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Crowley lounges on the chair, determined to wait patiently for Aziraphale – and really, what's his alternative, wait impatiently for him? –, even if he would like him to hurry. Well, not hurry, he doesn't want Aziraphale to come even a second before his time, he just doesn't want that time to take too long. No, still feels vaguely like wishing him ill. He's going to wait for Aziraphale for as long as he has to wait for him, and doesn't want him to hurry, but wants his own perception of that time to speed up. Alright, yes, that works. Now, he just has to remember that each time that he has to wait, it always feels a bit weird to want to have less time alone, considering what that would be indirectly wishing for.
He hates being the first to arrive, and not only because he keeps on imagining what might be happening to Aziraphale, and he doesn't get to find out the answer until Aziraphale gets there to tell him – he tried other times, but the books keep changing places, and he hasn't found the same ones again yet. He hates arriving there alone, although when he doesn't, Aziraphale is the one who has to deal with this part alone. But dealing with the other part alone is also not great, so Crowley might just have to accept that this is an unpleasant price to pay for their existence. Like having to deal with the bitter aftertaste of alcohol leaving his body so he could have the pleasure of drinking with Aziraphale, he could accept some unpleasantness to experience joy with Aziraphale.
At least time is somewhat strange inside the bookshop, usually in a positive way. He suspects that it's a case of temporal untethering from everything else, or possibly the severely decreased gravity in this entire universe. He should have paid more attention to the plans about gravity, he does remember that mass influences the passage of time, but not how, and at any rate, if that was the case then the ratio of passage of time on both sides would be stable, and it very much isn't.
One time, Crowley was spectacularly foolish, and stepped in front of a bullet. Well, he would do it again if he had the chance, because Aziraphale happened to be in front of the gun before Crowley put himself in the way a fraction of a second before it fired, but that was neither here nor there. He got there a good thirty years before Aziraphale, and had been considering a long nap when Aziraphale arrived suddenly, just as Crowley was making his second cocoa and considering his options. Another time, he got there just twenty or so minutes ahead, and still had to wait about three hours. Or so he thought, nothing to mark the time worked there, the grandfather clock remains frozen since time possibly stopped existing in this universe. The point is, the progression of time there doesn't really seem to work by any of the rules that he does know.
Crowley considers that he really should learn more about the universe in general terms – beyond just knowing about the parts that he helped make, which, granted, was plenty –, and wonders if that's what keeps making him into an astrophysicist. Since he's always starting over from scratch, it's not the most efficient way to go about things, but at least he can take advantage of human knowledge advancing, and human inventions as well. Well, it's not exactly a linear progression, he's not sure if time moves the same in all universes and it's just the bookshop that causes time weirdness, or if each is in a different point, but he never knows in what sort of time and society they're going to land. All that they know is, if they go in holding hands as the lines are written, they usually land temporally and geographically close. Close-ish. In the same decade and continent, which really isn't so bad.
He's going down a loop of what's the meaning of time when he hears a soft whoosh, and immediately jumps from the chair, rushing to find the source of it.
He smiles when he sees Aziraphale – well, sees some of Aziraphale, as he's laying face down on the floor, but those antiquated clothes falling apart would be unmistakable even if he wasn't the only person who can appear there –, although as always it's a bit of a conflicted smile under the circumstances, and something that he's still working through the meaning of. Maybe that's what also keeps making him into a philosopher, especially before there's any astrophysics to make him into an astrophysicist. It's a lot of stuff to make sense of, and that's not even considering theology, he doesn't want to go anywhere near theology.
“Angel, I'm here,” he says, kneeling on the floor in front of him, putting a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder, needing to feel that he's solid and real, as he always does.
He's still getting used to this whole process. It's quite a lot, actually, to get used to. He always did hope that things would work out, it took quite a bit to put a dent in that, and even those never lasted too long, but he still needs a bit of confirmation that everything really is alright. He can believe in a positive outcome and still watch over his shoulders because something would always come to try to screw him over, except that last part doesn't happen anymore. At least not in any way that matters. The bad stuff still happens, but it all turns out alright in the end. Aziraphale always comes back to him, and he always comes back to Aziraphale. They always find their way to each other.
Aziraphale turns his head up, relief, joy, sadness, and confusion all mixed together in his expression. “Anthony? Why do you look…? No, but you've… Is this a dream?” Aziraphale asks, which is to be expected.
It always starts with confusion. The mind adjusting to being big again, furniture being brought back out from storage and put back in all their proper places, it takes a little while. He's expecting this, he's just not very good at dealing with it.
“Yes. It'll come back to you. Yes. And I'm afraid not,” Crowley says, then he realises that this isn't all that helpful. Another reason to hate when he comes first, Aziraphale is a lot better at this part. He tries again, softer, “Yes, it's me, yes, I died, and sorry, but you did too, angel.”
Is he sorry, though? He's not entirely sure that he is. He wants them to live, of course, that's the whole point of it, to get a life and free will and new experiences. But it's not exactly sad when that ends and they get to go back there, considering that they're together, and they'll get to try the living thing all over again. It won't be the same life, it's never the same life, but they keep finding each other and loving each other. He should really thank Jim for the simile, even with all the memories gone, they still remember the shape of that love. Without being able to explain it, they can feel it there and make it anew.
