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This watch gave the time in twenty world capitals and in a capital city in Another Place, where it was always one time, and that was Too Late.
-Good Omens (1990), on Crowley's watch.
“Then I believe we’ve come to a decision.”
Crowley nods. His eyes, those golden irises Aziraphale hasn’t seen in three long years, brim with tears, but he’s smiling, his brave rebel. Even as a shudder goes through him, as the beginnings of a sob are swallowed down and his stubbled jaw trembles. The unshaven face suits him. Aziraphale never got to tell him.
There are many things he will never get to tell him, now.
And, suddenly, his chest seizes, even as he smiles back. Of course this is what it’s all led to. Of course this is what Crowley, radiant creature that he is, will choose. It could never have been any other way.
Aziraphale smiles, because it covers up for the way his heart is selfishly splintering inside his chest.
“Should we go tell Her?” he asks, and his voice is warm and calm with millennia of practice.
Crowley’s breath hitches loudly.
“You think we could stay here awhile?”
Aziraphale is not in a position to deny him anything. He doesn’t think he’d deny him even if Crowley asked him to punt God and Satan out of the shop and live the rest of eternity here, in the middle of a dull nowhere, surrounded by dull, blank books, holding the memories of what the Universe used to be like in their heads until they both go raving mad.
Gluttonous, the Almighty called him. Aziraphale supposes She’s right. He’s never felt more greedy than right at this moment.
“I’m sure She won’t mind if we delay a few minutes,” he says—clutching at this handhold that his friend’s offer provides.
A shadow flickers across Crowley’s face.
“There’s no Time anymore, angel,” he says, and turns away, towards the tree. “She can wait.”
The tree. Aziraphale’s not certain what God intended by it. Alpha and Omega, perhaps. The Beginning and the End made one. It starts, as it ends, in a garden. But all he can think of, all he can hear, as he watches the ripe apples dangle over Crowley’s head, is a sardonic, well-known voice:
Not very subtle of the Almighty, though. Big fruit tree in the middle of a garden with a ‘Don’t touch’ sign.
Aziraphale’s palms itch as Crowley circles the trunk. He wants to laugh. He wants to cry like a human child.
One last temptation, eh, Lord?
He swallows the bitterness back down. There’s no time. No Time.
“Do we have…? Ah. Here.” He pulls two chairs from somewhere. He is not sure where, or whether they ever belonged to him in the first place, though they go with the bookshop’s decor. High-backed, wooden frames with red velvet cushions. He sets them down facing the tree, putting its hefty trunk between them and God. Like Adam and Eve, playing hide and seek before they were evicted from Eden. “Please take a seat, my dear.”
Crowley folds into the chair in the same manner he’s always sat down in Aziraphale’s presence. Irreverent, languid in his serpentine grace. A myriad of images pass Aziraphale by. A drink in a surgeon’s home, a nightcap in this same shop, a quiet talk in a demon’s modern living room. He’s going to have to get used to this–he’s heard that, for humans, their lives flash before their eyes in the few moments before they’re gone: it stands to reason that for an angel with six thousand years of memories the process would start early.
Crowley’s already looking at him when he sits by his side. Aziraphale doesn’t need to ask to know he’s going through a similar process.
They stare at each other for an unquantifiable moment. Crowley’s eyes are the loveliest shade of yellow…
He breaks the silence first, and the angel’s whole body turns into a tuning fork, vibrating to attention with every word.
“Six thousand years… Feels like they were just starting to figure out agriculture last month.”
“Where has the time gone?” Aziraphale muses. He’s still valiantly trying to smile, but he’s not sure how well he’s managing. It feels slippery.
“Clever people, weren’t they?”
“I’ve always thought so, myself.”
“Yeah. Even when they were murdering each other to bits. You’ve got to hand it to them, they had imagination.”
“They deserve another chance. You’re right on that.”
“Am I? Because it feels like I’m damning you.”
It’s blunt. Aziraphale doesn’t expect it, and so it takes him a few moments to answer. Moments in which Crowley’s eyes start to glisten with tears anew.
That is what finally spurs him into motion.
“What? No! Whyever would you say such a—?”
“It’s me choosing it, isn’t it? It’s me who’s asking you to… It feels like I’m…”
“Shh. No! My dear boy, you’re being silly. I agreed to it, didn’t I? It’s the right thing to do.”
Crowley stares. His mouth flattens into a line.
“You hate it.”
“No, no.”
“You do.”
“I most certainly do not.”
“You—“
“I just wish I had told you. Before everything… ended.”
That shuts Crowley up. For a moment, anyway. When he speaks again, his voice’s gone soft. Mellow, even.
They’ve done such a good job of not speaking about it, that it feels like stepping off a cliff when Crowley says, ever-so-patiently, “I know, angel.”
Aziraphale’s smile cracks, at last. His lips wobble. “But I never said it.”
“No, but I know you did. Isn’t that enough?”
“Did?” Aziraphale chuckles wetly. “Do. I do, Crowley. Even if I’m too late...”
Crowley takes his hand and squeezes. Aziraphale squeezes back. “We’re both too late. It’s always Too Late.” He lets go of the angel’s hand—Aziraphale feels a pang of misery—to show him the face of that hideous diver’s watch he wears around his wrist. “That’s the point. It’s how She designed it.”
Aziraphale stares at the two words that the hand labelled ‘Hell’ is pointing to. He looks up.
“What do you mean?”
“She was never going to let us. Was She?” Crowley sneers. “Nah,” he answers himself. “It wasn’t as fun that way. You heard Her. It always made Her smile,” he hisses. “It was just a…” His hand waves in the air as he searches for words. Aziraphale catches it softly in his own. “...a nice story.”
“Nothing wrong with stories,” the angel says.
