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The door flew open.
Anthony jolted. His chair spun towards the door, wobbled, and tipped precariously; he caught it just before it went over. His glasses slid off his nose and clattered onto the floor.
“Jesus fuck, don’t you ever…”
“We’ve got an email!” Ana announced, marching in. “I haven’t opened it yet, wanted to do it with you.”
“…knock,” he finished, heart suddenly in his throat.
He willed it back down. Sort of. Picked up the glasses and pushed them back where they belonged. Slowly turned back to his desk and stared at the monitor.
Python was running. Line after line of output flickered across the screen, all white on black. No red.
No excuses.
“Open it,” Ana’s whisper brushed his ear. She’d slipped behind him without a sound, the witch. “Go ahead. Might be different this time.”
“Why would it be?” he muttered.
He grabbed the mouse with a trembling hand. The cursor slid across his desktop and stopped half a centimetre from the envelope icon.
“I have a good feeling,” Ana murmured. “Something good’s gonna happen today, I’m telling you.”
The cursor lingered just short of the envelope. Blinking. Anthony’s fingers tightened around the mouse. The heart in his throat pounded.
Ana’s hands came to his shoulders, steadying him.
“Has anyone ever told you that science and woo-woo aren’t exactly compatible?” he croaked.
“Yes,” she breathed into his ear, “The last reviewer who rejected our paper.”
His head snapped round. He shot her a glare. She laughed.
“Stop it. Just open the email.”
He turned back to the icon. It waited. He swallowed and clicked. They both leaned in, their eyes skipping straight past the greeting.
It was all in the second sentence.
“Shit,” Ana hissed.
Anthony slumped back in his chair, heart in his stomach for a change. Behind him, Ana straightened sharply and swore under her breath. Her heels clicked across the room, first one way, then the other.
Anthony skimmed the email before swivelling towards her, his face set in a silent told you so. She stopped in the middle of the office and shrugged.
“So. That wasn’t the good thing. Good news is it’s still coming.”
“Terrific.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Where do we resubmit this next?”
He ripped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They stung. Too much screen time, too little payoff.
“Do we?” he muttered.
“What?”
“Resubmit it?”
Ana raised her eyebrows, her arms folded across her chest.
“Obviously.”
“It’s the sixth rejection, Ana.”
“Oh, come on. It’s just one reviewer who doesn’t want this paper published.”
“You don’t know that.”
She shook her head in exasperation.
“But it’s clear! It’s always the same. The gravity equations don’t add up. The derivation doesn’t work. The math is not mathing.” She resumed pacing the room, stabbing the air with a hand. “It’s the same guy. Has to be. We just need to find a journal that won’t invite him.”
“That’s not the problem.”
She stopped dead.
“What is the problem then, Dr Crowley?”
“The problem is that he’s right. The maths. Not mathing. We made it work, but something is missing.”
She scoffed.
“May I remind you how many somethings are missing from quantum theory as a whole?”
“I know, but that's not…” He rubbed his face with both hands. “It’s different. It’s all too convoluted. It should be simpler. I feel like… I should know.” He hesitated. “Like I should… remember.”
“You should… remember.”
“Yeah.”
He looked up. Ana was staring at him now, her gaze drilling into him.
“How the fuck would you remember how gravity relates to dark matter?” she shot back. “Were you at the planning meeting when God came up with gravity? Or were you the one pitching ideas?”
Anthony raked his fingers through his hair.
“I… Nghhh. I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you. You were not. You were born in Glasgow some thirty-odd years ago, and you most definitely did not attend any meetings with God about the creation of the universe.”
A sharp pain lanced through his head and settled behind his eyes.
“I… don’t know,” he repeated. “I know we’re missing something. I feel like I should know what, but I…” He broke off. Winced. “I just don’t.”
Ana paused. Studied him with narrow eyes for a moment. Then she stepped closer, one hand settling on his shoulder while the other gently tipped his chin up.
“Hey,” she said, her voice softening. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he grumbled. “It’s just… my head.”
“The migraine again? Want me to get you some Tylenol?”
He squinted at her. His eyes refused to focus.
“There’s no Tylenol in the UK, Ana,” he mumbled.
“Right. Aspirin. Whatever.”
“No, I think I… I just need to get out of here.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“I’ll go to the library… read more Eddington.”
She whistled through her teeth.
“Again?”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you been reading this Eddington book now? Like, two months?”
“No idea. But…”
“But?”
“I can’t explain it, but… the answer is in the library. I know it.”
