit me. I wear it constantly. I wear it when I know you’re going to be home. I have, on at least three separate occasions, deliberately changed into it before you came back from the shop. I have been doing this for over a year.
I am also, he typed, slowly, possibly in love with my flatmate. It is, as you say, inconvenient. I had not planned on bringing it up. I had a complex internal system for not bringing it up, which involved a great deal of denial and several smaller subsystems of denial, all of which have been undone in the last seven minutes by your shopping list.
He typed: Please come home.
Then, because he was a man with no dignity left: The power is still out. I can’t make tea. I cannot face this conversation without tea. Please bring tea on your way home. There’s a Pret near the bookshop. Please.
He stopped. He looked at what he had written. It was the longest thing he had ever written in a grocery list. It was also, possibly, the most honest thing he had ever written in his life.
The typing bubble did not appear.
Crowley set down the iPad. He stood up. He sat down again. He stood up again. He walked into the kitchen. He walked back out of the kitchen. He went and looked out of the window at the rain.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out so fast he nearly dropped it.
The texts was from Aziraphale.
On my way.
I have tea.
The green jumper. You absolute menace. I gave you that jumper on purpose. I knew it would suit you. I have been congratulating myself about it for fourteen months.
Crowley laughed. He laughed properly, this time, with his whole chest, in the empty flat with the rain coming down outside and the iPad sitting on the sofa with all of his secrets exposed on it.
His phone buzzed again.
I love you too, by the way. In case it wasn’t clear. I should like to say it properly, when I’m home, but I thought you ought to know now, given the circumstances.
Crowley sat down on the floor. Just sat right down, in the middle of the rug, his long legs folded up underneath him.
Twenty minutes, the next message said. The traffic is dreadful. Don’t move.
Crowley typed back:
Wasn’t planning to.
He looked at the iPad on the sofa. He looked at his phone in his hand. He looked at the rain on the windows, which was beginning, possibly, to ease up.
Twenty minutes.
He thought, with great clarity, that he was going to spend the next twenty minutes sitting on this rug, in this flat, in this slowly easing rain, being extremely, ridiculously, foolishly in love.
He thought he might pick up the iPad one more time, just to read it all again, just to confirm.
He thought, no. Wait. He thought, let him tell you in person.
He set the phone down on the rug next to him and waited.
The power came back on at minute eleven, the lights flickering up all at once, the fridge humming back into life, the heating ticking. The kettle, which had been left ready, began its slow climb back to readiness. Crowley got up off the floor. He made two mugs out anyway, for when Aziraphale arrived with the Pret tea, because Aziraphale would want a proper mug and not a paper cup. He found the biscuits, the Italian ones, in the cupboard, where they had been all along. He put them on a plate.
At minute nineteen he heard the key in the lock and he turned around.
Aziraphale was standing in the doorway, hair flattened by rain, coat damp, two cardboard cups of tea held carefully in one hand, his bag slung crookedly across his shoulder. His glasses were misted. His cheeks were pink. He looked at Crowley across the small kitchen with an expression Crowley had been pretending, for two years, that he had not been hoping to see directed at him.
“Well,” said Aziraphale.
“Well,” said Crowley.
Aziraphale set the cups of tea down on the counter, very carefully.
“The green jumper,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Crowley.
“I gave it to you on purpose.”
“I gathered.”
“You wear it on purpose.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” said Aziraphale, faintly. “Oh, dear.”
He crossed the kitchen in three steps and kissed Crowley, who had been standing very still next to the kettle, and who continued to stand very still for approximately half a second before his hands remembered themselves and came up, one to Aziraphale’s damp coat and one to Aziraphale’s cold cheek, and the world went, for a long moment, entirely quiet.
When Aziraphale pulled back he was smiling. Not his small careful bookshop smile. The other smile. The one Crowley had seen exactly four times in two years and catalogued each time.
“I cannot believe,” said Aziraphale, his hand still on Crowley’s jaw, “that we did this through the grocery list.”
“Romantic, really,” said Crowley.
“Catastrophically unromantic.”
“Bit of both.”
“You’ll have to give me the iPad back,” said Aziraphale. “I’ve several other notes to revise.”
“Oh God,” said Crowley. “Are there others?”
“Mm,” said Aziraphale serenely. “Several. A whole folder, actually. I’d organised it. By colour.”
“Of course you had. You’re impossible.”
“It’s in the Greys, dear.”
Crowley laughed, helpless, his forehead pressed against Aziraphale’s. Outside, the rain had stopped. The kettle clicked off. The biscuits were on the plate. Somewhere on the sofa, the iPad sat innocently on its cushion, its damning, beautiful, accidental work entirely done.