Pray for Us, Icarus

by

Atalan

A fanfic based on Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

2019

Read more by Atalan on Archive of Our Own

This is a work of fanfiction. The author makes no claim on the characters, setting, or concepts from Good Omens, which have been used without permission.

Table of Contents

Title Page

AO3 Rating and Tags

1. Flowers for Anthony

2. Who Pluck'd Thee From Thy Stalk

3. Like a Sunless Garden

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

4. Herein a Blossom Lies

5. That Dares Not Grasp the Thorn

6. O Rose Thou Art Sick

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

7. And Boughs Where Apples Made

Author's Notes

Soundtrack: falling, falling, flying

Other Works Inspired by This Series

License Notes

About the Author

Also by Atalan

AO3 Rating and Tags

Pray for Us, Icarus (Series)

Fandom:

Good Omens

Rating:

T (Teen and Up)

Warnings:

Major Character Death

Wordcount:

65,836

Relationships:

Aziraphale/Crowley

Characters:

Aziraphale, Crowley

Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Memory Loss, Reincarnation, Temporary Character Death, Angst, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Happy Ending, Crowley is Human (?), Crowley Runs A Flower Shop, Language of Flowers, Aziraphale and Crowley Love Each Other Very Much, buckle in for the PAIN folks, if I have to suffer so does everybody else

1

Flowers for Anthony

London, 2008

Crowley didn’t look up immediately when he heard the shop door open; he was just in the middle of finishing off a complicated bouquet, and the blasted ribbon was being difficult about things.

“Just a sec,” he said, scowling as the end slipped away from him again.

There was a pause. And then a voice, softly, “There you are.”

Crowley looked up in surprise, letting the ribbon escape for the time being. There was something familiar about the voice, for all its odd non-sequitur. There was something familiar about its owner, too, about the white-blond curls and the too-blue eyes and the old-fashioned waistcoat and the ridiculous (but… somehow appropriate?) tartan bow tie. Something familiar about the emotion brimming over in his face, the faint tremble of his lower lip, the way he clasped his hands tightly in front of him as if to keep himself steady.

But Crowley had never seen him before in his life. Had he?

“Can… can I help you?” he managed finally.

The stranger tore his eyes away from Crowley, looking around the shop.

“Flowers again,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “I always find you among flowers…”

Then he seemed to shake off his strange mood, and he smiled when he looked back at Crowley. It was almost genuine, except for the depth of something in his eyes.

“I don’t know if you can help me, my dear, I’m looking for something quite specific.”

Crowley tried not to raise an eyebrow at my dear: the stranger couldn’t be more than ten years older than him. He had no call to be talking like Crowley’s grandmother. Still, it suited him, just like the stupid bow tie.

“Go on, try me. I might surprise you.”

The smile turned unexpectedly fond. The stranger looked him over, seeming to take in every detail: the unfashionable but necessary apron Crowley wore to protect his favourite black jeans and shirt, the way he’d bundled his hair back into a messy bun when it fell into his face one too many times, the snake tattoo he hated having to explain to people when they asked, the single hoop earring next to it.

“I expect you will.” The stranger - customer, Crowley supposed - wandered further into the shop, examining some of the roses on display. “Do you know much of the language of flowers?”

Crowley rolled his eyes while the customer wasn’t looking.

“Don’t really go in for that sort of thing,” he said. “I’d rather think about the overall look of the arrangement, the balance of colours and shapes, the scent of it. Rather than making it some sort of code to unravel.”

“Can’t you do both?” the customer asked, turning to raise an eyebrow in what was clearly a challenge.

Crowley had the sudden, inexplicable urge to tell the man to get out of his shop. It was something about that challenge, the familiarity of it, the way it felt like being teased by a very old friend. It was too raw, too unexpected, and it gave him the even more inexplicable urge to cry.

“I suppose I could try,” Crowley said, frowning to cover up anything else his face might decide to do. “What did you have in mind?”

The stranger looked away again, looked down as if examining the row of plump succulents beside him, but Crowley had the oddest feeling he wasn’t seeing them.

“Remembrance,” said the stranger quietly. “Patience. Protection. And…” He took a breath. “And lost love.”

His voice shook just a fraction on the last, his hands curling tight into each other. Crowley swallowed, something beating hard and fast behind his breastbone. Was it his heart, or was it something trapped there, something desperate to get free? He turned away and quickly pulled out his standard catalogue, even though he knew most of its contents by heart.

“I dunno that much about the traditional meanings,” he said, eyes on the page, not on the man who’d turned to regard him again. “Although… what’s that line from Hamlet? Rosemary, that’s—”

“—for remembrance,” finished the stranger with a strange little hitch in his voice that almost sounded like he was about to cry.

“Not the sort of thing I keep in stock here,” Crowley said gruffly, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the stranger sag slightly. “But I—” He hesitated, still pretending to study the catalogue. “I’ve got a bush out back. It’s in flower at the moment. I could maybe use a bit from that, if you like?”

“Only— only if it’s no trouble.”

“It’s fine, needs a prune anyway before it takes over the garden.”

“You have a garden, too?” the stranger asked, with an odd sort of delight. Lots of people had gardens, didn’t they? “What do you grow?”

“Nothing I sell in here,” Crowley said, all too familiar with this line of thought. Customers really liked the idea that he grew his own flowers, despite the impossibilities of doing so in a small London back garden. “Herbs for cooking, some ornamentals, fruit trees…”

“Fruit trees?”

“Just put in a couple of apple trees, but I’m not sure—”

He stopped, because the stranger was laughing, quietly like they’d just shared a private joke.

“Of course,” he said, and Crowley felt that prickle down his spine again, that urgency in his chest.

“Do I— do I know you?” he blurted out. “You seem—”

The stranger’s face changed at once, closing off, the laughter vanishing.

“No,” he said, “not at all. What about pink carnations?”

Crowley had to blink a few times to get his train of thought back onto flowers.

“Yeah, I usually have some of those. Do they mean something in particular?”

“They mean I’ll never forget you,” the stranger replied quietly. “At least, they did, the last time I… the last time I looked into it.”

“I’ll look it up,” Crowley promised. He pulled out a notepad and scribbled down what he had so far, a handful of symbolism and a couple of flowers. His hand shook when he got to lost love. He concentrated on practical details instead. “Anything else you particularly want? Or are you happy to let me use my own judgement?”

“Always,” the stranger murmured. Then, hastily, “I mean, please, you’re the expert. I’m sure it will be lovely.”

“When’s it for?” Crowley asked around the lump in his throat. “Do you have a deadline?”

“No, no deadline. Whenever you can manage.”

“And is it a gift? Will you want it boxed or delivered—?”

“No, I’ll come and collect them.”

“Okay, and your budget?”

“Effectively unlimited.”

Crowley had to look up then to give him an incredulous once-over. He did not look like the type to be throwing money around. The stranger smiled like he knew exactly what Crowley was thinking.

“Well, within reason,” he amended. “If you try to charge me a thousand pounds for a single-stem rose I might balk.”

“That’d be some rose,” Crowley muttered. “Oh, wait, do you want roses?”

The stranger’s face did something complicated and painful. He looked away.

“Best not.”

“Right. Okay. Well, then I just… I’ll need to take some contact details so I can let you know when it’s ready—”

“Of course.” The stranger started fumbling at his pockets. “I have a business card here somewhere—”

Crowley gave a snort of amusement before he could stop himself.

“Just name and number’s fine.”

“Oh. I—” For some reason that seemed to throw him off, make him nervous. “Of course. Well. My telephone number—”

He gave a London area number, rather than a mobile. Crowley wrote it down and looked at him expectantly. When the stranger remained silent, he prompted, “Name?”

The pause was so long that Crowley started to wonder what the hell was going on. It was a simple enough question—

“It’s, ah…” The stranger seemed to lose some inner struggle. “Aziraphale.”

Both of Crowley’s eyebrows went up to his hairline.

“Beg your pardon?”

The stranger with the strange name sighed.

“Yes, well. Do you need me to spell it for you?”

Oddly enough, Crowley didn’t think he did. When he went to make his best attempt on the piece of paper, his pen flowed through the letters as easily and automatically as if he were writing his own name. He stared at the result for a moment, then pushed it across the counter. Aziraphale looked at it, and nodded, a small smile creeping onto his face.

“Right first time,” he said softly.

“Okay, well then, that’s— that’s everything,” Crowley said. “It shouldn’t take more than a week. I’ll call you if there are any problems. And when it’s done, obviously.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale replied, with a gratitude that seemed excessive for a simple flower order. “I’ll see you in a week, then, my dear.”

Crowley watched him turn to leave, and was seized by the almost uncontrollable urge to rush after him, seize him by the sleeve, and tell him not to go. Aziraphale glanced back just once as he reached the door, smiling when their eyes met. Then he was gone.

Crowley stood for a long time staring at the door before he fumbled under the counter for his laptop, opened up a search engine, and started looking up the meanings of flowers.

It took less than a week, mostly because Crowley found himself obsessed with it, with fulfilling that deep and yearning need that had been in Aziraphale’s every word and glance. He gave serious consideration to a trip out of the city to see if he could find some forget-me-nots, but decided in the end that they didn’t fit the theme of the rest of the bouquet. Pink carnations, rosemary - he’d never used rosemary in a bouquet before but the smell would be heavenly - white heather for protection (he had to call in a favour to get hold of it), a lovely pale allium for patience. He couldn’t find anything specifically described as meaning lost love, but daisies were apparently for loyalty and faithful love, and from everything Aziraphale had said…

He thought about Aziraphale almost as much as about the flowers. Wondered about him. About the sadness that clung to him and the way he’d nonetheless smiled at Crowley as if he couldn’t help himself. His laughter, and the soft, worn-in way he looked, comfortable, familiar, dear…

He almost wished there were problems assembling the bouquet, just so he’d have an excuse to pick up the phone, but it all went without a hitch, and the finished result had a frowsy, homely sweetness to it that was quite different from Crowley’s normal bold and flashy style. Perfect for Aziraphale, though. He could picture it in those carefully manicured hands, imagine it on a shelf in some cluttered study or cozy sitting room.

He waited until there were no customers in the shop before he dialled the number Aziraphale had given him. He told himself it was just polite to minimise the background noise, and it definitely had nothing to do with the way his heart sped up as he tapped in the appropriate digits.

It took some time for Aziraphale to answer, and when he did, he had the slightly breathless sound of someone who has just rushed up or down a flight of stairs to get to the phone.

“Hi there, it’s, uh, Crowley—” Wait, had he given Aziraphale his name? He couldn’t remember. “I mean, I’m calling from—”

“Yes, of course, Crowley, from the flower shop,” Aziraphale replied, and Crowley felt a rush of warmth that was dizzying. People often pronounced his name wrong, or said it awkwardly, like they hoped he’d just let them call him Anthony if they made it clear how weird they found it to call him by his surname. Aziraphale spoke his name like he’d said it a thousand times, and like the weight of it was joyful in his mouth. “How’s the bouquet coming along?”

“It’s, it’s finished,” Crowley replied. “When would you like to pick it up?”

“Oh! Well, I… I suppose I could come over right away, if that isn’t inconvenient for you?”

“No, that’s— that would be fine, that’s perfect,” Crowley said. “I’ll be here.”

“Then I’ll come at once.”

“Okay,” Crowley said, and heard the phone click off at the other end.

He put his mobile down on the counter, noticing with surprise that his hand was shaking very slightly. It was the eagerness in Aziraphale’s voice, the way he’d said I’ll come at once. Like he’d drop everything without a second thought to come when Crowley called.

Crowley shook his head. He didn’t know what had got into him this last week. Aziraphale no doubt had some free time this afternoon and would find it easiest to collect his flowers immediately. Nothing more to it than that.

When Aziraphale arrived, barely half an hour later - he must live or work not far away - Crowley was watering the potted plants he kept on the display outside the shop. Just because it was a good time of day for it, and not because he was hoping to catch sight of Aziraphale coming down the street, maybe even see him before he saw Crowley.

He was denied the pleasure: Aziraphale appeared almost out of nowhere, stepping out from behind a small gaggle of other pedestrians just as they passed the shop. Crowley almost dropped his watering can, and ended up clutching it to his chest in surprise.

“Sorry, did I startle you?”

“No, it’s nothing, uh— come in, then.”

It felt strangely intimate, as if he were inviting Aziraphale into his flat, not the shop, which was after all open to anyone who wanted to step inside. Crowley put the watering can down and went to fetch the bouquet from the back room. He didn’t realise Aziraphale had followed him until he turned to bring it into the shop.

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s eyes were fixed on the flowers in Crowley’s hands, his face gone still as if there were too many feelings beneath his skin to express any of them at all. “It’s… Crowley, that’s beautiful.”

Crowley could feel the blush rising to his face, the unexpected weight of the praise slamming into him, the way Aziraphale looked at the bouquet - and then, for just a moment, the way Aziraphale looked at him as he glanced up, then glanced away.

“It’s perfect,” he said, before Crowley could find his voice. “Absolutely perfect.”

“Oh,” said Crowley, hearing his own voice come out quiet and fragile. “I’m… I’m glad you like it.”

There was a moment that stretched on too long, a moment where they both seemed to be trying to look at each other and not look at each other at the same time, and Aziraphale’s eyes kept going back to the bouquet, and Crowley thought, with a lurch of his heart, that he could see the sheen of tears in them.

“Well,” Aziraphale said at last. “I suppose I’d better…”

He got out of Crowley’s way, but he didn’t fully step aside, so that Crowley brushed past him as he went back into the shop. Just close enough that he caught the faint scent of Aziraphale, even over the heady perfumes of the back room: a smell like old books and tea and the tiniest hint of lavender. The shop blurred around him; he blinked fiercely to clear his eyes, at a loss as to why they suddenly wanted to overflow.

“Would you like a vase for them?” he asked as he reached the counter. “Or shall I just wrap them up?”

“Just wrap them, please.” Aziraphale drifted around to opposite side. “I already have a vase ready at home.”

Another jolt in Crowley’s chest, the quiet tenderness in Aziraphale’s voice reaching straight into his heart and pulling. He busied himself with doing his best wrapping job, trying not to feel Aziraphale’s eyes on him, and then all at once, he found himself asking, “Who are they for?”

Aziraphale caught his breath.

“Just… just for me,” he replied after a moment.

Crowley looked up at him with a frown. “Really?”

Aziraphale studied his face, as if mapping every line and angle, before he looked away again.

“There was someone I loved,” he said. “The flowers are… in a way, they’re for him. But it would be terribly unfair to give them to him now, you see. It was a long time ago. He’s not the same person he used to be. He… wouldn’t even recognise me these days.”

“Oh,” Crowley said, awash with the hurt in Aziraphale’s voice, the longing, the grief.

“I try not to dwell on it,” Aziraphale went on, with an attempt at briskness that fell rather flat given how tightly he was clasping his hands together. “Get on with things, you know. Plenty to do, after all. But sometimes I… get sentimental. And sometimes I…”

His voice wavered and his eyes flicked to Crowley for the merest second before he looked away as if ashamed.

“Sometimes I just miss him so terribly much.”

Crowley had never been good with his own emotions, let alone other people’s. He wanted to say… something, anything, anything that might soften the sharpness of Aziraphale’s sorrow. All he could come up with, out of some deep and yawning pit in his stomach, was, “Would he want this? Wouldn’t he want you to move on?”

Aziraphale huffed an almost-laugh, turning as if to inspect the greetings cards on the rack by the till.

“I appreciate the thought,” he said, “but it is a little more complicated than that.”

“Is it? ‘Cos I… I mean, I’m just saying, if it were me, I wouldn’t want you to spend the rest of your life—”

He stopped, because Aziraphale’s eyes had flown to him, and this time there was no mistaking the tears.

“I know,” Aziraphale said, very soft, and very sad. “I know you wouldn’t, my dear. But it’s my choice.”

He reached into a pocket and took out an old, battered wallet that looked exactly the way Crowley would expect it to look.

“How much do I owe you?” Aziraphale asked lightly, opening the wallet and fiddling with its contents, keeping his eyes down.

Crowley swallowed the lump in his throat and quoted a price that was considerably under what he ought to be charging. Aziraphale immediately glared at him, a mixture of affection and exasperation that felt so familiar it ached.

“I know enough about the cost of flowers to know that can’t possibly be right. Try again.”

Crowley reluctantly gave a rather higher number - though one that was still rather underpricing his own labour. Aziraphale gave him a look as if he knew full well what Crowley was doing, but apparently he decided to let it slide. He paid with cash, and when Crowley reached out to take the notes from him, their fingers brushed for a fleeting second, and it was all he could do not to reach out and clasp Aziraphale’s hand.

He had to recount the change three times before he got it right. When he went to drop the coins into Aziraphale’s waiting palm, he tried to let his fingertips touch skin again, but Aziraphale twitched away from the contact, catching the coins and hurriedly moving to put them away in his wallet.

“Right,” Crowley said. He was suddenly, terribly aware that there was nothing left to keep Aziraphale here, nothing to bring him back again. “So.”

“Yes.” Aziraphale reached for the bouquet, took it tenderly in both hands as though holding a child. “Really, I can’t… I can’t thank you enough. It’s everything I wanted.”

There was a lie in there, Crowley could hear it, though not about the flowers. Whatever Aziraphale wanted, it could never be his just through the purchase of an oddly specific bouquet.

“Well,” Aziraphale said after a moment, looking into the flowers, raising one hand to gently bruise a sprig of rosemary so the scent drifted over them both. “I’ll just be… well. Thank you, Crowley.”

“Come back anytime,” Crowley blurted out, desperate and aching and feeling like he was teetering on the edge of a very tall cliff. “I mean, I— I do discounts, for regulars, you know, and we have special offers—”

Aziraphale’s eyes flew to his, held his gaze for what felt like several thousand seconds. He took a deep breath, then turned away and started for the door.

“No, I— thank you, but I shan’t darken your door again,” he said, with what was perhaps supposed to be humour, but came out more like guilt. “This was all I came for.”

“You can,” Crowley stumbled on, hands clenched on the counter. “Darken my door, I mean, I— even if you don’t want to buy anything—”

Aziraphale stopped with his hand on the door. His back was still to Crowley, but Crowley could see his reflection in the glass. He was biting his lip, eyes downcast, a torment in his face like someone resisting the ultimate temptation.

“Best not,” he said, without turning around. “It never ends well.”

“Wh— what do you mean?”

“I’ve tried before, you see,” Aziraphale went on, so low Crowley could barely hear the words. “The first few times… but in the end, all I do is bring you pain, one way or another.”

“I—”

“Good bye, my dear. Live well.”

The door closed behind him. Crowley stood frozen, until a splash of something landed on his hand, still curled into the counter as if he were trying to carve it out with his fingertips. He touched his own cheeks, felt the wetness of tears there, streaming like they’d never stop.

“I don’t understand,” he said, aloud to the empty shop. His heart felt broken inside him. “I don’t… I don’t understand.”

2

Who Pluck’d Thee From Thy Stalk

Crowley had never believed in… well, in much of anything, to be honest. Certainly not in anything so woolly as destiny. Or any other force, cosmic or divine or otherwise, that could bring people together because their lives were meant to intersect.

And yet here he was, walking past the same bookshop for the third time this week, keeping to the other side of the road, glancing at it out of the corner of his eye as if he were a nervous teenager eyeing up the blacked-out windows of an adult store.

Today, he dared to drift to a stop, fumbling with his phone as if checking a message, looking at the place from under his lashes like he was afraid of facing it head-on.

He wondered what would happen if Aziraphale saw him out here, glanced out of one of those slightly-too-dusty windows at just this moment. Crowley remembered the look on his face, reflected in the glass, and his heart twisted. Suddenly ashamed, he stuffed his phone back in his pocket and hurried on, head down.

He was back two days later. Nothing had changed, except that today it was raining, and Crowley’s hair was straggling into his eyes, and the cuffs of his jeans were suffering that slow wicking effect that would soon have him wet up to the knees.

The shop looked better in the rain, somehow. Not that it had looked bad before. But now there was a soft, warm glow in the windows, something homely that beckoned without words. It looked cozy. Inviting. Exactly the sort of place he’d have expected to find Aziraphale.

Crowley wondered if the bouquet he’d made was in there somewhere, and his stomach flipped like he was falling, and he made himself turn around and leave, and told himself he wouldn’t come back.

He dreamed about Aziraphale again. Nothing coherent; nothing he could describe when he woke. No story, no scene, no words: just the knowledge, as he woke with his eyes wet with tears and his breath rushing out of him like he’d been about to cry out, that Aziraphale had been there, and it had been right, and that waking to find it was just a dream hurt more than anything he’d felt in his life.

He made himself coffee, showered, got dressed. Looked at himself in the mirror for a long time. His sharp edges, his too-long hair, his eyes that were such a strange shade of yellow-brown that in the right light they were almost amber. When he’d been younger he’d imagined someone might find them beautiful one day, but if anyone ever had, Crowley had made sure they never got close enough to tell him.

He didn’t know why he’d spent his life alone. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. More like his standards were so impossibly high, or his tastes so impossibly specific, that friendship was awkward and unsatisfying and fled as soon as the circumstances of convenience had passed.

He’d thought he understood loneliness, he’d thought it made him hard and smooth and satisfied with his life, and then the strange man with the strange name and the melancholy (beautiful) blue eyes had thanked him and walked away, and now Crowley found himself as broken open and messy and beyond repair as an egg thrust out of the nest before its time.

He scrawled a note on a piece of paper - closed until lunch - and taped it to the shop door. Then he caught a bus to Soho.

A little bell jingled when he opened the door, because of course it did. He was glad it wasn’t raining today; he hated the thought of bringing his damp, bedraggled self into this place with its drifts of paper and stacks of books and its dry, warm air and its faded woven rugs. As it was, he was careful to wipe his shoes clean of whatever London had left on them before he ventured further in.

There were no other customers in the shop, and Crowley’s heart leapt to his throat, expecting Aziraphale to appear in response to the bell, but he saw and heard no sound of movement. He could call out, he supposed, but his voice had tangled up into a knot and he couldn’t get even a word past his dry lips.

He drifted past the shelves and stands, eyes trailing over the books on display. Old books, strange books, books with leather covers and books clad in faded brown paper. Books on high shelves with impossible price tags, books behind glass with no price tags at all, sheet music and playbills and bundled manuscripts that looked like they belonged in a museum or a private collection rather than a place where they could theoretically be sold.

There was a gramophone, not a modern turntable with affectations, but an old, worn original that was so surprising and so utterly unsurprising that a strange, soft bark of laughter escaped Crowley’s traitor throat.

He heard a stirring then, saw the edge of movement beyond a doorway into some sort of back room. His voice, having done its worst, immediately deserted him again, and he could only stand tongue-tied as Aziraphale emerged from the depths, hair askew as if he’d been tugging at it absentmindedly, not quite looking at Crowley yet as he removed a pair of old-fashioned reading glasses and laid them down on the edge of the counter he was passing.

“Can I help—” he started, and then he saw who he was speaking to, and stopped as suddenly as if he’d been struck. His face paled and his eyes widened and his lip trembled and none of it spoke of pleasure or gladness. After a moment, he said, faintly, “Crowley.”

He shouldn’t have come, Crowley thought, heart turning to lead and sinking into his shoes. He should have respected Aziraphale’s clear intention that they shouldn’t meet again. He should have got some damn sleeping pills and turned his mirror to the wall.

“Hi,” he managed. “I. Uh.”

“How did you—” Aziraphale didn’t finish the question, but it was clear enough: how did you find me?

Crowley almost laughed at how perplexed he seemed, but his throat was still too strangled by nerves and need and a kind of nostalgia that had no obvious cause.

“Internet,” Crowley said. “Looked up your number. There was a listing for the shop.”

“Ah. I see.” Aziraphale took a deep breath and then sighed heavily. “And… why are you here?”

Because now I’ve seen you once I need to see you again. Because I miss you like you were always supposed to be here. Because I can’t bear how sad you are, you were never meant to be this sad.

“Looking for a book,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale gave him a look of such flat disbelief that he almost flinched, but there was the faintest flicker of humour in it, the faintest stirring from the quiet sorrow.

“A book? You?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t read.”

Crowley stared at him, mouth agape.

“I do read,” he protested. “Why would you think I didn’t?”

Aziraphale started to answer, tripped over his own words, turned away in a hurry as if to hide the blush that rose to his face.

“No-one reads anymore,” he complained, doing a good enough impression of a fussy old professor that Crowley almost believed it. “All you young people on your phones, I just tend to assume—”

Crowley’s eyebrows made a bid for the ceiling.

“Young people?” he repeated. “How old do you think I am?”

“I’m told it’s impolite to guess,” Aziraphale replied primly. “I, however, am positively ancient. You all look young to me.”

Crowley shook his head, bewildered and unsure of the joke. Aziraphale didn’t look old, despite his outdated wardrobe. Certainly not old enough to be calling Crowley young.

“I read books,” he insisted, clinging to something that might let him talk to Aziraphale like a normal person. “Got anything good?”

“I don’t stock books that aren’t good.” Aziraphale still wouldn’t look at him. “But they may not be to your taste, I’m afraid. I’m rather old-fashioned.”

“No, really?” Crowley said dryly before he could stop himself. To his surprise and secret delight, Aziraphale shot him the kind of look you give a friend who’s teasing you. “What’s your favourite book, then?”

“You can’t possibly expect me to pick just one.”

“How about top five?”

“Impossible!”

Crowley laughed, unable to contain the thing that was bubbling up in his chest, the aching sense of familiarity and fondness.

“How many favourite books do you have?” he asked.

Wordlessly, Aziraphale gestured to the entire shop. Crowley’s laughter turned into a sweet sort of pain beneath his breastbone.

“Doesn’t that make it hard to sell them?”

“Oh, that very rarely happens, believe me. I’m quite an expert on not selling books.”

There was the slightest sparkle in his eyes, the smallest curve to his lips, and it couldn’t dispel the sorrow that clung to him, but it caught Crowley’s breath and begged him to keep talking, keep coaxing that light out from the shadows.

“So what you’re saying,” he said, “is that if I want to buy a book I’ve actually come to completely the wrong place?”

“Now you’re catching on.”

“What about borrow? Can I borrow a book?”

“I am not a library.” Aziraphale huffed, but now he’d let himself look at Crowley again, he couldn’t seem to quite drag his eyes away. Crowley could almost feel it, the way they explored his face, the way they lingered as if everything they beheld was impossibly precious. “But I suppose I… I might have something. That would interest you.”

He turned and moved purposefully down one of the rows of shelves, as if he knew exactly where he was going and had no need even to glance at the titles to orient himself. Crowley found he’d hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans and was hanging on for dear life, as if he’d been balanced on the very edge of something for the last few minutes. He took a careful breath, forced his hands to relax, as Aziraphale plucked a book from the shelf like a falcon stooping on its prey and began to make his way back to Crowley.

He was so… ordinary-looking, Crowley supposed, apart from that impossibly white-blond hair that showed no sign of dark roots. He seemed like someone that Crowley shouldn’t even have noticed in a crowd. Nothing especially striking or fascinating about him, and yet Crowley found himself greedy for the sight of him, taking in the way he moved and the curl of his hands around the book and the softness of his face.

“Here.” Aziraphale held out the book, which wasn’t as old as some, but still dusty and worn enough that Crowley took it gingerly, afraid to hurt it. “Try this.”

He peered at the title and sounded it out in his head before he tried it.

“Decameron?”

“Written in the fourteenth century. The only good thing to come out of it, someone once told me,” Aziraphale replied, brushing the dust off his fingers with a wistful smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “It’ll make you laugh.”

“Will it?”

“Yes, it will,” Aziraphale said softly, with a certainty that left Crowley momentarily stricken into silence. Aziraphale kept his eyes fixed on the book now in Crowley’s hands, refusing to look up. He worried at his lower lip for a moment, and Crowley’s heart stuttered, sure he was going to say… something. Something that would…

Aziraphale turned abruptly towards the back room.

“Please return it when you’re finished,” he said, making his way over to where he’d left his reading glasses. “And do look after it. If you spill red wine or something on it I’ll— well, I shall be very displeased.”

“I’ll guard it with my life,” Crowley replied, trying for humour and missing by a mile as the words came out low and urgent and honest.

Aziraphale stopped at the counter, picking up his glasses and fiddling with them nervously.

“No need for that,” he said. “Please do… look after yourself, too, my dear.”

Crowley’s knees went watery and he took a step forward, but Aziraphale was putting on the glasses like armour, turning away with a finality that would not be gainsaid.

“I’m afraid I have to get back to my work now. It was… it was good to see you. Take as long as you like with the book. You can always just pop it through the letterbox when you’re done, if… if I should happen to be closed.”

“Right,” Crowley said, already determined to memorise the opening times of the shop to ensure that wouldn’t happen. “Okay. I’ll just… well. I’ll be back when I’ve read it, then. To tell you what I think.”

Aziraphale turned like he couldn’t stop himself, eyes flying to Crowley’s with a depth of loss and longing as full-fathom as the ocean. He smiled, a fragile thing.

“I’ll look forward to it.”

It took longer than Crowley expected to read the book: the translation was itself more than a hundred years old, its language dense and detailed and slow to unravel. And, as it turned out, utterly filthy in a lot of places. He was shocked, on some level, that Aziraphale had handed the book to him so readily, with no hesitation or embarrassment. On some other level, he was as unsurprised as he was that Aziraphale had been right about it making him laugh. He kept the book well away from all beverages, and wondered how Aziraphale had known that he rarely kept any wine in his cupboard other than red.

Aziraphale’s opening hours were a mystery wrapped in an enigma written out in purposefully cramped handwriting but he somehow managed to get it right, arriving at the end of the day when there were again no customers in the shop but the sign was still flipped to open. Crowley thought of Aziraphale’s joke about trying not to sell books, and smiled, and then smiled even more when he spotted Aziraphale almost completely tucked behind a shelf and as absorbed in reading as if he were a customer himself.

“Didn’t take you for a peddler of pornography,” he said by way of greeting.

Aziraphale’s head popped up over the shelf like an indignant dandelion. “I beg your pardon?”

Crowley held up The Decameron, waggling it gently from side to side.

“Absolutely x-rated,” he said with glee. “Putting the Devil in hell? Really? You were right, it made me laugh.”

Crowley had hoped to get a laugh in return, hoped to see his eyes light up. Instead, Aziraphale just said, “Oh,” and then didn’t say anything at all for a moment. Finally, he closed the book he’d been reading, reshelved it, and stepped out from his hidey-hole, tugging at his waistcoat and avoiding Crowley’s eyes.

“You enjoyed it, then?”

“Not so much the bits about plague.” It had given him unaccountably vivid nightmares, that remorseless description of the pestilence that consumed all in its path. He’d skipped ahead. “The rest was pretty good. Funny how modern it feels, even with the big words and run-on sentences.”

“I find that humans, as a whole, don’t change nearly as much as they think they do.”

“Someone studied anthropology, did they?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Aziraphale held out his hand for the copy of the Decameron. Crowley tried not to try to brush their fingers together, but failed on both counts: Aziraphale skillfully took the book while avoiding contact.

“I’m glad you liked it,” Aziraphale went on, smoothing his hand over the cover with a gentleness that made something in Crowley ache. “And I see you’ve taken care of it. Thank you.”

“No, I mean— thank you. For lending it.” Crowley took a breath and a chance. “What next?”

Aziraphale looked at him then with a helplessness that almost stopped his heart, like someone already falling but still frantically trying to regain their balance, like someone kneeling parched at the lip of an oasis and trying to will themselves not to drink.

“You might like the Canterbury Tales,” Aziraphale said after a moment, like a sigh, like a sip of water. “They were somewhat inspired by the Decameron, and they’re certainly, well. What was your phrase?” He smiled. “Absolutely x-rated. Some of them, at least.”

“I’ll give it a try,” Crowley said, drinking in that smile and the way Aziraphale had forgotten to avoid his eyes. “Assuming you’ve got a copy.”

“My dear, I have seven.” Aziraphale slipped past him, their shoulders not quite brushing, and Crowley closed his eyes for a split second as he caught the scent of him again. “I’ll try to find you one that’s in contemporary English, shall I?”

Crowley was almost starting to understand Aziraphale’s distaste for customers. Business in the flower shop ebbed and flowed, and normally he’d be grateful to be busy, but every new order that came in kept him from finishing the Tales, kept him from going back to the bookshop. He was often too tired to read much in the evenings, and he didn’t dare bring the book into the shop where it might get wet or dirty. Its leather binding was worn smooth with much handling, and its pages smelled like Aziraphale - or Aziraphale smelled like them, would perhaps be more accurate.

Someone asked him for marigolds for a lover, and he almost asked them, are you sure, do you know what those mean? He glanced at the book about the language of flowers, stuffed under the counter: marigolds for grief, for despair. Strange, that a bloom so redolent with reds and golds and sunset shades should have such a dour meaning. They’d always made him think of red velvet and gilded wings.

He found himself wanting to take more than the book with him when he returned. He hovered in the back room, eyes roving restlessly along the shelves. For a second he lingered on a long-stemmed rose, but no: too much, too soon, too honest. The whole room was a mass of hidden meaning now, flowers he’d thought of only as colours and scents transformed into fragments of code, requiring him to think carefully about the message they would send.

Finally, he picked up a sturdy potted fern, one that didn’t need much attention. Ferns for fascination. I want to learn you like a new language.

To his dismay, the bookshop was closed. He could see a light on, though, and so he hesitated, and tapped on the door, fingertips dancing a little rhythm like a song stuck in his head. Almost to his surprise, he heard footsteps at once, and a moment later, Aziraphale opened the door.

“I thought it might be you,” he said, voice soft as a breaking wave, eyes tender and mournful and haunted. “Come in, then.”

Crowley followed him inside with a feeling like a sigh trapped in his chest, an easing of something, an uncoiling. He handed Aziraphale back the book, and then offered him the fern as well.

“That’s… for me?” Aziraphale asked, as if Crowley were in the habit of wandering around clutching random potted plants.

“Little gift. To say thank you for the reading material.”

“I’m not terribly good with these things,” Aziraphale fretted, but he set the book down and reached out for the fern anyway. “How do I—”

“Just put it somewhere warm and not too bright, and keep the soil damp.”

He wasn’t trying, this time, but their hands touched anyway, meeting around the curve of the pot. Aziraphale’s fingers were warm and soft and sent a shiver through Crowley that seemed out of proportion to the lightness of the touch. He thought he heard an intake of breath from Aziraphale, but then he was turning away with the fern in his hands, carrying it over to the counter and placing it down with great care.

“I— I won’t leave it here, of course,” he said, words tumbling over each other, almost babbling. “I’ll take it upstairs - there’s a corner that will suit it very well, I think - and I’ll see it every day so I shouldn’t forget to water it—”

He took a steadying breath and turned back to Crowley with his eyes all crinkled with fondness and his mouth turned up at the corners and the shadows almost banished for just this single moment.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale said, warm with it, aglow. “So, how was the book?”

“I had no idea such a famous work of literature was built on jokes about arses.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised how much English culture has sprung from that particular font of humour. Shakespeare’s nearly as bad, though people tend to miss the references these days—”

“Shakespeare?” Crowley frowned. “Wasn’t he, y’know— more of a gloomy sort? All those dramatic speeches and horrible murders?”

Aziraphale’s mouth dropped open with a look of such genuine horror that Crowley almost started apologising for whatever he’d said wrong.

“You haven’t read Shakespeare?”

“Well, I mean— did Hamlet in school. Macbeth too, I think. Saw that film of Romeo and Juliet, you know, the modern one—”

Aziraphale made a soft, distressed sound.

“You mean you’ve never— you don’t know any of the funny ones?”

“There are funny ones?”

It was like he’d kicked a puppy off a bridge into a pit of spikes. Crowley thought there were actual tears welling up in Aziraphale’s eyes.