“I died? So this…? Is this the afterlife?” Aziraphale asks, looking around to what must seem a somewhat unimpressive afterlife.
It's not all bad. As Aziraphale put it the first time they were there, they have each other. And he didn't know then how right he was to say that they have the books. But really, if they had to be there for all of eternity, he's afraid that it might have gotten a bit boring, even if they do have each other. They like doing things together, and they didn't have enough of a chance to do that when there was still more to do.
“Not really? I mean, technically in the sense that it is after a life, but it's more of an… an in between? It'll get easier once you remember. Do you…? Remember?”
This conversation is hard enough when they are both on the same page when it comes to memories, and he's not about to attempt to have that with an Aziraphale who still thinks that he's human. None of this came with an instruction manual, they're not even sure how this happened.
He remembers desperately wanting to hold on to Aziraphale, not to lose him, even as they were both disappearing, then next thing Crowley knew, she's the navigator of a nomadic hunter gatherer group, using the stars to plot their travels through the year, and this is the only life she knows, then one day there's a dispute with another group, and when she goes along in the talks to settle it, there's this keeper of stories that she feels like she knew all her life, and each time they see each other, she feels all this warmth and fondness, and the feeling is mutual so once she trained her replacement she moves groups so they can be together. And once that life was done, he woke up in the bookshop, the only thing still standing in what had once been their universe, and Aziraphale was also there, seeming just as confused.
All they know for sure is, this wasn't the doing of God. They felt her presence before, they always felt her presence, and there's nothing now. No God, no Satan, nothing beyond the bookshop. He likes to think that somehow they held on to it together. Didn't they learn that? If they do a miracle together, it works a little too well. And they were holding hands, wishing not to lose each other, even though they understood that they couldn't exist as they were in the type of universe that he was demanding. So maybe they were able to still hold on to a little piece of the universe for themselves, as a kind of base of operations, the last remaining page of the book of life, slightly singed, saved by whatever power he could siphon out of the Eternal Flame.
“I…” Aziraphale raises a hand to his head, and Crowley helps him sit up on the floor. “I was going… it's going to be a year, tomorrow is a year since you… I don't… what happened to your eyes?”
That's always the complicated part. This time around, when he arrived, Crowley ran the whole bookshop calling for Asa, he kept taking books off the shelves, all of them blank – and one of these days, they might find out what happens to the ones that are filled, because there always just seems to be empty ones, and their number doesn't seem to decrease, but that's a mystery for a lot more lifetimes –, had a bit of a panic attack, and then he saw one of the notes that Aziraphale left him before they went, and that helped calm him down until the memories came into place properly. He has notes for Aziraphale too, but those are for when Aziraphale is the first to arrive, and it's always best if they talk in person. The first few minutes are the worst, the latest human life is all there is for a moment, the mind expands in space first, before the memories move in, and that's disconcerting to say the least.
“I'm sorry to have left you alone for that long,” Crowley says, although he couldn't have avoided it, and it's hardly an unusual amount of time. He's still sorry, if it were up to him they would die of old age in their sleep within seconds of each other. “You'll remember the rest in a bit. The important part now is that I was the Anthony J Crowley who married you under the bandstand, who would watch the stars with you in our little cottage in the South Downs, who saw you through the window of a bookshop and had to get in and ask you for something just to have an excuse to talk to you.”
There it is, grounding their human lives, that always makes it easier. Aziraphale always starts with that, holding on to him, caressing him, speaking softly of their shared memories. Crowley should have started with that. He always gets ahead of himself, thinking of all the logistics of this, but they have to be grounded in emotions first.
“You kept sketching stars, you knew so much about them but no one would listen to a spinster, even one who was so brilliant, and they told me you never agreed to a dance, that you would say no, but you didn't, you took my hand and you told me of the universe,” Aziraphale says, with his eyes closed, frowning. “No, you were in the Senate, you kept arguing that people should have food, that they needed their basic needs met, and that the plebe… No, I had a friend, a painter, he introduced us, he said I would love your art, and I did, but I loved you more.”
Or maybe that's the worst part, all the boxes are in, but nothing is unpacked and put away, the furniture is still being pushed around to its proper place. It makes everything all jumbled up. The more times this happens, the more they seem to kinda mix together for a bit, but at least they aren't taking longer to recover. It's just that they're more confused during the recovery itself.
“You're almost there, angel. All of that was me, a few more, actually,” Crowley says, glancing back at the shelves that, when spun around, have a board behind that they're somewhat jokingly using to keep track.
Not of how many lives they've lived, once everything is settled they're usually pretty good at remembering that. They're comparing how many times they each land on some of the most popular professions. Aziraphale’s top rank is anything to do with books, followed by healer and then, sadly, a magician, not often a good one. Crowley's is anything to do with stars, followed by artist, and then, far behind, a few others that are close to a tie with each other, he's been a cobbler, a midwife, a race car driver, a naturalist, a mathematician, an alchemist, a nanny, the list goes on. The other thing that they're tracking is who made the first move, but that's at times a contested list, and this time around there might be an argument again over which of them deserves the point, since he would argue that walking into the bookshop should count. It's probably best to wait to bring up the board until all the memories are there.