“Except that they end how and when the author wants.” Crowley scoffs, then mumbles, “Austen would have been kinder. I still don’t get it! Make a game of the universe and then rig it so you always win. Bloody brilliant, that!”
Aziraphale doesn’t like the bitterness in Crowley’s voice. Not because it isn’t warranted, but because it’s an old tale. The same water under the same rickety bridge, taking a bend and circling back to run its course again, and again, and again. Crowley’s leg, bouncing impatiently, is the same leg Aziraphale had tended to, so long ago, after a fiery-eyed rebel held him at swordpoint. ‘I have a lot of questions. And nobody ever has the answers.’ It held true, even now. It had been eating at him for six thousand years, an injury Aziraphale couldn’t ever put a bandage on.
But he can be there while it hurts. Isn’t that what they’ve both been doing, through centuries of meet-ups, when it comes right down to it?
“Yes, but the thing about a rigged game,” he starts, and Crowley settles down, his head turning to him, “is that, even though you’re going to lose, you can still have fun at the table. If the company’s right.”
Crowley stares at him. Aziraphale can almost see something uncoiling behind those slit pupils.
“I don’t know what I would have done without you there,” Crowley says. A hint of his old snark shines through when he adds, “I mean, you’ve seen what I’d be like.”
“Astonishingly drunk?” Aziraphale proposes. It makes Crowley laugh. Jackpot. His own smile feels a little less brittle in turn, a little more like old times.
Crowley is staring at him with unabashed fondness, now. For the first time, Aziraphale lets himself stare back without an excuse. He’s a little disappointed when his friend breaks eye contact to lean forward on the chair, arm reaching outward for…
He sits back down, looking pleased with himself. The tree’s branch shakes leaves onto the floor and a bright red apple shines in Crowley’s hand.
“What do you say, angel?” the serpent of Eden asks, arching an eyebrow. “One last meal?”
Aziraphale doesn’t hesitate. He takes the apple in his hand the moment Crowley tilts it towards him and bites into the crisp skin. It’s sweet and flavourful, and he has a moment to wonder at its existence before he offers it back to Crowley. He swallows with the slightest difficulty around the lump in his throat. “Your turn, dear.”
Crowley takes it. He bites.
(It doesn’t escape the angel’s notice that he sinks his teeth exactly where he did.)
Juice drips down Crowley’s chin. He wipes it away with his sleeve. “Quite good for a fruit that doesn’t exist anymore.”
They pass the apple around for a while. Aziraphale has to admit that the familiar act of eating, of eating with Crowley, does ease the tangled net of nerves in his chest. It happens to humans, he knows. He’s read about it. They call it an evolutionary remnant. Like Crowley said, they are nothing if not imaginative.
Aziraphale’s face softens as he swallows the next bite.
“Do you think they’ll be okay?”
“I don’t know.” Crowley examines the apple, and gives the last bite to Aziraphale. “That’s rather the point, isn’t it? No one knows.”
“Tip the table over.”
Crowley’s grin is sharp. “Blow up the casino.”
Aziraphale guffaws. “When you put it like that…”
“Not that bad, is it?”
There’s a hesitant quality to Crowley’s voice when he says that. Aziraphale thinks of all the things he’s wanted, all the plans he’s made while in Heaven, waiting for the day the Second Coming would be over and done with and he could go back to Crowley. They’d settle down. Maybe here in London, maybe somewhere else. Somewhere Crowley could tend a garden and see the stars properly without light pollution. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Aziraphale would say. You’re lovely. You’re my best friend in the whole world, do you know that? Here’s some cocoa. You look very handsome with that stubble. I think I’d like to share my life with you. I really do.
But how long could they have been happy, really? How long until the next disaster, the next call-in from their respective offices, the next attempt at a stupid war? Only God knows. Only Her, and no one else.
“Not bad,” Aziraphale agrees. He rubs Crowley’s hand with his thumb, his eyes fixed on his expectant face. If I loved you less, he thinks, with a sharp pang between his ribs, I might be able to talk about it more.
He regrets the years of unsaid things, the missed opportunities. He regrets how things ended between them before he left for Heaven and the three years of painful silence. He regrets, with a devastating surge of guilt, how strongly he stood up for the plan, for ineffability, when it was all a hoax. But he does not regret playing this game with Crowley.
“I’m beside you,” Aziraphale affirms. The smile doesn’t hurt as much this time. “We’re a team.”
Crowley’s face does something complicated. There’s fondness there; exasperation, too. An old tale. “A group of the two of us.”
The angel puts the apple core down on the floor. He stands up, dusting his clothes though they are pristine. As if it were a cue, Crowley stands, too. His fingers trace the chair’s armrest reverently.
Aziraphale looks around the transformed shop. He looks at his home.
His home looks back with soulful yellow eyes.
“Shall we?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Aziraphale says. Part of him still wants to take his wings out and hide them both beneath them, but the system cannot stand as it is. It cannot be fixed, it cannot be jumpstarted again the way it was. It needs to be dismantled, the author stripped of their pen. And who better than the most annoying, rebellious angels in Creation to do it?
He leans to the side, an imperceptible change in angle. Crowley catches on. He mirrors him. They knock shoulders. There’s an arm around the waist, a squeeze, a huff.
And, in the face of impending oblivion, both smile.
It’s not that bad. When you get used to it.
¿Por qué seguimos jugando a los dados (why do we keep rolling the dice)
sabiendo que esto está cargado a tu lado? (knowing the odds are stacked in your favour?)
¿Por qué seguimos jugando a las cartas (why do we keep playing cards)
sabiendo que tienes un as bajo la manga? (knowing you've got an ace up your sleeve?)
-Mi Nuevo Vicio (Morat)