“Oh, my dear—” Aziraphale wrung his hands like something out of a Victorian tragedy. “You must— I have the complete works somewhere, you must read the comedies—” Aziraphale started towards one of the shelves, then stopped, so agitated he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. “No, no, you must see them, you can’t— they’re meant to be performed, you can’t just read them if you’ve never—”

“I feel like I’ve insulted your honour or something,” Crowley said lightly, trying to find it funny, failing. Aziraphale seemed so genuinely stricken. “Take a breath.”

“Yes. Of course. I— I’m sorry.” Aziraphale pulled himself together. “But you really must— they have Much Ado on at the Globe this month, you always loved—”

He seemed to trip on his own words, suddenly pale, suddenly hesitant.

“It’s a wonderful cast,” Aziraphale finished quietly. “You should— you should go.”

“Not really much for going to the theatre,” Crowley replied, folding his arms across his chest to hide the tremor in his hands. “Not on my own, anyway.”

It hung there between them for a moment, like a warm breeze, like the scent of rosemary, and Crowley found he was cracked open and desperate again, almost holding his breath as Aziraphale looked at him like he was cool blue water in the desert sands.

And then something shattered in his eyes, something went out of him like life departing an exhausted creature, something closed off in his face and drew his body up straight and tense, and Crowley knew he’d somehow made a terrible mistake.

“I’m sure you can find someone to accompany you,” Aziraphale said with brittle politeness. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“Wait—” Crowley scrambled desperately for something to fix it, anything to wipe away the vice gripping his heart, the same pain he saw in Aziraphale’s taut expression. “I, uh, I need another book—”

“Try your local library.” Aziraphale moved towards him, but with a determination and defensiveness that made Crowley give ground. “Now, I really must be closing up, if you don’t mind—”

Crowley let himself be herded towards the door.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out as Aziraphale flipped the latch and pulled it open for him. He didn’t even know what he was apologising for. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Aziraphale’s expression crumbled just for a moment, his eyes too bright, his lip wobbling dangerously.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, brokenly. “It isn’t your fault. Goodnight, Crowley.”

“Aziraphale—”

The name splashed agonisingly against the door that had been shut in his face. Crowley heard the lock click, then quick footsteps walking away. After a few moments, the light went out. His fists were clenched so tight that his fingernails were cutting into his palms. His heart was beating like frantic wings. His face was wet, he realised, his vision blurry.

He stood outside the door so long that someone stopped to ask if he was all right. He lied, and turned away, and went home.

He tried to stay away. He couldn’t.

He thought he might be angry, once he’d soothed his heart with wine and hours of meaningless television, but he couldn’t find it in him. Aziraphale’s pain was too obvious and too bitter. Whyever he’d sent Crowley away, it wasn’t his fault, either. Crowley thought maybe he should tell him that. And so he found himself back at the bookshop a few days later.

It was closed again. He knocked, but this time there was no reply. He realised belatedly that the windows were dark, that there was a chain on the door that hadn’t been there before. A new notice, posted in place of Aziraphale’s chaotic opening hours.

Closed Until Further Notice.

Crowley hammered on the door, frantic and freefalling.

“Aziraphale! Aziraphale, are you in there?”

Someone approached from the other side of the street, an older woman with flour in her hair.

“Are you looking for Mr Fell?” she asked.

“I— suppose I am,” he mumbled, glancing at the name emblazoned on the bookshop.

“He’s gone away,” the woman told him, with none of the solemnity such a terrible pronouncement deserved.

“For— for how long?”

She frowned.

“Actually, he didn’t say, but he seemed to think it would be for a while.”

“A while?”

She shrugged.

“Sometimes he goes away for a few months,” she said. “Sometimes a year or two. He’s a funny one, to be completely honest with you—”

Crowley didn’t hear anything else she had to say. At some point, he must have found a way to end the conversation. At some point, he must have walked away. At some point, he must have let his feet carry him to the park he found himself drifting through.

It was a sunny day, but he felt cold. There were people laughing and tossing bread to the ducks, but the noise rose and fell around him like the swells of an unkind sea. There were flowers blazing bright along the borders of the path, marigolds in all the colours of a dying day.

He sat on a bench and stared at nothing for a long, long time.

Ungrateful he, who pluck’d thee from thy stalk,

Poor faded flow’ret! on his careless way;

Inhal’d awhile thy odours on his walk,

Then onward pass’d and left thee to decay.

The Faded Flower, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

3

Like a Sunless Garden

Chapter 1

London, 1660

“They’re saying it’s a miracle.” Crowley’s voice was unexpected, but somehow not a surprise. Aziraphale tried not to smile, glanced sideways in time to see him sidling into place in his satin-lined short coat and the new, looser style of breeches. “Deliverance from all the chaos of the Commonwealth.”

“I couldn’t possibly comment,” Aziraphale replied, adjusting his collar and watching as the newly-crowned Charles II waved to his subjects. “Let’s hope he’s better at the job than his father.”

“Pity it didn’t work out.” Crowley leaned forward, watching the coronation from behind his dark glasses. “It was a nice idea, no more kings.”

“Yes. Perhaps they’ll get back to it someday. When things are a little less… unsettled.”

“When are things ever less unsettled, angel?”

“One must live in hope.”

“Oh, must one?” That sideways grin, the darting glance. “Speaking of hope, I don’t suppose the food around here’s improved in the last fifty years, has it?”

“As a matter of fact, I know a lovely little place—”

“Of course you do.”

“—but unfortunately, I’m leaving London tonight.”

“Oh.” Real disappointment flickered over Crowley’s face and warmed Aziraphale’s heart. “Will you be gone long?”

“Some years, I suspect. The Ottomans are getting rather frisky again and I’ve been told to go and give old Leopold a bit of a hand.”

“Well,” Crowley said, feigning nonchalance, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t have any plans for the next decade. I’ll just stick around here until you get back. We can have dinner then.”

Aziraphale bit his lip against the smile that would have given far too much away.

“I’ll look forward to it,” he said.

The worst part - no, that was a foolish way to phrase it. Worst part implied that there might, somehow, be some parts that were better, were tolerable, were less awful than others.

But the thing that haunted Aziraphale was how long it took him to go looking. How, when he found no sign of Crowley upon his return to a London forever changed by the Great Fire, he was disappointed and a little annoyed, but simply assumed Crowley had grown bored, or been called away on Hell’s business.

He should have known better. Crowley had never broken a promise to him. He’d said he’d wait. Aziraphale should have known better. Should have known sooner that something was wrong.

As it was, he didn’t start to become concerned until the century began to draw to a close, and by then, the trail was cold.

Sicily, 1692

Aziraphale never forgot that first sight of him, that first time. Kneeling in the dirt, working the soil with his bare hands, hair longer than Aziraphale had seen it for nearly two thousand years, braided roughly. His clothes were simple and worn-out and lacked all his usual flair. His skin was brown from a life in the sun, his fingers red with rusty Mediterranean dirt, his shoulders bowed. He looked much younger than he should, but also more worn-in, like he’d spent that shorter span of years toiling ceaselessly. It wasn’t much of a garden, but every scrap had been put to use growing vegetables to feed the tiny cottage behind it, and the wisteria that sprawled over its trellis on the side of the house was at the height of its late summer second bloom.

Aziraphale leaned on the wall and let out a long breath of relief, and then allowed himself to feel properly aggrieved.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” he said. “Really, you could at least have let me know—”

Crowley’s head came up, startled, staring at him, and Aziraphale’s heart stopped in his chest.

“Your eyes!” he gasped. “What—- what happened to your eyes?”

“I… don’t speak your language,” Crowley said hesitantly in the local dialect, a frown on his face. “Do you speak mine, sir?”

Aziraphale gaped at him.

“What are you playing at, Crowley?” he demanded, reluctantly slipping into his somewhat rusty Sicilian. “What on Earth have you done to your eyes?”

Crowley scrambled to his feet, and to Aziraphale’s amazement and dismay, took several steps backwards.

“How do you know my name?”

“How do I— Crowley, it’s me. You do know me, don’t you?”

And to his disbelief, Crowley shook his head, and Aziraphale saw nothing in his face but honest confusion. No hint of teasing, no indication that this was some tasteless joke. His all-too-human eyes with their round pupils and their honey-brown irises were full of doubt and wariness.

“I’m afraid I don’t, sir,” Crowley said. “Can I be of some assistance?”

“No,” Aziraphale said faintly. “No, I— I don’t think you can. Forgive me, I… must have confused you with someone else.”

He took a room in the town. He didn’t know what else to do. He walked out past the cottage every day. Crowley lived quietly, it seemed, and on the edge of poverty like so many others in these rural communities. He tended his garden and tended his goats and cut wisteria blossoms to take to the market every week, to earn a few extra coins.

He had history here. There were people in the village who remembered his birth, his childhood, his parents (now departed, rest their souls). If this was miracle work, it was the most complex and subtle rearrangement of memories that Aziraphale had ever encountered. Not only that, but as far as he could tell, Crowley was completely human. There were no traces of demonic power about him.

Aziraphale tested it, finally, approaching Crowley in the market and, with a wave of his hand, obscuring the memory of their first meeting, soothing away the wariness that Crowley had shown towards him ever since. He met as little resistance as he would from any human.

Crowley blinked, shook his head slightly, and smiled at Aziraphale, his distrust gone. Aziraphale’s heart sank. He folded his hands tightly together to hide his trembling fingers.

“Hello,” Crowley said, as friendly as he had been in the Garden. “I’ve seen you around town. English, are you?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale replied, for want of a better option. “These… these flowers are lovely.”

Crowley looked pleased, a simple pride and satisfaction that Aziraphale couldn’t ever remember seeing on his face before. He cast a considering eye over the bunches of wisteria and selected one with the care and intent of a craftsman choosing the perfect piece of wood to carve. He held it out to Aziraphale.

“Keep them in water, they’ll last a week or so,” he said. “And I’ll have more next time.”

“How much?”

Crowley shrugged. “A gift.”

Aziraphale took the flowers, ensuring, with a brush of his fingertips, that they would stay fresh and perfect for a lot longer than a week.

“Thank you,” he stammered.

Aziraphale didn’t know where to turn. He dared not report to Heaven. He had no means of obtaining information from Hell. He suspected some punishment had been levied against Crowley by his superiors, in which case, there was little Aziraphale could do except wait for the sentence to expire.

If this was punishment, though, it was a strange choice. Crowley’s life here was neither glamorous nor easy, but he seemed… content with it. With no awareness of what he’d lost, there was no torment, nothing that would satisfy Hell’s need to cause suffering.

Aziraphale even considered the possibility… that Crowley had somehow chosen this. Done it to himself. How he could have achieved it, Aziraphale couldn’t begin to guess, but he had seen Crowley do quite remarkable things in their time on Earth. And he had seen Crowley weep, too, and rage against all he’d witnessed of human misery, and lean his head wearily against the wall as though his very existence were too heavy a burden to bear. Was it so hard to believe that he might have sought an escape of some kind?

But no, he’d promised. He’d promised to wait in London, and he would never… Crowley would never have done such a thing without at least telling Aziraphale of his intentions. Even if he’d kept it secret to prevent Aziraphale from interfering, he would have found a way to leave a message.

Wouldn’t he?

Aziraphale went back to the market every week for as long as the wisteria was in bloom, collecting fresh bunches of flowers (he insisted on paying, after the first time) that never wilted. His room became an arbour of fragrant blossoms. When there came a week that Crowley had no more to sell, he thought he felt his heart break a little, but Crowley smiled at him so sweetly it caught his breath, and said that though the flowers were over for the season, if he ever cared to come sit in the cool shade beneath the leafy vines, he’d be most welcome to a cup of wine.

Who knew what the villagers thought of the Englishman lingering in their midst and seeming to do nothing but visit the market and walk the country lanes? Who knew what Crowley thought of him, really? But as the season slowly cooled into autumn, they sat together under the wisteria for hours of an evening.

It was strange, talking to Crowley like this. Their far-ranging philosophical debates were gone, their sharing of thousands of years of memory, their commentary on the humans around them. This Crowley had never had access to books or papers, could barely read, had no shared knowledge of the topics they used to debate, but he was as keenly intelligent as ever, quick to learn, eager to listen. He was certainly quick enough to catch the occasional moments when Aziraphale let something slip, and Aziraphale felt as though he had to be constantly on his guard, choosing his words with care. It was hard work, sometimes, and there were nights when he missed the real Crowley so much he could hardly stand it.

And yet it was also… there was a quietness, an easiness to it, a sense of simplicity that they had never had the luxury of sharing. Aziraphale had never known Crowley not to be looking over his shoulder, not to be swathed in his armour of insouciance. It had been nearly seven hundred years since Aziraphale had even seen him without those dark glasses of his, and although his eyes now were wrong, there was a tremulous joy in seeing them so unguarded, and so often lingering on Aziraphale’s face.

Autumn faded into the gentle Sicilian winter, and there was less for Crowley to do in the fields, more time spent on small homecrafts. Crowley could spin, and weave, and sew, and Aziraphale watched his clever hands in fascination, how they turned coarse wool to smooth yarn to soft, simple fabric.

He didn’t find it strange that Crowley solicited more and more of his company, that they were together more than they were apart. It was only the same dance they’d been stepping to for centuries, played to a faster tempo, given a scattering of new turns. He’d forgotten, as Christmastide passed and the new year began, that for humans such things were often a path to a particular destination, and that Crowley saw him through human eyes.

One night, the earth shook as they were rising from supper, one of the quakes that struck the area sometimes, strong enough to send Aziraphale reeling. Crowley caught him, held him steady as they waited for the tremors to stop, hands warm on his back, legs braced against the bucking land with the ease of practice. When the quake subsided, Aziraphale clung to him a few moments longer, regaining his balance, and that was when Crowley’s hand slid from his back, to his upper arm, to his cheek; cupped his face, thumb brushing along the line of his jaw.

They never touched, not like this, and the surprise and the softness of it took Aziraphale unawares, so that for a moment he leaned into the gesture, let his eyes flutter closed as he regained his breath. And then had it stolen a second time, as Crowley kissed him, gentle and eager, fingers running into Aziraphale’s hair, the other hand on his back drawing him close enough to feel Crowley’s rapid heartbeat.

It was simple panic that drove Aziraphale to push him away so forcefully, that made him retreat almost to the other side of the room in shock.

“What— what are you doing?”

“I— I thought—” Crowley stared at him in the dim twilight, the crickets and the birds outside beginning a belated, raucous chorus as if to protest the heaving earth that had disturbed them.

“You thought wrong,” Aziraphale stuttered, his face burning, his whole body shaking, and then he fled, trying to block from his mind the image of Crowley catching hold of the table for support, suddenly unsure of his footing even though the tremors had stopped.

Aziraphale stayed away the day after. Crowley didn’t seek him out. He dined alone for the first time in months. He touched his lips, over and over, and as the shock subsided, he was stunned and dismayed by the longing that rose up in him, to go back to the cottage, to return the kiss and soothe away the hurt he’d dealt by leaving. His thoughts were a jumbled mess, a quagmire; he paced his room all night, haunted by the scent of the ever-perfect wisteria blossoms, and the next day he still didn’t know what to do.

Crowley came to the house where he was staying, a little past noon, but Aziraphale told the woman who hosted him that he was unwell and unable to see visitors. He watched through the crack in the shutters as Crowley left again, shoulders slumped. He’s not himself, Aziraphale thought, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He paced the afternoon away. He wished with all his heart that he could bring back the real Crowley, the one who called him angel and knew where all the lines were and which ones could not be crossed. Almost all his heart, at least. A treacherous, selfish corner of it whispered that this Crowley knew exactly what he was doing, knew no reason not to offer all of himself so freely, knew what he wanted and how to ask for it.

Aziraphale took supper with his hosts, late in the evening as was the custom, and when the second quake hit - or, as Aziraphale would understand later, the real quake, for which the previous tremor had been but a foreshock - although the house collapsed around them, the family miraculously survived.

Others in the village weren’t so lucky, and at first Aziraphale rushed from house to house, doing what he could for survivors, never thinking of Crowley. How many such disasters had they weathered, how many times had they picked through the rubble in the aftermath? If Aziraphale thought of him at all, for those first desperate hours, he thought only that they would find each other later, and hold each other up, and drink a memorial, as they had so many times before.

He’d forgotten, again, everything Crowley’s apparent humanity entailed. He remembered in an instant like the fall of the executioner’s axe, when he heard one of the villagers say that there was nothing left standing on the far slopes.

He might have run there. He might have flown, the darkness hiding his frantic wings. He might have willed himself across the distance in a heartbeat. It didn’t matter, it was all too late. Crowley’s cottage was no more than a heap of broken stone, the wisteria torn and tumbled, the garden roiled and ruined. Aziraphale cried his name, but he already knew, could see how completely the structure had collapsed, could sense no life, no spark within it. There had been no miracle here.

He searched anyway, lifting stone after stone, until he uncovered one cold and bloodless hand, and then his knees gave out, and he wept until dawn.

He didn't leave at once. He continued to give aid to the wounded and newly destitute. He helped them bury their dead.

He buried Crowley.

He held out hope, until the graves were dug, that this seeming death might spark a return to his true form, that the cloth-wrapped body Aziraphale could not bear to look at would fade into nothing, as happened to the mortal form of a demon or angel should they be discorporated, and Aziraphale would know that things had not gone so very far after all from the course they should be on.

But the graves were prepared, and the dead waited silently, and so they were buried under the pale January sun, and Aziraphale felt as if his soul had been ripped out of him and cast into some cold and lightless place.

He gathered his few belongings that had survived the quake. All of the bundles of wisteria had been crushed, except for one, the first Crowley had given him, and still the loveliest. He wrapped it in cloth and secured it in his case and left Sicily with no destination in mind other than away.

Chapter 2

Habit drew Aziraphale back to London, eventually. Habit, and hope, battered but hanging on. Perhaps Crowley’s human life and death had satisfied Hell. Perhaps he would soon return to Earth in his own form. If so, he’d surely remember his promise, and come to London.

Years passed. Aziraphale’s orders kept coming. He did his distracted best, but even without Crowley to counterbalance his influence, he felt as though he accomplished very little. Humans were so complex and contrary, their lives so rarely able to be changed by a single blessing or curse; their will to choose was a bright blade that cut through all his efforts.

He finally took a chance, included a note in one of his reports that he had seen no activity from the demon Crowley for half a century, wondered (with studied offhandedness) if head office knew whether perhaps Hell had recalled him at last. He had no reply for some time, and then only a curt note to the effect that regardless of the demon’s current status on Earth, Aziraphale was to remain alert for any infernal interference.

Aziraphale read and re-read the missive, trying to glean some additional meaning from it, some clue. It could mean, he supposed, that they knew Crowley would be returning. Or it could mean they had no idea what was going on either. Or that they had information they were unwilling to share with him…

London was a lonely place without Crowley. One day, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and within a week, he’d packed up his lodgings and booked passage to the far-flung colonies of the New World. He didn’t return to Europe for over fifteen years.

Copenhagen, 1735

Aziraphale heard his name first, felt his heart lift and swoop and quiver when the scholars of the Trinitatis spoke of Herre Crowley’s excellent work. He was a glassmaker, and supplied vials and flasks to the natural philosophers. Some swift enquiries guided Aziraphale to a place of business that had survived the fire that had destroyed so much of the city.

There was a boy in the shop itself, quick to invite him to inspect the glassware, knowledgeable with the eager intelligence of youth. When Aziraphale asked to speak with Herre Crowley, he was directed through a side-door and into a small glass-roofed shed attached to the main building.

He found Crowley stooping over a riot of geraniums, a dozen or more plants in elegantly blown glass vessels, their roots tracing intricacies through the dark soil. He was older than he had been in Sicily and had the pale complexion of a tradesman of comfortable means; his hair was not as long as it had been then, but long enough to be gathered loose at the nape of his neck with an elegant simplicity. He looked more like himself, more like Aziraphale was used to seeing him, at least until he glanced up questioningly, and his eyes were still honey-brown instead of vivid yellow.

Aziraphale swayed under his gaze, unprepared for the tumult of emotion that seized him. The grief, the joy, the longing, the dismay. There was still no recognition there, as Crowley began to frown.

“Can I be of some assistance?” he asked, his Danish smooth and careful, the voice of a man who’d had humble beginnings and worked hard to hide them. “Was my apprentice not out front—”

“No, no, I mean— yes, he was there, and very helpful too, a— a jolly good lad, I should say.”

Crowley’s mouth twitched, a sideways smile that only just wasn’t a smirk.

“She’s no lad,” he said, “though she’ll be pleased to hear you thought otherwise. So, it’s me you’re looking for, then?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale breathed, a rush of emotion he could no more contain than he could keep the tears from his eyes.

Crowley straightened, stared, his eyes suddenly wide. He half-raised a hand, then seemed to recall himself, laid it on the bench instead.

“Have we met?” he asked, uncertain as he stared at Aziraphale’s face. “I feel as though I— might have known you, once.”

Hope stirred sluggishly in Aziraphale’s breast.

“You did. We have. I mean to say—” Aziraphale forced himself to take a breath. “We met, a long time ago. I should like to renew our acquaintance, if you are amenable.”

“Perhaps you’d have lunch with me?” Crowley offered, smiling now, clearly intrigued as he looked Aziraphale over. “I confess I’ve no recollection of our prior introduction, but I think perhaps I would like to be reminded.”

It was a very nice lunch in Crowley’s club, almost like old times, until Aziraphale started trying to explain to Crowley who he really was. He had, perhaps, thought that some great surge of understanding would flow through Crowley when he heard it, that this human version of his friend would instinctively recognise the truth of Aziraphale’s claims. Instead, the warmth and curiosity on Crowley’s face twisted swiftly into confusion, concern, wariness, and finally something painfully like hostility.

“It’s a poor thing to take up a man’s time with such an ill-conceived jest,” Crowley snapped, as he took his leave and strode out of the club before they were even finished with the main course. “I suggest you find some other way to entertain yourself.”

Aziraphale found that his own appetite had uncharacteristically deserted him. He left the rest of the lamb untouched on his plate and contrived to pay for the meal, even though it had been ordered on Crowley’s account. He spent that night walking by the waterfront, feeling his stomach roll and turn like the currents and ripples, listening to the occasional cry of wakeful, mournful gulls.

He could, he supposed, remove Crowley’s memory of their meeting, and try again, but every scrap of conscience in him squirmed at the thought. It had felt wrong in Sicily, when he’d hoped the attempt would fail. It felt worse now he knew it would succeed. Crowley’s good opinion had always mattered to Aziraphale far more than it should; to force that opinion in his favour by playing with Crowley’s mind was a betrayal he couldn’t stomach. No, he’d made a mess of things, and if he was to fix them, he would have to do it with words and deeds.

He considered a dozen plans, some so convoluted they wouldn’t have been out of place on the stage. He considered lying, saying it had all been a foolish notion, a moment of madness. He toyed with some tale of a wager or a game got out of hand. He mused on passing himself off as a wild-eyed poet who’d been speaking in metaphor.

But he had never been much good at dissembling. Especially not with Crowley.

At last, he took himself back to the shop late one evening. He slipped unnoticed past the apprentice, who was half-asleep and dreaming of running away to sea besides. He found Crowley in the outbuilding again, working patiently and delicately with the geraniums. He was grafting, Aziraphale saw, trying out new rootstock. There were detailed notes on a page beside him. His lantern was beginning to burn low; his eyes must be strained in the dim light.

Aziraphale let his wings unfold, their tips brushing the glass roof and the wooden walls. He snapped his fingers to summon white radiance into the small space. Crowley shot upright, mouth dropping open, eyes widening until they almost seemed to start from his head.

“I was telling the truth,” Aziraphale said simply. “I’m sorry for making such a poor job of it.”

It had been a long, long time since he’d shown a human - any human - what he really was. Not since before the fall of Babylon had he spread his wings for any other eyes than Crowley’s. It was like a cold blade in his heart now to see such fear in those eyes (so different, still him) and such disbelief and awe in that familiar face. Crowley shouldn’t look at him like that. Crowley should be teasing him good-naturedly for the state of his feathers, which were much like his hair, and refused to lie smooth and neat. But Crowley was human, here and now, and he looked upon an angel for the first time, and Aziraphale knew that all he saw was glory.

“I—” Crowley could barely speak, the words a whisper from a throat parched by shock. “What— what do you want with me?”

“To help you, if I can,” Aziraphale replied. “To find out what’s happened, why you’re like this.”

Crowley swallowed hard, tore his eyes away from Aziraphale, stared unseeing at his flowers.

“You said… you said I wasn’t human.”

“Yes.”

“That I’m a demon.”

“Yes.”

Crowley shook his head, and Aziraphale saw the tears swimming in his eyes.

“No. That’s not— that can’t be— I’m not a godly man, Lord knows, but I’ve never… I’ve tried to live right. All my life, I’ve tried—”

“Yes, you have,” Aziraphale said desperately, heartbroken by the shattered look on his face. “Ever since the Beginning. You’re not… you’re not evil. That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what am I?”

“My dear friend,” Aziraphale replied, with helpless honesty.

Crowley took a swift, ragged breath, eyes flying to Aziraphale’s, and though they were still too bright and wet, there was a spark of longing in their depths that called to the embers of Aziraphale’s heart.

“Come inside,” Crowley said, stepping away from the bench, taking a hesitant step towards Aziraphale and the door. “I— I’ve some wine. We can sit and talk. You can tell me… you can tell me who I’m supposed to be.”

It took more than one night, and considerably more than one bottle of wine, for even someone of Crowley’s intelligence and imagination to come to grips with what Aziraphale had to tell him. He had so many questions, Aziraphale could hardly finish each answer. And at first, it seemed like that was a good thing, like Crowley was seizing back the missing parts of himself with both hands.

But then the rot crept in.

Aziraphale failed to recognise its initial harbingers, though they troubled him on their own account. Crowley’s initial fervour turned into something like obsession. He read every book and manuscript Aziraphale could provide for him, every arcane religious text, every work of prophecy. He slept fitfully, troubled by dreams that neither of them could interpret: maybe fragments of memory, maybe just images conjured up by his racing thoughts.

There was a closeness between them now, but it was fevered, monomaniacal, nothing like the easy way they’d talked for centuries. Crowley had always drunk too much when his mind wouldn’t let him sit silent, but as a human he had to bear the toll of it, and there were times when Aziraphale had to intercede to ease the strain on his poor liver. Crowley asked him to simply miracle him sober so he could continue drinking, and Aziraphale refused, disturbed by the request even though it was nothing they hadn’t done for themselves in the past. After that Crowley began to usher Aziraphale out earlier in the evening, so he could continue to drink alone.

As the weeks turned into months, Crowley seemed to lose interest in the life he’d built for himself. His shop had gaps in its stock. He did not fulfill his orders promptly, and his buyers turned to other tradesmen, and he didn’t much seem to care. The geraniums wilted in their shed; his notes collected a thin layer of dust. His apprentice disguised herself as a boy and stowed away on a ship heading for Portugal, and Crowley didn’t even realise she was gone for two days.

(Aziraphale took care of it, blessing her to be safe on the seas and from the prying eyes of anyone who might question her disguise. Many decades later, he’d hear stories about the dashing young captain who’d cut such a swathe through the Caribbean, and much speculation about where he vanished to after, and what his connection was with a certain wealthy spinster who seemed to inherit all his possessions later in life, and whose past was a fog of mystery.)

Crowley spent too much money on wine and on books, volumes that Aziraphale had refused to purchase because he knew they were full of nonsense. Aziraphale began to realise that he was Crowley’s only company. He’d led a lonely life before, it was true, but now he seemed dismissive of his trade contacts and his handful of friends.

“What’s the point?” he asked when Aziraphale tried to delicately raise the question. “None of it’s real, is it?”

“All the same—”

“And I’ll be leaving it all behind, won’t I? When we work out how to fix me?”

To that, Aziraphale had no argument, but something settled in his chest like a heavy weight, and after that, he began to observe Crowley more closely, and he didn’t like what he saw. Crowley’s questions took on an edge. They were the questions he’d always asked - about God’s plan, about the justice of human suffering, about the righteousness of Heaven and the evil of Hell - but now they had a bitter, vicious edge to them. This Crowley couldn’t step back or accept the great tapestry of human experience, not when he was himself a thread that was beginning to fray.

“Why did you let it happen?” he demanded, voice ragged and too loud, the day after the neighbour’s two children were trampled by an out-of-control horse in the street. “Why didn’t you stop it?”

“I didn’t know,” Aziraphale protested, weak with his own sorrow. “I was on the other side of the city.”

“You couldn’t have— protected them? Put a blessing on them?”

“If I’d known what was to come, but it’s not like I can forsee the future—”

“Why not do it anyway? Just in case?”

“My dear, you don’t know what you’re asking. To hand out blessings to every child that crosses my path—”

Crowley’s face twisted into something ugly.

“Get out,” he snarled, and Aziraphale left.

Two days later, Crowley’s anger had simmered down, but there was a bleakness, a bitterness in its place.

“What about the plague?” he said, not long after Aziraphale arrived.

“Which one?” Aziraphale asked, thoughtlessly, and Crowley’s expression darkened.

“When I was seventeen,” he replied coldly. “It came to the city from Russia. Took my parents, my brothers. Nearly took me, but for some reason, I survived.”

There was something haunted and horrible in his eyes, a too-intimate acquaintance with the handiwork of Pestilence, a trauma that had never healed.

“Oh— my dear, I—”

“You didn’t know. Yes. You’ve made that plain. For an angel, there seems to be a lot you don’t know.”

“They don’t consult me on policy decisions,” Aziraphale whispered miserably.

Once, Crowley’s face would have softened at that. He’d always needled Aziraphale into either defending the actions of Heaven or admitting that he could not, but he’d never needed it explained that Aziraphale had no influence over them either way. He’d been all too aware of the inevitability of their masters’ plans.

This Crowley gave him a look of disgust, and though he didn’t tell Aziraphale to leave, Aziraphale went anyway.

That night he flew to the top of the Round Tower, hidden from mortal sight, and looked at the stars. Crowley made lenses for the observatory - or he had, before his recent apathy. It hurt Aziraphale almost more than he could bear that he’d come so close to his beloved stars without ever learning their names.

A week later, he went to Crowley’s house, determined to do whatever he could to undo the damage he’d wrought. He found it shut up, and for a terrible moment he feared that Crowley had left the city without telling him, but when he waved open the locks and ventured inside, he could sense a living presence.

He found Crowley weeping, kneeling by his bed as if he’d been praying, hair in disarray, nightshirt creased and sweat-dark. When Aziraphale rushed to kneel at his side, Crowley flinched away, and the broken thing in Aziraphale’s chest shattered into even smaller pieces.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice trembling. “This is— this is all my fault.”

“Yes,” Crowley replied, hoarse and tremulous, but there was no accusation in the word, just a bottomless pit of grief. He managed a ghost of his teasing smile, the slightest of wry tilts to his lips. “It is, rather.”

Aziraphale reached out slowly, giving him time to move away. Crowley permitted him to lay a hand on his shoulder, closed his eyes and leaned his head towards the touch.

“I understand,” Crowley whispered. “I understand why you tried. But it’s— I can’t— I can’t do this anymore, Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale’s stomach lurched with fear and desperation.

“Can you take it away?” Crowley asked without opening his eyes. “All of it, everything you’ve told me… can you make me forget?”

“Crowley—”

His eyes flashed open, deep gold in the dim light of the shuttered room. His hand came up to grasp Aziraphale’s, lifting it from his shoulder, bringing it to his lips.

“Please?”

Aziraphale felt the first of Crowley’s tears splash onto his hand, felt his own eyes overflowing with the agony of it.

“Is that what you want? Truly?”

Crowley nodded, pressing Aziraphale’s hand to his cheek, turning his head to press his lips to it a second time.

“But not you,” he whispered against Aziraphale’s skin. “I don’t want to forget you.”

Aziraphale couldn’t stop his fingers from curving against Crowley’s jaw, stroking the damp skin.

“I can’t untangle it like that,” he explained brokenly. “If I take away your memories of these past months, it all has to go.”

Crowley shook his head, a sharp, abortive movement, clung to Aziraphale’s hand.

“Then say you’ll be here afterwards,” he pleaded. “Introduce yourself to me again. Let us start over. Say you’ll be my friend.”

“Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale whispered, and drew him into his arms, and laid a kiss on his sweat-damp forehead. “I will always be your friend.”

It was hard, to take away so much time without doing harm, without leaving a gap that would draw at Crowley’s curiosity until it drove him mad all over again. It took patience, and finesse, and a steadiness that Aziraphale had to force upon himself until he was exhausted, as Crowley sank into slumber, went limp in his arms.

At last, Aziraphale lifted him, laid him in the bed (the sheets clean and fresh with a snap of shaking fingers), opened the window to let in the late morning breeze. He smoothed Crowley’s hair across his pillow and wiped away the tracks of tears from his cheeks. He gathered up the books of prophecy and apocrypha, miracling them to his own apartment. He cleared away the empty wine bottles and the detritus of too many months forgetting what it was to be human. He couldn’t do much about the missing glassware or the absent apprentice, but he stepped into the shed and brought the geraniums back to life, waved away the dust that had settled on the workbench. He took one of the plants, the one with the purple and white petals that Crowley had been tending the first time they met, and tucked it under his arm as he returned to the bedchamber.

“When you awaken,” he said softly, sitting on the bed by Crowley’s side, drinking in the sight of his dear face, now peaceful again, the torment gone, “you will have dreamed gently and sweetly. The last few months, you’ve been melancholy, a darkness on your thoughts, but it’s gone now. It won’t take you long to win back the trust of your clients. And I think, if you ask them, the gentlemen at the Round Tower will be delighted to let you look through the lenses you’ve ground for them, and teach you the names of the stars.”

He bent and pressed one last kiss to Crowley’s forehead. Crowley stirred, and Aziraphale hurried to his feet. He cradled the geranium in its glass vessel as he let himself out and locked the door behind him.

The next boat out of Copenhagen was bound for Athens, so that was where he went.

Chapter 3

Cyclades, 1793

Gabriel’s visit caught him unprepared, but he wasn’t exactly surprised. Aziraphale straightened from where he had been leaning on the harbour railing, made an attempt at a polite smile. The expression felt unfamiliar. Had he really smiled so little in the past fifty years?

“Aziraphale,” Gabriel said, like his very name was distasteful. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“God’s work, I rather thought,” Aziraphale replied. He almost winced at his own temerity, but the numbness that had permeated him for so long left him too dull to care. “We are supposed to bless and guide them—”

“Yes, but every child on this dreary backwater island, Aziraphale?”

“One never knows which of them will go on to great things.”

“You’ve used three times as many miracles and blessings in the last decade as most angels do in a century,” Gabriel snapped. “Enough is enough. Unless you really believe that this fishing village is so full of virtue?”

Aziraphale looked out over the bay. At the children running to join their parents bringing in the day’s catch, the siblings helping each other mend nets, the mothers who hadn’t died of childbed sickness. They would all live long lives free of disaster. What they did with those lives was their own decision.

“I see much of grace in them,” he said.

Gabriel scowled at him, but for the first time in more than five thousand years, Aziraphale didn’t care what he thought.

“You’re to go to Paris,” Gabriel went on brusquely. “Talk them out of all this revolution nonsense.”

“Yes, I’d heard about that. Getting a bit carried away, but it’s not such a bad idea, is it? No more kings. Those chaps in New York seem to be doing all right for themselves—”

“Don’t be so ridiculous.” Gabriel turned his back on the harbour as if the sight disgusted him, focused all of his disdain on Aziraphale. “They’re too gullible and argumentative to rule themselves. Take away the authority figure and their whole society would collapse. You don’t want that, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then go to Paris. And cut back on the frivolous miracles.”