She sighed.
“Seriously, Tony, you should take your mind off this. Go out. Have some fun. Meet someone…”
He pulled a face. She ignored it.
“…or you could download Grindr,” she continued. “I know what it’s known for, but…”
“Not interested,” he muttered.
She crouched in front of him, both hands braced on his knees.
“Tony, babe,” she cooed, as though speaking to a child. “You’re obsessed with this research. Spending every free moment in the library isn’t helping. Especially with the migraine. That’s pretty obvious.”
“Shut up.”
“You don’t even need the library. Ever heard of the internet?”
He growled.
“The library is where I need to be, alright?”
One corner of her mouth twitched.
“And who’s gone all woo-woo now?”
Whatever Anthony was looking for in the library, it wasn’t in the reading nook behind the physics section.
He picked up the Eddington from the small desk he’d been using, tucked it under his arm, and headed for the main reading room. He claimed the first empty table, set the book down, then sank into an armchair – more comfortable, at least – and eyed it warily.
It was hiding something. He’d already read the whole thing twice and was yet to find it.
He sighed and leaned forward. Time to switch tack. Randomise it. Nothing was truly random anyway.
He let a finger drift along the edge of the closed book. Stopped. Slipped a fingernail between the pages. Pushed upward.
A random page. Pure chance. Right.
He reached to mark his place, then paused. Just long enough. The pages fluttered back, and the book fell open at the very end. Arthur Eddington’s face stared back at him from the dust cover.
Randomise it.
“Hello,” Anthony muttered under his breath. “What did you know that I don’t?”
He fished his phone out of his pocket. Opened the browser. Typed Eddington and scrolled through the results. Not Wikipedia. Not Britannica. Not Cambridge, Oxford, EBSCO, BBC… None of them would tell him anything he didn’t already know.
Randomise it.
He closed his eyes, tapped, then peered at the screen.
The Images tab was open.
The same greyscale portrait of Eddington gazed at him, stoic as ever. In the next image, a much younger Eddington was smiling. Or trying to. In the next, an even younger Eddington, this time in colour, was… crying?
No. Not Eddington. An actor playing Eddington.
Anthony tapped the image. A video began to play, the sound muted. Beneath a tree, Eddington was shaking with sobs.
“I can’t tell anyone,” the subtitles read.
A young woman stepped into view.
“You can tell me.”
He hesitated. Then his face crumpled.
“I loved him so much,” he said at last, burying his tear-stained face in her shoulder.
The dormant pain behind Anthony’s eyes flared so sharply that it forced him to squint.
A sudden gasp came from his left. A clack of wood against wood. A thud of books hitting the floor.
Anthony’s head whipped round.
Two tables away, a chair lay on its side, still rocking. Books were scattered around it. A man in a beige cable-knit jumper stood frozen by a table, his hands braced on the surface, his back to Anthony. His shoulders rose and fell much too fast.
Anthony jerked in his seat. An urge to get up and rush over tugged at him. No point. One of the library staff was already hurrying over. A girl with short, dark hair, whose face he recognised from the counter.
“Terribly sorry,” the man blurted. His voice shattered the silence of the reading room and ricocheted around Anthony's skull.
Something about it…
The girl pressed a finger to her lips.
“Terribly sorry,” the man repeated in a whisper. “I really mustn’t… I really… I should go.”
He straightened and hurried towards the exit.
Anthony’s body moved before his mind could catch up. He surged to his feet, one hand outstretched, his mouth opening to call after the man.
He bit the words back just in time.
The girl, watching the man disappear through the door, now turned to Anthony, puzzled.
Normal. Act normal.
His arm dropped to his side. He stepped around his table and lifted the chair from the floor. He set it upright, then stooped to gather the scattered books. As he straightened, he caught the girl’s eye. She gave him a grateful smile and bent to collect the rest.
Anthony set the books on the table.
One book was still there. It lay open to a page with a black-and-white photograph. An old one, around the same era as the Eddington in the film. Maybe a decade later. In the photograph, two men were…
Kissing?
A burst of pain, violent and blinding, almost knocked Anthony off his feet. He planted his hands on the table, just as the man in the beige cable-knit jumper had done minutes earlier. The room blurred. Only the photograph stayed razor-sharp.
Two men. One of them blond. His eyes were closed, his smile contented, careless. A slightly upturned nose. Hair a touch too mussed for the era. The other man, in a fedora, was leaning in, his lips resting happily on his companion’s.
And he was…
Pain sliced through Anthony’s skull like a blade. He staggered.