Finally, Aziraphale looks at him with the proper amount of recognition, and his expression softens into fondness. It still makes him a bit weak on the knees, each time that Aziraphale looks at him like that, like Crowley is his whole world. And that's great, because Aziraphale is his. All the rest is just where they get to see what their sacrifice bought, their world would always be each other.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, putting a hand on his cheek. “There you are, I always miss your eyes so much, even though I don't know it. That has always been my favourite colour.”
Crowley still struggles not to look away embarrassed, even after having a few thousand years to get used to Aziraphale saying this sort of thing to him. He can take a compliment, somewhat, he likes them, even, but they're still a bit hard to hear. Maybe after a few more goes at it. Or at least he will enjoy trying, even if he can never get past some things.
“Glad to see you again, Aziraphale. It's boring without you here, angel,” Crowley says, allowing himself to lean into the touch instead of giving in to the instinct that still tells him to keep to himself. It keeps getting easier to fight it, easier to give in to what he wants instead.
It still feels strange to be, in a way, glad that Aziraphale died, but it's really not it. He's glad that Aziraphale had a full and happy life, that he was loved, that he got to live freely, that he could go out there and taste delicious foods and wear comfortable clothes and see a little corner of a human life with Crowley. He's glad that that happened, but he's also glad that at the end of it they get to go back to the bookshop, go back to each other, go back to themselves.
Aziraphale nearly jumps to him, hugging him tightly, and Crowley has to put a hand behind himself to keep their balance, but the other he puts around Aziraphale, holding him just as tightly. Crowley closes his eyes, just enjoying the contact. He wants to have this forever, the whole package, human lives and reunion, time after time, each part of it making the other even better.
“Oh Crowley, I tried not to be sad, I knew you wouldn't want me to be sad. I still went on the trip, you know? I would cry every time they asked me about the reservation for two, but I still went. I took your ring with me, and I kept talking to you, hoping that you would be listening. I couldn't remember that you wouldn't be, but I'll tell you all again now,” Aziraphale says, without letting go of him.
Crowley kisses him on the side of the head. “I'm glad, I always worry when I leave you alone, I don't want you to suffer when you're alone. And I do want you to tell me all about it, especially if they did the surprise I called ahead to ask the hotel to book, but we have time. Get settled first. Do you want me to make you hot cocoa? You always feel better after a hot cocoa.”
If the start of this always feels unpleasant, all the rest of it is the part that he loves. They get to just be together, trading stories, talking, discussing the newfound weirdness of their existence, drinking the wine that never seems to run out, or that hot cocoa that Aziraphale loves, which comes in a single can that has made maybe a million cups by now. Sometimes Aziraphale will even try his hand at the kitchen. The cookbooks are all blank, but he can still remember how to cook some things, and they usually come back knowing a few more recipes. Maybe one of these days Crowley will end up a chef, he would like that, not all the time but at least once, so he would have a few recipes for Aziraphale.
As far as they can tell, they can stay there as long as they like. The time weirdness seems to extend to that as well, and, in fact, they have been born in years that would seem to overlap with another of their lives, but even if they wouldn't remember to search each other, he thinks it would be useless if they did. He's not prepared to say that they've been born only once per universe, but he's almost sure that they passed through at least a dozen of them so far. It's the only way that he can explain some things, like the Bernstein Bears.
They usually stay for at least a few years, he thinks. Again, time is very hard to count there, but it feels like it's a few years. Tens of thousands of meals and conversations and dances and cuddles and hours hand holding and all that good stuff. He can never get really tired of it, but just to make sure that he never will, it's good to also have the break of living in an universe that has more than two beings. And even then, only because he knows that they'll always find each other, and they'll always end up there again.
“In a bit, my dear. I just want to hold you for a while longer, if that's ok,” Aziraphale says, pressing him tighter, and he sounds like he might be holding back his tears.
Crowley doesn't care anymore if they'll fall, he needs both his arms around his angel. They don't fall, but it's only because Aziraphale is pulling Crowley to him so firmly that he can't fall. He understands the feeling, of course, he has been there before. Even after they're reunited, even after they remember that this would always happen, and even if they were the sort of human who might believe that this could happen, that doesn't erase the loss. The grief was still there, it was still real. It only makes the reunion sweeter, and the writing themselves in another book more bittersweet. It's both, it's all of it.
“Of course it is, angel. We can stay as long as you would like,” Crowley says, burying his nose on the white curls, comforted by that smell that he knew so well even before he was allowed to hold Aziraphale close like this.
There's so much that they weren't allowed to do before, and they are now. They can have anything that they want, and the people still get a chance, they still get an universe, a few of those, actually, without all those tests and a manipulative God playing games and Heaven and Hell meddling. They get to have it all, and all it took was for them to demand knowledge against the rules of God, standing firm without fear of punishment or expectation of reward. They can have all that they ever wanted, they just had to resist the temptation of the garden, and choose to walk away.