Gabriel vanished without another word. Aziraphale stood there for a long time afterwards, watching the village come together in the business of feeding themselves and their families. They had a king, in theory, but he was far away, and meant little to their hopes and dreams. Aziraphale had wandered from island to island throughout the Aegean Sea, avoiding the cities he’d once taken such joy in, trying not to count off the years of a human lifespan, failing utterly.

He went to Paris. He made a poor job of it, though he did do his best when he saw exactly what the revolutionaries were getting up to now they were in power. The paranoia and cruelty made him heartsick, made him want to lose himself again in those little villages where life sometimes pretended to be simple. He’d always loved Paris, loved its food and its wine, but he rarely found it in him to enjoy eating, these days. And he was afraid to drink alone; afraid he might not be able to stop, that he’d eventually sober up and find that years had passed.

It perhaps wasn’t entirely surprising when they threw him in the Bastille. He sat in chains for hours, and considered letting the humans discorporate him. What were you thinking, Aziraphale, being so careless? Well, Gabriel, I was thinking that I wouldn’t want to frivolously save my own life, now would I?

Maybe it would be good for him, to go back to Heaven for a while. Maybe getting away from this too-human existence would soothe the weary ache that seemed permanently lodged in his chest.

But he thought of Crowley, of the possibility that he might return to his true self and come looking for him, and changed his mind. He walked out of the Bastille and left Paris behind without a backward glance.

Vienna, 1801

He arrived in Vienna at the turn of the century, just as Beethoven was making a splash. He’d missed Mozart and most of the Bachs, which saddened him, but the musical scene was so vibrant and exciting, he felt a flutter of interest and delight for the first time in more than half a century.

He wondered if that was some sort of portent, when he found himself watching Crowley play the pianoforte in a small, select salon held by an influential family. And for the first time, Aziraphale wondered if there was something guiding him, some whim of God or eddy of fate that kept washing him up at Crowley’s door.

Crowley was a virtuoso performer, all lithe exuberance and exquisite timing, intense concentration and a bright, brilliant joy unshielded on his expressive face. If Aziraphale had never known him before that night, he might have lost his heart to the sheer unbridled passion of the performance. The drawing room was decked with roses, blood-red blooms bursting from porcelain vases, single stems laid artfully on tables and mantles. There was a bowl of them on top of the grand piano, and Crowley wore one in his buttonhole, almost glowing against his dark coat.

In all their centuries before, Crowley had never shown any interest in making music, though he’d enjoyed listening to it many times, often in Aziraphale’s company. To see him like this, so blazing bright, so gleeful and certain in his skill, so contained and yet overflowing… Aziraphale wanted to fly back to Eden and hand him a harp and beg him to make the strings sing.

He went back, again and again, as often as he was invited. He couldn’t help himself. The music lifted his heart; Crowley’s brilliance and easy confidence were a balm on his soul, so different from that last wretched morning in Copenhagen. Aziraphale drank in every smile and flourish, the way those golden-brown eyes darted over the crowd in delight. He kept his distance, made no attempt to approach.

He never expected the courteous touch on his elbow during the obligatory mingling after one of the performances, the smile directed directly at him, the eyes seeking his own.

“I’ve seen you here every night,” Crowley said. He wore a silk cravat and a high-waisted tailcoat and his hands were swathed in gloves so fine they were almost gossamer. “Dare I flatter myself that you come for me?”

Aziraphale stuttered and stammered something about Crowley’s talent on the keys, his flair for performance, and made his excuses, and left the gathering.

Two days later he was back, as if a fishhook had settled in his throat, pulling him remorselessly to its point of origin. This time when he felt the tremor of someone stepping to his side, he was at least a fraction more prepared.

“Fell,” Aziraphale said, when pressed for an introduction. The alias sat poorly on his shoulders, but it would raise no eyebrows and spark no questions. “Do you compose?” he went on, trying not to stare at Crowley, trying not to devour him with eyes as famished as his soul. “Your own works, I mean?”

“Not a note,” Crowley replied with a laugh. “I love to play, but I don’t seem to have an original melody in my bones. Fortunately I’m well-supplied with the genius of others. Have you heard Hummel perform?”

“I confess I have not.”

“You must!” He’d never seen Crowley so alight, so unburdened. It was hypnotic; it was addictive; it was desperately beautiful. “In fact, a friend of mine has invited me to a small performance in a few days’ time. Perhaps you’d care to join me?”

Aziraphale could feel himself blushing, could feel himself hesitating, could feel himself about to walk open-eyed into disaster again. And all the same, he said, “I would like that very much.”

This time, when Crowley kissed him, Aziraphale understood that it was coming, had read the signs in his hands and his face, the softness of honey eyes lingering on lips and cheek and throat. He’d intended to find a way to put some distance between them, but he’d left it too long, left it too late, always wanting just one more evening together. They were about to say goodnight after one of those, Aziraphale gathering his hat and gloves to take his leave from Crowley’s apartment, when Crowley caught him by the wrist, and then the waist, and then ran soft fingertips along his jaw, and then bent to capture his mouth with a little indrawn breath of anticipation.

Aziraphale meant to push him away. He’d swear before all the Host that he’d meant to end it at once, even knowing the pain it would cause Crowley.

But he remembered Sicily, and a cold hand among the stones, and he remembered Copenhagen, and Crowley, tear-streaked, kissing his palm, and he remembered five thousand years of companionship and the comfort of being known. Just a few weeks here with Crowley and the colour had begun to creep back into the world, the warmth back into Aziraphale’s veins. This physical intimacy was surely a poor substitute for what he truly craved, but he was so riven with loneliness, so torn apart with despair, that he found himself pulling Crowley closer, surrendering gladly to his eager embrace.

It was a mistake, of course; of course it was a mistake. But Crowley’s hair felt like silk between his fingers, and Crowley’s mouth was warm and needy on his skin, and whatever Aziraphale told himself, the truth was that he liked it, the way Crowley whispered heartfelt words he’d never say out loud, the way they breathed raggedly against one another, the way this human form of his could give so wholly of itself to another.

The truth was that he found himself wishing it was the real Crowley who lay with him afterwards, murmuring softness against his neck, running worshipful fingers over his chest and stomach. Wishing those eyes were as gold and glimmering as they should be, wishing that smile was weighted with all their centuries together, wishing that Crowley would call him angel, would call him by his true name. Wishing they’d found a way to do this long, long ago.

Wondering if they would ever have the chance now, or if this pale echo was all he could hope for.

For the first time in a very long time, Aziraphale could almost call himself happy. Vienna sparkled like the jewel in the crown of the new century. Humanity here strove for beauty and transcendence in their music, in their art, and though there were always the uglier sides to life, it was easy to believe that people were moving on an upward trajectory, that things would get better. It grieved Aziraphale to see the consequences inflicted on those who loved and lived in ways deemed transgressive, but - some might say miraculously - his own association with Crowley never drew undue notice, and compared to living with the fear of Hell’s wrath, it was easy sailing.

Years slipped past like days, an easy rhythm of simple human pleasures and simple human hopes. He even learned to sleep occasionally, with Crowley by his side, and the rest of the time lay quiet through the night, thinking of nothing but Crowley’s warmth and lazy heartbeat.

“I’d marry you, you know,” Crowley said once, barely a breath against Aziraphale’s skin in the dark. “If it were permitted for men like us.”

Something in Aziraphale’s chest twisted and broke and came out as nearly a sob. Crowley gathered him close, whispering soft comfort, and maybe it would have been enough, if he weren’t calling Aziraphale by a name that felt falser with every passing year, reminding him that none of this was truly real.

When Napoleon took Vienna in 1805, it wasn’t much to write home about, the city preferring to regard these invaders with polite interest, the soldiers deciding that the battle was already lost and therefore best avoided altogether. Nonetheless, it jolted Aziraphale out of his reverie, forced him to pay attention to how things were changing on the continent. He didn’t much like what he saw, not least because he felt a creeping certainty that soon he’d receive orders to intercede. It was foolish, he thought, reading the newspapers with new fervour, listening more carefully to conversation in the salons; these piecemeal wars were all about territory and politics and power. They were utterly human and utterly irrelevant to either Heaven or Hell. He hoped that this time perhaps Above and Below could leave well enough alone.

He hoped in vain. The letter arrived on ivory paper with a watermark of finely detailed wings and a seal styled as a pair of gates. He was to go to London and aid the war efforts, even though the British victory at Trafalgar suggested they were doing quite well for themselves unassisted. There was no explanation as to why one side had been picked over the other. Perhaps, Aziraphale thought bitterly, Gabriel resented the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire, which he’d always taken credit for.

At least it would mean taking Crowley away from the unsettled continent, but in that he hit a snag.

“London?” Crowley demanded, his voice a perfect blend of incredulity and bewilderment. “Why on Earth would we want to move to London?”

“You don’t fancy a change of scene? I mean, with everything that’s going on in the world—”

Crowley shook his head, half-laughing, half-exasperated. He reached over their breakfast table to put his hand over Aziraphale’s.

“You worry too much. The French have no reason to make themselves unpleasant here. We’ll be fine.”

“It’s my family,” Aziraphale blurted out.

Crowley blinked, amusement becoming concern and a deep compassion that made the lie burn on Aziraphale’s tongue.

“You’ve heard from them? After all this time?”

(There was a story there, one Aziraphale had crafted solely as an excuse not to have to talk about his fictional past, but had found echoing with odd half-truths when he spoke of how badly he had fitted in at home, how little he desired contact with his family now, how domineering his non-existent parents had been.)

“There’s a small matter of an inheritance,” Aziraphale said, scrambling desperately for an excuse. “A— a property in London.”

“Well, if you need to go over to sort it out, by all means, but we hardly need to uproot ourselves and—”

“It’s rather important to me.” Aziraphale took his hand away from Crowley’s, turning his eyes to the tablecloth to hide his shame. He lied to Crowley every day, in some small way or another, whether in answering to his not-name or avoiding some innocent question. It never got easier. “I’d always hoped… well, I wanted to open a bookshop there, you see, but they wouldn’t allow—”

“A bookshop?” A snort from Crowley. “You want to take on a trade? You?”

“It was all I wanted,” Aziraphale said to his napkin, voice softening with the truth behind the lie.

It had been Crowley’s idea, even, back when Aziraphale was enthusiastically collecting Shakespeare’s folios and complaining about finding appropriate storage for them. Aziraphale had scorned the suggestion, knowing Heaven would never approve such an indulgence, but he’d thought about it on and off, coming to like the notion more and more with every passing decade. Even after he’d lost Crowley and everything had begun to unravel, he’d found himself dwelling on the idea of a place that was truly his, a place he could return to, a place where he could keep the things that he treasured safe from harm.

He would never have thought to pursue such a dream now if it meant leaving Crowley, but he had no choice: to London he must go, and he couldn’t say if it would be for one year or ten.

I will lose him for this, Aziraphale thought in quiet despair. And he won’t even understand why—

Crowley’s chair scraped on the floor as he moved around the table, within arm’s reach. The backs of his fingers brushed Aziraphale’s cheek. Crowley sighed, and there was frustration in the sound, but there was fondness in equal measure.

“Let me think about it,” Crowley said. He leaned in, kissed Aziraphale briefly at the corner of his mouth, rose to his feet before Aziraphale could respond. “It’s just… very sudden. Give me some time, all right?”

Aziraphale stared after him as he left the room, hands gripping each other so tightly he had to force them to relax, and felt the smallest flicker of hope.

After a week, it was fanned to a breathless flame when Crowley said, casually but with a soft smile, “I suppose I could spare the time to show those English music-lovers what they’ve been missing out on.”

London, 1806

Of course, then Aziraphale had to actually find a property in London and arrange things so that its provenance matched the story he’d told, which turned out to be somewhat more difficult than he’d anticipated. He went on ahead, leaving Crowley to wrap up their affairs in Vienna, and hoping he’d have enough time to get things set up. Aziraphale breathed a sigh of relief when he found a nice little place in Soho, with its theatres and its music halls and its day-to-day vivacity, and if it was perhaps not the most genteel district in the city, well, he thought Crowley might rather like its grubby edges.

They took an apartment near St James’s Park. Crowley grumbled about the weather (not that Vienna was much better endowed in that regard, at least in Aziraphale’s opinion) but he took well to London society, though his English was awkward at first. It was beyond strange to hear him struggle with a language he’d once spoken with the skill to outwit Shakespeare and Marlowe.

If he improved rapidly after their arrival, until only his accent betrayed him, well, that was surely Crowley’s clever mind at work, nothing miraculous about it.

The bookshop was small, but more than adequate for Aziraphale’s needs. He loved the way the light fell through its glass skylight, easing away the darkness of the English winter. He had his books and papers brought to him from the places he’d left them over the decades - a trunk in a quiet, forgotten attic here, a crate kept safe in the cellar of a tavern there. Opening them was like recognising old friends, remembering faces he’d half forgotten.

Not all of the memories were good. The books of prophecy from Copenhagen were like a silent accusation. And there were other things, mementos from centuries past, objects he had no business possessing, that anyone with a sharp enough eye would frown over. Crowley was very sharp-eyed, and had never been afraid to ask questions. Aziraphale had the workers build him a small room, not much more than a closet, and hide its entrance behind one of the shelves, and that was where he kept those items he could neither bear to part with nor risk Crowley seeing.

On the day the shop first opened, Aziraphale realised belatedly the flaw in his plan, which was that people now actually wanted to buy his precious books. He was in quite a state by lunchtime, when the bell jingled, and Crowley walked in with a smile, a bouquet of red roses, and a small package of chocolates.

“So how are you finding life as a purveyor of fine literary volumes?” Crowley asked, the smile becoming a grin, eyes flashing with mirth as he took in Aziraphale’s scowl. “I’m sure you’ve sold half your collection already.”

Aziraphale glared, but it was hard to pretend to be irritated when Crowley was holding out the flowers to him, as eager and hopeful as if they’d only just met.

“You should put a piano in here,” he said a few minutes later, after Aziraphale had placed the roses in a vase and shown him around the shop. “There’s space for it right there.”

“Why would I put a piano in a bookshop, dearest?”

“So I can play it, of course. If this is where you’ll be spending your time from now on, I may as well get comfortable.”

Three days later, Aziraphale had a small grand piano delivered, its dark wood lacquered to a glassy perfection, its ivories glimmering like pearls. The stool that accompanied it was padded in plush red velvet and had serpents coiling up its mahogany legs, their clever faces peeping out from under the seat. Aziraphale had no talent for making music himself, but when he tested the keys, the clarion perfection of their sound brought a smile to his face.

He left a single red rose under the lid.

For five years, Aziraphale did everything Heaven asked of him. He’d never been so diligent. Whenever his orders arrived, he hurried to guide politicians and generals, to bless ships, to pray for soldiers. It was hard sometimes to explain his absences to Crowley, painful to lay the lies like paving slabs across the soft soil of their shared life, but Aziraphale did what he had to do, and watched the British Empire expand.

So it felt like nothing short of unfair when Gabriel and Sandalphon walked into the shop, false smiles plastered on their faces, eyes flat with disapproval. Crowley was playing Beethoven’s famous lilting sonata, his back to the door, but he saw how Aziraphale stiffened; his hands slowed at once, the piano fell silent. He turned to look at their visitors, and Aziraphale hurried forward, desperate to avert disaster, terribly afraid it was already too late.

“Gabriel! What a pleasant surprise! I was— as a matter of fact, I was just about to go out - would you mind terribly if we walked and talked, as it were?”

Gabriel’s eyes went to Crowley, frowning from the piano stool, and Aziraphale saw the unmistakable contempt, and his heart froze solid in his chest.

But Gabriel smiled his too-broad smile and said, “Of course, Aziraphale, lead the way.”

Crowley started to get up; Aziraphale waved him back, unable to look him in the eye.

“Would you watch the shop for me?” he pleaded, taking his coat and hat from the rack with trembling fingers. “I won’t be long.”

Even without looking, he could sense Crowley’s tension, knew that his gaze would be flicking between the three of them, seeking answers, seeking the reason for Aziraphale’s discomfort.

“Are you sure?” he asked, his accent coming through strongly on the vowels, betraying his concern.

“Of course,” Aziraphale replied, with a false smile of his own, and ushered his unwelcome visitors out through the door and away down the street.

“To what do I owe the—”

“Cut the crap, Aziraphale,” Gabriel said, the smile gone. “You know why we’re here.”

It was dangerous to play dumb, but perhaps more dangerous to guess at what Gabriel already knew.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Aziraphale replied, striving for the kind of polite worry he’d have shown on similar occasions in the past. “Is there a problem with my work? I thought things were going rather well—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve done your duty. For once.” Gabriel’s face was stern. “Which is the only reason you aren’t in more trouble. Did you think we wouldn’t notice you fraternising with a human?”

Human, Aziraphale thought, and didn’t know if he was relieved or dismayed. Not demon, then. You don’t recognise him. You don’t know about him.

“I don’t see the problem,” he replied with a bravado he didn’t feel. “If it doesn’t interfere with my duties on Earth—”

“Have you forgotten the Nephilim?” Sandalphon demanded, scowling. He’d taken a personal interest in eliminating those hybrid children of angels and humans, Aziraphale remembered.

“Really, Sandalphon,” he blustered, “if that’s what’s worrying you, you need to learn a bit more about human biology, I can assure you it’s not a problem—”

“But what is a problem,” Gabriel interrupted insistently, “is you behaving like you’re one of them, Aziraphale. This building of yours, this library—”

“It’s a bookshop, actually, I use it to spread righteous texts to the humans—”

“—whatever you call it, I don’t care!” Gabriel snapped, with a silencing gesture. “It isn’t right for an angel to have so many possessions, to get so attached.”

“It’s necessary to blend in with them,” Aziraphale argued, knowing he would lose, compelled to try all the same. “They find it strange if someone has no history, no roots. It makes them distrust me. Since I opened the bookshop I’ve found it far easier to guide them along from day to day—”

“Enough excuses.” Gabriel glared at him, his eyes almost glowing. “Frankly, Aziraphale, it’s my opinion that you’ve been down here too long. I wanted to recall you.”

A deadening cold seeped out of Aziraphale’s chest, into his limbs.

“However,” Gabriel went on, “you have done good work here. And since you do seem to have a knack for cosying up to the humans, we may as well put that to use.”

Aziraphale’s lips were half-numb with dread. He couldn’t feel his fingers.

“What— what do you mean?”

“We’ve found a very bright young man up in Glasgow, lots of potential. He could be a saint, one day, with the right guidance. He’s just signed up to become a missionary. He’ll be arriving in London in a few days’ time, ready to board a ship to Guinea. You’re to go with him.”

Aziraphale had to swallow twice before he could speak.

“For how long?”

“Oh, for as long as it takes,” Gabriel said. “As long as it takes to make sure his soul is ours. Might be his whole life, who can say?”

Aziraphale searched his eyes for malice, for spite, but all he saw was what he always saw: that Gabriel thought him barely competent, in constant need of micromanagement. There was no awareness there of how this would hurt Aziraphale, no understanding of what would be destroyed. He saw an angel who had grown too comfortable, too indolent, and he dealt with it with a good hard shove, and considered himself a magnanimous boss.

It didn’t make it any less cruel.

“I’ll—” Aziraphale managed, fighting to keep his voice from breaking. “I’ll need a little time to— to make preparations—”

“The boat leaves in five days, Aziraphale,” Gabriel replied with a finality like a falling blade. “Be on it.” He cast a single pointed glance back towards the shop. “Alone.”

There was no way to explain it, no excuse that would suffice. From the moment he stumbled back into the shop and Crowley leapt to his feet with a flood of questions, Aziraphale felt it all splinter apart. If he left without a word, he’d hurt Crowley more than he could bear, but telling him the truth would destroy him. He couldn’t explain that Gabriel would think nothing of having Crowley killed, if he believed Aziraphale needed that extra kick back into line. He couldn’t take away Crowley’s memory, even if he’d wanted to, even if he’d thought it permissible - it had been almost ten years now, and too much of Crowley’s life was wound up with him. He’d been stupid, selfish, and desperately irresponsible to allow himself this association, and now Crowley would suffer for it, and he couldn’t even tell him why.

And so he tried to edge his way through half-truths and evasions, and Crowley’s dismay turned to disbelief, and then to anger.

“You can’t be serious! You’re out of your mind!” he snarled, pacing the shop, eyes fever-bright. “A missionary? You? Just— woke up today and decided—?” He was so agitated he almost collided with a bookshelf, had to throw out a hand to steady himself. “Tell me what’s really going on! Who were those men? What did they want? Why did they call you—”

“Don’t,” Aziraphale pleaded, because if he heard Crowley call him by his real name right here and now he would break, and he didn’t know if he would ever find all the pieces again. “Please, dearest, I know it’s hard—”

“It isn’t hard, it’s incomprehensible!” Crowley rounded on him, hands clenching into fists at his sides. “I’ve always known you had secrets, that there were things you weren’t telling me, but surely by now you trust me—”

“It isn’t a matter of trust,” Aziraphale whispered, closing his eyes against the pain behind Crowley’s wrath. “I have to go. I can’t explain. There’s nothing else to say.”

He waited, and wasn’t surprised when the next thing he heard was the door opening and then slamming shut.

The next five days brought no comfort, no reprieve. Crowley vacillated between angry questions and desperate pleas. He grew pale and drawn as Aziraphale hurried through the process of shutting up the shop, packing a trunk. They slept in separate beds - although Aziraphale didn’t actually sleep, and for once he didn’t think Crowley did, either - and took their meals in silence because anything else would end with one of them storming away from the table.

The last day was the worst. Crowley abandoned all pretence of calm, every shred of dignity, begged Aziraphale to stay as if he were begging for his life. Aziraphale had to leave their apartment, fleeing to the shop and spending the night sitting by the sheet-covered piano, staring sightlessly at the book-lined walls.

He arrived at the docks before dawn had fully broken, the chilly half-light casting everything into a dreary monochrome. Two sailors took his trunk aboard, and Aziraphale stood for a moment by the gangway, looking at the foggy warehouses, as if he was waiting for something, though he didn’t know what.

He found out when a carriage careened out of a side-street, horses skittering to a halt almost in front of him. Crowley half-fell at his feet, had him in his arms before Aziraphale could even open his mouth, and no, he couldn’t do this, he couldn’t bear it if Crowley started to plead with him again…

But Crowley just crushed him close, face buried in Aziraphale’s neck, shoulders shaking.

“I’ll be here,” he said, his voice as broken as Aziraphale’s heart. “I’ll be waiting. For however long— just come back to me, please. I’ll wait right here. I’ll make sure nothing happens to your books. Just—”

Aziraphale took Crowley’s head in his hands, raised him up and kissed the words away, because he couldn’t even guess when he’d be back, and he wouldn’t lie, not this time, not now.

“I’ll write to you,” he promised instead, voice weak with misery. Crowley half-laughed, bleak and mirthless. “I will.”

“I know you will,” Crowley whispered, closing his eyes, leaning his forehead against Aziraphale’s. “And I’ll write back. And when you come back, I’ll be waiting.”

Aziraphale kissed him one last time, tasting the salt of their mingled tears, and then he tore himself away, and went aboard the ship. He let them lead him straight to his cabin; he couldn’t stand on the deck and watch Crowley watch him leave.

The missionary was eager and determined, but he had no qualities that made him stand out from the crowd, nothing to justify Heaven’s personal interest. Aziraphale hated himself for thinking like that, he who’d always believed in the importance of every soul on the planet, but hating himself was better than hating the man for something that wasn’t his fault.

Better than letting himself think that should the missionary succumb prematurely to some tropical fever, he’d surely go straight through the pearly gates, and could even Gabriel complain about that?

But Aziraphale protected him, and guided him, and the years slipped away.

He wrote to Crowley. It couldn’t be often, not when they were trekking through miles of pathless jungle, when paper and ink were scarce resources, but he wrote whenever he could, and he ensured that his letters always miraculously reached London.

Crowley wrote back less often - or rather, Aziraphale received fewer letters from him. He had no way of knowing if that was by Crowley’s choice, or if most of them were lost on the way, though he suspected the latter, since the ones he did receive often spoke of topics as if Crowley had written about them before. He treasured the ones that made it to him. He wept sometimes when Crowley, seeming unable to hold himself back, poured his heart onto the paper. He never begged for Aziraphale to return, not again, but he didn’t need to: it was there in every line, every word, every dot of ink.

Aziraphale wrote of the work they were doing, of the people they met, of the strange and exotic plants, of the animals, of the music. He dared not bare his heart. He dared not write I miss you, I miss you like a part of me has been cut away, oh come to me, come to me my love, at least then we’d be in exile together—

And the years slipped away.

When there was an unusually long period with no correspondence from Crowley, Aziraphale tried not to worry. They’d been in difficult terrain for over six months; perhaps the mail simply wasn’t getting through. Lying awake in the night under white canvas, listening to the endless cacophony of the jungle, he wondered miserably if Crowley had finally grown tired of waiting for him, if he’d moved on with his life. He knew he should hope for that, if he truly loved him. He should pray that Crowley had healed from the terrible wound Aziraphale had dealt him. That he might even love someone else, now.

He tried, he really did.

Two years without a word from Crowley. Fifteen since Aziraphale had left England. Despite himself, he thought of slipping away from his charge just for a little while, of unfurling his wings to fly back to London just long enough to find out—

And then the missionary took sick with some lingering malady that Aziraphale couldn’t seem to heal. Despite his own selfish heart, he fought for the man’s life, kept him going for months longer than the locals predicted. And in the end, he died all the same, and with his last breath, he thanked Aziraphale, and it left him a sobbing wreck for a day and a night.

The envelope was in his travel gear when he finally set about the process of breaking camp. A commendation; a gold star. The missionary had gone where he was supposed to be, and his death, Aziraphale read with shock and anger and a terrible weary understanding, was preordained. All exactly according to plan. Aziraphale had performed in an exemplary fashion.

There were no further instructions. No warnings to stay away from London. And so Aziraphale fled to the coast, and took passage on the first ship he could find that would take him home.

He was too late, and he couldn’t even find it in him to be surprised, when his leaden feet dragged him to Crowley’s grave. The influenza had burned through the city two years ago. Aziraphale had laid blessings on Crowley before he left, to protect him, to grant him long life, but Pestilence herself must have been stalking the streets during that terrible winter, must have demanded her due and taken her toll.

The shop was just as he’d left it, though dusty, except that it was clear the piano had been kept in tune, had been played. Aziraphale considered abandoning the whole place, just turning his back on it all, but he couldn’t do it, not when there were echoes of Crowley in every corner. Not when Crowley had guarded it for him for so long.

Some months after he reopened, he took delivery of a number of packages: Crowley’s things, it emerged, or at least, the ones that Crowley had deemed worth leaving to him.

One of the boxes was full of Aziraphale’s letters, each one worn with much re-reading. But still more precious, Crowley had kept copies of his own letters, all of them, so many more than Aziraphale had received.

He read for days, and when he finished, he went back, and started again.

Chapter 4

Aziraphale knew his own weaknesses, his own sins. He knew he could be slow to change. He knew now he could be greedy and covetous and short-sighted in his selfishness.

But even he could learn a lesson taught so painstakingly over so many decades.

When he found Crowley in South Carolina in 1863, he was resting wearily among the goldenrods as the Union army prepared to march. Aziraphale gazed at him for a long, long time, at his rust-red hair against the yellow flowers so like his eyes had once been, and then he passed on without letting Crowley see him. He took a handful of softly swaying golden stems with him.

When he found Crowley in the Algarve in 1897, there were asphodels growing along the walls of his generous garden as he sat and read beneath a tree, signs of wealth and ease about his comfortable abode. It was harder, then, to walk away, when he heard Crowley’s laughter, when he saw his clever fingers swiftly turn a page. He came back under the cover of darkness and cut the star-laden asphodel stalks and watched the gentle flicker of lantern light in a shuttered window for hours until it was finally put out.

When he found Crowley in Ypres in 1917, he was barely more than a boy, and it was already too late; he’d been gutshot and left to die in the mud. There were no flowers here, nothing but the hellscape of this war to end all wars, nothing but wasteland and poisoned water and the smell of death. Aziraphale tried to heal him, but he was so far gone, his soul was barely clinging to his mortal frame. He held him instead, cradled the child with Crowley’s face, and wept for his silent, unwitnessed passing.

There were no flowers there, but later, when the bone-white crosses sprang up row on row, Aziraphale returned, and gathered poppies from beside his grave.

London, 1941

When the woman from the intelligence agency approached him, Aziraphale turned her away. The thought of playing her games of cat and mouse exhausted him. The Blitz was battering London, and every night he locked up the shop, and walked through the blackout, and did what he could to reinforce shelters and guide stragglers to safety. Once, he was so close to a bomb blast that it blew him off his feet, but all he suffered were cuts and bruises.

He wouldn’t say he wanted to be discorporated. He didn’t know what he’d do in Heaven after all this time. But there was a heaviness, an emptiness, a dullness that had crept into him over the last century. A silence and a solitude that only trembled whenever he stumbled across Crowley’s latest lifetime, and which he folded himself back into as soon as each chance had passed. There was something in him that didn’t know what to do now, didn’t know where to turn, didn’t understand what his purpose was any longer.

Rose Montgomery was determined, he had to give her that. It took a rather strong miracle to persuade her she’d never heard of him, and that bought him a few weeks, and then she was back again, like a wasp that had caught the scent of jam.

And in her wake, a knock at the door, and honey-golden eyes under a broad-brimmed hat, a charming smile, face young and unlined. Arms overflowing with white tulips (a cover, he’d later explain, an excuse to knock on the bookshop door without arousing suspicion). Rose Montgomery wasn’t what she seemed, Crowley said, his accent soft with a strong Scottish lilt; she was actually a member of the Nazi spy ring herself, acting as a lure to reel in unsuspecting prey. He, on the other hand, was a bona fide member of the Secret Service, come to ensure that poor Mr Fell didn’t fall into their trap.

If it had been anyone else, Aziraphale would have shut the door in their face and then emigrated to Australia until the war was done. But it was Crowley, Crowley half-laughing at the ridiculousness of his own explanation, Crowley trying to hide his genuine concern for the bookseller who might be hoodwinked, Crowley glancing around the shop with the faintest furrow in his brow, as if it were familiar to him. Crowley, bright and beautiful, eager and curious, blazing into Aziraphale’s world like a falling star.

Aziraphale let him in. Poured him a drink. Agreed to help. Just this, he thought, desperate, selfish, aching. Just this, just this one brief encounter. No reason for Crowley to stick around, as long as Aziraphale didn’t give him one. Crowley handed him a bunch of tulips (”for the look of the thing”) and Aziraphale let their fingers brush for just a moment, and shivered.

It all turned out as well as it could have. The Nazis were shot by Crowley’s back-up when they tried to pull a double-cross, and Aziraphale couldn’t find it in him to regret their deaths. Crowley wasn’t hurt, even though he should have been, even though Rose had turned her pistol right on him and fired. Miraculously, some malfunction had caused the gun to explode in her hand, and Crowley had taken her down before she could even cry out.

The books weren’t so much as scratched, and Crowley handed them over with a smile and a flourish, and offered Aziraphale a lift home. His car was an old one, fifteen years or more out of date, but it had clearly been a luxury model in its time, and Crowley kept it well-maintained, caressed it like it was a much-loved companion. A 1926 Bentley, Crowley explained when asked, his eyes lighting up, his smile proud, Aziraphale wouldn’t believe what he’d had to do to get hold of it, oh, the stories this car could tell…

“It’s beautiful,” Aziraphale said, Aziraphale who’d never much cared for these modern contraptions and their smoke-spewing engines, but who couldn’t help but love anything that Crowley loved so very much. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

It was over too soon. Crowley walked Aziraphale to the bookshop door, and hesitated, and there was a moment…

There was a moment, and Aziraphale longed for what he knew would come next, if he allowed it.

Instead, he turned briskly away, said, “It’s been a pleasure working with you, Mr Crowley. Good luck in your future endeavours.”

“Oh. Yes.” Maybe that was disappointment in Crowley’s voice. Maybe it was just surprise at Aziraphale’s abrupt goodbye. “You too, Mr Fell. Hope to see you on the other side of this mess.”

He came back, a few weeks later. Aziraphale kept the door locked and pretended to be away. Crowley came back three more times, before he gave up, or was moved on to some other wartime role. Aziraphale found himself reaching for the case of letters, now brown with age and stiff with handling, but turned away, and went back to walking the night and saving those he could.

London, 1967

But Crowley came back one last time, decades later. Older now, and too thin, his cheekbones sharp with the wasting that came in the last months of life. He walked into the bookshop at the end of the day and stood there silently until Aziraphale looked up, recognised him.

“You know,” Crowley said, and his voice was hoarse, as wrung out with sickness as the rest of him, “somehow I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not?” Aziraphale whispered, too shaken to even pretend not to know him.

“To find you still here,” Crowley elaborated. His accent had faded, though you could still hear the Highlands in it. “Looking not a day older.”

“I—”

Crowley coughed, turned away, fumbled a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his mouth until he was done.

“Knew there was something weird about you,” he continued when he could speak again. “I’ve dreamed of you, you know? Ever since we met.”

Aziraphale sat silent, grief-stricken, repentant. Crowley’s eyes flicked over his face, and he sighed.

“Doesn’t matter now,” he said gruffly. “Thing is, I don’t have much time left.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Crowley shrugged, looked away.

“And I just wanted to know. If I was crazy, or if you really were… different.”

Aziraphale rose to his feet, came around the desk, crossed the floor to where Crowley stood. Gently, he took Crowley’s face in his hands, looked into his eyes, read the suffering written in every line carved into his face. Aziraphale breathed in, breathed out, and the pain eased out of Crowley, left him shaken and gasping, eyes very wide.

“What did you—”

“I can’t save you,” Aziraphale whispered, hundreds of years of meaning behind the words, simple and devastating. “But it won’t hurt now, I promise. It will be easy, when the time comes.”

Crowley swallowed, and folded like a puppet with its strings cut, and flung his arms around Aziraphale. And he smelled the same, how could he smell the same after a hundred and fifty years and four lifetimes, how could he feel like Aziraphale’s own heart finally coming back into his chest?

“Thank you,” Crowley said into his shoulder.

They stood like that for minutes that stretched like hours, and then finally Crowley pulled away, and rubbed the back of his hand over the tear-tracks on his cheeks, and said, “Yeah. Well. I’d better—”

“Go safely,” Aziraphale told him, feeling his chest empty out again, hollow and full of regret.

“Thank you,” Crowley said again, and then he was gone.

Almost a year later - Crowley never did give up without a fight - Aziraphale received a bequest he wasn’t expecting. It came in the form of a set of keys in a brown envelope, a scrap of paper scribbled with the address of a run-down garage in Liverpool.

The Bentley looked worse for wear despite what had clearly been decades of attempts to keep it running and in good shape. Aziraphale didn’t know much about cars, but he knew this one would in all likelihood never start again. There had been no instructions with the keys, no final request, but Crowley wouldn’t have left it to him if he’d intended it to be sold for scrap.

He thought of what it had looked like that night in the Blitz, when Crowley had been so aglow with triumph, so joyful in his company. He closed his eyes, and snapped his fingers, and when he looked again, the car was almost pristine, showing only the kind of wear that meant it had been cherished and cared for.

Aziraphale didn’t know how to drive, but that didn’t really matter. He slid into the driver’s seat, laid his hands on the wheel, and said quietly, “Would you kindly take me home?”

The Bentley did.

When he found Crowley barely half an hour from Soho in 2008, it was like tripping over a step you should have expected but had somehow forgotten. It was the name of the florist that caught Aziraphale’s eye, Eden’s Gift: how bold, how defiant, how ironic. It could have been any human’s flight of fancy, he supposed, but as soon as he laid eyes on the place, he knew, even before he caught the faint glimpse of red hair through the reflections in the window.

He meant to walk away. He found himself opening the door instead.