“You alright?” came a whisper.
He looked up, straight into the girl’s eyes, wide and startled. Her gaze swept over his face, then drifted towards the open book on the table.
No. That wasn’t for her to see.
Anthony snapped it shut.
“I’m fine,” he stammered. “Just… just a headache.”
She smiled uncertainly.
“Could I… perhaps…” He cleared his throat. “Could I borrow it?”
He held the book out to the girl. She turned it over, glanced at the sticker on the back cover, and frowned.
“It’s the only copy. I’m afraid only faculty members can borrow…”
“I’m faculty.”
Anthony took the book back before she could answer.
“Oh,” she blinked at him. “That’s alright, then. But, erm… he might come back for it?”
He might indeed.
“That’s okay. I can wait. I still…” Anthony glanced at the Eddington, abandoned on the nearby table alongside his phone. “I still have some work to do.”
She nodded. Anthony clutched the book to his chest and made his way back. He laid it beside the Eddington.
Only then did he read the title. Queer love in 20th-century Britain.
He pressed his thumb to the phone's fingerprint reader. The screen lit up. Young Eddington – or whoever played him in the film – resumed weeping over the one he'd loved and lost.
Queer love indeed.
The video ended, then began again. “I loved him so much,” Eddington said.
Anthony reached for Queer love and opened it at random. The same black-and-white photograph. Nothing was random in the universe.
His gaze drifted from the screen to the photograph, then back again.
Eddington.
The man in the fedora.
His own face, a century too early.
Time slipped by. Fifteen minutes. Thirty. Forty-five.
The man didn’t come back.
At last, Anthony gathered both books and headed for the library counter.
It wasn’t there.
No matter how long Asa stared at the bookshelf, the book refused to materialise in the spot where he’d found it a week earlier. It had taken him that long to shake off the eerie feeling, to regain his senses, to summon the nerve to come back.
And the book wasn’t there.
“I’m sorry, dearie,” the woman at the counter said. Not the one from last week. This one was middle-aged, with fiery hair, even fiercer make-up, and enough bracelets to defy the Silence sign. “Someone’s borrowed it.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me who?” Asa asked, barely above a whisper.
“Can’t do that, love,” said the woman.
“I see.” Asa lowered his eyes. A tiny tremor ran through his eyelashes, and his lips curled into a disappointed pout. He might have despised himself for it a little, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Which worked every time.
The woman’s expression softened.
“Is it very important?” she asked.
Asa looked up and sighed.
She hesitated.
“I think I left the kettle on in the staff room,” she said slowly. “I’ll only be a moment.”
She gave him the faintest wink.
As she turned away, her hand lingered on the monitor, nudging it ever so slightly. When she disappeared through the door, her bracelets clinking behind her, the screen was angled just enough towards him. He hardly had to crane his neck.
Anthony J. Crowley. Department of Physics.
Physics?...
Asa bit his lower lip. History would have made sense. Literature. Anthropology. Sociology…
But physics?
He turned from the counter and crossed to the public computers at the far end of the hall. One was free. He sat down, nudged the mouse to wake the screen, typed the name into the search bar, clicked the first result…
And froze.
The man smiling back at him from the Department of Physics website was missing only the fedora.
The headache was back. As though it wasn’t bad enough that Anthony had to teach the undergraduate lecture on basic wave equations on a Friday afternoon. Now he had to teach it with his head threatening to split in two.
It was in the big auditorium, an old-fashioned descending amphitheatre with a podium, a pulpit and an honest-to-God blackboard. The last of its kind in the department, if not the whole university. Anthony’s fingers grew steadily whiter as he scribbled equation after equation. By now there had to be chalk dust on his shirt. His face. Probably his hair.
A handful of undergrads huddled in the back rows, as high up the auditorium as they could go. Avoiding chalk dust getting on their clothes or physics getting into their brains. Little more than a blur against the far wall.
Anthony didn’t mind. Not today.
Today he was doing his very best to keep his back to them. Eye contact felt impossible with this dull blade sawing through his cortex.
“Are there any questions?” he asked, turning at last to face the group.
He froze in place.
The chalk slipped from his hand.
Someone might have raised a hand; he couldn’t tell. His vision had narrowed to a single figure at the end of the top row, sitting apart from the others. Pain ground behind his eyes, blurring the face. Through the blur, two shapes emerged.
A beige cable-knit jumper.
A shock of light blonde hair.
Something clicked into place. The pain lifted. The image sharpened.
