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The road ahead seemed absolutely endless, and the deserts that stretched out on either side of the infinite highway under the immense night skies beckoned all the way to the dark horizon. They were somewhere in the American Southwest. Aziraphale wasn’t sure what state they were in anymore; the land itself felt vaguely confused by the notion of borders.
Crowley sighed. “I’d forgotten just how big America is.”
“It is… dauntingly vast,” Aziraphale agreed.
It was the first time either of them had spoken in hours, or possibly days. He wasn’t entirely clear, anymore, how long they had been traveling in search of the missing Son of God. Perhaps they’d transcended time and space, somehow. Or perhaps they’d been sent on a wild goose chase.
Possibly they were actually dead, and this was a special Hell, reserved only for them. Dante had been very keen on special Hells. So had Sartre.
Of the two, Aziraphale knew first-hand that Dante was closer to the truth. As long as he was with Crowley, Hell was something that happened to other people. Purgatory, on the other hand, was being with Crowley but feeling so unbelievably distant from him, even sitting right beside him.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said at last.
Crowley glanced at him briefly. “You’re doing everything you can. I just wish I could make this car go faster. Damn international miracle conversions! Who thought that was a good idea?”
“Side effect of the landscape, I expect. This part of the country is so vast, even miracles don’t seem to go very far.”
“Major design flaw, if you ask me.”
He fell silent again. Aziraphale gazed out the window and felt disoriented. He was in the wrong country, he was in the wrong car (Crowley had been forced to submit to the indignity of a rental vehicle) and on the wrong side of the car—everything had gone wrong. Jesus had run away, and Crowley…
“I don’t know what else to do!”
“Nothin’ else you can do at the moment, angel. And there’s no going back now, so just calm your halo an’—”
“I don’t know how to get you to stop being so angry with me.”
Crowley went so completely still and silent that he might as well have vanished completed. Then he pulled the car off the road and onto what passed for the shoulder. “I need a break,” he said. “My legs are cramping.”
“We can’t get leg cramps.”
“You try driving for three days non-stop on service station coffee and no piss breaks and no sleep and half-powered miracles keeping your corporation together, and then tell me we can’t get leg cramps.” Crowley lurched from the car and slammed the door.
Aziraphale waited a few minutes to allow Crowley to attend to the call of nature (the lack of full miracles manifested in many inconvenient ways, and he felt a pang of sympathy for angels assigned to America) and then got out. He let out an immediate and unexpected groan of relief. “Oh… oh, I didn’t realize how folded up I was.”
He looked at Crowley, who was leaning heavily against the back of the car, his arms folded across his black Henley shirt, his eyes glowing in the darkness. The sky overhead was incandescent with stars in a manner neither of them had seen in decades, but for the moment, all they saw was one another.
“I’m not angry at you, Aziraphale,” Crowley said at last, and he sounded so tired. “Dunno what I feel anymore. We were… always there for each other. Always in each other’s back pocket, y’know? And then, you weren’t. D’you know how easy it would’ve been for me to go back to Hell? Or just drink myself into a very solid coma?”
“I do know, yes,” said Aziraphale, a little shakily. “I’m… grateful, that you didn’t.”
“It was a temptation,” was the flat reply. “I know how to resist them. I just… didn’t expect you to come back. Not for me.”
The intensity of Crowley’s gaze was like a weight, solemn and burning, a brand on the angel’s aura. A single-minded focus that Aziraphale felt and trembled beneath but couldn’t return. Not measure for measure; he loved too many things, his attention was too divided. He adored food, alcohol, music, clothing, books—he worshipped books the way Crowley worshipped him.
He adored Crowley. And he could, he knew, worship Crowley as well.
If Crowley would still let him.
“I needed you,” Aziraphale said, quite softly, but his words sounded so loud in his own ears. “I told you that before you—before I left. It’s still true. That never changed, never. I’m just sorry it took me so long to come back for you. I couldn’t… I couldn’t let you be alone, at the end.”
He held Crowley’s gaze, refusing to look away even though it hurt him, pleading silently for Crowley to accept the apology, to forgive him, to say or do something.
What Crowley did was to push his hip off the boot of the car, and climb onto the roof. Aziraphale’s heart sank, and then rose again when Crowley said, “C’mon, get up here.”
The angel stepped onto the rear bumper and Crowley pulled him up, into a brief, searing kiss and a long, long, long hug. “You idiot,” he murmured, his face buried in Aziraphale’s hair. When he let go, it was to slither down onto his back on the flat roof, and tug Aziraphale down to lie next to him.
“Been a while since I’ve seen ‘em like this,” he said, gesturing up towards the stars. “Not a lot of light pollution out here.”
Aziraphale smiled through his tears, gripping Crowley’s hand tightly. It was a kind of forgiveness, and a very Crowley kind. Perhaps tomorrow, there would be more. Perhaps tomorrow, there would be other apologies, and other reconciliations.
For the moment, there was the enveloping, comfortable solitude of the desert. There were the stars, and there was an angel and a demon, holding hands, pressed close together with nothing to disturb them. There was still a tomorrow.
It was everything Crowley had to give, and for Aziraphale, it was enough.