And there he was: surrounded by flowers, long hair pinned back but strands escaping into his eyes, frowning at some complexity of the bouquet in his hand. Aziraphale drank him in, for a moment forgetting everything except this, here, now. His breath caught in his throat as he watched Crowley bite his lip, watched those clever fingers twist the ribbon just so, watched another strand of red hair drift lazily down past his ear to tickle his cheek.

He could still walk away. Crowley hadn’t even looked up from his task, hadn’t seen him yet. He could take this stolen glimpse and leave with it cradled to his chest. He should.

Then Crowley said, “Just a sec,” and for the first time in all his lives his voice was the same as it had been before, the same language, the same accent, the same intonation, and Aziraphale couldn’t leave, couldn’t move, couldn’t bear it.

“There you are,” he said.

Crowley looked up.

It was a mistake, of course; of course it was a mistake. And when Aziraphale realised just how close he was to starting down the path that would destroy Crowley again, all he could do was run. All he could do was remove himself at once, even if it meant leaving the bookshop, even if it meant hurting Crowley. At least, after so short a time, it would be a small hurt, easily forgotten.

(Wouldn’t it? How Crowley had looked at him, holding out that fern; how Crowley had looked at him, as Aziraphale shut the door in his face…)

He travelled aimlessly for months, as spring wore on into summer. He crossed the equator, turned the seasons upside-down, paused in Capetown, carried on to New Zealand where winter was unfurling brilliant icy fronds and the mountains were capped with blazing white. The grandeur of the scenery was unlike anything one could see in England, and yet in places it felt remarkably like home.

Perhaps too much so. Down a Christchurch side-street he stumbled across a florist that looked just like Crowley’s, except he could see at a glance that the flowers weren’t half so well-kept. There were pink carnations in a bucket by the door. Aziraphale stood staring at them for a long time, and only realised his cheeks were wet when a tear dripped from his chin and landed on his tightly-clasped hands.

Christchurch, 2008

The wine here wasn’t so good as the old French varieties, in his opinion, but it was acceptable if you got the right vintage, and at least none of it was anything he’d ever drunk with Crowley. And besides, the goal was not so much to savour it as to temporarily dull himself into a comfortable fog, without drinking so much that he could no longer contain the misery that was howling for attention in his chest. It was a delicate balance. On this particular evening, he wasn’t maintaining it very well.

He was on his second bottle when he felt the shiver and shimmer of manifestation. He froze, and made sure to school his expression before he looked up. Gabriel was standing by his booth, eyeing him with faint bewilderment.

“Aziraphale,” he said, all jovial bluster and casual disdain. “What are you doing all the way over here? I expected to find you in London.”

He couldn’t miracle himself sober, not with Gabriel right there. Aziraphale breathed carefully, made sure he was sitting straight without swaying, that his tongue framed syllables cleanly.

“I thought perhaps I’d been there rather a long while,” he said, the words coming out precise and unslurred. “Didn’t want to get too… attached, you know. Thought I should check in on the rest of the world.”

“That’s admirable, of course,” Gabriel admitted, though his tone suggested that he preferred such ‘admirable’ decisions to be run by head office before being put into practice. He showed no sign of recognising the barb embedded in the word attached. “You’ll need to head back, though. Things are afoot.”

“Things?”

“The big one,” Gabriel said with an infuriatingly self-satisfied smirk. “The final showdown. The end times, Aziraphale. We have reliable information that the Antichrist is arriving on Earth as we speak.”

Aziraphale stared at him, a rising tide of panic filling his throat until he could hardly breathe.

“Armageddon?” he croaked. “It’s— it’s happening now?”

“Well, not for another decade or so, the boy has to grow up first, of course. And we have to prepare for the battle. But it’s all going down in England, so we’ll need you on the ground there to keep an eye on things for the next eleven years.”

“Eleven years.” Despite Gabriel’s presence, Aziraphale picked up his wine glass and took a long swallow. “And then… “

Gabriel was frowning down at him, eyes flicking to the bottles on the table.

“Why are you consuming that?” he asked, pointing disdainfully at the glass in Aziraphale’s hand.

“It’s wine,” Aziraphale replied, too shaken and heartsick to be diplomatic. “Even you must know what wine is, Gabriel, they’ve had it since Noah. Shall I get you a glass?”

“I do not sully the temple of—”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Aziraphale sighed. “You should try it sometime, you might like it more than you think.”

“I highly doubt that.” Gabriel was giving him an odd look - disapproving, yes, but also slightly wary, as if he wasn’t sure what to make of Aziraphale talking back to him. “So you’ll be returning to England then, as soon as possible?”

“I suppose I will.” Aziraphale’s heart clenched at the thought, but his mind was already racing ahead. What would happen to Crowley, when the world ended? Would he finally be restored to his true form, only to be thrust onto the battle lines, opposite Aziraphale, sword in hand? Or would he just… die with all the other humans? “Eleven years? That’s all we have left?”

“Why so glum, Aziraphale? This is everything we’ve been working towards! It’s time to reach out and seize the day!”

Aziraphale set his glass down. He stared at the gentle sloshing of the wine as it settled back into place. He thought of flowers, and books, and honey-brown eyes wounded and raw and broken because of his choices.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Perhaps it is.”

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Oscar Wilde

4

Herein a Blossom Lies

Crowley hadn’t known he could hurt like this. Hadn’t known he could feel this wretched, this broken, this alone. When his parents had died, he’d felt a mix of bitterness, and regret, and relief, and he’d wondered at the time if there was something wrong with him, that he didn’t shed a tear.

(They hadn’t wanted him. Not as a child, not as an adult. They hadn’t cared when he moved to London. He hadn’t called. Neither had they.)

The only reason he survived this new and cataclysmic pain was that it was so shocking, so unfamiliar, so unexpected, that a part of him was fascinated by it. He watched himself fall apart, watched himself grieve for… what? Not even friendship, an… acquaintanceship? A passing encounter? A person he didn’t even properly know? Something that could have been? Something that never was?

He couldn’t explain it, just like he couldn’t explain the intensity of all his reactions to Aziraphale, couldn’t explain the pull he felt, like gravity, like grace, like words on the tip of his tongue, like a memory that wouldn’t quite come into focus.

At first he went back to the bookshop every day. Then, once a week. Then, the weeks turned into months, and Crowley tried to stay away, for his own sanity, but he found his feet would take him there more often than they should. Nothing changed, except the windows became a little dirtier, and someone scrawled some graffiti on the front door.

(The next time he passed that way, it was gone, the door as unblemished as if the crude word had melted away of its own volition. He supposed the woman across the road must have taken care of it.)

Spring crawled into summer, summer dawdled drearily on. It was August before Crowley knew it, and London was unbearable in the heat. He thought about closing the shop for a week and going into the country somewhere, maybe even making a start on doing up his parents’ dilapidated cottage, but what if Aziraphale came back while he was gone?

He’s never coming back, Crowley told himself, trying to make his stubborn heart listen. Or if he does, he’ll avoid you.

It was obvious, with hindsight, what he’d done wrong. Aziraphale had come to him talking about lost love and someone he couldn’t get over after what sounded like years, and Crowley had… what? Hit on him? Asked him out? Courted him? He wasn’t even sure himself what he’d been aiming for, but it was clear enough that he should have looked before he leaped, and that the consequences were all on his own head.

He ached with the thought that he’d done anything to magnify Aziraphale’s pain. Then he felt guilty for being so arrogant as to assume that he could have that sort of impact. Then he wondered if he was making excuses not to take responsibility.

Mostly he missed Aziraphale, and knew it was ridiculous. He’d barely known him. Barely even spoken to him: a handful of brief interactions, some books, nothing else. It shouldn’t feel like losing an old friend.

It was weird, he reminded himself, in the shower, at breakfast, in the shop, the whole thing was just plain weird, and you’re better off forgetting about it.

But he dreamed of Aziraphale. Not always; it wasn’t a nightly torture. Just, every so often, he’d wake in the morning with the sense of being torn away from where he was supposed to be.

Twice, he had nightmares so awful he screamed himself awake, sat shaking for hours after, waiting for the dawn. Nothing to do with Aziraphale, as far as he could remember, but he suspected they meant he needed to do something to cope better with his emotions, like go to therapy or get some pills or have a mid-life crisis and move to Alaska.

He didn’t do any of those things.

What he mostly did was carry on, one day after another, waiting for time to do its job and soften the edges of the memories, and in the meantime compulsively running his mind over them to test how sharp they still were.

It had been a long, hot day, the sky dark with thunderclouds, the air humid and heavy and horrible. Crowley wanted nothing more than for it to just rain already, but as he started shutting up the shop, there was still no sign of the storm breaking.

He normally locked the door before he started tidying up, but he was tired, sticky, and miserable, and had apparently forgotten that step, because he heard someone come in while he was in the back room topping up the water for the cut flowers. Crowley stifled a wretched groan, wiped his hands on his apron, and tried to plaster on something approaching a polite expression as he walked to the doorway.

“Sorry, we’re closed, actually, I just forgot—”

He stopped, because it was Aziraphale standing in the shop, and the light behind him was so strange, so coppery and dim and skewed by the clouds, that for a moment Crowley actually thought he was hallucinating, that he’d crossed some threshold into delirium.

“Hello,” Aziraphale said, and then didn’t seem to know what to say next.

Crowley tried to form words, but couldn’t; he knew he was ridiculous, standing in the doorway staring, but he couldn’t make his throat work, or take his eyes from Aziraphale’s face. He was so caught between the shivering suddenness of seeing him again and the black-rot tangle of emotion from the last three months that his legs felt weak, his head felt light.

Aziraphale bit his lip and looked down at the floor.

“I’m, well, I was just— I was in the area—”

“In the area,” Crowley repeated flatly.

“Yes,” Aziraphale replied, studying his shoes.

“You left,” Crowley said. He tried to keep the accusation out of his voice. It wasn’t like he had any right to it, really. “Just… disappeared. For months.”

“I did.”

“And now you’re back.”

“I am.”

Crowley took a deep, shaky breath, folded his arms over his chest to keep himself steady. There were too many feelings fighting for his attention. Anger, maybe, that Aziraphale could walk back into his life so easily, but it was a feeble thing, washed away almost at once by the incredible relief of seeing him there. Fear, that Aziraphale would do it again; fear, that Crowley would drive him off with a word, a glance. A longing more powerful than anything he’d ever known, to walk over there and touch Aziraphale, make sure he was real, hold tightly to him and refuse to let him go ever again.

He took another careful breath.

“What happened?” he asked.

It clearly wasn’t the question Aziraphale was expecting. His eyes flew nervously to Crowley’s face, then darted away.

“I can’t explain,” he replied, and Crowley felt a shudder of a different kind of apprehension, the hint of something dark and anguished in Aziraphale’s downturned eyes. “But I’m sorry. I’m— I’m so sorry, my dear. For leaving like that, without a word.”

Crowley clamped his hands tighter on his own arms, hugged himself like a boa constrictor to stay upright and in one piece and at least something approaching sane.

“Okay,” he heard himself say. “Did you— did you just come back to say that? Are you going to go away again?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, and it was like a promise, or like the answer to a promise made long ago. “I’m— I’m back now. I’m staying. I won’t—”

He stopped himself, fidgeted with the ring on his right hand, darted another glance at Crowley like he couldn’t bring himself to look directly at him.

“I’ll be at the bookshop,” Aziraphale continued after a moment, and his shoulders hunched, like someone bracing for rejection. “If you— that is to say, if you want— well, if you wanted—”

He stuttered into silence, took a deep breath, stole one more look - lingered, this time, as if afraid it would be the last - then turned away.

“I’ll— I’ll leave it up to you,” he said, starting for the door.

Crowley was moving before he could even think, almost falling, hardly keeping his feet. He grabbed Aziraphale’s arm before he could reach for the door handle, felt the warmth of him under his fingertips, heard the startled inhalation.

“Don’t go,” he said, rough and wretched and God, he was pathetic, he was losing his mind… “Please.”

But the words hit Aziraphale like a blow, tore something out of him, laid bare a raw and terrible seam of grief that was like looking into an open wound - or a mirror. He shuddered under Crowley’s hand, leaned into it like his legs were unsteady, then turned so suddenly that Crowley almost fell against him. Aziraphale put a hand against his chest, gave him back his balance, and Crowley could feel his fingers trembling.

They stood there like that, Aziraphale’s palm flat over Crowley’s heart, Crowley’s hand tight on Aziraphale’s arm, both of them with their heads bowed, and slowly, slowly, Crowley felt the black, tangled mess in his gut begin to uncoil, and slowly, the trembling of Aziraphale’s fingers stilled.

They raised their heads at almost the same moment, eyes meeting like stars colliding, and Crowley knew two things with absolute certainty: that he wanted to kiss Aziraphale, and that it would be a huge mistake.

He let go of Aziraphale’s arm, moved back just a fraction, not even enough to be called a step, but enough for Aziraphale’s hand to fall away from his chest. They both took a breath, as if they’d been underwater for too long.

“You really won’t leave again?” Crowley whispered.

“Oh, my dearest, I swear.”

Crowley nodded, swallowed around the lump in his throat and the tremor of tears and confusion that answered the word dearest, looked anywhere but Aziraphale.

“I should— I should give you my number then,” he said, striving for off-handed, as if there were any way to return this conversation to the realm of normality. “If— if that’s—”

“Yes,” Aziraphale replied softly. “Please.”

Walking away from Aziraphale, even just across the room, was the hardest thing he’d ever done. In just those few steps, panic seized him, convinced him that he’d turn and Aziraphale would be gone—

He looked back; he couldn’t help himself. Aziraphale was still there. Crowley ducked his head, reached the counter, grabbed pen and paper to scribble his mobile number and the shop landline. After a second, he added his email too. He barely stopped himself writing his address and postcode, realising at the last moment that Aziraphale knew where he lived, being as he was standing there right now.

He offered the paper to Aziraphale, who took it as carefully as if it were one of his books, folded it and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.

“I thought— well, I was thinking—” Aziraphale fluttered his fingers over his lapels, smoothing them unnecessarily. “I thought I might see if— if they’re still performing Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe. Or, well, somewhere else, it’s always playing somewhere. That is, if you’re— if you’d like—”

“Okay,” Crowley said, pulse thrumming wildly in his throat. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

Aziraphale nodded, and looked at Crowley with that same lingering intensity, like he was memorising - or savouring - Crowley’s face.

“I’ll call you, then. If I can get hold of some tickets. Or, I—” Aziraphale blushed, just the faintest tinge. “I mean, I’ll call you either way.”

It was enough, enough for Crowley to say, “Yeah, okay,” and not chase after him again when he turned to leave. Even so, he had to grip the countertop tightly when Aziraphale shut the door behind him, cast one last look over his shoulder, and disappeared into the crowd..

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there. A crash of thunder broke him from his daze, the first hard drops of rain scattering themselves across the window. Crowley walked to the door, locked it, pulled down the blind. He flicked off the lights, passed through the back room, stepped out into his small garden.

The rain was intensifying, fat globs of water that hurled themselves from the sky, which lit up with a bright white flash, followed seconds later by a long, low rumble. Crowley stood by his apple saplings and tilted his face up towards it, closed his eyes, breathed in the heady scent of the earth softening beneath the downpour. His hair was already bedraggled, his shirt becoming sodden; he’d start to shiver with it soon, but he needed it, needed the cold for his overheated skin, needed the water for his parched soul, needed the rain to wash away his helpless, grateful, ridiculous tears.

Crowley didn’t know what people wore to the theatre (he assumed it didn’t involve top hats and monocles, which was the only image his mind conjured up when he thought about it) so he played it safe, went a little smarter than his day-to-day wear but stopped short of anything too formal, swapped jeans for black trousers and a leather jacket, chose a slightly nicer shirt in patterned crimson.

As he fussed with his collar while waiting for Aziraphale he realised he was performing the age-old pre-date ritual of trying to look good without looking like he’d put too much effort in, and grimaced at himself in the mirror. Too fast, he thought accusingly, don’t you ever learn?

He wanted Aziraphale in his life, wanted it desperately, wanted his friendship, his companionship, his presence. He wasn’t going to risk that by pushing any other unwanted feelings onto him.

Even so, he took the time to tie his hair back neatly at the nape of his neck and dig out the gold and garnet earring he hadn’t worn in years. The gemstone matched his shirt perfectly.

Aziraphale had offered to pick him up, which was just as well, since Crowley neither wanted to drive Aziraphale around in the battered van he used for deliveries, nor could quite see him on the back of the motorbike he rode the rest of the time. If he’d spared a thought for it at all, Crowley supposed he’d expected Aziraphale to turn up in something compact and comfortable: a Mini, perhaps, or a nice little Ford Fiesta.

His jaw almost hit the floor when the classic Bentley pulled up outside his shop.

“Holy shit,” he said aloud, as Aziraphale leaned over from the driver’s seat and waved self-consciously through the passenger window.

“Where on Earth did you get a car like this?” Crowley demanded as he carefully opened the door, making sure not to scrape it on the pavement, and slid into the leather seat that smelled so good and so familiar it gave him deja vu. “This is— I’d swear you couldn’t find one outside a private collection, let alone drive it around London—”

“It was, ah… it was a bequest,” Aziraphale replied, watching Crowley taking in the details of the car, an avid sort of anticipation in his eyes. “From an old friend. I think he would have wanted me to make use of it, not shut it up somewhere. I had to learn to drive specially.”

“It’s gorgeous,” Crowley breathed, running an appreciative hand over the walnut veneer, marvelling at the uncracked varnish. He’d always liked old cars, used to collect little models of them as a kid, still dared to dream that he could save up for one of his own - though not this, he could never afford this. “The insurance must be astronomical.”

“Worth every penny,” Aziraphale replied softly, and Crowley realised he was still being watched, Aziraphale’s eyes soft with something Crowley couldn’t name. He glanced away as soon as he realised Crowley was looking, laid his hands almost reverently on the steering wheel. “Shall we?”

Crowley reached automatically over his left shoulder, before realising that a car this old wouldn’t have seatbelts. It felt surprisingly transgressive to sit there without that restraint, as Aziraphale carefully put the Bentley into gear, checked his blind spot three times, and pulled out onto the road.

It was no surprise that Aziraphale was a cautious driver, doing everything by the book and just a little more timidly than was really appropriate for London traffic, but then, Crowley would drive a car like this carefully, too. Not a scratch on the paintwork, not a dent that he’d seen, every sign that it had been loved and cared for since the moment it had rolled off the factory line. He caught himself rubbing his thumb gently over the leather seat by his knee, forced himself to stop. It was probably rude to feel up someone else’s car.

They weren’t going to the Globe, in the end, but that was probably a good thing, given that the initial downpour had given way to a heavy, sullen drizzle that would have made an open-air experience less than pleasant. The performance was a modern interpretation, Aziraphale told him as they queued to get in, explaining details of setting that meant little to Crowley since he had no familiarity with the original text.

Understanding was less important to him than just listening to Aziraphale talk, anyway, drinking in the way he kept veering off on tangents of his own devising, like there was too much to say and he couldn’t decide where to start.

He’d expected the actual experience of watching the play to be a bit of a drag, something to put up with for the sake of spending time in Aziraphale’s company. He didn’t expect to find himself laughing so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes, nor for the time to fly so swiftly that the interval took him by surprise.

Aziraphale beamed at him like his laughter was a gift he treasured, and swept him away to the bar to buy them both a glass of wine, while Crowley marvelled aloud that the humour and humanity of the play came through so strongly even without following all the details of Shakespeare’s language.

“Reading them just isn’t the same,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley shot him a sideways glance, catching his faint expression of satisfaction.

“No-one likes an ‘I told you so’,” he teased. Aziraphale flashed him a wounded look. “But okay, yeah, you did tell me so, and you were right.”

The smile he got for that was… breathtaking, or at least, more than enough to take Crowley’s breath away. Aziraphale looked almost happy for the first time since they’d met, and Crowley was already determined to make it happen again and again and again.

Laughter was supposed to be good for the soul, wasn’t it? By the time they left the theatre, Crowley felt half-healed, and not just because of the play. Aziraphale was almost glowing with pleasure, hardly able to contain his anticipation of taking Crowley to see another. So I didn’t mess it up this time? Crowley didn’t say, biting his tongue against delight and relief. You really do want to stick around?

He got his answer when Aziraphale dropped him off outside the flower shop and said, almost shyly, “Perhaps we could do this again? At the weekend, maybe?”

“I’m all yours,” Crowley replied without thinking, then could have kicked himself.

But Aziraphale just blushed and smiled like he didn’t even mind, and Crowley didn’t know what that meant, but he thought about it for a long, long time before he finally fell asleep.

Crowley was surprised how long it took him to notice the piano in Aziraphale’s bookshop, although in his defence, it was swathed in thick velvet coverings and had been so thoroughly buried under books that it was easy to mistake for just another table. He’d fallen into the habit of wandering over after he’d closed up his own shop (on the occasions when Aziraphale didn’t pick him up for dinner, or a theatre trip, or both) and he often found himself idly exploring the shelves while he waited for Aziraphale to finish up for the day.

“Look around all you like,” Aziraphale had said early on, though there had been an odd, anxious hesitation in his face. “Just… I’d ask you not to, well, poke into anything that’s obviously private. You know, if it’s locked or put away—”

“‘Course not,” Crowley had replied, even as he felt a prickle of irrepressible curiosity. “I’ll just browse, shall I?”

There was certainly plenty to keep his attention. Aziraphale’s collection could generously be described as eclectic, though it would be more accurate to say it was mindbogglingly random. It was impossible to work out what the thread of commonality was, what drew Aziraphale to hoard these particular works. At first Crowley thought it was just that he loved old books, but there were plenty of modern volumes sprinkled throughout the shelves. First editions? Lots of those, but also nondescript mass-market paperbacks and seventh printings of obscure Biblical analysis. Was it religion, then? There certainly was a tendency in that direction, but even Crowley, who hadn’t set foot in a church since he was old enough to refuse, could see that it wasn’t a selection any priest would approve of. And besides, it was all intermixed with Shakespeare’s folios and classic literature and an entire colourful series of modern fantasy novels.

In the end, all Crowley could say for certain was that Aziraphale loved books, and while some metric was clearly being applied (there were no blockbuster thrillers or political diaries, for example) the best Crowley could come up with was that Aziraphale really had been telling the truth when he said everything in the place was a favourite.

The piano, though, was so incongruous Crowley thought at first he was mistaken. He circled it, gently nudging aside the piles of books until he was sure of its outlines. He thought the thing he’d taken for a side-table must be the stool to go with it. Cautiously, curiously, he found the edge of the velvet drape, tweaked it up until he could catch a glimpse of the glossy wood beneath, the brass pedals surprisingly bright and well-polished given they’d clearly been disused for so long.

He realised belatedly that perhaps this qualified as obviously private, and dropped the fabric rather than pry further, but he couldn’t seem to let go of the thread of it. To have a piano in a bookshop was an odd choice in any case, but to have one that was never used, buried under books as if better forgotten… it gnawed at him until he had to ask Aziraphale about it one night over dinner.

Aziraphale flinched as if Crowley had hurt him, and Crowley’s heart stopped dead in his chest, panic surging in his stomach.

“Never mind,” he said, too quickly, “sorry, didn’t mean to—”

“Do you play?” Aziraphale asked unexpectedly, pushing a forkful of perfectly seared rare steak around like he no longer had the appetite for it.

“Me? No, not much talent for music, me—”

And for some reason that seemed to hurt Aziraphale too, enough that he swallowed hard and Crowley had the terrible premonition that he was about to make an excuse and leave.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, and then he made some conscious and herculean effort, pushed away whatever was weighing him down so painfully, reached for his wine glass. “It’s just a… keepsake, I suppose. I’d almost forgotten it was there.”

And then he took a breath and a careful sip of wine, smiled in a way that didn’t reach his eyes but was sincere all the same, and changed the subject.

Crowley supposed the lack of any real answer was what bothered him enough to dream about it that night, to dream of his own hands gliding with practised ease over the ivories, drawing forth a lilting sonata, alone with only the candlelight and the silent books for company.

August wore into September, which went so fast Crowley barely even realised it had arrived before it was almost over. He wondered sometimes what he’d done with himself before meeting Aziraphale, how he could possibly have filled up his time. He tried not to wonder what he would do with himself if Aziraphale… stopped being in his life again. The terror that came with the thought was so all-encompassing and paralysing that it was like being seized in the claws of a remorseless creature.

Most of the time he didn’t think about it. Most of the time he learned not to worry about it. But there were moments. There were always moments. Things he said that made Aziraphale’s face fall, brought all that pain and misery back into his eyes. Times when Azirapahle seemed distant and awkward with him. And of course, the things Crowley wanted that he couldn’t have, that he didn’t dare ask for.

One of his saplings produced a single red apple the size of a golf ball, much to Crowley’s surprise and delight, since he hadn’t expected any fruit until at least next year. He called Aziraphale up in the middle of the day, as excited as if he’d found buried treasure, and only realised how ridiculous he was being when Aziraphale started to laugh gently down the phone at him.

“May I come and see?” Aziraphale asked, before Crowley could even try to regain what little cool he possessed.

“I— yes— of course.”

Oddly enough, for all the times Aziraphale had met him outside the shop, he hadn’t been in again since that day when he’d reappeared out of nowhere. They never went back to Crowley’s flat; somehow, if they were going to sit and talk (and drink excellent wine) it was always in the bookshop. Crowley didn’t even know where Aziraphale lived. Except that wasn’t true: it was clear enough that he lived in the bookshop, and wherever he slept and ate and changed clothes, he didn’t seem to consider it home. Crowley went back and forth between imagining a tiny flat like his own, or some kind of gargantuan townhouse with big empty rooms full of sheet-covered furniture. Or maybe just a rented room in someone else’s house, like an old-fashioned lodger? Regardless, asking to go back to Aziraphale’s place was very firmly on Crowley’s list of forbidden questions, and so he had no way of resolving the mystery.

It made Crowley’s stomach flutter in a not quite pleasant way to see Aziraphale step through the shop door again, but at least this time, he was smiling, and for a moment Crowley caught his breath, so mesmerised by the gentle affection on Aziraphale’s face that he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do.

Aziraphale blinked and raised an eyebrow at him, blushing faintly, and Crowley shook himself.

“This way,” he said, more than a bit self-conscious as he headed through the back room and out into the garden. “I mean, it’s not much of an apple, you understand, it’s pretty wimpy really, probably tastes terrible—”

“It’s perfectly lovely,” Aziraphale replied as they reached the small tree and its single fruit, and he was so sincere in his praise that Crowley felt a wobble of something almost like paternal pride. Later, when Aziraphale wasn’t there to hear, he’d come back and tell the sapling that it was a Good Tree. “What are you going to do with it?”

Crowley hadn’t really thought about it, but as soon as Aziraphale asked, the answer was obvious. He reached out, carefully plucked the apple from its stem, and offered it up.

He’d thought Aziraphale might laugh; he wasn’t prepared for Aziraphale’s stunned expression, eyes suddenly wide and dark with emotion. But then before Crowley could panic, Aziraphale did start to laugh after all, eyes glittering, hand pressed to his mouth, shaking his head hard enough that his curls flew back and forth and caught the late-morning sun.

“Why don’t we share it?” Aziraphale suggested, the smile now settled on his mouth as if sharing a private joke, though it was one Crowley couldn’t fathom. “It seems only fair.”

And these were the moments that pushed Crowley to his limits, because what he wanted to do was bite into the apple himself, then hold it out to Aziraphale. What he wanted was for Aziraphale to take it without hesitating, to put his mouth right where Crowley’s had been, to keep their gazes locked as he licked the juice from his lips.

Crowley wavered, and then he swallowed hard, and said, “Okay, come up to the kitchen, then,” and headed back inside.

Was there a flicker of something on Aziraphale’s face that might have been disappointment? No, of course not. He followed Crowley upstairs, and the next time Crowley looked at him, he was surveying the flat with bright and undisguised interest.

“I haven’t been in here before,” he said, stating the obvious as if it had only just occurred to him. “How nice! I do like those curtains.”

Crowley fought a wave of self-consciousness, wondering what the place looked like to Aziraphale’s eyes. It was as tidy as a small flat could be, clean enough not to be embarrassing, but it struck Crowley as he followed Aziraphale’s gaze that although there were plenty of things on the shelves and in the cupboards, they were all things that served specific purposes in his day-to-day life. He hadn’t amassed any collection of meaningful objects or sentimental artworks. The books were the ones he liked to read, and the DVDs were the ones he liked to watch, not a signed copy or a special edition among them. Even the shelves and shelves of CDs were simply there so he could listen to the music he liked, and these days he had most of them ripped to his laptop.

He found himself wondering for a moment what had happened to those miniature cars he’d loved when he was a child. They might still be in a box somewhere, he thought, in some corner of his parents’ cottage. He really should grit his teeth and sort the place out.

“How long have you lived here?” Aziraphale asked, wandering over to examine the CDs.

“Oh… eight years or so?” Crowley had to think for a moment, go back over dates in his head. “Yeah. Started the shop with my inheritance. Before that I was just, you know, wherever.”

“Have you always lived in London?”

“No, came up for uni, never left.” Crowley crossed the sitting room to the kitchenette set into its alcove, pulled out a knife and a chopping board. He washed the miniature apple, then carefully sliced it into quarters. “I had a go at working for those big white collar companies, you know, couple of investment bankers, a law firm, but I…”

He trailed off, grabbed a plate, arranged the apple quarters on it with far too much care given how briefly they were going to be in that position, then stepped out of the kitchenette.

“This was what you always wanted to do?” Aziraphale asked with a quirk of his eyebrow and something that wasn’t quite a smile.

Crowley snorted with laughter.

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “I just hate taking orders from other people. Running my own business seemed like the best option, but I’m not, y’know, one of those people with a passion for things…”

He shrugged.

“I like gardening, I like plants, I’m pretty good with them, and flowers are… I dunno, they make people happy. Unlike insurance claims. So this is where I ended up.”

He held out the plate. Aziraphale was looking at him the way he sometimes did, as if he were… disappointed? No, more like dismayed, like he could see potential in Crowley that Crowley had never seen for himself. It should have made him angry and resentful, the way his father’s snide comments always had, but instead, it just left him feeling oddly sad, uneasy in his own skin.

“It’s probably going to be bitter as anything,” Crowley went on, nodding at the plate. “Too small to get properly sweet.”

“Well, I’ll take my chances.”

Aziraphale came to his side and took one of the slices delicately between thumb and forefinger. He paused, and Crowley realised he was waiting. Feeling slightly ridiculous, he grabbed a slice for himself. They looked at each other, and then both took a bite at the same time.

It wasn’t all that bitter, to Crowley’s surprise. It had a tartness that was rather pleasant, and the promise that future fruit from the same tree would be full of all the crisp sweetness summer had to offer.

“How lovely,” Aziraphale murmured, and smiled, and took a second bite.

Autumn rolled on with its reds and golds and yellows, its squalls of sullen rain, and its distressingly early onset of Christmas advertising, and Crowley was happier than he could ever remember being, except for the doubt that gnawed away in the pit of his soul.

He didn’t know where this thing with Aziraphale was going, didn’t know what to expect. He still wanted to kiss him, still didn’t dare. Were they friends? Crowley thought they were, even thought maybe this was a kind of friendship he’d never experienced, something deep and lasting. If he could have this for - forever, if he were honest with himself - then God knew, he would accept it gratefully.

He’d had… hook-ups, he supposed was the right word for them. While he was in university, and for a while afterwards, as a young, broke person with nothing in London to occupy his time except clubs and alcohol and other young, broke people. It was sort of just what you did, and it wasn’t like he didn’t like sex or anything.

But it had just never really… been more than scratching an itch, and over time he’d found that it wasn’t really worth it, not for him, not when there was something lacking, something that simple physical pleasure couldn’t compensate for. And if he found himself wondering if it would be different with Aziraphale, if his heart raced over the slightest, silliest thing, a flutter of his eyelashes or the way he licked his lips, well, it just wasn’t worth the terrifying possibility of losing him altogether.

And yet sometimes Aziraphale looked at him like… like he was waiting. Like he was expecting Crowley to - what? Take his hand? Kiss him? Formally request the honour of wooing him?

But every time Crowley started to think maybe it wasn’t just wishful thinking, every time he allowed himself to consider that such a move might not be unwelcome, there’d be one of those other kinds of moments.

Like just last week, when he’d pinned a poppy to his coat in the run-up to Remembrance Day, and Aziraphale had gone sheet-white and looked at him as if he’d cut his own throat. He’d been shaken and too-quiet for so long afterwards that Crowley had made sure not to wear the flower again, dropping a big handful of change into a collection bucket out of a vague sense of compensation.

Or before that, when Crowley had asked about all those books in Danish on that one slightly awkward shelf in the back corner of the bookshop, and Aziraphale had snapped at him to leave them alone, as if they’d been pornographic or something.

(He’d been annoyed by that, had waited until a day when Aziraphale was absorbed in a particularly musty leather-bound volume and slunk over to take a peek anyway, but there’d been no dirty woodcuts or obvious indications that they were anything other than dry textbooks. He’d copied down a phrase or two and put it into Google translate when he got home, but it had returned something baffling about two-headed goats and shooting stars.)

He’d assumed from the start that all those moments when Aziraphale seemed so shaken he was almost distraught were due to bad memories of The Ex - and if Crowley ever met that bastard, he was going to throw punches first and ask questions later - but lately he was starting to question his own conclusions. It was the way Aziraphale would look into his eyes, stricken, like it was somehow Crowley who’d left him and broken his heart.

He often found himself dreaming of those moments later, with an odd clarity and detail, full of things that dreams usually failed to have, like smells, and tastes, and changes in temperature. He dreamed of reading those weird Danish books, dreamed he understood them perfectly. Dreamed of drinking wine with Aziraphale by candlelight, by lamplight, by gaslight, under drooping leaves and smoke-stained timbers and the skylight of the bookshop.

He dreamed of playing the piano so often that one day, on a sudden whim, he moved enough books out of the way to open up the lid. It should have been horribly out of tune after who-knew-how-many years of neglect, but it sounded fine when he cautiously pressed a key, sending a clear, sonorous note through the shop.

He hadn’t expected it to be so loud. He winced, hearing Aziraphale drop something in the back room, and then hurried steps across the shop floor.

“Sorry,” Crowley said without looking round, braced for anger or that awful, hollow pain. “I was just— I was curious.”

A pause, and then Aziraphale said, “Go on, then.”

Crowley cast him a surprised glance, found Aziraphale lingering by the end of the nearest shelf, shoulder pressed against it as if in support, face tight with sorrow but eyes deep with something more like longing.

“Not like I know what to do with it,” Crowley muttered, pressing the same key again, then the one to its right. It sounded pleasant enough, at least. “Might be able to manage Three Blind Mice if you give me a few minutes to work it out…”

And then his fingers did something without his permission, moved to one of the black notes instead of the next white one, because that was right, that was the next sound in the sequence, then back to white, white again, then on to two more blacks. Crowley stopped, startled, and heard a soft intake of breath from Aziraphale.

“You know some scales, at least, then?” Aziraphale said after a moment.

“How’d you mean?”

“That was C Minor, I think.” Aziraphale’s voice was odd and distant. “Are you sure you’ve never learned?”

“I— I think so.” Crowley ran his fingertips over the smooth keys, not hard enough to sound them. He could almost feel the shape of a melody under them, the urge to reach for particular notes. “I just, sometimes I feel like I could…”

“Try,” Aziraphale murmured.

Crowley tried. He tried to hold one of those candlelit dreams in his mind, reached for the sense-memory of the keys under his fingers. It was far from perfect - he stumbled and missed notes, particularly when he started to think too hard about what he was doing - but for as long as he could keep himself from questioning, he was playing, and it was the melody from the dream, and now he heard it in waking life, he realised it was a real piece of music, one he’d heard before.