“If there are no questions, we’ll stop here,” he said automatically, his eyes fixed on that face.
That face.
An image rose in his mind, black-and-white at first, then gaining colour and life. Lips curling into a contented, careless smile. Eyes closing in bliss.
A century ago.
The lips now parted. The eyes blinked, then flashed with panic. The man grabbed a messenger bag, slid out of his seat and covered the distance to the exit in two swift strides. His hand was pushing the door open.
He was slipping away.
Anthony hopped off the podium and rushed after him. Before he could reach the top of the auditorium, the man had gone.
“He won’t go far,” came a voice. Anthony turned towards it and was met with an all-too-knowing smirk. Adam. Who else.
“He turned right,” Adam said.
Anthony stared.
Adam shrugged.
“Dead end. You can corner him there.”
There was nowhere to go.
Asa had taken the wrong turn and was facing a wall. Quite literally.
He leaned a forearm against the cool concrete and rested his forehead against it. Oh well. He would only need to wait until everyone had left the auditorium before passing it again. It could take a while. The lecturer could be detained by a curious student with too many questions or a colleague giving a lecture after him. Caution was warranted.
But Asa could wait.
Or…
Ludicrous idea. Stand in front of the man and say what? “Excuse me, Dr Crowley, I believe you may have kissed me sometime around 1932?”
Someone cleared their throat behind him.
Asa stiffened.
“Um, hello,” came a voice. Eerily familiar, as if things could get any stranger. “I… I think I saw you at the library last week.”
Asa swallowed.
“Certainly not impossible,” he said.
“You came to my lecture,” the voice behind him continued. “That’s not a coincidence, is it?”
“No.”
A pause. A throat was cleared again.
“Look, I… I saw the photo, and I…”
Asa sucked in a breath, pushed himself off the wall, and turned to face him.
“You haven’t seen much, I’m afraid.”
Gorgeous brown eyes blinked slowly, then swept over Asa’s face. Not surprise. Slow recognition.
“What I’m seeing is odd enough,” Anthony mumbled.
Asa let out a chuckle.
“Oh, thank you.”
Anthony frowned, then his eyebrows rose in realisation.
“That’s not what I…”
“I believe I know what you meant.” It was Asa’s turn to clear his throat. “Look, I apologise for inviting myself to your lecture. Your teaching schedule is public, and I’m afraid curiosity got the better of me. It won’t happen again. Now, if you allow me…”
“Of course,” Anthony turned his head away and stepped aside to give him an exit.
Asa didn’t move. Something stronger than common sense rooted him to the spot.
Three seconds of silence stretched like an eternity. Cold. Empty. Lonely.
Not that.
He might have whimpered. Anthony’s curious gaze turned back towards him.
“Or, if you’re amenable…” Asa began.
“There’s a cafeteria downstairs,” Anthony cut in. “Fancy a cuppa?”
Tension melted from Asa’s muscles. He smiled.
“After you.”
“So, you’re in art history, and you’re looking for images of gay men …” Anthony prompted.
“Yes,” Asa swirled a little spoon in his teacup. The tea looked muddy. Hopefully drinkable with enough milk. “For a grant proposal on depictions of gay love throughout history. I’ve been working on it for a few months, and…”
“And that’s how you stumbled upon this… thing.”
Asa sighed and took a sip of the milky concoction. His nose wrinkled for a split second, but he said nothing. He set the cup on the table and leaned back in his chair.
“I stumbled upon several things, in fact. Perhaps it’s best if I show you.”
Anthony’s eyebrows shot upwards as Asa reached for the messenger bag hanging from the back of his chair and took out a black folder.
“I started with the antiquity, you see,” he said, opening the folder to an image. “The first thing I found was… this.”
He slid the folder across the table. Anthony looked down at the image. It was a reproduction of an ancient portrait. Two faces, one ginger, one blond, stared back at him with wide, melancholy eyes. Stylized. Almost unrecognisable.
Almost.
The air grew thinner. Anthony’s lungs refused to fill.
“What… what is this?” he stammered.
“An Egyptian funerary portrait,” Asa said matter-of-factly. “They were quite the hype after Egypt became part of the Roman Empire. Double portraits weren’t very common, but not unheard of.”
“So, these two were… buried together?”
“It would appear so. This one’s in the British Museum. It’s catalogued as a portrait of two brothers.”
“Of course it is.”
“Most of them are,” Asa shrugged. “When I first saw it, I didn’t think much of it. Just… that’s odd, the blond one looks a bit like me. But then…”
“But then?”
“Go on. Turn the page.”
Anthony did. It was a medieval illustration. A blonde and a ginger, clearly monks. The blond cradled the ginger's face between his hands. No likeness to speak of. Yet Anthony felt dizzy again.
“This one’s from an 11th-century Cistercian codex from North Yorkshire,” Asa murmured.
“Who were they?”
“Lovers, probably.”
“Wouldn’t they have been burned at the stake or something, back then?”
“Not necessarily. Medieval English monasteries had the concept of spiritual friendship. If you ask me, it wasn’t so different from a same-sex union. But there is more. Go on.”
Anthony turned to the next page. A blond and a ginger, in profile, looking at one another.
“Bordeaux, 15th century,” said Asa.
Anthony flipped through the folder, no longer waiting to be prompted. No longer breathing.
A Flemish oil. An Elizabethan miniature. An etching. A pastel. A watercolour. Sometimes painstakingly lifelike, sometimes almost caricatures. Sometimes shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes a step apart. Sometimes lovers. Sometimes only companions.
But it was them.
The two men leaning over a black folder in the university cafeteria.
He reached the last picture. A 19th-century daguerreotype. Blurred. They’d clearly moved, burst out laughing. Their faces were hardly recognisable.
And yet.
“You don’t have the other photo here, do you?” Anthony muttered. “The one from the library?”
“No. Someone borrowed the book before I could make a copy.”
“Oh yes, about that. It’s in my office.”
Asa nodded. Of course he knew.
Anthony closed the folder, squeezed his eyes shut and raked his hands through his hair. Something was stirring in his head. Shifting. Growing. Neurons firing out of order, rearranging into brand-new configurations. Supernovas exploding. Galaxies forming and collapsing in a heartbeat. Entire universes popping into existence, branching out, again and again. Reality bending. Folding back on itself. Becoming something new and ancient at once, something...
...right.
His eyes snapped open and met grey-blue ones. Watching him closely.
“Hello,” Asa said tentatively. The corners of his eyes crinkled like they always did when he smiled. Every time.
In every century.
Crowley smiled back.
“Hello, angel.”
The angel’s eyes widened. So did the smile.
“What do you remember?”
“Well. I don’t remember having a picture taken in the 1930s, but...”
Crowley’s hand came to rest on the table between them, palm up. A beat, then the angel’s hand settled on top of it, soft, warm, and so…
So long awaited.
So very right.
“Sorry if this is too forward,” he murmured. “But I believe we should continue this conversation somewhere more private. Would you mind terribly taking it to mine?”
The phone buzzed on the bedside table. Crowley reached behind and swatted it blindly, like a nagging fly.
It went silent.
Crowley sighed and brought his arm back where it belonged, around the waist of an angel sleeping peacefully with his back flush against Crowley's chest. The miracle of a body rising and falling beneath his hand. Warm. Alive. He buried his nose in the angel's neck and inhaled his scent. New yet familiar. Constant. Since the dawn of time.
He’d never known such quiet happiness. Except…
Except he had.
The phone began to buzz again. Crowley groaned, untangled himself from the angel, and rolled towards the bedside table. He picked up the phone and squinted at the screen.
This one wouldn’t give in.
Fine.
He got out of bed, plucked his boxers from the floor, and pulled them on with one hand. He tapped Accept on his way out of the bedroom.
“Hey,” he whispered into the phone.
“Tony, thank fuck,” Ana’s voice sounded exasperated and relieved at once. “You didn’t show up at the pub, didn’t read my texts, I thought you were dead!”
“Sorry,” Crowley mumbled, pulling the door shut behind him. He caught it at the last moment and peeked back into the bedroom.
“Was it the migraine?” Ana asked on the other end of the line.
“What?”
“The migraine.”
“No,” Crowley smiled as the angel’s nose wrinkled. The cutest thing. “That’s gone.”
“The migraine’s gone? Just like that?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh… Good. Great. So, what stopped you yesterday?”
“Nothing. Was busy.” The angel gave a little yawn, and Crowley was undone. “But I know what’s missing from our gravity equations.”
“Really? You spent Friday night working?”
“Nah. Just a bit of… inspiration, you could say.”
A heavy sigh came from the other end.
“Okay. What’s missing, then?”
“A constant,” Crowley said. As if on cue, the angel's eyes fluttered open. A sliver of blue against the white sheets. They found Crowley's. Crowley blew him a kiss, then closed the door.
“What constant?” Ana asked.