Aziraphale made a noise like something wounded. Crowley snatched his hands back from the keys, spun around, to find him standing with one hand wrapped tightly across his stomach, the other pressed to his mouth as if to keep himself silent. His eyes were as wide as if he’d seen a ghost.

“I—” Crowley didn’t know what to say, wanted to apologise, had no idea what for. “Do you— recognise it?”

Aziraphale nodded. He pulled his hand away from his mouth, and Crowley saw the brief wobble of his lip before he spoke.

“Beethoven. The Moonlight Sonata,” Aziraphale replied, voice wavering. “Well, I mean, it wasn’t called that at the time, but that’s what— that’s what they call it now…”

“How the hell do I know how to do that?” Crowley whispered to himself, staring at his own fingers like they belonged to someone else. “I swear I’ve never touched a piano before today…”

“What was going through your mind?” Aziraphale asked, and now there was an urgency in him, his hands twisting together as his eyes flicked between Crowley and the piano. “What made you think you could?”

Crowley shrugged awkwardly, knowing how bizarre it was going to sound, but having no other answer.

“I keep dreaming about it. Playing the piano, playing that bit of music.”

Aziraphale inhaled sharply.

“Anything… anything else?”

Crowley turned to stare at the keys for a long moment.

“It’s this piano, I think,” he found himself saying. “Here, in the bookshop, only… everything is lit by candles. There aren’t as many books. I’m alone and I’ve lost something and I don’t know how to get it back…”

He frowned as a detail he hadn’t remembered before came suddenly into his consciousness.

“There are roses.”

Aziraphale made a choked, anguished sound. Crowley jerked around to look at him, but he was already gone, all but stumbling away as if running for his life.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley went after him. He found him in the back room, sitting in his wing-backed armchair, head in his hands. “Look, I’m sorry, forget it— it’s too weird— just a dream, dreams are stupid—”

“Not always,” Aziraphale whispered, and Crowley’s blood ran cold at the stark despair in his voice. “Oh, what have I done?”

“Aziraphale—”

Aziraphale stood abruptly, avoiding Crowley’s eyes, moved past him with a frenzied urgency, came to a halt at the entrance to the back room, staring at that odd shelf at the back of the shop.

“My dear,” he said, and his voice was calm now, but it was the kind of calm that was pulled tight over sharp edges and deep chasms, “I’m terribly sorry, but could I ask you to go? I need— I need to think—”

The world splintered and fragmented around Crowley, his stomach twisting sickly.

“Wh— what?”

Aziraphale didn’t look at him, seeming deep in some painful train of thought, twisting his fingers into the hem of the warm, soft jumper that had taken the place of his waistcoat now the weather was colder.

“I’ll call you,” he said. “When I’m done.”

Crowley thrust his hands into his pockets and clenched them into fists, stared at Aziraphale’s profile, the way he’d closed his mouth tightly, the way his skin was too pale. Opened his mouth to ask for an explanation. Closed it again, feeling like he’d stepped off a cliff and fallen up instead of down. Why had he even messed around with the piano? Why hadn’t he left well enough alone? Nothing made sense except that he’d hurt Aziraphale again (again) and now Aziraphale wanted him to leave.

“Okay,” he said hoarsely.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale replied, moving towards the front door as if Crowley needed to be shown out. Crowley followed in a haze of misery. “I’ll— well, I’ll call you.”

“Right,” Crowley said, letting himself be hustled out of the shop like an unwanted customer. “I—”

The door closed behind him, the lock clicked, and Aziraphale yanked the blind down and hurried away.

Crowley waited three days. Aziraphale didn’t call.

The first night, he barely slept, he was so afraid of his dreams. He tossed and turned, got up for a while and tried to watch a film, went back to bed, tossed and turned some more. The next day was hell, especially with a large party order to fill, but at least it kept his mind off things until the evening.

On his lunch break, he dodged out to the shops and bought a packet of over-the-counter sleeping pills. He stayed up as long as he could, checking his phone every five minutes, before giving up and swallowing one of the pills around midnight.

He had the nightmare again, but this time, he couldn’t wake up. He dreamed that it was dark and he was dying, and it wouldn’t end, but even though all he wanted was release, he kept fighting to take another breath, to keep from slipping away, because he’d promised, he’d promised…

When his alarm finally ripped him out of it, he sobbed into the pillow for almost twenty minutes, sick to his stomach and doubting his sanity and desperate to hear Aziraphale’s voice.

There were no missed calls or messages on his phone. He scrawled a closed note and pinned it to the shop door, spent most of the day lying on the sofa under a blanket, watching old TV shows whose jokes and plot twists he knew by heart. He dozed, but jolted awake every time he might have sunk deeper, feeling the fever-heat and the fear creep back into his chest.

When he went to the shops later, he bought a bottle of whiskey that was a couple of steps above bearable, but not such good quality that he’d feel bad about what he was about to do to it. He ate oven pizza and drank most of the bottle and staggered off to bed when he couldn’t focus on the TV anymore. He didn’t dream, or didn’t remember dreaming, and although he felt wretched the next morning, the hangover was almost comforting in its familiarity.

He struggled through a quiet morning where not a single customer seemed to want to trudge through the rain, except one who walked in and asked for pink carnations and nearly sent him into a nervous breakdown. Somehow, he sold the flowers without screaming, but as soon as the customer was gone, he knew he couldn’t do this anymore.

He left another note on the door (he was going to be in trouble if he did too much of this sort of thing) and headed to Soho.

The bookshop was locked, the blind down, and for a moment it was spring again, and Crowley was standing there listening to the lady who ran the bakery tell him about strange Mr Fell and his habit of leaving for months or years. There was no notice this time, no indication that Aziraphale hadn’t simply stepped out to run an errand, or decided on a late opening, except that Crowley had a conviction bordering on terror that the door had been locked since he’d left three days ago.

Panic made him hammer on it, made him shout Aziraphale’s name, and he was already spiralling, already sure there would be no reply—

He didn’t hear footsteps, but perhaps that was because his heart was pounding so loudly in his ears. It took him by surprise when the door suddenly opened; he almost fell forward into Aziraphale, whose expression of irritation flashed instantly into alarm.

“Crowley? What is it, what’s wrong?”

“You said you’d call,” Crowley blurted out.

“Well, yes, I—”

Aziraphale stopped, staring at him, and a stricken look took hold of his face.

“Crowley,” he said urgently. “How— how long has it been?”

Crowley gaped at him in disbelief. He was wearing the same clothes as the last time Crowley had seen him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, his entire wardrobe seemed to be comprised of nearly-identical outfits—

“Three days,” he finally answered.

Aziraphale’s face crumpled.

“Oh, my dear,” he said, reaching out and taking hold of Crowley’s hands. “I’m sorry— I never meant— it’s just that when I get absorbed in something, I lose track of time—”

“For three days?” Crowley demanded, halfway between anger and incredulity. The half-hearted rain was working its way under his collar. “Didn’t you— didn’t you notice how many meals you got through, how many times you slept—?”

Aziraphale’s eyes darted guiltily away from his, and Crowley’s mouth dropped open.

“Did you sleep? Or eat? You must have— you can’t have been holed up in here for three days without—”

“I— well I mean I suppose I— I’d just sort of stop for a bit and then carry on—”

There was a lie in there but Crowley couldn’t make sense of it, not when he was sure Aziraphale was telling the truth about the time he’d spent doing— whatever he’d—

“What were you doing all that time?”

“Ah— reading, researching—” Aziraphale bit his lip, and peered at Crowley’s face with a whole new wave of concern. “Are you all right? You don’t look— I mean to say—”

He was still holding Crowley’s hands in his, Crowley realised, and it was enough to drain away his maelstrom of emotion into exhaustion.

“Can I come in?” he managed, suddenly conscious of how cold he was.

A nervous look crossed Aziraphale’s face, another flash of guilt.

“Not— not just at the moment,” he said. “The shop’s a bit— I’ll need to clean up—”

A weary ache settled in Crowley’s chest.

“Right,” he said. “Okay then.”

He pulled his hands away from Aziraphale’s, shoved them into his pockets, and turned to go.

“Wait—” He heard Aziraphale pull the door shut, then there was a hand on his arm, tugging him to a standstill before he could get up any speed. “Crowley. Look at me. Please.”

He was too tired not to obey. Aziraphale searched his eyes for a long moment, and whatever he saw there brought such self-recrimination into his face that Crowley flinched with the need to ease it away.

“Look,” he said desperately, “it doesn’t matter, I’m just— I just need to get some sleep, I’ll—”

“Crowley. I’m so sorry.”

To his shock, Aziraphale stepped forward and embraced him, wrapping his arms around him, pressing him close. Crowley stood stiffly for the length of one breath in and one breath out, and then sagged into it, pressing his face helplessly into Aziraphale’s shoulder. He was so warm; Crowley wanted to wrap himself around him.

“Let me take you home,” Aziraphale murmured, holding him tightly, cheek pressed to his damp hair. “Back to your flat. Let me— you look exhausted. Have you been eating?”

Crowley made a noise that was supposed to be affirmative, but came out more like a verbal shrug, which was more honest than he’d intended.

“Come on, then,” Aziraphale said. He brought one hand up, stroked the back of Crowley’s neck gently, just once. His fingers felt hot on the chilled skin. “I’ll drive. Did you open your shop today?”

“Yeah, for the morning…” Crowley reluctantly drew back, tried not to think about how close Aziraphale’s face was, how Aziraphale didn’t seem to want to let him go. “What about your— your research?”

“Never mind that,” Aziraphale said. His hand was still on the back of Crowley’s neck; he ran his thumb up and down briefly, let go even as Crowley shivered under the touch. “I had my priorities all wrong.”

When Crowley woke up, he was so confused that for a moment he thought he hadn’t woken up, that this was one of those strange dreams-within-a-dream. The light was wrong, the covers were wrong, the bed was wrong…

He started to roll over, and realised that he was on his sofa, not in his bed. The throw blanket had been tucked carefully around him. And it was early evening, the room dim with twilight.

He heard the sound of a page turning. He lifted his head, and saw Aziraphale sitting quietly in the nearby armchair, reading one of Crowley’s spy thrillers. From the faint furrow in his brow, Crowley had the sudden certainty that he was assembling a list of questions starting with why the villains had decided to blow up the moon and ending with some acid remarks about the hero’s choice of catchphrase. He laughed before he could stop himself. Aziraphale immediately looked up, and his expression softened into affection and concern.

“How do you feel?”

“Better. Thanks.” Crowley sat up and rubbed his eyes. “How long—?”

“A few hours. You seemed to need it. Are you hungry?”

He was, for the first time in days. Also more than a little embarrassed, now his brain was working more clearly again.

“Yeah, but I can— I can sort something out for myself. You don’t have to—”

“Don’t be silly.” Aziraphale set the book aside. “I’ll order something for us, or— or I suppose I could cook, if you like?”

He extended the offer with an overtone of worry that made Crowley smile despite himself. For all Aziraphale’s taste for good food, Crowley wouldn’t be surprised at all if his culinary skills extended to boiling the occasional egg. He almost wanted to accept, just to see what would happen.

But he was also very hungry and still felt as fragile as a pile of broken glass wrapped up in human skin, and Aziraphale had said order for us, and that meant he was going to stay regardless.

“There’s a good curry place,” Crowley said. “Menu’s on the fridge.”

Aziraphale stood up and disappeared into the kitchenette, returning triumphantly with the takeaway menu like it was a rare manuscript he’d unearthed in some library. Crowley realised he was smiling again, too wrung-out to hold it back when everything about Aziraphale was so dear to him.

Aziraphale caught the expression and paused mid-step, and Crowley looked away quickly, occupying himself with folding up the blanket that he’d been sleeping under.

“Sorry for— freaking out,” Crowley said, taking more care than was necessary to line up the edges of the blanket before each fold. “I’ll— it won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t,” Aziraphale replied quietly, an ache in his voice. “Because I won’t be so careless with you. It’s easy to forget sometimes how… human you are.”

Crowley stared at him, confused and slightly offended, but Aziraphale was moving again, and to Crowley’s surprise, he came to sit on the sofa instead of returning to the armchair. Not at the far end, either; he sat down right next to Crowley, so close Crowley could feel the warmth of him all along his right side.

“You haven’t kissed me,” Aziraphale said out of nowhere. Crowley’s brain stopped functioning in a cascade of error messages as he stared at Aziraphale’s profile. Aziraphale glanced sideways, bit his lip. “And it’s because I’ve made you afraid, isn’t it? Afraid that if you put a foot wrong, I’ll leave.”

Crowley looked away, swallowing hard against his suddenly pounding heart.

“Something like that,” he muttered, clutching the folded blanket tightly like a talisman. “Didn’t— know if you wanted—”

“Oh, dearest.”

Aziraphale reached out and took the blanket away from him, which was just rude, what was he supposed to do with his hands now—

Gentle fingertips on his cheek, turning his head towards Aziraphale, and then Crowley was being kissed, and despite the fact that they’d just been talking about it, he was completely unprepared. Aziraphale seemed to understand, though, didn’t seem to take offence or take his stillness as a rejection, just kissed him softly and sweetly, ran his hand up into Crowley’s hair and curled his fingers just enough to send a shudder down Crowley’s spine.

He was suddenly glad his hands were free, because he needed to wrap his arms around Aziraphale and grab handfuls of his warm, soft jumper and pull him closer. Aziraphale went so willingly that he almost ended up in Crowley’s lap, both hands in his hair now, kissing him and kissing him and murmuring wordless reassurances in between.

It had been a long time since Crowley had kissed anyone, and he’d never considered himself much good at it, if he were quite honest, but with Aziraphale it was so easy, as if his body already knew what do, as if Aziraphale already knew how to respond. So easy to flick his tongue tentatively against Aziraphale’s lips, and for Aziraphale to open his mouth eagerly and make a soft noise that went straight to Crowley’s libido. So desperately, helplessly easy for Crowley to close his eyes and hold on like he was drowning, like Aziraphale was the only solid thing in the world.

Crowley felt like he could do this forever, and he wasn’t sure why they stopped, in the end, except it seemed to happen naturally, the kisses gentling until their lips barely brushed, until they were leaning their foreheads together, eyes closed, breathing in sync.

“I’m sorry I waited so long,” Aziraphale whispered. “I’m just… not well-practised at taking the initiative. In general, if I’m honest, but particularly in… this.”

Crowley nodded. He felt like something that had been clamped around his heart had suddenly released, and like a weight he’d been dragging behind him had suddenly vanished, and like he might start laughing, the kind of bubbling, helpless laughter that came with sudden safety after too long under fire.

“Can I stay tonight?” Aziraphale went on, heartbreakingly hesitant and breathtakingly bold at the same time. “I want to look after you. I don’t think you’ve been looked after enough in your life.”

Crowley opened his eyes then, frowning in automatic deflection, but Aziraphale was so close, his own eyes so soft and blue and full of love, his voice came out half-hearted when he spoke.

“I’ve always got along all right by myself—”

“That was rather my point,” Aziraphale replied, and kissed him again, feather-soft and light as summer rain, drawing back before Crowley could deepen it. “You don’t have to anymore.”

Everything in Crowley should have rejected that, reached for the armour of sarcasm and dismissal, but at this moment he was cracked open and helpless to hide the tender heart of himself. He buried his face in Aziraphale’s shoulder, held onto him so tightly his arms ached, and let out a long, ragged breath as if he’d been holding it half his life.

“Stay,” he mumbled into the wool that smelled so wonderfully of Aziraphale. “Please.”

“Until the end of the world,” Aziraphale murmured, and if that was an odd turn of phrase, Crowley didn’t care, not when Aziraphale was stroking his hair like that. “I promise.”

Herein a Blossom lies—

A Sepulchre, between—

Cross it, and overcome the Bee—

Remain—’tis but a Rind.

Emily Dickinson

5

That Dares Not Grasp the Thorn

November 2008

It was hard to leave Crowley, even just for a few hours, but he insisted, clearly embarrassed - maybe even a little humiliated - by the state he’d been in the day before. He’d slept for ten hours overnight, with Aziraphale lying quietly by his side, ensuring that he didn’t dream at all. This morning he almost looked back to normal, except for the hesitant way his eyes kept sliding to Aziraphale, as if he was afraid to blink and find him gone.

Those glances rang through Aziraphale like a cracked bell, like an accusation. He should have known - should have understood the moment he returned and saw Crowley again that he hadn’t been careful enough - that he’d left his fingerprints too deep even in that short time. Should have seen how much hurt he’d dealt, should have realised sooner how it had twisted Crowley up with fear. Should have kissed him weeks ago - maybe months - instead of waiting for him to make the first move like he always had before.

The bookshop was still in chaos, books of prophecy and magic scattered everywhere, and what did he have to show for three days of research? Nothing except more questions, and the memory of Crowley falling apart in his arms. Three days without a word. Nothing, to an angel. Nothing, to Crowley, once. To a human? Insufferable. Unfair. Cruel.

It wouldn’t happen again.

Aziraphale snapped his fingers. The books returned themselves to the hidden room behind the hinged shelf, his notes and journals to their secret boxes. If he was going to find any answers, it wouldn’t be here, not in these words he’d already read so many times over the past few centuries. His books had failed him before; why had he thought they would succeed this time?

Perhaps, he thought with a stark honesty that didn’t often come to him, he had just wanted to shut out the world until the anguish of understanding had passed. The shock of realising that somehow, Crowley retained some memories of his past lives, and of knowing all too well what horrors lurked there. Of fearing that it was his fault, that it was his presence in Crowley’s life that was triggering these dreams. Of feeling torn apart, tugged one way by the desperate hope that Crowley would remember more, and the silent prayer that he never did.

There was a door in the back wall of the bookshop that currently led to a broom closet. Aziraphale couldn’t remember if he’d ever opened it when Crowley was present. He hoped not. He took a deep breath, and thought about Crowley’s flat above the flower shop. When he opened the door, there were stairs leading up to a set of rooms that hadn’t existed a moment ago.

He fussed over the space for a long time, trying to make it look lived-in, trying to remember what things humans kept around. He’d made a list while Crowley slept through the night, slipped away to itemise the contents of his bathroom and kitchen. All the implements for cooking (and they mustn’t seem too new and unused), the clever modern appliances for heating and cooling and mixing and cleaning, the razor he’d have to get into the habit of pretending to use, the toothbrush with the strange little rubber nubs on the back of it.

The flat was a bit small for two people. He expanded it, made sure there was enough space in the sitting room for Crowley to go off in a corner, the way he used to do in their apartment when they’d first moved to London at the start of the nineteenth century. Grief washed through him; he pushed it aside. He’d already spent too long sacrificing the here and now on the altar of the past. They had so little time.

He made the bath deep and luxurious. There had been a time when he’d enjoyed bathing, back when it was still done by candlelight, with servants hauling hot water from the kitchen. It was so much easier now. Everything was so much easier now; they were so clever, the humans, so marvellously inventive and endlessly imaginative.

(Why would anyone want to end it when they were just getting started? There was so much more, still so much more to come. It was a waste. It was a crime. It was… it was the Grand Plan, and there was nothing he could do about it.)

He made the bed the way he remembered that Crowley had liked it, broad and high and with a mattress that was neither too firm nor too soft. No-one had four-posters anymore, did they? A pity, he’d always liked the way closing the curtains had felt like being swathed in warm wings.

He spent the whole day on it, going room to room, working through the details: necessities, conveniences, luxuries. Things for Crowley, which he then immediately realised would be inappropriate to already have on hand, and waved away with a sigh. He could bring them back later. He tried a television, but he couldn’t work out what to do with the wires, so substituted it for a radio set. Crowley already thought him old-fashioned, and he’d always rather preferred listening over watching.

By the time he was done, Aziraphale was tired in a way he hadn’t been in years, but there was a soft hum of pleasure under it, the weariness of hard work for a worthy reward. He didn’t often create things out of whole cloth like this, couldn’t remember the last time he’d put so much effort and care into anything but his books, but when he thought about being able to invite Crowley up here, of making sure he understood that this was where he belonged, it still didn’t seem like enough.

He glanced at the coffee table in the middle of the sitting room. With a thought, a cut-crystal vase appeared. Aziraphale looked at it for a long time. Then he went down to the shop and picked up the phone.

Crowley answered on the second ring, as if he’d grabbed his mobile the second he saw Aziraphale’s name. Aziraphale took a careful breath.

“When you come over tonight,” he said, proud that his voice didn’t waver, “would you bring flowers?”

Crowley made a startled noise that metamorphosed into a laugh.

“I think I can manage that.” Aziraphale could hear his smile. “Anything in particular?”

Aziraphale closed his eyes.

“Roses,” he said.

August 2009

“Thought we could go out somewhere tomorrow night,” Crowley said, in that too-casual tone that Aziraphale would have recognised immediately, if he hadn’t been absorbed in a lovely little book of poetry he’d found on a market stall. “Watch a play. Get dinner somewhere nice.”

“If you like,” Aziraphale replied absently, tilting the page towards the light so he could catch the barest traces of pencil letters in the margin. Someone had tried their hand at writing a love poem of their own, given up in despair, rubbed the graphite off the page but left the indentations of their heartfelt words. “Anything you want to see in particular?”

The hesitation was just enough to get his attention. Crowley was sprawled over the far end of the sofa the way he usually did, feet not quite in Aziraphale’s lap but ready to inch into his space at the slightest invitation. He was staring at the ceiling with a studied nonchalance that meant he was actually quite nervous, and Aziraphale abruptly lost interest in the book.

“They’re doing Much Ado again,” Crowley said. “Thought we might— well, it’s, you know, it’s been a year—”

Aziraphale thought he felt his heart stop as he scrambled desperately to line up dates and times and the ridiculous speed of it all. Crowley finally risked a glance at his face, and whatever he saw there brought that awful guilty look into his eyes. He sat up suddenly, turning to put his feet back on the ground and (completely coincidentally, of course) hide his face by checking his phone.

“Never mind, it’s a weird thing to want to celebrate—”

“No, it’s not,” Aziraphale said, setting aside the book and willing the tremor out of his fingers. “It just— caught me by surprise. It’s really been a whole year?”

He slid along the sofa, pressed his hand to the small of Crowley’s back, felt the tension ease. How long was it going to take before these wounds Aziraphale had left on him healed? Would they ever? Or was it more than just his mistakes in this lifetime? Did Crowley somehow bear the scars of every other time Aziraphale had hurt him so terribly?

Crowley still dreamed. Once or twice he’d had terrible nightmares, but Aziraphale put a stop to that; as long as he was at Crowley’s side, he wouldn’t suffer like that again. He couldn’t do much on the nights that they didn’t share a bed, but those were few and far between now, and though Aziraphale had always felt like sleeping was a waste of time, he treasured every moment he could lie quiet with Crowley in his arms, could pretend it had always been like this and always would be.

He still didn’t know what it meant, that these fragments of Crowley’s past lives came back to him in his dreams. His human lives: he never seemed to dream of anything from before. No recollection of his true form, nothing of wings or scales or his own slit-pupil eyes, of all the times they’d met, of all the times they’d parted. He never dreamed of the Globe, never of Rome, never of the Garden.

The only exception was the tattoo on his cheek. It had never been there in any previous life; Aziraphale had hardly dared to ask about it. When he did, Crowley had been reluctant to answer, but finally he’d sighed with the resignation of someone who had tried to explain this before and never succeeded.

“Saw it somewhere, when I was seventeen. And I just thought… it was just right. Needed to be right here.” He’d tapped the coiled snake fondly. “Sounds crazy, I know.”

“It is right,” Aziraphale had replied, tracing his forefinger over the ink, and Crowley had caught his breath, and stared at him in wonder and relief. “It’s exactly right.”

He leaned in now and put his lips to it, heard Crowley sigh, the last traces of anxiety melting out of him.

“I take it you have tickets?” Aziraphale asked, smiling at the way Crowley blushed just a bit. “And a dinner reservation, probably.”

“Only if you want to—”

“I do want to.” Aziraphale leaned in and kissed him properly, pressed love and reassurance against his lips, held onto the moment, tried not to think past it. “Of course I do.”

He couldn’t quite push it away, though, the remorseless whisper in the back of his mind: one year down. Ten to go.

June 2010

Aziraphale was surprised by how reluctant Crowley was to drive the Bentley. He’d assumed he’d just be able to hand it over, give the car back to its rightful owner, but he’d reckoned without the delicate balance of human sensibilities surrounding monetary value. It wasn’t that Crowley didn’t want to take the wheel - Aziraphale could practically see his fingers twitch every time they drove anywhere - but he was equally worried about damaging such a valuable car, and Aziraphale couldn’t exactly explain that it was literally under divine protection.

He finally coaxed Crowley into the driver’s seat by pleading a headache on the day they were going to look over his parents’ old house. Crowley eased them out of central London with such nervous care that even Aziraphale had to bite back the urge to suggest he go a little bit faster, but once they were on the motorway, he started to relax, melting into the seat as if it had been made for him.

(Aziraphale wondered if it had. He never did get the full story, back in 1941, and now he never would.)

“It’s going to be a mess,” Crowley said as he smoothly overtook a caravan that had been dawdling in the middle lane. “Just warning you. Less charming country cottage and more one of the really bad episodes of Hoarders.”

“I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”

Crowley made a disgruntled noise. Aziraphale would have liked to ask a lot of questions about his childhood, his parents, but he didn’t dare. Crowley might start asking questions of his own, and so far Aziraphale had managed to avoid that particular ordeal. As long as they both treated family as a topic that was off-limits, he didn’t have to lie.

“You really haven’t been back since—”

“Since the funeral. Nope. Didn’t feel like it.”

Aziraphale bit his lip, looked out of the window at the scenery. It was nice not to be driving. He’d never much enjoyed it, but he’d felt a sense of duty to keep the Bentley running. A large silhouette wheeled against the sky; he craned his neck and caught sight of rust-red wings swooping over the verge.

“It’s so lovely to see them here again,” he murmured.

“Hmm?”

“The red kites. They used to be everywhere, you know, particularly in the cities. They’re scavengers, for the most part. Helped keep the streets clean of carrion and so on. But people treated them like pests, and then one day there weren’t any left. Until the reintroduction programme.”

Crowley laughed, shooting Aziraphale a fond look.

“You always make it sound like a personal anecdote when you talk about that sort of thing,” he teased.

Aziraphale made a noncommittal noise, hurriedly running the conversation back through his mind to check for anything egregious. It was so hard to keep track of what he should and shouldn’t remember, what had happened a decade ago and what had passed more than a century since. He remembered the kites squabbling over refuse in the filthy cities. For that matter, he remembered when there had still been wolves in the woods.

The longer Crowley drove, the more confident and at ease he seemed, and Aziraphale watched him, openly at times and covertly at others, smiling at the way he would stroke parts of the car absentmindedly, like it was a beloved pet. Aziraphale would fake as many headaches as it took to make this a permanent arrangement.

Their destination was surprisingly picturesque; from Crowley’s antipathy, Aziraphale had thought it would be a bit of a slum, but the village of Tadfield was lovely in the summer sun, as perfect as a postcard.

“So this is where you grew up?” he asked before he could stop himself.

Crowley made a sour expression as he navigated them through the village centre.

“Lord, no,” he muttered. “Can you imagine me running around this place with the local kids like the Famous Five? No, I grew up on a housing estate in Swindon. My parents moved here after I left home. You know, when I wasn’t holding them back any more from the kind of life they wanted.”

The bitterness could have turned milk, and Aziraphale ached for him. It was another pattern, he’d come to realise: in all Crowley’s lifetimes (the ones he’d seen up close, at least) he didn’t think Crowley had ever had loving parents. He wondered if it meant anything, or if it was just the luck of the draw.

(He’d taken the time to do a different kind of research, in the last year or so. Searching through birth records and family trees, online archives, reading old censuses. He’d confirmed what he’d long suspected; that every time Crowley had died in the past, he’d been reborn within a year, apparently a normal human baby with normal human parents. It hurt, to see the dates laid out, how short so many of his lives had ended up. Copenhagen had been the longest, in the end. Aziraphale wished he’d gone back just once, in all those decades after he’d left. He wished he could change a lot of things, now.)

“Here we are,” Crowley said, pulling the Bentley up to a rusty gate that had been rather overtaken by the nearby hedge. “Ugh. That’s not a good start.”

He fished out a set of keys and got out of the car to unlock the gate, while Aziraphale looked at the cottage beyond. It might not be in the best of repair, but it could be lovely, with some work. He watched Crowley wrestle the gate open, losing a battle with the hedge in the process, and smothered a laugh.

Crowley swung back into the driver’s seat. There was a bit of privet stuck in his hair and he had the look of a man who was contemplating mass herbicide.

“Should’ve brought my secateurs,” he muttered, putting the Bentley in gear and edging forward through the overgrown gate. “Or a flamethrower.”

“I’m sure you could whip it into shape in no time.” Aziraphale frowned. “Do you have a flamethrower?”

“No, but don’t tell the hedge that.”

The car rolled to a stop on weedy gravel drive. When Aziraphale got out, he was struck by how quiet everything was, no hum of traffic or murmur of voices, how clean the air seemed, how perfect a June day it really was here.

“It’s nice,” Aziraphale blurted out, and he didn’t really mean the cottage itself, which definitely needed a good deal of work. He meant the place, the village and its surrounding countryside. It felt loved, with a soft and simple love like a child wrapping chubby arms around a favourite toy. “It feels like a nice place to be.”

Crowley was looking around, the frown he’d been wearing since they arrived starting to ease away.

“Yeah,” he said, tilting his face upwards to examine the ivy that had climbed onto the cottage roof, closing his eyes for a moment and letting the sun bathe his face. “It’s… better than I remembered.”

Crowley wanted to clear the whole place out and sell it. Aziraphale suddenly wondered if he could persuade him to keep it instead. He thought he’d like to come back. Spend summer weekends here with Crowley, maybe. Get away from the city for a bit.

“All right, here we go.” Crowley found the front door key and unlocked it. “Brace yourself.”

“I really think you’re—” The door swung halfway open and immediately struck a pile of something in the hallway just beyond. “Oh dear.”

“Told you.”

“Yes, all right.” Aziraphale peered past him at the rickety side tables piled high with knick-knacks, the heaps of folded clothes on every step of the staircase, the stacks of magazines arranged neatly but covered in dust. “This may take a while.”

Crowley was eyeing the wooden beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, the patch of golden sunlight falling through the nearest window.

“Still,” he said slowly, “it could be all right, couldn’t it? I remembered it being… I dunno… darker. Colder. Narrower. But with a bit of redecorating…”

Aziraphale smiled, took Crowley’s arm in his own and rested his cheek on his shoulder for a moment.

“I was just thinking the same thing, dearest.”

April 2011

When Gabriel and Sandalphon walked into the bookshop, Aziraphale experienced a flashback so powerful he found himself rooted to the spot, unable even to force his face into a smile or mouth words of greeting. Without even meaning to, he glanced at the velvet-swathed piano - but Crowley wasn’t here this time, Crowley wasn’t here to see it end.

In an instant, his heart turned to stone, and then in the very next breath he felt it shatter into shards of a cold anger he’d never known in all his existence. No. Not again. Not this time. He curled his hands into fists and plastered on a bland and hopefully welcoming expression.

“Aziraphale!” Gabriel had his jovial expression on, throwing out his arms as if to initiate a hug, though he’d never dream of doing such a thing. “Good to see you!”

“Gabriel,” Aziraphale replied cordially. “Sandalphon. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Business, I’m afraid, not pleasure,” Gabriel said with a conspiratorial grimace. He glanced around the shop. “Perhaps we could go—”

“There’s no-one else here at present.” Aziraphale waved a hand, and the door locked itself, the sign turning to closed. He could hear the ice in his own voice; he prayed that Gabriel couldn’t. “You can speak freely.”

“Excellent.” Gabriel paused to examine a set of cookery books, then cast a critical eye over the rest of the shop. “You seem to have more books than last time, Aziraphale.”

“It’s an unfortunate necessity of doing business,” Aziraphale replied, fighting to keep the sarcasm out of the words. “It becomes harder to sell books if one doesn’t have any. It’s a human thing.”

“Humans,” muttered Sandalphon with the comfortable disdain of someone who’d only seen them from a distance, and thoughtlessly squashed them like ants.

“Anyway,” Gabriel said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them like he was trying to start a fire. “We didn’t come to chit-chat. We’ve received some information on the whereabouts of the Antichrist.”

Aziraphale swallowed against a wave of dread.

“You have?”

“Yes, it seems that Hell has arranged to have him adopted by the American Ambassador, right here in London. And you know what that means?”

That I could kill him and put a stop to all this? The thought flashed through Aziraphale’s mind in an instant, shook him with its simplicity and its cold, sharp-edged logic. Take the child out of play, and the whole thing falls apart, doesn’t it?

He had to take a steadying breath, horrified with himself, unable to unthink it.

“What does it mean, Gabriel?”

“It means you’re perfectly positioned to keep an eye on things, Aziraphale. Hell already has agents within the family, of course, making sure he grows up evil and so on. Now, that’s their right, can’t say it isn’t, but we don’t want any of those agents to get out of hand in the meantime, do we? Got to keep our hand in, no excuse to slack off on the thwarting just because the world’s ending, is there?”

“No,” Aziraphale said distantly. “I suppose not.”

“Excellent!” Gabriel clapped him on the shoulder. Aziraphale tried not to flinch. “So you’re to keep them under surveillance, make sure they don’t get too comfortable, keep us up to date on the boy’s progress. He shouldn’t be any trouble until his eleventh birthday. Got all that?”

Aziraphale nodded.

“We’ll let you know if you’re needed for anything else.” Gabriel turned to leave. “Make sure you get your reports in on time, we’re on a schedule here.”

“Of course,” Aziraphale replied. “I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”

He unlocked the door for them with a wave, watched them depart. He stood there for a long time, so long that before he knew it, Crowley was arriving, grumbling to himself as he juggled two bags of shopping and a sickly-looking aloe vera that was probably about to join the other rescued houseplants that had taken up residence in Aziraphale’s flat.

Aziraphale was moving before he gave any conscious command to his feet. He wrapped his arms so tightly around Crowley that he heard a gasp of surprise, buried his face in Crowley’s neck and closed his eyes, breathing him in, feeling his heart beat in his chest.

“Aziraphale? What’s wrong?” The bags hit the floor, there was a scraping sound as if the aloe vera had been shoved onto the nearest shelf. Crowley’s arms went around him and cradled him close. “What happened?”

They will not take you from me again.

“A couple of… acquaintances decided to drop by,” Aziraphale said, breathing deeply, letting the familiar scent calm him. “I’m not overly fond of them. They’ve left me a little upset.”

Crowley kissed his hair, ran soothing hands down his back.

“You need me to beat them up for you?”

Aziraphale snorted ungracefully into his collar.

“You?”

“You should see what these elbows can do in a fight.”

Aziraphale laughed, raised his head enough to press his lips to Crowley’s cheek.

“It wouldn’t help,” he sighed. “But I appreciate the offer.”

May 2012

Warlock Dowling was more than a bit of a brat, in Aziraphale’s opinion, but then, he was also not-yet-four-years-old, and at least he wasn’t in the habit of summoning hellfire when he had a tantrum.

In fact, he seemed terribly ordinary, even under the influence of the strange Satanic nun who served as his nanny, and the uncouth demon who acted as a bodyguard. Aziraphale didn’t dare enter the house, but he watched the boy play in the gardens, followed him discreetly when his mother took him out on trips.

Another year had passed. Aziraphale still hadn’t made up his mind what to do.

He’s the Antichrist, Aziraphale would think, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, running his fingers softly through Crowley’s hair. Killing him would be an act of goodness, surely. To protect the world and all the people in it.

(But he wasn’t thinking of the world, he was thinking of kissing Crowley awake in the morning, of the way he’d start smiling before he even opened his eyes.)