“A constant. You know. Something that’s always been there.”
“Thanks, I know what a constant is.”
“It’s always been there, Ana. I just didn’t realise until... well, until yesterday.”
A pause.
“You sure you’re alright, Tony?”
“Never better.” Crowley stepped into the kitchen, tucked the phone between his ear and his shoulder, and took two mugs from the cupboard. He eyed the kettle. Enough water for two cups of tea. He turned it on.
“You know what, I’ll just come over. Be at yours in fifteen?”
Crowley flopped into a kitchen chair, switched the phone to loudspeaker and placed it on the table.
“I’m not home.”
“What? Where are you, then?”
“I met someone.”
“Oh. A one-night stand? You?”
“No.”
“No?” Ana sounded amused.
Footsteps echoed from the hallway. The angel entered the kitchen, looking extra angelic in his off-white dressing gown. Only his hair was tousled in a decidedly non-angelic manner, and Crowley’s heart swelled with tenderness. His own hands had done it.
“It’s serious,” he said.
“Oh, really? When did you meet him?”
“Yesterday.”
“You’re kidding me!"
The kettle clicked off. The angel dropped two teabags into the mugs, poured the water, set one in front of Crowley and sat opposite with the other, one eyebrow raised. Distracting.
"What time will you get home?” Ana asked.
“Not anytime soon,” Crowley mumbled towards the phone.
“Anthony J. Crowley,” the voice on the loudspeaker growled. “You’re not U-hauling with a man you’ve only just met, are you?”
“I might be. Ana, meet my angel.”
“Hello, Ana. I’m Asa,” the angel in question said.
Silence.
“Um... Hello, Asa. And who are you?”
He glanced sideways at Crowley, clearly entertained.
“An angel, Anthony seems to think.”
A strangled noise came from the loudspeaker.
“I’m a lecturer in art history,” he added quickly. “I’ve got a human job that comes with a human salary, and I assure you my intentions are pure.”
“Okay… You sound like you’re asking for Tony’s hand in marriage.”
“Oh.” The angel’s face lit up. “Should we get married, Anthony? I don’t believe we’ve ever had the opportunity before.”
Crowley arched a brow.
“We might have.”
“In another universe?”
“Maybe even this one. You’ve only searched for images of gay couples, but who knows? I might have been born a woman at some point.”
“Or I,” the angel said.
The loudspeaker emitted a wheeze.
“You alright there, Ana?” Crowley asked.
“I… guess,” Ana’s voice, a touch shaky, replied. “But I’d better just… leave you to it. Tony, let’s touch base on Monday. About the, um… paper.”
“The paper, yeah,” Crowley scratched his cheek. “Actually, I think I’d like to write a book.”
“A book?”
“Yes. We can resubmit the paper if you want. I’ll correct the maths. But I’d like to write something longer, something like, you know… Astrophysics for humans.”
“Humans,” Ana repeated weakly.
“Or Astrophysics for everyone, or something. The title doesn’t matter. It’s just that… Humans deserve an explanation of how the universe really works, don’t you think? They’ve been trying to work that out for centuries and they’re nowhere near it, so…”
A whimper.
“Right. I… really need to go now.”
“Lovely to meet you,” the angel called out, but the line had already gone dead. He shrugged, amused, set the mug on the table and stood. Crowley grasped him by the wrist, pulled him into his lap and looked up at him.
“Do you reckon we should turn it down for them?”
The angel bit his lower lip, his hand coming to rest against Crowley’s cheek. An absent-minded caress. As natural as breathing.
“Possibly.”
“We’re out of practice,” Crowley murmured.
“Well, it’s been a few decades.”
Crowley covered his hand with his own, then pressed it to his lips.
“How much do you remember?”
“Only a fraction of it, I think.” The angel paused, pensive. “It’s a bit like… being in the house you grew up in, years later. The furniture’s not there, but you know where it used to be, you know what it looked like, and now you’re looking…”
“…at where the furniture isn’t. I know.”
The angel sighed and rested his forehead against Crowley’s. His eyes fluttered shut. Crowley wrapped his arms around him, drawing him closer.
Birdsong poured into the kitchen through a half-open window.
“Do you hear that?” Crowley murmured.
The angel nodded, his nose nudging Crowley’s cheek.
“A nightingale?” he asked quietly.
“It’s almost noon.”
The angel let out a chuckle.
“They’ve always sung for us at the most improbable moments, haven’t they?”
Crowley hummed.
Indeed. They always had.
Time after time.