And then he’d go to the house and watch the child shrieking with delight as his mother chased him around the garden, the way she’d snatch him up and snuggle him as he squealed and laughed. The way the nanny, for all her eccentricities and tendency to greet people with “Hail Satan!”, treated him with kindness and affection. Even the boy’s father, barely present in their lives if truth be told, did try to spend time with his son when he could, and Warlock clearly adored and idolised him, at least at this stage of his life.

Aziraphale had thought about doing it today. They were going on a trip to the zoo; it wouldn’t be hard to arrange a traffic accident. He watched the boy climb excitedly into the car, babbling about the monkeys and the parrots and the penguins, clutching his stuffed bear with the inverted pentagram on its forehead.

He felt sick, felt cold and forsaken down to his very soul. He turned away. Not today, then. Not now, when the child was so happy, when it would rip his mother’s heart out to lose him so cruelly and suddenly.

(Would it ever not?)

Aziraphale was barely aware of heading back to the bookshop. He’d told Crowley not to expect him until later; he supposed he could go somewhere else, sit in a dark corner and dwell on his own guilt and cowardice, but he found he just wanted to go home. Find Crowley in the flat that might as well be called theirs now, maybe cooking dinner or watching that television show with all the clothes, push the choice away for another night.

He slowed as he reached the door. He could hear music; piano music. His heart caught and shuddered. He stopped to listen for a minute, then another. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. With an unsteady hand, he opened the door.

Crowley stopped mid-bar, swinging around with surprise and guilt on his face.

“I— thought you weren’t going to be back—”

“Do you do this often?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley studied his face anxiously; Aziraphale didn’t know what his expression was doing or how much of the chaos in his heart was reflected in it. “Play, I mean?”

“Not— not often.” Crowley glanced awkwardly at the keys. “I’ve been— um. I’ve been taking lessons, actually. Was— going to surprise you. Maybe. Hadn’t made up my mind, to be honest, wasn’t sure if you’d like it.”

“Well, I’m surprised.”

Aziraphale found himself drawn across the space between them. Crowley had unearthed the stool that had come with the piano. There was a carved snake peeping out from just behind his knee, and it made tears come to Aziraphale’s eyes, how familiar he looked there, and how different. It hurt, and it felt good, as well, like something settling back into place, like something he’d missed. When he reached Crowley’s side, he bent and kissed him, just like he used to when the piano was new. He felt the nervousness bleed out of Crowley at his touch. It was seldom there, these days, except in the moments like these, where the ghosts of the past thronged thick between them.

“I do like it,” Aziraphale said. “What was that you were playing, anyway?”

Crowley laughed.

“Only you would have to ask.”

“Should I know it?”

Crowley shifted on the stool, making room for Aziraphale to join him, then started playing the same thing again. He was good at it, Aziraphale saw, his hands moving easily, no missed notes or hesitations. He must have been having lessons for some time, quietly relearning the skill he’d half-remembered in his dreams. A sudden intense swell of love filled him, left him shaken. He slipped his arm around Crowley’s waist and watched his fingers dance across the keys.

“Ringing any bells?” Crowley murmured. Aziraphale shook his head. “Honestly, one day I’m going to sit you down and force you to listen to every volume of Now That’s What I Call Music until you catch up with the rest of the century.”

Aziraphale laughed.

“It is familiar,” he admitted. “I expect I’ve heard you listen to it.”

Crowley turned his head for a second to kiss the corner of Aziraphale’s mouth, missed a note, made a face, and returned his attention to the piano.

“Here,” Crowley said, and played the melody line a bit louder as he sang (slightly off-key), “I would do anything for love, Oh I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that—”

And the world spun, and Aziraphale drew in a sharp breath, and for the thousandth time asked himself if he could possibly understand God’s ineffable plan and its consequences in the ripples of the world.

Crowley stopped playing, half-turning on the stool to touch Aziraphale’s cheek with a frown.

“Are you okay?”

Aziraphale looked into his eyes, honey-gold and worried and full of love. Not the kids, he remembered: the horror in Crowley’s voice, the disbelief. You can’t kill kids.

“I love you,” Aziraphale whispered, burying his face in Crowley’s shoulder to hide his tears, relief and despair shocking through him like water sloshing in a tub as he knew all at once that there was only one correct choice.

Oh, that little half-gasp Crowley always made at the words, like he couldn’t quite believe them, like he didn’t dare hope they were for him.

“Love you too,” he murmured against Aziraphale’s hair. “You want me to play something else?”

“I want you to play me absolutely everything you’ve learned,” Aziraphale replied fervently. “And practice in here whenever you like.”

“It’s not much so far,” Crowley admitted, kissing his ear and then letting him go. “I’ve been staying away from the classical stuff, to be honest. But I did have a go at this…”

He reached for the keys again and started to play. He wasn’t as confident as he had been with the other piece, but Aziraphale recognised it within a few bars, and smiled.

“What was that about catching up with this century?”

“Hush, I know you like this one.”

Aziraphale leaned his head against Crowley’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and listened to the gentle lilt of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

He thought about Warlock Dowling coming back tired and thrilled from his visit to the zoo. Thought of his nanny getting him ready for bed, his mother coming in to say goodnight, his childish dreams of superheroes and dinosaurs. Thought about the years slipping away, the world spinning unawares towards its final destination. No matter how tightly he held onto Crowley at the end, he would be torn away.

But I can’t do it. I won’t do it. Not even for you. I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry I even considered it.

September 2013

Sicily was heavenly in the late summer, the fierce heat of August ebbing away into gentle breezes and cool nights.

He watched Crowley, searched for any signs of recognition, but all he saw was delight in the lovely villa they’d rented, pleasure in the wine and the food and the scented air, and love, always love, lapping at Aziraphale like the warm sea that rose and fell on the pebbly beach below the cliffs.

Would they ever have come to this, he wondered, if Crowley hadn’t been plunged into these repeating human lives? Oh, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t felt the deep affection Crowley held for him, before, the bond that had formed between them over five and a half millennia. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t known, deep down, that he cared rather more for Crowley than he did for anyone or anything else in creation. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t known it in his soul for what it was, and spent years, centuries trying to understand how there could be love between an angel and a demon.

But it had never been safe to acknowledge its true name, never been safe to spend more than a few hours in each other’s company, never been safe to drop their careful facade of allies of convenience. It perhaps wasn’t safe now, had never been safe for Aziraphale to reach out and touch Crowley’s mortal existence, not when humans were so fragile, and Heaven was so ruthless, but it was too late now for second thoughts, too late to do anything but hold on fast against the coming storm.

He wondered. Wondered if he would ever have known the delight of kissing Crowley, the joy of holding him close, the fierce pleasure and helpless abandon of making love. The simple things that came from spending the days together, the wordless understanding and the soft shaping of a shared life. Wondered what it meant for his soul, that he didn’t want to give this up, that if you gave him the choice of going back and preventing whatever had happened all those centuries ago, he’d hesitate.

But then sometimes he’d watch Crowley across the room, and the longing would seize him, choking and sharp-edged in his throat, for Crowley to look up, and for his eyes to be serpent-sulphur and wicked and knowing. To hear him say, angel, with all those centuries behind it. To hear him say, I missed you too.

Crowley did look up, and if his eyes were too human, they at least held a certain promise of mischief, and the gentle glow of the five years he’d spent at Aziraphale’s side.

“Sun’s setting,” Crowley said, unfolding himself from the chair he’d been slouching in, coming to wind lazy arms around Aziraphale’s shoulders and pluck the book from his hands. “We could go for a twilight swim.”

“That sounds lovely. I’ll just find my bathing suit—”

“Oh, not sure you need that,” Crowley murmured, kissing his neck with enough intent to make Aziraphale catch his breath. “It’s a very private spot, after all.”

“Are you trying to tempt me into some sort of risque open-air dalliance?”

“Is it working?”

His lips were right by Aziraphale’s ear, his teeth grazing gently over the line of his jaw. Aziraphale shuddered and closed his eyes and laughed breathlessly.

“Yes, my darling, it rather is.”

December 2014

Tadfield would have been a lovely place to spend Christmas under any circumstances, but the fact that it seemed to have some strange microclimate that ensured crisp, clear winter days and a perfect blanket of snow made it the only place Aziraphale wanted to be at this time of year. That, and the way the village made him feel, the warm and welcoming protective aura, the sense of coming back to a place of love. He didn’t understand quite what gave it such potency, such depth, but being here soothed his heart when it ached to breaking point, eased his grief when he found himself counting off the days until the end of the world.

The cottage was a wholly different place, wholly theirs now, from the garden where Crowley had decided to transplant his apple trees before they grew too big to be moved, to the book-lined study with Aziraphale’s favourite worn-leather armchair, to the kitchen where they had set the turkey on fire the first time they’d tried to cook a proper Christmas dinner. The tree that they’d selected from the nearby garden centre (and which had, as ever, not looked quite so big when surrounded by its fellows as it did when they tried to wrestle it through the door) was glimmering with coloured lights and gold tinsel. To Aziraphale’s relief, Crowley had never tried to put an angel on the top; they had a delicate, three-dimensional silver star instead, something Crowley had found in unopened packaging while he was clearing out his parents’ things, and decided to keep.

The knock on the door on Christmas Eve was traditional by now; Aziraphale already had the mugs of hot chocolate ready to go. Crowley always made faces about how twee it all was, but he was still always at the door before the second knock, and Aziraphale saw how fondly he grinned at the collection of bobble hats on the doorstep.

“Oh, no, are you lot back?” Crowley groaned, leaning on the door jamb with an exaggerated grimace. “Did you remember all the words to Away in a Manger this year?”

“We’ve got books,” Wensleydale exclaimed proudly. Aziraphale thought his glasses were even bigger and rounder than they had been the last time they’d seen him. “Cuz we’re big enuff to unnerstand the words now!”

“Some of ‘em,” Brian muttered, casting a doubtful look at his carol book, which was already discoloured and slightly ragged around the ages, much like something that had had a fizzy drink spilled on it. “My mum still won’t tell me what a virgin is.”

Mr Young - who had apparently drawn the short straw this year as Accompanying Adult - coughed hastily.

“Now, boys—”

“Um,” said Pepper with a scowl so fierce it had in the past given even Aziraphale pause. “Excuse me.”

“Sorry, sorry… I meant, now, children, you’re supposed to be singing, not talking Mr Crowley’s ear off.”

Aziraphale arrived at the door with the tray of mugs and set them on the side table that Crowley (not that he’d ever admit it) had positioned in the hallway a couple of years ago for exactly that purpose. Aziraphale usually handed them out after the fourth carol, on the basis that they needed time to cool down, although in truth he had no compunctions about ensuring that the cocoa would be the perfect temperature as soon as it passed into eager little hands.

“We’ve been looking forward to it all week,” Aziraphale said encouragingly (and truthfully: he’d heard better renditions of the music of Christmas than four piping voices that kept falling out of time with each other, but none that brought him quite so much delight). “Go on, what’s first?”

Three of the children looked at the fourth. Adam Young wasn’t tall, for a six-year-old, and his round face and curls were hardly imposing, but somehow, it was always him that the others looked to for instructions.

“While Shepherds Watched,” Adam said firmly. “But wiv’ the proper words, okay, ev’rybody?”

“What, no sock-washing?” Crowley said, winking at Brian. “Shame.”

They had a bit of a false start, and Aziraphale was almost certain he heard some non-standard lyrics in there, but that could just be Pepper, who occasionally had strong opinions on the pronunciation of words and was unswayed when the rest of the world disagreed.

(Aziraphale always struggled not to laugh at this one, not least because he knew how much Gabriel hated it. The birth of Christ had really not gone down at all the way humans had been telling it for two millennia, and a surefire way to get under Gabriel’s skin was to enquire innocently about the difference between Bethlehem and Babylon.)

Away in a Manger was next, sung with perhaps more enthusiastic belting out of the gentle tune than strictly necessary, then Jingle Bells, then Ding Dong Merrily On High, which suffered a slight hitch in that none of them quite knew when to stop singing the gloria part. Crowley was shaking with suppressed laughter by the time Mr Young intervened.

Aziraphale handed out the hot chocolate, complete with mini marshmallows and a peppermint candy cane in each mug. There was a round of mumbled thank yous and then appreciative slurping. Crowley pulled out a bottle of whiskey from somewhere and held it up while the children were distracted; Mr Young gratefully accepted the addition to his own mug.

(He was younger than Crowley, but somehow it was hard to think of him as Arthur. He was a man who’d been born to be a Mr.)

It was perfect and it was so terribly fragile and fleeting and in the midst of all this simple joy, of secretly watching the gentle way Crowley teased the children, the way they laughed at him and tugged on his sleeves to get his attention, Aziraphale felt a pain like an icy hand gripping his heart.

Five years left. How has so much time passed already?

He realised Adam was looking at him with a frown, hurriedly smoothed his expression away from whatever might have been leaking through.

“What are you hoping to get for Christmas, then?” he asked, an easy distraction for a six-year-old.

Adam’s eyes lit up and he took a deep breath.

“I want,” he began, “a dinosaur that really roars an’ a lamp that makes stars on the ceiling an’ a laser sword an’ rollerskates an’ a puppy an’ a—”

“I want never gets, Adam,” Mr Young admonished him with a sigh and a grimace. “Now, remember, we talked about realistic expectations…”

Adam turned big, hopeful eyes on his father, the picture of a child who had never met a realistic expectation he couldn’t improve with a little imagination.

Crowley caught Aziraphale’s eyes, looking far too pleased with himself, and Aziraphale mock-glared, because all right, he had questioned buying the pack of glow-in-the-dark stars, and Crowley had insisted they would be the perfect gift for Adam.

“Now that reminds me,” Aziraphale said, putting down his mug and heading towards the tree in the sitting room. “I do believe we have a little something here for each of you…”

In all his years on Earth, he’d brought countless blessings to the needy and hope to the desperate, but Aziraphale was fairly certain he had never brought such joy to anyone as he did by handing a group of excited six-year-olds a present each on Christmas Eve.

Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. After they’d gone and the door was safely closed, Crowley took his face in both hands and kissed him.

“I swear, every year when we do this, you almost shine,” he murmured. “Proper little Christmas angel, aren’t you?”

Aziraphale’s heart clenched painfully. He managed a laugh, though it sounded forced to his own ears.

“I’m not much of an angel.”

It slipped out: too honest, too tired, too raw. Crowley started to frown; Aziraphale pulled him in and kissed him until he went pliant and eager in his arms.

Outside, it started to snow.

October 2015

Aziraphale was beginning to think it had been a mistake, coming to Rome. He’d wanted to see it again, wanted to see it with Crowley at his side, but he’d reckoned without the sheer number of memories he had wound up with the place. Rome had been the city for so long, at least in this part of the world, and both Heaven and Hell had been so preoccupied with its religious dominance, that he and Crowley had run into each other with more frequency than at any other time in their long history. They’d eaten oysters, more than once (Crowley had developed a taste for them, to Aziraphale’s delight); they’d drunk wine, visited the baths, watched with a kind of morbid fascination as the once-great Empire shook itself apart.

He’d thought he’d enjoy taking Crowley to their old haunts, introducing him to all of it over again, but without that shared pool of memory, the sights seemed diminished, the city a weary shadow of what it once had been. Modern Rome had its own charms, of course, but Aziraphale had come here to walk the bones of Old Rome, to trace the veins that had once carried the lifeblood of an Empire, and now he found himself looking at a corpse.

Crowley seemed content enough, but Aziraphale had to watch every word, and felt a dull grey sadness creeping in on him with every day that passed. He tried not to let it show, but he found himself looking at the ruins and the fading remnants, thinking about how all the cities of the world would be like this before very long.

He’d thought of a mad plan lately, something he kept coming back to over and over even though he knew it was futile. Could he take Crowley away somewhere, before the end? There’d be no place on Earth that would truly escape Armageddon, but the planet itself would survive, though a wretched husk. Could Aziraphale hide them in some deep, secret cave, create a sort of sanctuary where the war between Heaven and Hell would not find them, where the Antichrist in his new rule of Earth would never look?

(But what then? Crowley would still die, eventually. What would happen to his soul, if he survived past the final reckoning? Would he even want to live like that, cowering in the dark, never to see the stars again?)

“Hey.” Crowley touched his hand lightly; Aziraphale jerked guiltily back into the moment. “Everything all right in there?”

Aziraphale bit his lip, looked out over the piazza at the early-evening crowds.

“I’m not having as much fun as I thought I would,” he finally admitted.

Crowley snorted gently. “Yeah, I’d noticed.”

“I’m sorry, dearest—”

“How about we leave, then?” Crowley leaned back in his chair, picked up his wineglass, smiling but serious. “Just pack up and finish off the holiday somewhere else?”

“I thought you were enjoying yourself.”

“It’s fine. The wine’s nice. The company’s better, though, and I can take that with me.”

Aziraphale started to protest that they couldn’t, then stopped. Why not? Why shouldn’t they just go wherever they wanted? Why shouldn’t they leave behind these grey ghosts and long-lost nights?

“Did you have anywhere in mind?” he found himself asking.

Crowley shrugged.

“I dunno, you’re the well-travelled one. Venice? Venice is supposed to be nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Aziraphale felt like a sudden weight had lifted off him. “It is, actually. It’s very nice.”

(And it was somewhere they’d never been together, though he’d once, in the midst of a sixteenth-century Carnival, daydreamed wistfully of running into a black-clad figure in a serpent mask whom he couldn’t possibly be expected to recognise or avoid talking to.)

“Come on, then.” Crowley drained the rest of his wine, stood up, held out his hand. “Let’s go back to the hotel and make some arrangements, shall we?”

Aziraphale didn’t need help getting out of his seat, but he took Crowley’s hand anyway, and let him lead them both wherever he chose.

March 2016

Crowley was nervous, and nervous enough that he kept avoiding Aziraphale’s eyes and losing the thread of conversations. It had been a long time now since anything had made Crowley so jumpy around him, so long that Aziraphale had almost begun to believe that it would never happen again. He didn’t like it, and fretted endlessly over what could have caused it, but he came up blank when he tried to think back over the last few weeks. Crowley hadn’t dreamed any more than usual, and they hadn’t talked about anything that touched on the places Aziraphale dared not tread.

He tried to find out subtly, but Crowley either missed the question or dodged it, Aziraphale couldn’t even tell which. He was just starting to think he might need to resort to desperate measures, like asking Crowley what was wrong, when Crowley finally screwed his courage to the sticking point (aided by several glasses of wine).

“I was just wondering,” Crowley said, apropos of nothing, halfway through a conversation about the latest exhibition at the Tate, “and, look, it’s just, I mean, just wondering, okay, it’s not—”

He seemed to tangle himself up with his own tongue. Aziraphale tried not to hold his breath, ran his eyes along the length of him where he had twisted himself sideways into an armchair, eyes fixed resolutely on the ceiling. Tried not guess what Crowley could have been wondering about. Had it been long enough for him to notice that Aziraphale didn’t age? Had Aziraphale finally said something so unequivocally impossible that he’d started to pull on the threads of it? Had Crowley somehow found Aziraphale’s latest set of orders from Heaven, which he’d been so sure he’d hidden quickly enough when they appeared on the kitchen table?

Crowley took a large gulp of wine and then looked at his glass in betrayal when he discovered he had emptied it. Not for the first time, Aziraphale wished for the convenience of snapping his fingers to refill it. Just now he didn’t dare move towards the bottle, in case it broke the moment and sent Crowley running for cover again.

“I just thought— maybe you’d been thinking about it too, you know, and maybe I should— it’s not like it really has to mean anything, I suppose, but it might be— it would be— I’d like—”

He tripped over his words again and made a noise of pure frustration.

“Please tell me you know where I’m going with this,” he said finally, shooting Aziraphale a desperate glance.

Aziraphale shook his head, utterly at a loss. Crowley’s mouth tightened, and he suddenly rocketed upright and grabbed the half-empty wine bottle. Aziraphale watched as he refilled his glass and drank deeply from it.

“I was wondering,” Crowley managed, staring at the carpet so intently he seemed to be planning to memorise it, “if you’d thought. At all. About. Marriage?”

God, Aziraphale wished he had better control of his face, was better able to hide his shock, wasn’t so transparent to Crowley now after all these years. Crowley took one look at him and flinched away, scrambling out of the chair and almost spilling his wine, putting distance between them, pretending he was for some reason very interested in checking on the plants on the windowsill.

“Right, okay, that’s a no then, it’s fine, like I said, just wondering, doesn’t matter really—”

“Crowley—”

“Uh, just a sec, I think I heard my phone—”

Crowley fled into the kitchen. Aziraphale sat very still until he could breathe again and pull himself out of the whirlwind that had seized his mind. He thought about marriage.

He thought: it would be blasphemy, surely, an angel and a human - who was once a demon! - asking God to join them together for eternity.

(More blasphemous than what they already shared? Didn’t God see everything, know everything, anticipate everything?)

He thought: it wouldn’t be fair, when he doesn’t know the truth, when I’d be making mortal vows that don’t even apply to me.

(More unfair than living with Crowley as he did now? Than pretending to be human and hiding Crowley’s past lives from him?)

He thought: it would be dishonest to promise a lifetime when I know we have only three years left.

(More dishonest than lying every day, as he did by omission if nothing else? Than hiding the incontrovertible fact of the Apocalypse from Crowley?)

He thought: it would put him in danger.

(More danger than Crowley was already in, when Gabriel could drop in at any moment? Than he would face when the skies grew dark and the seas began to boil?)

He thought: I can’t.

(Why?)

It was something humans did. Not demons. Not angels. It didn’t work like that for them.

(I wonder, has anyone ever tried?)

Marriage was a human thing, really, in the end. Oh, they might ask the Almighty to bless their unions, but they had a hundred ways of entreating divine favour, who knew what God really thought of any pair (or more) of humans who bound their lives together? Some of them didn’t even bring God into it at all. Some of them just trusted that whatever the road ahead brought, they’d rather face it hand in hand.

(So clever, humans. So clever, so creative, so compassionate, when they wanted to be. Reaching out to each other, over and over, even if it burned them. Reaching out, holding on. For whatever portion of forever they were allotted.)

I’d marry you, you know. If it were permitted for men like us.

Aziraphale got to his feet and went into the kitchen. Crowley was standing by the counter, drinking a glass of water with the grim determination of someone who intended to consume a lot more alcohol in the near future and was doing his best to mitigate the inevitable hangover. His phone was in his back pocket, where Aziraphale was fairly sure it had been all along.

“I didn’t say no.”

Crowley froze, gripping the glass so tightly Aziraphale could see his knuckles whiten.

“But you hadn’t thought about it,” he mumbled. He’d been running his hands through his hair; it was a wild tumble across his shoulders. “Had you?”

Aziraphale crossed the room, took the glass gently out of Crowley’s hand, laced their fingers together. With his other hand he began smoothing Crowley’s ruffled hair back into place.

“No,” he admitted, “but then, you know I can be a little… slow to catch up with you, dearest.”

Crowley huffed a laugh.

“Well anyway,” Crowley said, pulling Aziraphale in and hugging him tightly, the beginnings of relief in his voice. “Like I said, I was just wondering. Not asking. Just, you know. Starting a conversation.”

Aziraphale wondered if it would ever not take his breath away, to hear that depth of love and patience, to know that no matter how long he took to get somewhere, Crowley would always be waiting.

“Crowley.”

“Yes?”

“Ask me.”

A swift intake of breath, Crowley’s hands curling into the back of his shirt.

“Marry me?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale whispered. And then, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, “But not in a church, I think.”

April 2017

It took Crowley a while to notice, which wasn’t surprising, since it turned out one’s wedding day was a surprisingly busy affair with innumerable small details to attend to. He spotted it as they were stealing a moment away from the small reception in the cottage garden, frowned at Aziraphale’s hands.

“Where’s your ring?”

Aziraphale held up his left hand, where the new gold band sparkled in the late afternoon sun. Crowley’s expression softened briefly into something that might be called positively dewy-eyed, before he reached for Aziraphale’s right hand, touched his bare pinky finger.

“The other one, I meant.”

Aziraphale looked at the space where his signet ring had rested for so long. He had worn it since the Beginning, since the first moment he arrived on Earth. It hadn’t been given to him like the sword, assigned to him like his body. No-one had made him wear it as a token of his allegiance to Heaven. He’d chosen it himself, chosen the weight and the shine of it, chosen to mark his side, to bear it as an oath of loyalty. He had never taken it off, until this morning.

“It was… something I wanted to leave behind,” he said, curling his fingers into Crowley’s, drinking in the sight of him, a little bit flushed, a little bit stunned, a little bit head over heels in love. “This seemed like as good a time as any.”

“You sure? You’ve always worn it, as long as I’ve known you. You know you’re allowed to wear more than one ring, right?”

Teasing, laughing, just a touch of concern, of wanting to be sure that Aziraphale wasn’t making some unnecessary sacrifice. Aziraphale kissed him, partly to shut him up, but mostly because he couldn’t help himself.

Later, after the sun had gone down (but the evening stayed miraculously warm and pleasant, for tempermental April), there was dancing, which Aziraphale participated in for the strict minimum time necessary and then fled from with all due speed. Crowley had no such dignity and had been responsible for the playlist, so Aziraphale resigned himself to sitting quietly alone for the first time that day. He didn’t mind it. It was a beautiful night, and the people here were kind, and happy for them, and for a little while he could almost pretend he was truly human, and that there were decades stretching ahead to enjoy.

There was a shuffle at his elbow, and a mop of curls appeared over the top of the table as Adam Young clambered into the seat next to him.

“Bit past your bedtime, isn’t it?” Aziraphale asked, smiling.

“Special treat,” Adam replied with a grin. Then his face grew serious. “Why are you sad?”

Aziraphale choked on nothing, quickly looked away.

“I’m not sad. Why would you think that?”

“You’re always sad,” Adam said bluntly. “Even when you’re happy, a little bit of you is sad. I thought maybe today would be different, but it’s not.”

Aziraphale caught his breath, stared at Adam for a long moment. Eight years old, with that coltish grace that came from spending his time running around in the woods and fields, and that fierce intelligence that drove him to read and imagine and question.

“It’s not something I can explain,” Aziraphale said finally. “If I could change it, I would, but since I can’t…”

He looked for Crowley, found him in the middle of what seemed to be some sort of group dance that involved a lot of flailing arms and waggling hips. He smiled despite himself, felt the simultaneous tug of sorrow in his chest. Adam was far too perceptive, for a child his age.

On impulse, he went on, “Adam, can I ask you something?”

Adam shrugged. “Sure.”

“Is he happy?”

He looked back to Crowley, found him looking around in turn. Their eyes met across the garden, and Crowley smiled like there was no-one else in the world but them.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “He is.”

“Then that’s enough,” Aziraphale replied, as Crowley started towards him. “That’s enough for me.”

September 2018

It was only a minor accident. It could have been so much worse. Aziraphale knew exactly how much worse, because he’d been the one to arrange things so that it wasn’t, and he didn’t think his heart had returned to a normal rate in all the hours since.

“I’m okay,” Crowley said for the hundredth time.

He really was. Nothing broken, just some scrapes and bruises, a sprained wrist. If he’d come off the bike half a dozen other ways, if the reckless asshole in the Prius hadn’t swerved just far enough after clipping him, if the van coming in the other direction had had slightly less efficient brakes or its driver worse reflexes…

If it had happened anywhere but right in front of the bookshop, while Aziraphale was looking out of the window…

“Aziraphale.” Crowley sighed and got up with a wince from his chair. “You’re supposed to put the water in.”

Aziraphale realised he was, indeed, staring at the perfectly dry teabag in its cup. He didn’t know when the kettle had boiled, but it wasn’t steaming anymore.

“Sorry, I—”

Crowley hugged him from behind, rested his chin on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“Think it might be time I got ride of the bike,” Crowley said gently. “Yeah?”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and nodded. Crowley barely used the motorbike anymore, preferring the Bentley, which was now his in all but name. He’d even gone to the great effort and expense of having a music player installed without damaging the vintage dashboard. Crowley could do something clever with his phone that made him able to play whatever they liked at the touch of a button. He’d made special playlists for Aziraphale, and the fact that they were all labelled things like “Old Music”, “Really Old Music” and “Music So Old It Isn’t On iTunes So I Had To Rip It Specially” just made him smile.

Crowley barely used the bike anymore, but it had just been a quick errand, he hadn’t wanted the hassle of trying to park…

It could have been over so quickly.

Aziraphale didn’t realise he was crying until Crowley told him not to, turned him around on the spot and held him close, soothed a hand down his back like Aziraphale was the one who’d been hurt.

“It’s okay. I’m okay. And if I spot that wanker with the custom numberplate coming down our street again—”

“Oh, don’t worry, he’s already thinking better of his actions,” Aziraphale mumbled with vicious certainty. “I’m sure he’ll never drive above the speed limit again. And start campaigning for better road safety measures.”

Crowley snorted a laugh against Aziraphale’s hair. He was shaken too, but he’d pushed it aside, the way humans did, that moment’s intimacy with Death, that cold whisper on the back of the neck. Aziraphale wished he could do that. Wished he could stop imagining what would have happened - a second either way - or if he hadn’t been paying attention…

He shuddered. Crowley’s arms tightened around him.

“Glad you haven’t lost your faith in people’s better nature,” Crowley said. “Personally I tend to think people like that don’t change.”

They often didn’t, unfortunately, but they did when they found themselves dreaming of the wrath of angels and the judgement of God for the next several weeks. Maybe it was petty. Maybe it was unangelic behaviour. Or who knew? Maybe Aziraphale was saving the man from a lifetime of grubby little selfish sins and oblivious steps towards damnation.

Except it wouldn’t be a lifetime, would it? It was barely a year now. What would it even have mattered, if Crowley had died out there today? It wasn’t like they had enough time left.

It mattered. Aziraphale found the tears were too strong to choke back, found himself all but sobbing into Crowley’s shoulder.

“Hey.” Crowley sounded concerned now, maybe even a little alarmed. “Come on. It’s okay. Aziraphale. It didn’t happen. You can’t get caught up worrying about things that didn’t happen.”

He couldn’t explain, of course. Couldn’t explain that it wasn’t the things that didn’t happen that were tearing him apart as they stood here in the quiet of their own kitchen, holding each other like they had so many times before. Couldn’t explain that it was the certainty of the things that would happen, the deadline inexorably approaching, and the agony of waiting for it helplessly like a deer in the headlights.

There had to be something. Something he hadn’t thought of. Something else he could try…

He fought his own breathing under control, willed away the tears.

“I suppose you’re right,” he managed hoarsely. “But yes, I think you should get rid of the bike.”

Crowley laughed a little shakily, kissed his temple.

“I’ll never complain about parking again.”

August 2019

It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. There just wasn’t enough time. For months now, Aziraphale had waited until Crowley was asleep, then crept downstairs to the bookshop, pulled out his secret notes and private books, spent hours poring over them, searching for some clue that he’d missed, some hint as to the reason for Crowley’s human lives.

He studied the Apocalypse, re-reading Revelation, puzzling through prophecies. He used the internet now that Crowley had shown him how, though most of what he found was garbage, humans telling stories for other humans, fiction and fact blurred beyond recognition. He ordered more texts, and stayed up late skimming through them, and hurried to hide them when he saw dawn creeping around the window blinds.

It wasn’t enough.

But there had to be something. There had to be something. How could God do this, throw out a world so full of life and potential, destroy so many lives, so many loves? What about the children? What about the whales? What about Crowley, who’d been torn so violently from what he should have been (not once, but twice; whyever had he been permitted to Fall?), thrust into a riddle that Aziraphale had not been clever enough to solve?

Prayer, for an angel, was a different sort of affair than for a human. There was no delusion that one was speaking directly to God; there was a chain of command, a pecking order. When Aziraphale prayed, he knelt by his circle and lit his candles; it was the equivalent of dialing a number and waiting for someone to take his call.

Or it had been, up until now. Now he found himself praying in a way he never had before, in a way that was all too human. Sometimes silent, sometimes aloud. Sometimes angry, sometimes pleading, sometimes weeping.

Why? Why? Why?

He knew where those sorts of questions could lead. He didn’t care anymore. Falling couldn’t be worse than losing Crowley, than losing everything. And if Falling was the punishment for demanding some compassion, some accountability… perhaps Lucifer had had the right of it all along.

(He didn’t Fall, as far as he could tell. He was almost disappointed. He was almost angry. But mostly, he was afraid, a terror deep and dreadful that swelled with every passing hour.)

He left it too late one morning as the end times loomed, had to rush to hide the books and shove the hinged bookcase back into place as he heard Crowley moving around upstairs. He hurried back up to the kitchen and tried to pass it off as an early morning desire to find a particular book, but Crowley caught his hands, stilled his over-eager explanations.

“I’m worried about you,” Crowley said, searching Aziraphale’s eyes, running his thumbs over the back of Aziraphale’s hands. “You’d tell me if anything’s wrong, wouldn’t you?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Aziraphale replied, and the lie stuck in his throat so that it almost choked him. Every moment now was anguish and terror, waiting for the axe to fall. “I just…”

Crowley looked like he didn’t believe him, but he pulled him into his arms all the same, held him close for longer than either of them could pretend was just a casual morning embrace.

“I’ve some errands to run,” Aziraphale said, making up his mind all in a rush. “I’ll be out for the morning, I think.”

“On a Sunday?” They always spent Sundays together. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, not today.”

“All right.” Crowley kissed his cheek, the corner of his mouth, pressed their lips together for just a moment. “I’ll see you at lunch time, then.”

Aziraphale fled as fast as he could without worrying Crowley further. He took the tube to the Dowlings’ grand house, bent reality around himself so he could slip past the human security and the bodyguard demon, seeking out the child who would destroy the world in just under a week.

Warlock Dowling would be eleven years old in three days and seemed glued to his mobile phone, playing some sort of game that flashed and popped in his hands. There was a sulkiness in his face that came from getting his own way too often and the slow beginnings of understanding that the world was a lot more complicated than he had been led to believe. The toys he’d loved so much had been put away - taken away? - and his room was full of untouched books and complicated construction kits which had immediately lost several small but important pieces on being opened. They wanted him to be a specific kind of clever, to use his brain in a particular way. He just wanted to make some friends who liked him and not his father’s money.

Please don’t do it, Aziraphale had come here to say. Surely you know who you are by now. Surely you can feel it coming. Please don’t do it, don’t tear it all down. Don’t you want to find out what happens next?

But Warlock was scowling at his phone and in his mind was the roil and rebellion of a pre-teen who felt betrayed by the people he’d trusted but had yet to put words around the feeling, and so lost himself in apathy. Find out what happened next? What could possibly be interesting enough to bother?

Aziraphale left without revealing himself, so heartsick he could hardly walk, so terrified he could hardly breathe. There was nothing particularly hellish about Warlock Dowling, but in a way, that made it worse: he was human, at least in his own mind, with all the flaws and failings of humanity, with every spiteful impulse and desperate desire. Was there grace in him? Perhaps, but Aziraphale no longer had faith that it could counterbalance the weight of the world that had spun for six thousand years with all of Eve’s children upon its back.

His heavy feet took him home unbidden. He unlocked the door, and stepped inside, longing for forgetfulness, knowing that he couldn’t escape his own thoughts this time.

He froze.

The hinged bookcase that formed the door to his secret room was swung wide open, some of its books of prophecy fallen to the floor. The reason was clear enough: Crowley stood in the middle of the space, his back to Aziraphale, staring at what was inside.

A terrible ringing sound filled Aziraphale’s ears, a cold and a heat flushing through him intertwined, a feeling like falling.

“Crowley—”

Crowley jerked, swung around. He was chalk-pale and wide-eyed, something like horror in the hunch of his shoulders, something like fear in the way he looked at Aziraphale.

“What— what is this?” he choked, one flailing hand gesturing at the room behind him. “Aziraphale, what the hell is all of this?”

He could take the memories away, Aziraphale thought distantly, he could reach right into Crowley’s head and steal away everything he’d seen behind that hidden door. He could take him back upstairs and pretend nothing had ever happened and wash away that wild disbelief in Crowley’s eyes.

He could… he could…

He could do nothing, in the end. He could do nothing. There had never been anything he could do. He’d followed the same old road to ruin, he’d given in to selfish need, he’d struggled like a fly in tar, like an angel who dared to question. It was over, one way or another. He’d lose everything, whether it was in this moment or a week from now. He’d lose Crowley, as he’d already lost him so many times, as he’d known all along that he would again. He’d lose everything. Everything.

The world had gone dim, the ringing in his ears now a roar, the end times arriving ahead of schedule—

“Aziraphale.” Crowley’s hands on his shoulders, then his back. His voice taut with confusion and questions, but his hands so gentle, pulling Aziraphale in close. “Breathe, sweetheart, it’s all right, it’ll be all right—”

He used endearments like that so rarely, while Aziraphale scattered them freely (my dearest, my darling). Why was Crowley the one comforting him? Why was Crowley still here, still holding him tight when the shards of lies and betrayal were falling all around them?

In the absence of any answers, he did as Crowley told him: breathed. Breathed in the scent of him. Felt the tension thrumming through him like a wire, but also that patience, that endless willingness to wait, that wellspring of love and trust.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale whispered, hearing his own voice break. Over Crowley’s shoulder, he looked at the secrets exposed to the light of day. “I—”

“Just tell me,” Crowley replied, shaky and desperate. “Please. Tell me what’s going on. Why you have— how you have all, all this— what it means—”

Aziraphale held him tight for one more moment, then gently pushed him away. With a thought, he locked the bookshop door and drew down the blinds. Then he took a deep breath, and unfurled his wings. They glowed in the dim light, wrought of divinity, so laden with the truth of what he was that no words were needed to explain.

Crowley jerked back, eyes wide and stunned, staring open-mouthed. Aziraphale tried not to flinch from his shock, stood still and quiet, let him look, let him understand. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor, unable to bear seeing either fear or awe come into Crowley’s face, of reverent wonder taking the place of familiarity and affection.

There was a long pause.

“Are— are they supposed to be like that?”

Aziraphale blinked, looked up despite himself. Crowley was regarding his wings with the faintest hint of a frown.

“Like what?”

“Messy? The feathers are all—”

The world tilted under Aziraphale and realigned with a shudder and a shock.

“Messy?” he repeated, voice rising in pitch. “I’m showing you my wings and that’s the first thing you say?”

Crowley shrugged helplessly, eyes still roving above Aziraphale’s shoulders, the faintest, tiniest curve of amusement at the corner of his mouth.

“I dunno, do you, like, brush them or something? Is there such a thing as a wing comb? I just thought— not that I think about angels on a regular basis, you know— but I would’ve thought they’d be sort of sleek and shiny—”

“Just because some of us don’t spend hours preening—”

Crowley’s eyes snapped to his. The twitch of his lips became a smile. He started to laugh. And Aziraphale felt as though he had seen the truth of the universe revealed, as if it had been Crowley who had finally unveiled his true nature. He made a choked noise, stepped forward. Crowley caught him, cupped his face and kissed him, and Aziraphale shuddered under it, and didn’t try to hold back the tears that spilled down his cheeks.

“Okay,” Crowley said, leaning their foreheads together. “I have questions. A lot of questions.”

Aziraphale laughed shakily.

“Of course you do,” he murmured. “You always do. I’m not sure I have answers. But I’ll do my best.”

On all her breezes borne

Earth yields no scents like those;

But he, that dares not grasp the thorn

Should never crave the rose.

The Narrow Way, Anne Bronte

6

O Rose Thou Art Sick

Chapter 1

Crowley had never believed in much of anything, until he met Aziraphale.

He wasn’t sure what he believed in now. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to be found in a church, read from a book of scripture. But there was something, something, a thread humming through this life they’d made together. Missing pieces, strange echoes, distant shadows.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

(He’d never even liked Hamlet, he didn’t know why so many pieces of it seemed to have stuck in his memory, even before watching Shakespeare with Aziraphale had become a thing.)

He dreamed strange dreams, and as the years went by, he realised that they were fixed, could be repeated. Like scenes playing over and over again. Not just some collection of images and impressions, but the same events, the same backdrop, the same emotions. He could categorise them: the dream where he played the piano alone and wept, the dream where he played it for Aziraphale and laughed, both lit by candlelight, both in a bookshop that was too new, too sparsely stocked.

Sitting in the evening breeze under the scented, drooping flowers; working the earth with his hands, weary but unwilling to let the garden go untended. Clipping and cutting and coaxing potted plants into new combinations by guttering lamplight; blowing glass into delicate shapes; grinding lenses to exact measurements; looking through the great telescope for the first time and seeing the crescent of Venus like a tiny, far-off moon.

Sometimes Aziraphale was there, and those dreams were always soft with love, left him so filled with longing that all he could do on waking was wrap himself around Aziraphale and breathe him in. But most of them were painted in shades of loneliness, whether the sharp grief of loss or the persistent ache of never finding something he hadn’t known he was looking for.

Crowley had the nightmare very, very rarely now, and only ever when Aziraphale was away. He didn’t mention it anymore when it happened. He’d seen the way Aziraphale’s face had twisted the first time he’d tried to describe it. They were so rarely apart, it was a burden he could suffer alone, even if it made him dread Aziraphale’s infrequent absences.

(But oh, the suffocating closeness of it, the heat, the heavy perfumed scent, the horror: it was dark, and he was dying…)

He’d come to accept it, the dreams as well as the nightmares. Come to believe that they were in some way a price that had to be paid for having Aziraphale. It was worth it, in that case. It was worth it.

He wasn’t sure what he believed in now, but he had come to accept that even after eleven years there was something about Aziraphale he didn’t understand. Perhaps would never understand. Something about the bond between them that for all its ease, for all its everyday fondness, for all its deep and abiding trust, was taut and vulnerable like a bared throat. Something about the silences and the moments when Aziraphale looked so distant, so haunted. Something that made Crowley bite his tongue on certain questions, for fear of shattering the whole world with a careless word.

(Who was it who sent Aziraphale those too-white envelopes that Crowley never quite seemed to see delivered? Aziraphale hid them so swiftly, Crowley had never had a chance to look inside, but he knew they must contain commands, because it was only after receiving them that Aziraphale would suddenly need to travel on ‘urgent business’. Crowley had entertained a number of theories over the years, but deep down he knew he hadn’t married a spy or a secret agent or a man beholden to the mob. And deep down he was glad he’d never managed to get to one of those envelopes before Aziraphale did.)

He wasn’t sure what he believed in now, except that Aziraphale was the core of it, the centre of his orbit, his guiding star. That they had been meant to meet, somehow, whether two halves of a single soul or tangled in red string or whatever stories people liked to tell. That he would do anything, anything to keep them from being parted again.

(Even ignore his own questions.)

So there was a strangeness, but it was like an infrequent haze that burned away under the noon sun, the brief shock of static electricity, a moment of surprise and then gone. It was nothing compared to all the rest of it, the quiet joy and the shared laughter and the slow, certain realisation that everything he felt was reflected back on him a thousandfold, that Aziraphale loved him, that Aziraphale knew him like no-one had ever known him, that Aziraphale had chosen him, and would keep choosing him, no matter what shadows lingered in his eyes.

Crowley could have lived with it forever, he thought, like you learn to live with double vision or a missing limb, could have gladly bent himself around Aziraphale’s strangeness like a tree growing past a forgotten stone.

But it didn’t last forever.

There was something like fear lurking in Crowley’s stomach again these days, a sense of dread, of impending doom. It was the way Aziraphale hardly seemed to sleep, the way he clung to Crowley like he expected to be torn away, the way he stared silently into the distance sometimes until Crowley had called his name twice, three times.

Something was coming, but Aziraphale wouldn’t tell him what it was. It was like a sword hanging over them, like a comet drawing closer and closer, ready to descend in a blaze of fire.

(Sometimes he thought: This is madness. One of us should see a doctor. Maybe both of us. It has to be all in my head, all in his head. The world doesn’t work like this.)

(And something in him would whisper back: It does for us, I think. And there are no pills or potions for this.)

After Aziraphale left on his errand, Crowley drifted around the flat, restless and on edge. In the end he found himself wandering into the bookshop, thinking he’d play something on the piano. He didn’t know why, but his fingers were itching to try the Moonlight Sonata again. He could probably find some sheet music online…

He paused halfway across the shop, frowning as something caught his eye. That odd bookcase, the one that never seemed to quite fit right, the one with all those Danish books Aziraphale never touched (but they never gathered dust, either). It was jutting out from the wall, as if it had been knocked forward somehow. Crowley crossed over to it, intending to shove it back into place. It gave too easily under his hand, swung too smoothly, not like a bookshelf at all.

Like a door.

Startled, Crowley stopped pushing, pulled instead. The shelf swung out - yes, it was hinged, yes there was space behind it—

(Aziraphale had told him not to pry into anything obviously private. So long ago now, he’d almost forgotten. Had assumed there was nothing left in the bookshop for him to find.)

He lost his grip on the door, fingers suddenly numb with shock. He dimly heard it collide with one of the other shelves, heard some of the books topple to the ground, but it was all distant, unreal, as he stared into the room that shouldn’t be there.

It was too big, for a start. There shouldn’t be space for a room like this. A closet, maybe, but this was a windowless chamber big enough to house shelves, cabinets, a table and chair. There was a cord hanging by the door; Crowley reached for it and yanked it hard. An unshaded lightbulb began to glow dimly above his head. Slowly, remorselessly, it gained in brightness, revealing the contents of the room to Crowley’s wide and disbelieving eyes.

(There was an old story he’d heard as a child, on some school trip where they tried to scare each other around the campfire. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest your heart’s blood run cold…)

There were things pinned to the walls, like something out of a detective show, notes and pins and strings and scribbled questions. There were maps, some of them old, marked with strange symbols. The table was covered with papers and journals full of Aziraphale’s handwriting. There was a circle painted on the floorboards, set about with runes and intersecting lines, so white it almost glowed.

There was a portrait hung on the wall, an old-fashioned oil painting. Not just old-fashioned but old, like something out of the National Gallery. His own face looked back at him, dressed in clothes from two centuries past, and something was wrong with his eyes. And on the shelf below it…

(You may open any door in the castle, Bluebeard said to his new bride, except the little room at the end of the hall. But she couldn’t contain her curiosity, and then she learned what had become of all his other wives…)

Flowers.

They were set out in a row, like a line of bodies awaiting burial. Wisteria first, a cluster of fresh blossoms. (Wisteria, it meant welcome.) The scent of it was familiar, winding around memories of warm nights and soft words.

Next a geranium in a glass pot that made Crowley’s heart clench with familiarity. He’d dreamed of shaping that vessel, of tending the plant that grew within it. It was far too dark in this little room for it to thrive, but it was laden with purple flowers, its leaves a rich, deep green, its roots healthy and plump.

(Geranium. Folly.)

After that roses, deep red, in a cut-crystal vase that he recognised with a shock as the twin of the one Aziraphale always used when Crowley brought him flowers. No need to dredge his memory for their meaning: romance, passion.

The next two were bunches of wildflowers, tied carefully with bookbinder’s string. Goldenrod, a native of North America; he knew it because he’d dreamed of lying among those flowers, had searched through plant catalogues until he’d found the yellow spears. Be cautious, was their message, be wary. And then asphodel, creeper into cracks, a scattering of stars on a winding stem, the flower of Persephone, of Eurydice: my regrets follow you to the grave.

Poppies, red as blood: oblivion, eternal sleep. Tulips, white as snow: I am worthy of you. And last of all…

Even after eleven years, he remembered every moment he’d spent on that bouquet. The pink carnations, the rosemary. Allium, white heather, daisies. Though I’ve lost you, I’ll never forget you, I cannot forget you, my love, my love, my love…

Eleven years, and it was as perfect as it had been when he’d handed it over to Aziraphale, watched him leave the shop, felt his heart break for the first time without knowing why. Impossible. It was impossible. All these perfect flowers in this dark and secret room, all these signs of desperation, of someone searching for an answer even if it took him to the depths of madness, and that picture…

It was him, but the eyes were wrong. The eyes were as yellow as goldenrods, their pupils slit, a glow in their depths. Panic was rising up in his chest, seizing his throat, shrieking in his ears. He kept looking from the painting, to the bouquet, and back, and back again. The bouquet was too new, too fresh. The painting was too old, too worn. How could Aziraphale have these things? Why were Crowley’s eyes painted like that, and why did it send a stab of recognition through him—?

All these flowers. Like a message, like a code. Like a history…

There was a white envelope on the table, one that had been opened and its contents then stuffed carelessly back inside. He reached for it with a shaking hand, fumbled the note out and unfolded it.

Aziraphale, Angel of the Eastern Gate, the letter read, in a looping hand, in ink of gold, and Crowley’s vision swam as he stared at the word angel. Some part of his mind thought, a codename? A password? Was Aziraphale a spy after all?

We appreciate your hard work and contributions towards monitoring the Antichrist and maintaining Heaven’s advantage in the war to come. However, we must deny your request for further information on the demon—

“Crowley—”

He hadn’t heard the shop door open, hadn’t heard Aziraphale’s footsteps. He dropped the letter, turned like the world was turning under him, like he could hardly keep his balance. The look on Aziraphale’s face was the same as those glimpses he’d caught all those years ago, but now there was no attempt to hide the anguish and the agony and the desperate, clawing guilt.

“What— what is this? Aziraphale, what the hell is all of this?”

Aziraphale stared at him, through him, and Crowley thought he saw him break, the breath going out of him, no spark of hope left in his bleak blue eyes, his body suddenly a shell as fragile as china and about to shatter. That terrible pain, that endless grief, kept at bay for so long now, crashing back in on him, a weight too heavy to bear, he would crumble beneath it, he would fall…

It tore him out of himself, the need to catch Aziraphale, the need to protect him. Everything else could wait. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else had ever mattered. Crowley pushed aside his questions and wrapped his arms around Aziraphale, held him until he felt the life come back into him, only then let himself ask again.

And Aziraphale unfurled his wings.

Angel of the Eastern Gate, the note had called him. Not a codename. Not a password. And Crowley’s first thought, on seeing those wings that glowed with divine light, was, Yes, that’s right, that’s what’s been missing. This whole time, I knew there was something missing, and it was this.

That pearly, unearthly light reached into his mind and filled it with certainty. No room for denial or argument, no space for doubt as to what he was seeing. No inclination to explain it away or question whether he was hallucinating or dreaming. Simple, quiet, absolute: he’s an angel. He always has been.

It should have changed everything. It did change everything, it upended Crowley’s understanding of the world, it raised so, so many questions for which Crowley had long assumed there were no real answers: so wait, does Heaven really exist? Does Hell? Does God? Do I have an immortal soul?

But the one thing it didn’t change was Aziraphale. Even with those glowing wings arching behind him, he was as familiar and as achingly beloved as he had been all this time. His face downturned, expression taut, waiting for Crowley’s reaction like he was waiting for the axe to fall. Wearing his fussy waistcoat and his ridiculous bow tie and his hair - and feathers, now Crowley looked - all flyaway like an absentminded professor, hands gripped tightly in front of him, almost shaking with a fear that Crowley recognised all too well. Don’t go, please. Don’t walk away. Don’t forsake me because of what I’ve shown you.

As if he ever would. As if he ever could.

“Are— are they supposed to be like that?” Crowley asked, running his eyes over Aziraphale’s ruffled feathers, thinking about the way he looked in the mornings before he’d had a chance to comb his hair.

“Like what?”

“Messy? The feathers are all—”

“Messy?” Aziraphale’s voice pitched into a familiar outrage, the way he responded when Crowley was teasing him, exactly what Crowley wanted to hear. “I’m showing you my wings and that’s the first thing you say?”

Nothing had changed, not where it mattered. Crowley shrugged and found himself fighting a smile. He supposed he should be grateful Aziraphale’s wings weren’t tartan-patterned.

“I dunno, do you, like, brush them or something? Is there such a thing as a wing comb? I just thought— not that I think about angels on a regular basis, you know— but I would’ve thought they’d be sort of sleek and shiny—”

“Just because some of us don’t spend hours preening—”

He sounded so indignant, and this felt like such an old argument, and Crowley found he was laughing, and then the next thing he knew, Aziraphale was in his arms. It seemed like kissing him was the best way to soothe his fear and his outrage both, so Crowley did that. When he wrapped his arms around Aziraphale, he felt the soft brush of feathers on the backs of his hands.

“Okay,” Crowley said, leaning their foreheads together. “I have questions. A lot of questions.”

Aziraphale laughed shakily.

“Of course you do,” he murmured. “You always do. I’m not sure I have answers. But I’ll do my best.”

Chapter 2

They started with tea (when agitated, Aziraphale was drawn to the kettle like it was his only anchor in a treacherous world) but moved on to Scotch fairly quickly, ignoring the fact that it was barely noon. It helped, a little.

There was just so… much. Aziraphale was trying to be succinct, but it had never been his strong point. Crowley listened, and sipped his whisky, and kept his arm tight around Aziraphale’s shoulders, now devoid once more of wings.

(Aziraphale had tried to sit them down opposite each other like some sort of interview or debrief. Crowley had dragged him onto the sofa and made it clear that he was not planning to let up on physical reassurance for even a second.)

But there was a moment when enough of the pieces fell into place that Crowley took a huge, helpless breath of realisation.

“So the— my dreams. They’re from— actual past lives.”

“I believe so, yes.”

“So I— we really did sit downstairs hundreds of years ago, and I played for you?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale whispered, turning his head for a moment to press his face against Crowley’s shoulder. “But please don’t— don’t ask me to tell you more about those lives, I can’t—”

“I know,” Crowley replied softly, holding him closer. “I remember when we first met. You said it never ended well.”

Aziraphale nodded.

“And the flowers—?”

“There were always flowers, every time I found you. I don’t know why. I took to keeping them. They were often all I had left of you.”

Crowley shivered, a cold creeping through his veins. At the distress in Aziraphale’s voice, and at the memory of his nightmare. Oh, he thought, with horror and a strange kind of relief. Oh. I dream of dying because I remember it.

“What about the portrait?”

“It was painted while we were in London together,” Aziraphale replied with such an ache of sadness and longing that it made Crowley ache in turn. “After you— after I lost you, that time, I went back to the artist and had him change the eyes.”

“Because I’m…” Crowley swallowed. This part was harder to wrap his mind around. He had no dreams to ease the way, no sense of recognition. “I’m… not really human?”

“You are now,” Aziraphale said. “But you weren’t, once. And I haven’t been able to find out why it happened.”

Crowley took a long drink of whisky, letting the burn of it ground him.

“Okay,” he said, although nothing was really okay, not when everything he’d ever thought he’d known was being torn up and reshuffled in front of his eyes. “What about— the rest of it, the— the maps and the notes— and that letter mentioned the actual Antichrist?”

For the first time, Aziraphale didn’t reply. Crowley felt how he drew in on himself, tense and miserable. He turned to look; Aziraphale had tangled his hands in his lap, the fingers so tightly woven together his knuckles were white. His wedding band glinted softly in the light that fell through the sitting room window.

“I’m afraid,” Aziraphale said finally, voice sunk so low it was barely a murmur, “I’m rather afraid, my dearest, that we are— we are living in the end times, you see.”

“What?” Crowley suddenly didn’t want to drink anymore. He shoved his glass onto the side table. “The what?”

“Armageddon is on its way. The real thing. It’s all due to come to an end, you know, the way it’s told in Revelation. The seas will boil and the kraken will rise—”

“No, wait, stop, Aziraphale.” Crowley turned fully towards him and grabbed both his hands. “You’re not serious. The end of the world?”

Aziraphale couldn’t meet his gaze. He nodded wearily.

“Okay, but I mean— someone’s trying to stop it, right?”

“I—” Aziraphale closed his eyes. “No, not especially. The only people who know it’s coming want it to happen, you see. Heaven and Hell have been preparing for this second war for six thousand years—”

“And, what, the Earth is just… collateral damage?”

“In their eyes, yes.”

“But that’s—” A fierce anger roared to life in Crowley’s chest, an outrage so enormous it felt like it would swallow the sun. “No, come on, no, there’s seven billion people on this planet! And all the, the animals and things as well—”

“Whales,” Aziraphale said sadly. “Gorillas. Yes. I know.”

“We’ve spent the last century just barely managing not to blow ourselves up! It’s not fair to just— wipe the board clean without even giving us a chance!”

“I’ve come to believe,” Aziraphale whispered, staring at their joined hands, “that fair is not a word the Lord built into the structure of the universe.”

He’d never seen Aziraphale so defeated, so hopeless. Crowley tightened his grip, glared until Aziraphale finally raised his head and met his eyes.

“If TV has taught me anything, it’s that apocalypses are meant to be stopped,” Crowley said, managing a weak grin. “We’ve got to have a go, haven’t we?”

Aziraphale bit his lip.

“I don’t think there’s anything—”

“We have to try!” Crowley insisted. “How long have we got?”

Aziraphale flinched and looked away.

“About a week,” he said.

Crowley stared at him so long that Aziraphale wilted and hung his head.

“A week,” Crowley said flatly. “One week. One. That’s it?”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale replied miserably, “I didn’t want you to live with it hanging over you—”

“Like you did.” Amidst the panic and disbelief, another puzzle piece shifted, fell into place with a heart-wrenching heaviness. “That’s— you knew it was coming. You’ve known all along. That we were running out of time.”

Aziraphale nodded, and Crowley saw the glint of tears on his cheeks, and he thought his heart might break on the rocks of Aziraphale’s anguish.

“No,” he said.

Aziraphale jerked under his hands, trying to pull away, like he thought Crowley was angry with him. Crowley held on tightly. He was angry, all right, but not at Aziraphale, who was so plainly exhausted from so many years of despair.

“No,” he said again. “I’m not going to let it happen.”

Aziraphale stared at him, stunned, colour rising to cheeks that had been too pale for too long.

“My dearest,” he said faintly, “how do you possibly think you can stop—”

“I don’t know yet.” Crowley scowled at the clock on the wall, its second hand sweeping them onward like an unwelcome current. “But we’ll think of something, because we have to. Because I’m not losing you again.”

He pulled Aziraphale into his arms and held him as tight as he could. Aziraphale made a soft noise like he’d only just remembered how to breathe, and clung on with equal intensity.

“Tell me everything you’ve already figured out,” Crowley said. “We’ll go from there.”

The next few days were a blur as Crowley tried to wrap his head around things he’d never believed in and things he wished he’d never known. Aziraphale had been thorough, exhaustive (of course he had), cataloguing every prophecy and reference to the Apocalypse, charting every named location for its key events. Crowley’s head swam with it, with myths made real, stories made fact. Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him…

When the shop bell sounded, Crowley barely registered it, too absorbed in the text he was trying to decipher. It was Aziraphale’s reaction that got his attention: the way he bolted upright from where he’d been bent over a map of the Middle East, the colour draining from his face. It was only then that Crowley remembered that the bookshop was closed, the door supposed to be locked.

“Aziraphale!” The voice was strident with outrage. “Aziraphale!”

Aziraphale grabbed Crowley’s arm before he could speak, shaking his head frantically.

“Stay in here,” he whispered fiercely. “Don’t make a sound.”

He was out of the secret room in a heartbeat, swinging the shelf back into place so that Crowley was shut inside. Crowley swallowed a prickle of panic at the idea that he might be trapped.

“Gabriel?” Aziraphale was saying, his footsteps hurrying towards the front of the shop. “What on Earth is the matter—”

“What’s the matter?” The person Aziraphale addressed as Gabriel sounded like every overbearing office manager Crowley had ever encountered. “What’s the matter, Aziraphale, is that Warlock Dowling is not the Antichrist!”

A pause, in which Crowley’s mouth dropped open and he imagined that a similar expression of shock was on Aziraphale’s face.

“What?” Aziraphale managed weakly. “How—?”

“That’s what we’d very much like to ask you,” came another voice, a woman’s, dark with suspicion. “Since you were supposed to be watching him—”

“But, Uriel, how do you know he’s not—”

“Yesterday was his eleventh birthday!” snarled Gabriel. “The day he should come into his powers! He was supposed to receive a hellhound, and Downstairs certainly sent one up here, but it never turned up at the boy’s birthday party! So what in Her name is going on?”

There was a thump, as if Gabriel had picked up one of the heavier books and thrown it down in frustration. Crowley’s hands curled into fists and he started searching for a catch on the inside of the bookcase door. He wasn’t going to stand by while anyone talked to Aziraphale like that—

“You never noticed anything was wrong in all this time?” Uriel demanded, unconcealed menace in the words. “You never noticed he was just an ordinary child? Or did you know all along, did you interfere somehow—?”

“That is quite enough,” Aziraphale replied, and his voice was suddenly diamond-hard in a way that Crowley had never heard, that made him catch his breath and freeze where he stood. “Gabriel, if you recall, you told me that Warlock was the Antichrist. You also told me that he wouldn’t show any signs of it until he turned eleven.”

Gabriel started to sputter an answer, but Aziraphale carried on remorselessly, his voice gaining volume and intensity.

“I’ve watched him, just as you commanded. I’ve dedicated a not inconsiderable amount of time and effort to preventing his demon caretakers from running riot around London, which has been far from straightforward.”

Aziraphale wasn’t shouting. Crowley had never heard him shout, at least, not in anger; he’d only ever heard Aziraphale raise his voice in delight or surprise. He wasn’t shouting, but there was a thin current of cold rage behind every word he said, and the two who had come to confront him had stopped even trying to interrupt.

“And now you come in here and accuse me of— of what, exactly, Uriel? What the hell do you think I could possibly have done, with Beelzebub’s agents watching over him from birth? When I didn’t even know his identity until he was three years old? When I have done everything you asked of me! How dare you come in here and try to pin the blame on me?”

There was a ringing silence. Crowley fought the urge to applaud, even as his heart raced with panic.

“Now, Aziraphale,” Gabriel said after a moment, suddenly conciliatory, “no-one is trying to pin any blame on anyone—”

“And how is it that you know so much about what Hell has planned for the boy?” Aziraphale cut in furiously. “You say he has a hellhound? You never mentioned that in any of my briefings—”

“It wasn’t relevant,” Uriel replied tartly. “Until it failed to show up.”

Aziraphale laughed: a sharp, sarcastic sound.

“So what you’re saying is— is that Warlock Dowling is just an ordinary human child, and somewhere out there in the world, the real Antichrist has grown up with no supervision whatsoever, and has now received a powerful and vicious beast from Hell, and you don’t know where either of them are?”

“Er,” said Gabriel, and Crowley grinned viciously at how utterly wrongfooted he sounded with that one syllable. “Now, as I said, Aziraphale, we aren’t pointing any fingers here, obviously there’s been a— a failing somewhere along the way, but for right now the most important thing is to find the boy—”

“Why don’t you ask Hell where he is, since you seem to be so friendly these days—”

“Because they don’t know either!” Gabriel almost howled. Uriel let out a hiss of protest, but the words were already out there.

There was a strained silence.

“So you really do have contact with them?” Aziraphale asked finally. That thread of anger was back, but wound about with something else, something like dismay and outrage and vindication all in one. “Six thousand years of they’re the enemy, they’re unforgivable, and now you’re, I don’t know, sending each other memos? Having a cozy chat on the telephone?”

“Armageddon is too important to risk messing up through miscommunication—” Gabriel stammered weakly.

“And yet you seem to have messed it up anyway,” Aziraphale replied with such soft venom that Crowley sucked in his breath. “Impressive work, Gabriel.”

“You’re out of line, Aziraphale,” Uriel snapped. “You can’t talk to us like that.”

“Can’t I? It seems I just did.” Although Crowley couldn’t see it, he was absolutely, completely sure that Aziraphale was standing with his hands behind his back and that look on his face Crowley had only ever seen once, twice: that cold-blazing certainty and refusal to be cowed. “Since we’ve established that I was as in the dark about all this as you apparently were, I suppose you want me to try and find your missing Antichrist, do you?”

“If we can’t find him, you won’t be able to,” Uriel spat. “He’s shielded from occult interference until he comes into his full power.”

“I wasn’t planning on scrying for him, Uriel. Humans have other ways of finding each other. Nothing occult about it. If the child was switched without the knowledge of Heaven or Hell, it must have been humans who managed it. There’ll be traces, if one knows where to look.”

“Do you really think so?” Gabriel cut in, desperation and hope naked in his voice, a far cry from the way he’d started the conversation. “You might be able to find him?”

“We can hardly rely on humans—” Uriel started.

“Quiet, Uriel,” Gabriel snapped. “Aziraphale. Can you find him? The Four Horsemen have already been summoned, we must know where to assemble the Host for the final battle—”

“I’ll certainly give it my best shot,” Aziraphale replied, almost serenely. “Wouldn’t want to be late to the Apocalypse, would we?”

“No,” Gabriel said with a gratifying note of mortification, “that would be— that wouldn’t look very good.”

“Though in that case, I had better get on—”

“Yes, yes, of course, we’ll leave you to it.” There was a shuffling sound of footsteps heading for the door. “The resources of Heaven are at your disposal, just do whatever you have to, understood?”

“You can’t be seriously leaving it to him—” Uriel hissed.

“We have work to do, Uriel,” Gabriel replied sharply. “Come on.”

The bell jingled as the door was wrenched open.

“Keep us up to date,” Gabriel commanded, over the sounds of Uriel muttering her way out of the shop. “The second you find him, you let us know, okay?”

The door slammed shut. There was a long moment of silence, then Azirapahle’s hurried footsteps. The shelf swung open so suddenly that Crowley almost fell out of the hidden room into Aziraphale’s arms. He clutched at the front of his waistcoat for balance; Aziraphale steadied him with hands on his shoulders.

“Was that— Gabriel, as in the Archangel fucking Gabriel—”

“The very same, more’s the pity.” There were two bright spots of colour high on Aziraphale’s cheeks, a mesmerising fire burning in his gaze. “You heard, yes? You heard what they said—”

“I heard them try to throw you under the bus—”

“It doesn’t matter. Crowley! You don’t understand.” Hope, Crowley realised, it was hope blazing in his eyes, white and hot like the heart of a star. “They got it wrong. They messed it up! The great plan - the six-thousand-year payoff - it was all written down at the Beginning but it’s not going the way it’s supposed to—”

“So maybe that’s not how it’s supposed to go,” Crowley said, comprehension dawning, his heart picking up its pace. “Maybe they’re wrong about all of it.”

Aziraphale nodded, shaking now, eyes still star-bright. Crowley had never seen him like this, never known he could burn like this, and he was breathless and bowled over and there was something like deja vu in it, something like the scent of rain and the taste of apples and a question with an unexpected answer…

“We have to find him,” Aziraphale went on, taking a shuddering breath and frowning as he considered the challenge. “We have some information. We know he was born - or, well, arrived on the Earth - eleven years ago yesterday. Hell has been watching him all his life, and his mother surely would have noticed a difference if they replaced her son with another during his childhood—”

“Unless it happened right at the start,” Crowley finished for him, thinking of soap operas and gothic melodrama. “Switched at birth.”

“I need to talk to Warlock’s mother. Find out where he was born, if there was anything strange about the circumstances.”

Crowley frowned, shook his head.

“You can’t just walk in there and start interrogating the woman—”

Aziraphale smiled. It took Crowley’s breath away.

“You forget, my dearest, I have all the resources of Heaven at my disposal.”

Chapter 3

Piece by piece, they uncovered it all, turning stones one at a time until the shape of it began to emerge, until the flow of it bore them away like a river, racing desperately against time, against the looming will of what is written.

“… but of course, it burned down not long after we took Warlock home, such a shame, it was just outside Tadfield if I’m remembering correctly—”

“Wait, what? Tadfield? Our Tadfield?”

“Oh dear Lord. Oh no. Crowley, when is Adam’s birthday?”

(Turn)

“This is crazy. Everything’s completely normal. You’re not seriously telling me that little terrier is a hellhound?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe— maybe I was wrong—”

“No. You were certain. I saw your face. Don’t doubt yourself now.”

“I… I’ll try, my dearest. What were they saying about the American woman who just arrived?”

(Turn)

“I told Mom it wasn’t a metaphor. Here. Read this one.”

“And on thee eve of thee storme an angel shall come to thee, Anathema, and bringeth with him knowledge of that which yet eludes thee, so mindeth well that thou hast leaves for steeping and sweet confections to hande on this day— oh. Oh, good heavens.”

“Tea? Cake?”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me—”

(Turn)

“The airbase. It’s all going to happen at the airbase, don’t you see?”

“Can’t we stop it before it gets that far?”

“Not according to Agnes. There’s too much momentum. We have to wait until the right moment, the point where it all comes into balance, where it can be pushed one way or another— my dear girl, where are you going?”

“Oh, I have an appointment with a Witchfinder. I’ll catch up with you later.”

(Turn)

“We can’t just sit around and wait—”

“I think we must, dearest. I think we only get one chance at this. He’s had no preparation, no tutelage in his true destiny. If we approach him too soon, scare him into using his full power—”

“But it’s Adam! He’s— he’s Adam.”

“Yes. And I think… I think perhaps that might save us all, if we don’t rush in before our time.”

(Turn)

The clouds gathered above the airbase like an army massing for battle. Perhaps that wasn’t so far from the truth, Crowley thought with a shudder as he pulled the Bentley up to the gates. His head was stuffed with the impossibilities of the last twenty-four hours: a child he’d known almost a decade who had the power to unmake the world; an honest-to-goodness witch with a book of prophecies that bothered to predict when someone would drop around for tea; an awkward boy who’d turned up out of nowhere and was now crammed into the back seat for reasons Crowley wasn’t entirely clear on; and now this, the guard stepping forward with a scowl, and Aziraphale simply snapping his fingers, so that the man vanished and the gate opened.

“That’s going to take some getting used to,” Crowley said weakly, fumbling the Bentley into gear and rolling them through the gates onto the tarmac beyond.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Aziraphale flinch and shrink in on himself.

“I— prefer not to do that sort of thing— it’s only that—”

“You know,” Crowley interrupted, reaching out to put a hand on Aziraphale’s knee even as he spotted a crowd in the distance and headed towards it. “It’s just struck me how staggeringly ironic it is that you spent so damn long trying to get the hang of that trick with the coin when you can do actual magic.”

“I enjoy learning sleight of hand—” Aziraphale protested, and then ahead of them, twenty or more soldiers suddenly fell to the ground senseless.

“Did— did you do that?”

“No. He did, I think.”

Adam stood with his friends, very small, very ordinary-looking, his little dog at his heels, his eyes clear and calm as he looked towards one of the buildings. It was hard to believe he was what he was. He just looked like he always did, like the boy who’d played a game with Crowley for years now, of whether he could sneak apples from Crowley’s trees without being spotted, who only ever made his raids when he knew Crowley and Aziraphale were staying at the cottage, who somehow evaded even Crowley’s vigilance at least half of the time.

Except there was a look in his eye as he watched four figures emerge from a door.

“What the hell are they?” Anathema demanded in horror. “Their auras—”

“No-one you want to get to know,” Aziraphale replied tightly. “But whatever they’ve been doing in there, I think it’s up to you to undo it.”

“Oh. Yes. Come on, Witchfinder Private Pulsifer.”

They spilled out of the car. Anathema took her Witchfinder by the hand and dragged him towards their destiny. Crowley looked at Aziraphale. Aziraphale took a breath, and held out his hand, and they walked together towards theirs.

“Adam—” Aziraphale began as they approached.

Adam turned to look at him, and the force of his gaze seemed to strike Aziraphale almost physically, making him stumble and come to a halt.

“‘S all right, Mr Fell,” Adam said with a small, rueful smile. “I know. We’ve got this. Right, Pepper?”

Crowley stared open-mouthed and frozen in horror as the red-haired monster in human shape swung a weapon of flame at a defenceless child. He blinked, and the sword was on the ground, and then Pepper was seizing hold of it, brandishing it without fear.

“Good heavens,” Aziraphale said faintly, “is that my sword?”

“Your sword?” Crowley croaked. “You had a sword?”

“Well, yes, in the Beginning, but I—”

Crowley didn’t hear the rest of it, because that was when Adam looked at him, and his brow furrowed.

“Wait,” he said, staring at Crowley, staring into Crowley. “Mr Crowley, what’s… what’s happened to you?”

Crowley blinked again, even as Pepper dropped the sword and Brian seized it in turn.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re all— you shouldn’t be like that—”

And it was like being hit by a wall of water, like being bowled over and bruised and broken and baptised, like taking a breath and drawing water deep into his lungs, so much water he could barely hold it within his skin, too many memories, too many lifetimes, flowers and music and fear and loss and Aziraphale, Aziraphale—

“Stop, Adam, please! Whatever you’re doing to him, stop!” Aziraphale was crying out, and Crowley dimly realised he was on his knees, a crumpled thing of flesh and bone, a vessel too fragile to hold so much, the breath tearing out of him in desperate sobs.

And then it ebbed, leaving him weak and shaking, Aziraphale’s arms tightly around him, cradling him close, and all he could do was lean his head into Aziraphale’s chest and draw breath after ragged breath.

“It’s not me that did this to him,” Adam said, and his voice was quiet, but it was the quiet of the eye of the storm.

Crowley opened his eyes. Three of the four monstrous figures were gone. The sword lay on the ground at Adam’s feet. Before him was a cloaked skeleton, all pretence of human disguise cast aside. Adam was staring straight into the star-glow of its bottomless gaze, and for the first time, there was anger gathering in his eyes.

“What did you do?” he demanded of the figure that could be none but Death. “Why did you do it?”

Death looked, for a moment, at Crowley, and he felt the cold of it in his chest, a clutching hand that squeezed his heart, threatened to stop his breath. Aziraphale made a terrified, torn sound, held him tighter, whispered, “No.”

Adam took a step sideways, placing himself between Death and Crowley. The invisible, bony fingers released their grip. Crowley gasped and sagged back in Aziraphale’s arms as Death met Adam’s gaze unflinching.

A LESSON, Death said, the words hollow and heavy and hung with horror. ONE HE IS SLOW TO LEARN.

“This isn’t teaching,” Adam retorted, “this is torture. For both of them! They’re not meant to be like this!”

MEANT TO BE IS NO CONCERN OF MINE. I AM WHAT IS, AND WHAT WILL BE. AND BESIDES—

And there had never been laughter so awful as this, so echoing and so laden with the breath of the tomb, so bleak and devoid of any human warmth.

BESIDES, Death continued with cold amusement, HE COULD HAVE CONCEDED. SO MANY TIMES, HE COULD HAVE ADMITTED THAT HE WAS WRONG. WHEN I TOOK HIS FORSAKEN SOUL FROM THE RUBBLE IN SICILY—

Aziraphale gasped, the air wrenched from him like he’d been gut-punched, and Crowley tried to push himself upright, tried to be the one to offer comfort, even as his head swam.

WHEN I CAME FOR HIM IN COPENHAGEN, it was remorseless, it was cruel, STILL DREAMING OF THINGS HE COULDN’T REMEMBER. WHEN HE DIED ALONE IN LONDON, STILL HOPING AGAINST HOPE FOR A PROMISE TO BE KEPT—

Aziraphale cried out then, curling in on himself, clinging to Crowley.

“That’s enough,” Adam snapped. He stepped forward suddenly, bent, picked up the sword. At his touch, it burst into flames. Where before the fire had been orange and gold, now it was rimmed in electric blue and plasma green. “This isn’t how you make people learn. Let him go. Give him back what you’ve taken.”

YOU CANNOT DESTROY ME, Death said. I AM CREATION’S SHADOW. WITHOUT ME, HOW DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT? WITHOUT ME, HOW DO YOU FIND MEANING IN LIFE?

“I reckon we’ll think of something,” Adam replied. He raised the sword, and for the first time, Death seemed uncertain, bony feet shuffling under his robes. “I reckon we’ll figure out how to get rid of you for good, one day.”

Adam took another step forward.

“It can be today, if you like.”

There was a pause as if the world had stopped turning. As if the sun had halted in the sky. As if an unstoppable force was racing towards an immovable object.

And Death took one step backwards.

VERY WELL. I RELEASE HIM FROM HIS CHAINS.

If Adam’s regard had been a wall of water, this was an avalanche, a landslide, an impossible weight, and Crowley heard his own hoarse voice before he even knew he’d screamed. Buried alive, torn apart, an immensity of existence thrust back inside him, the mortal shape of him stretched and strained beyond breaking point. Aziraphale cradling him again, begging with words Crowley couldn’t understand, torn with terror and guilt and grief…

Aziraphale.

Crowley fell silent. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think. All he knew was that Aziraphale’s arms were around him, that Aziraphale was here, that after so many centuries and so much grief and so many missed chances, he was here…

“Angel,” he whispered, heard Aziraphale’s choked cry.

And he remembered.

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The Sick Rose, William Blake

Chapter 4

London, 1665

He should have left months ago. August was no time to be in London even under normal circumstances. Now, with the dead-carts piled high with corpses, the whole city was a miasma of horror and decay. The air was foul; Crowley filled his rooms with lilies that never wilted, the strongest scent he could lay his hands on, and it wasn’t enough to mask the stench.

He should have left months ago, but he’d promised Aziraphale he’d wait. He’d promised he’d be here. And so he found himself watching Pestilence at work.

He’d seen her in many guises over the millennia. Scarred and grinning and garbed in red satin as she kissed smallpox across fevered skin. Tall and blue-lipped and draped in ragged grey as she breathed influenza into open mouths. Here she wore her favourite shape: the plague hag, swathed in heavy robes of black, shuffling from house to house with her broom and her rake.

(They said that if she used the rake, some in the place would survive, but if she used the broom, all would perish. Crowley hadn’t seen the rake in her hands since the start of the summer.)

There had been a time in the fourteenth century when Crowley had found himself walking through a deserted village in the depths of an empty forest. Every single person who’d once lived there had died in the calamity that would later be known as the Black Death. Most of them had not been buried, the infection spreading too swiftly and mercilessly, claiming all before they could flee. They lay where they’d died, and no-one came to ring the church bell for them. He’d heard her laughter in the silence.

(Three centuries later, that village was long lost to the forest, the bones scattered and gnawed, the bell gripped tight in the roots of a dying tree.)

This visitation of Pestilence upon London couldn’t compare in scale. Crowley knew that the hag wouldn’t have her way upon the whole country this time, knew that in comparison to the forest fire that had been the Black Death, this was hardly a stray spark on a heath.

But they were dying, all around him, and they were dying horribly, and there was no reason for it, except that Pestilence loved their misery, and God apparently cared nothing for their suffering. The rich had fled, the poor had been left to rot, and as ever, the old and the young were devoured with especial glee by the sickness.

He should have left months ago. But he was here, and every day he watched children die. And he thought about how Aziraphale had been sent away to mind some petty squabble of kingdoms, how the borders of so-called Christendom were of far more importance to Heaven than a few hundred thousand London commoners.

And so he donned the black robes and beaked mask of a plague doctor, and he went to work.

It wasn’t the first time he’d healed. He’d done it in Aziraphale’s stead, and in truth, he’d done it on his own account, more often than any demon should. He was very good at excusing it, finding justifications that would satisfy Hell: this soul that would have gone to Heaven has been given more time to sin, this child who would have died innocent will now grow into all the temptations of the world.

Hell took no notice of his efforts. Pestilence sneered at him, raised her broom threateningly when she saw him in the street. Crowley stared her down. He wasn’t breaking any rules, wasn’t opposing her directly. There would always be some who survived, always some who slipped through her grip, whether by chance or by direct intervention. If Aziraphale had been here, he would have been doing the same thing. This was practically just another part of the Arrangement. If it happened to be a demon rather than an angel who brought cool water to cracked lips and clean linen to fevered bodies, well, that was no business of hers.

He should have remembered that of all the Horsemen, Pestilence was the one who lived with constant fear, who watched the humans slowly find better ways to fight her, who knew that one day, she would be conquered. He should have realised that it would make her petty and vengeful and vicious, that even now as she set out to claim a full quarter of London’s population, she was raging that her nasty little gifts were not reaching out further, that the world had changed enough to slow the spread of her favourite infection.

And he should have remembered that she had allies.

The child was the youngest daughter of the family who lived on the floor below Crowley’s rooms. Her three older siblings had already succumbed. Her father had carried each of them out to the street in their shrouds, and her mother lay delirious with the sickness, still cradling her last living child as if she could protect her with her body.

There was nothing to mark them out from the other humans in the city, except for proximity. Except that Crowley had idly watched those children play in the street, had seen them grow up (and they would grow no further now, cut down like slender stems before they even had a chance to bloom). Except that he heard the man’s prayers to God through the floorboards, and knew that there would be no answer.

In the depths of the night, Crowley silently descended the stairs. He didn’t bother with the robe and mask. They wouldn’t see him anyway. The father was asleep on his knees, exhaustion interrupting his useless prayers. The mother was sweating and shifting in pain, but Crowley thought she would live, if she could survive the heartbreak.

The girl was already marked for death, black and red pinpricks mottling her skin, the blood poisoning spreading through every vein and capillary, devouring her from the inside out. No human medicine yet invented could bring her back from that brink. Even a miracle would be barely enough. In other households, Crowley had conceded defeat for such victims, speeding their passage mercifully when he could, saving his strength to heal those who were not so far gone.

Here, he began to pull the poison from her blood, a slick black liquid that dripped into the bowl he conjured in his free hand. There was so much damage; her body was so frail. He might remove the infection completely and she could still die, her worn-out heart faltering, her ravaged lungs collapsing. He wasn’t a healer by nature; he didn’t understand all the details of how to repair a human body. For the simpler things, intent was enough. For something so complex…

It must have been hours later that he heard her breathe deeply for the first time, saw the livid mottling of her skin begin to fade. Her fever had broken; the flesh that had been tensed against unbearable pain relaxed. She would live.

YOU HAVE DENIED ME WHAT IS MINE.

Crowley stiffened and turned to face the cowled figure behind him.

“Yeah, well, you can’t win ‘em all,” he said nonchalantly. “And what’s one human more or less to you, anyway?”

EVERYTHING, Death replied, the rattle of chains and the echo of the tomb in the words. THIS ONE WAS MARKED FOR ME. THIS ONE WAS MINE.

A cold sweat started on the back of Crowley’s neck. He heard a sound from the door; when he looked, he saw Pestilence’s haggard face smirking at the threshold.

“You’ve taken enough from this family,” he snapped, with a defiance that was shaky at its core. “You’re getting greedy. There’s plenty more out there you can lay your bony fingers on, don’t let me keep you—”

GREEDY? Death laughed, a cold and harrowing sound. IT IS YOU, I THINK, DEMON, WHO GRASPS FOR MORE THAN YOUR SHARE. TO LIVE IS TO DIE. THERE MUST BE BALANCE.

“Balance? You call this balance?” Crowley realised he was still holding the bowl of vile black fluid; he sent it into oblivion with a flick of his wrist. “There’s nothing balancing the deaths of these children. There’s just you and your girlfriend there glutting yourselves on suffering.”

It was beyond foolish to goad Azrael himself, but Death’s fleshless face was, if anything, amused. His eyes flared like twin novas, blue-white and calculating.

THEIR DEATHS ARE BALANCED BY THEIR LIVES. THIS IS ALWAYS THE WAY. THEIR SPAN ON EARTH IS ALL THE SWEETER FOR ITS BREVITY.

“Fuck that,” Crowley snarled. “They could live long and happy lives and it would be just as ssssweet. I’ve seen them do it. All that shit about appreciating life more because of death is just propaganda to keep them in line. There’s no reason they couldn’t be as immortal as we are. No reason except sssspite.”

CAN YOU BE SO SURE OF SOMETHING YOU HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED?

“I’ve died. More than once. No human can say the same.”

YOUR DISCORPORATIONS ARE NOT COMPARABLE. YOU KNOW WHAT WILL COME AFTER. YOU KNOW YOU WILL RETURN. IT IS A MINOR INCONVENIENCE AT WORST.

“There’s nothing minor about getting stabbed with a damn polearm—”

YOU HAVE NEVER DIED, SERPENT. YOU HAVE NEVER TRULY KNOWN MY TOUCH. YOU ARGUE FROM A PLACE OF IGNORANCE, AND SO YOUR ARGUMENT HAS NO WEIGHT.

“No weight? You think I’ve watched them live and die for five and a half thousand years and I don’t know what I’m talking about—”

CORRECT. Death took a step forward. The shadows in the room grew darker. STEP ASIDE NOW. I WILL TAKE THE CHILD.

“No.”

THERE MUST BE BALANCE. IF YOU DENY ME HER LIFE, I MUST TAKE ANOTHER. HER FATHER? HER MOTHER? ONE OF THE OTHERS IN THIS CITY? WHY SHOULD SHE LIVE WHILST THEY DIE?

“You and I both know it doesn’t work like that,” Crowley retorted. “It’s never been that finely measured. You can let her go just as easily as you can take her. There’s no need for all this… trading nonsense. One human life is practically a rounding error in your ledger.”

I DECIDE THE NEED. AND I DECIDE THE PRICE.

From the shadows at Crowley’s feet, black chains sprang like snakes to bind his ankles, wrists and throat. They pulled him to his knees before he could even shout, and when he tried to miracle himself free, nothing happened. Frustration and rage welled up in his chest, made him bare his teeth and lengthen them into fangs.

“You’re not proving anything, you know. You’re just bullying your way into getting what you want.”

And Death laughed.

YOU MISUNDERSTAND, he replied, stepping forward, reaching out to lay one bony finger on Crowley’s forehead. Crowley tried to flinch back, but found he couldn’t move at all now, his body frozen like a statue. I HAVE DECIDED TO AMEND YOUR IGNORANCE. THE GIRL WILL LIVE. AND YOU… YOU WILL LEARN. EVENTUALLY.

It was like all the warmth draining out of him. His head was seized with pain like a vice, and Crowley cried out, squeezing his eyes shut against it. His heart beat suddenly loud and hard, his lungs insisting on air in a way they never had before. That finger pressed to his forehead was like a nail driving into the centre of his brain, and when it finally pulled back, it took something with it, like floss drawn out from a spindle.

Crowley sagged, shaking. The chains vanished, and he sprawled on the hard floor. When he managed to lift his aching head, Death was gone.

Pestilence, however, remained. She hobbled across the room towards him, reaching with eager, clawed hands to haul him up to his knees. Crowley struggled weakly, but there was no strength in his limbs and no response from his wellspring of infernal power.

“One last little gift for you, dearie,” Pestilence rasped with a horrible gap-toothed grin. Before Crowley could react, she crushed her mouth to his in an awful parody of a kiss. Crowley tried to jerk back, but she held him in place with cruel-iron fingers, and he felt her breathe into his lungs, and felt the unnatural heat of fever take root there. “First lesson’s free.”

He reeled back up the stairs to his apartment, the sickness already burning its way through him. He couldn’t seem to use miracles. He had to remember how to open his door the normal way. He staggered through it, made it to the bed.

Crowley had never experienced illness first hand, beyond the sort of self-inflicted unpleasantness one could achieve with alcohol and other intoxicants. It was even worse than it looked from the outside. He lay in something close to delirium for a while, the heavy scent of the lilies all around him, cloying and suffocating now where they had once been sweet.

It was clear enough that he wouldn’t survive it, that Pestilence had ensured his discorporation in revenge for his defiance. He wished he could get it over with quickly. Then he thought of Aziraphale and groaned aloud. How long would the paperwork take? Could he get back in time to keep his promise? His thoughts drifted into dreams and hallucinations for who knew how many hours; he tore himself awake, realising that if he went under now, he wouldn’t come back up again.

He rolled off the bed and crawled across the room to the writing desk. It seemed to take eons to haul himself wretchedly into the chair, to fumble paper and quill from their places. He spilled ink over the desk, a black tide that reminded him all too vividly of the infection he’d pulled from the girl, the same one that was now devouring his mortal form. He dipped the quill into the puddle and began to scrawl a note to Aziraphale.

Halfway through, he glanced blearily at the small mirror set on the wall, and dropped the quill.

His eyes.

Crowley stared, pressing his shaking hand across them and taking it away again, as if it would somehow change what he saw. Human eyes stared back at him, wide and frightened. Desperate, Crowley reached again for his powers, for some tiny miracle - to clean up the ink, to finish the letter, to cool his burning forehead.

Nothing.

A wave of terror crashed into him like nothing he’d ever known, a force so overwhelming and unbearable that he heard himself cry out, something half a gasp, half a moan. He slumped forward onto the desk, and then found he couldn’t sit up straight again. The room was beginning to swim around him. He fumbled for the quill and knocked it onto the floor, and it drifted away on a draft, like a feather falling from an angel’s wing.

He tried to reach for it, fell from the chair, lay on the floor in a daze of fear and disbelief. In all his existence, he had never known this terror of the unknown, this fear of simply winking out like a candle, never to be rekindled. And Aziraphale— he’d promised Aziraphale—

It was dark and he was dying, and it wouldn’t end, but even though all he wanted was release, he kept fighting to take another breath, to keep from slipping away, because he’d promised, he’d promised…

The lilies thronged around him like silent watchers at a funeral. His own faltering breaths were the tolling of the church bell. His last thoughts were of flowers, and Aziraphale.

Chapter 5

“Angel,” he said again, hands like claws in Aziraphale’s shirt, hanging on like a drowning man. “I—”

Aziraphale was pulling him around, up, a shaking hand on his face.

“Crowley,” he begged, “open your eyes— please— look at me—”

It hurt, but Crowley obeyed, struggling to focus on the blur of pink and white that he knew had to be Aziraphale. Aziraphale gasped, and then his breath fled back out of him in something that could have been a sob or a nearly-hysterical laugh.

“It’s you.” Suddenly his arms were crushingly tight around Crowley, his shoulders shaking. “It’s you, Crowley.”

“Dunno who else you were expecting,” Crowley muttered thickly, letting his head rest on Aziraphale’s shoulder as the world swam around him. “I— I’m—” Whatever he’d meant to say, it twisted in his mouth into simple honesty. “I’m very confused.”

Aziraphale made a muffled noise that wasn’t any sort of answer, and Crowley gave up for the moment on any of it making sense, as memories seesawed in and out of his head like reflected light from the surface of water.

“Angel,” he managed after a few more moments, remembering the heavy scent of lilies, the spilling of ink like black blood, Pestilence’s laughter, “I think I fucked up.”

Another garbled noise from Aziraphale, and then, as if from a very long way away, a door slamming, excited voices. Crowley managed to raise his head and peer blearily at the figures approaching. Anathema, he remembered, that was the girl’s name, and the boy was… Frog, or something, wasn’t he? They were important. Because. Armageddon? Yes, Armageddon. Had to be Armageddon, there was the Antichrist and everything.

Adam was standing with War’s sword still in his hand, facing a patch of empty air. He lowered the blade as the other two approached.

“You stopped it, didn’t you?” he said. His friends formed a silent semi-circle at his back, waiting for his lead. “You broke the machines.”

“Technically, he upgraded them,” Anathema said cheerfully, hooking her arm through the boy’s. “But they probably won’t ever work again now, no.”

Adam turned to look at Crowley then, and Crowley shivered under his gaze, as Adam seemed to look into him and see more than any human ever should.

“That’s better,” Adam said. “Might take you a bit to feel like yourself, Mr Crowley, but it should all be back where it’s s’posed to be now—”

Lightning struck the ground, far too close for comfort. The tarmac shook and splintered. Aziraphale finally lifted his head, loosening his hold on Crowley enough to look towards the commotion.

“Gabriel,” he said, his voice almost toneless. “Of course, he won’t like the idea of calling things off, will he?”

“Oh shit, that’s Beelzebub,” Crowley muttered in response, still trying to pull together a thousand pieces of himself, but absolutely sure that the Prince of Hell was not someone he wanted to face at this moment. “They can’t just decide to do it anyway, can they?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale replied, and there was life in him now, a rising fury that had Crowley staring at him speechless. Aziraphale took hold of his elbows, urging him to stand. “But I shall have something to say about it if they try.”

They reached Adam at the same time as the two new arrivals, Aziraphale’s arm tight around Crowley’s back, Crowley staggering as if his legs had forgotten they had knees (or as if six thousand years of memories were trying to settle back into a mind accustomed to human limitations).

“Aziraphale.” Gabriel’s face was an unappealing puce colour. “What are you playing at—?”

“Crowley,” Beelzebub growled, cutting him off, her eyes glowing red with fury. “Three hundred yearszzz, Crowley. Did you think you would get away with it?”

“Er,” said Crowley.

“Playing truant like you thought we wouldn’t notice, hiding yourszzzelf from Heaven and Hell—”

“I didn’t do it on purpose—”

“What do you mean,” Aziraphale cut in sharply, “Heaven and Hell?”

He locked gazes with Gabriel, and for the first time that Crowley could ever remember, the Archangel flinched.

“Another thing you’ve been having cozy chats about?” Aziraphale went on with deadly sweetness.

“Not my department,” Gabriel said hurriedly, “Michael was looking into it.”

“Come here, Crowley,” Beelzebub snarled, reaching out as if to grab him by the collar and immediately drag him beneath the Earth. “We have such planszzz for you—”

“No.” Aziraphale pulled him back a step, steel in his voice. “I won’t let you take him.”

Gabriel’s mouth dropped open. Beelzebub’s eyebrows furrowed as she stared in furious disbelief.

Adam said, “You’re going to leave both of them alone.”

Everyone’s attention swung to the boy standing in the eye of the storm. He was still holding the sword, Crowley saw, and that fact sent a prickle of unease through his body, although the blade was no longer aflame.

“You!” Gabriel drew himself up, forcing an insincere smile onto his stunned face. “Antichrist boy! Just the person we wanted to have a word with, in fact. Now, about Armageddon—”

“It’s not happening,” Adam replied. “Not now. Maybe not ever. You can all go home and forget about it.”

“Forget—” Gabriel sputtered. “You don’t understand, kid, this is the whole point of it! Of everything! Of all of Creation—”

Adam’s eyes narrowed.

“You think all the Earth and all the people on it are just there for you to smash up like a smaller kid’s sandcastle?”

He raised the sword.

“Adam,” Crowley said. “No.”

Adam shot him a glance full of so much that Crowley almost swayed under it. The unfettered outrage of childhood, faced with something so thoughtlessly unfair. The pure and blinding fury of it, the recognition of adult hypocrisy, the desire to simply strike out and make them do as they were told, force them to obey in the way children were so often forced to obey…

“Not like this,” Crowley said. “This isn’t how you make people learn. Right?”

Adam’s face slowly cleared. The point of the sword dropped, hit the tarmac as it dangled loosely from his hand.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right.”

He turned back to Gabriel and Beelzebub.

“I reckon,” he said, “that if you want to find out which side is best, you should be learning from each other, not fighting.”

“But the Great Plan—” Gabriel managed in a strangled voice.

“The Great Plan seems to have gone rather off-script already,” Aziraphale put in, chin up and eyes ice-bright. “It’s almost as though what was written can be crossed out. Or written differently somewhere else.”

“Almost like it’s all a bit… ineffable,” Crowley added, and felt Aziraphale twitch against him.

He saw it, the moment when doubt dimmed Gabriel’s violet eyes, when dismay damped Beelzebub’s seething rage. They looked at each other. There was some gesticulating, and then they stormed off for a bout of furious whispering.

“You never liked that word,” Aziraphale said very quietly.

“Turns out it has its moments.”

Aziraphale shivered and tightened his grip on Crowley. Gabriel and Beelzebub finished their hurried conference and turned back with such outraged defeat on both their faces that Crowley had to bite back a grin.

“You,” Gabriel snarled at Adam, who looked right back at him, unmoved. “You had one job, kid—”

“When your father hearszzz about this—”

“One more thing,” Adam interrupted. He jerked his head towards Crowley and Aziraphale. “I meant it. You leave them alone.”

“You think Hell can overlook a demon fraterniszzzing with an angel?” Beelzebub demanded. “You think we’re going to let one of ourszzz run off and do what he likes for centurieszzz without repercussionszzz—”

“He’s not one of yours anymore.” Adam glared at her, then at Gabriel. “Neither of them are. They’re ours now. And you’re going to leave them alone.”

And as if there could be no further word on the matter (and perhaps, in this moment held in the palm of Adam’s power, there couldn’t) the Archangel and the Prince of Hell vanished without argument.

There was, for the space of several breaths, a settling peace and a sense of swelling triumph, before the ground started to shake, and a rush of infernal power struck Crowley between the eyes. He almost plunged right back to his knees, would have if Aziraphale hadn’t held him up.

“Fuck,” he managed through gritted teeth. “They told his father.”

“I see,” Aziraphale replied, far too calmly. Then, “Adam, would you mind giving me that back?”

He held out his hand. Adam looked at the sword still dangling from his fingers. He hefted it for a second, and then tossed it away to clatter across the tarmac.

“Nah,” he said, the beginnings of his ever-mischievous grin playing around his mouth even as the ground bucked and trembled like an earthquake. “When you’re in trouble with your dad you’ve gotta own up to it.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a—”

“‘Course,” Adam went on, turning to look at the gates of the airbase. “When I’m in trouble with my dad, it’s my real dad I’m in trouble with.”

The tremors seemed to falter.

“And I’m always in trouble with my dad,” Adam went on with the resigned, put-upon sigh of an eleven-year-old boy with far too much imagination. “‘S not anything special, being in trouble with my dad.”

The sense of swelling infernal power popped like a soap bubble. The ground stilled. There was the sound of a car pulling up to the gate, an older engine that had been carefully maintained by the sort of man who read the manual every Sunday.

“He’s gotta catch me first, though,” Adam said, and suddenly he and the rest of Them were in motion, a gaggle of flailing limbs on bicycles, an excited dog racing to keep up. Adam’s voice drifted back as the four children sped away. “Keep an eye on your apples, Mr Crowley!”

There were loose ends after that, an incensed Arthur Young to placate, a platoon of American soldiers to get out of the way of before they woke up and started asking awkward questions. Crowley leaned into Aziraphale and let it wash over his head. Every time he closed his eyes he saw memories that felt like his and didn’t at the same time, an overlapping mess of impressions, emotions, desires.

Aziraphale guided him gently back to the car and, without even asking, settled him into the passenger side. Crowley lolled his head sideways, caught a glimpse of himself in the wing mirror. His own sulphur-yellow eyes were almost a shock to him after so long.

“What about the other two,” he mumbled, “don’t they need a lift?”

“Mr Young is taking them back.” Aziraphale slid into the driver’s seat and extended his hand for the keys. Crowley passed them over without protest. “I think… I think we should just go home now.”

“Yeah.”

Crowley slumped down in the seat, resting his head on the smooth leather, as Aziraphale started the engine and performed a too-careful U-turn. Oh, the smell of the Bentley, so familiar, he’d spent so many years in this car, made so many sacrifices to keep hold of it in a life that had been full of hard grind and few luxuries…

His eyes snapped open. He stared at the glossy paintwork visible through the windscreen, then looked at the walnut veneer, visibly aged but in otherwise almost perfect condition, ran his hand over the smooth leather of the seats. He remembered the cracks he hadn’t been able to repair, the rips, the stains, and the day the engine had finally died and he hadn’t had the money to get it restored.

“You—” And more recent and familiar memories rushing in, Aziraphale telling him how he’d learned to drive so the Bentley wouldn’t sit unused in some garage, Aziraphale so insistent that Crowley should take the wheel, so eager to relinquish the car to him. “Oh, angel. Thank you.”

Aziraphale’s little intake of breath was far too fragile, far too fraught.

“What— whatever for?”

“Where do I start?” Crowley murmured. He closed his eyes again, reached out to cover Aziraphale’s hand on the gearstick. “For keeping the Bentley. For restoring it. For giving it back to me.”

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Aziraphale whispered. “I… Crowley…”

“Home,” Crowley said, feeling Aziraphale’s hand tremble, giving it a reassuring squeeze before letting go. “Let’s get home first. Then we can talk.”

By the time they got back to the cottage it was almost dark. The walk from the car to the front door seemed insurmountable, but Crowley managed it without support, mostly because Aziraphale had been looking increasingly like a strong wind could knock him over, and Crowley didn’t want to add any more weight to his shoulders.

He keeled over on the sofa and lay there while Aziraphale turned on the lights, closed the curtains, hung up his coat, all the little domesticities of coming home. Home. The cottage wasn’t where they lived most of the time, but he had so many good memories of it…

“We got married,” Crowley blurted out, staring at wide-eyed at the ceiling.

Another little hitch of breath from Aziraphale.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, my dear, we did.”

Crowley heard him sit down in his favourite armchair, turned his head. Aziraphale wasn’t looking at him; he was staring at his own hands, fingers tightly laced together.

“Would— would you like some tea?” he went on. “Or—”

“Wine,” Crowley said with some feeling. “Lots of it.”

“Of course, I’ll go and—”

“No, don’t. Stay there.”

Crowley swung himself upright, took a breath, and snapped his fingers. It felt shaky and uncertain; the bottle from their wine rack back in London wasn’t quite the vintage he’d been thinking of, but it would do. One of the wineglasses fell over sideways, but it didn’t crack. Crowley felt himself smile in a way that was far too open, far too relieved.

“Still got it.”

Then he looked at Aziraphale, whose eyes were fixed on him, wide as the ocean, and as overflowing.

“Angel—”

Aziraphale curled forward, burying his face in his hands with a wretched sob, and Crowley was off the sofa and across the gap so fast he might as well have teleported, falling on his knees at Aziraphale’s feet, reaching out automatically to comfort him.

“Sweetheart,” he said, shock rippling through him at how easily the endearment came, “Aziraphale, it’s all right—”

He pulled him into his arms, pulled him right out of the chair and into his lap, muscle memory too insistent to falter. Aziraphale folded into him, shaking with tears, and Crowley wrapped his arms around him and breathed in the scent of him and quivered in between warring memories like a butterfly caught in a hurricane…

(… because it was Aziraphale, whom he’d known for so many thousands of years, whom he’d loved hopelessly and desperately for almost as long, whom he’d never thought he’d even get to touch for more than an instant…)

(… because it was Aziraphale, whom he’d known and loved for eleven human years, whom he’d shared a mortal life with, whom he’d married…)

(… because there were other memories, other lives, there was love and grief and loss and regret and he couldn’t deal with it right now, he had to shove them away to be picked over later…)

… but it was Aziraphale, and he was sobbing, and Crowley had never heard or seen him come apart so completely, never known him so utterly lose control. He whispered nonsense things into his hair, cradled the back of his neck, cradled him. Pressed light, thoughtless kisses to his ear and cheek and jaw, tasted salt, felt his own eyes grow damp and then spill over as Aziraphale’s grief washed over him like the pull of the tide.

“It’s all right,” Crowley murmured, trying to hold him impossibly closer, trying to stem the flow of it somehow. “It’s all right, it’ll be all right.” And then, helplessly, “I love you.”

“Do you?” Aziraphale whispered back, his doubt as devastating as his anguish. “Or is it just— you’ve been living as a human, my dear, you’ve been thinking like they do—”

“Aziraphale. Angel.” Crowley leaned back enough to take Aziraphale’s face in his hands, to drink in every tear-stained, red-splotched inch of it. “I love you. I married you, didn’t I?”

“That’s a human thing,” Aziraphale protested, stubborn in his misery, “it would never have happened if—”

“You wouldn’t have married me if I hadn’t been human?”

“You wouldn’t have asked me if you hadn’t been human!”

“Sure about that, are you?” Crowley murmured, and kissed him, and kept kissing him until Aziraphale made a helpless noise and broke away to bury his face in Crowley’s shoulder.

“I’ve loved you for centuries,” Crowley ploughed on, and it was terrifying, and it was exhilarating, like flying, like falling, like taking hold of a borrowed courage, a very human freedom. “For millennia, Aziraphale. I’ve always wanted what the humans have. The way they stand up and say— say I choose you. I’d have married you in Rome if I’d thought we could get away with it, if I’d thought you’d say yes.”

“That long?” Aziraphale mumbled weakly into Crowley’s shirt.

“Longer, probably, just… took me a while to admit it.”

“It took me a while too,” Aziraphale replied. He took a shuddering breath and Crowley felt the tension in him start to ease. “Oh, dearest, I’ve missed you.”

Crowley closed his eyes tightly against more tears and pressed a fierce, possessive kiss to Aziraphale’s temple.

“I’ve missed you too,” he managed. “I didn’t even know I did until I saw your wings… God, Aziraphale—” He caught himself with a start. “I mean— Satan— I mean— fuck.”

Aziraphale’s shoulders started to shake, and for a bad moment Crowley thought he was sobbing again, but then he heard the hitching laughter muffled against his shoulder. He didn’t try to stop his own smile, his own sigh of relief.

“Can I see them?” Crowley found himself asking, surprised by his own longing. “Can I see you properly?”

Aziraphale lifted his head, pressed the backs of trembling fingers against his cheeks in a futile effort to dry them. Crowley miracled him a handkerchief. Aziraphale’s lip wobbled, but he managed to turn it into a shaky smile.

“Are you going to tease me about my feathers again?”

“Depends. Will it make you laugh?”

Aziraphale did laugh, breathy and helpless, and then his wings unfolded behind him, soft feathers brushing the backs of Crowley’s hands like they had in the bookshop, barely a week ago, before he’d remembered being sheltered from the first rain, remembered that first kindness offered unthinkingly, like it was something he had a right to.

“Your eyes,” Aziraphale said softly, gazing into them like he couldn’t get enough. “I’ve missed your eyes.”

“Always thought they were a bit creepy, myself.”

Aziraphale shook his head vehemently. His gaze wandered over Crowley’s shoulder.

“Could you—?”

Crowley nodded, and unfurled his own wings, and oh, there was another puzzle piece slotting into place, an ache he’d never understood, the constrained feeling of a part of him crammed into some ill-fitting drawer. He groaned at the relief of it, rested his forehead against Aziraphale’s for a long moment.

“You know,” Aziraphale said, his voice so brimming with innocence that Crowley jerked back sharply, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Those aren’t looking quite as well-groomed as usual, darling.”

“… it’s been more than three hundred years, angel, I have an excuse—!”

Aziraphale laughed, but sudden pain shone through in his eyes, in the way he sagged in Crowley’s arms.

“Three hundred years,” he repeated in a whisper. “More than that. Three hundred and fifty—”

“Three hundred and fifty-four,” Crowley corrected after a moment of calculation.

Aziraphale drew in a careful breath.

“Tell me?” he said. “Tell me how this happened? I understand it was Azrael’s doing—”

Crowley shuddered. Aziraphale shifted in his arms, reached behind him, and Crowley felt his gentle fingers moving through black feathers, stroking them soothingly back into place. He sighed and leaned into it.

“He wanted me to say I’d been wrong,” Crowley said after several long minutes of nothing but soft touches and their breathing settling into a slow and steady rhythm together. “That you need death to appreciate life. And I… wouldn’t.”

He closed his eyes, a wave of guilt and anger turning his stomach.

“Every time,” he whispered thickly. “Every time I died, he came to me again. And I knew that if I just… told him what he wanted to hear… maybe it would stop. Maybe I could come back to you. But I… I couldn’t do it, angel. I couldn’t. Because he’s wrong. Adam had the right of it. One day they’ll figure it out, figure out how to put a stop to it forever, and I—”

He choked, and Aziraphale kissed his eyelids, murmured his name.

“I’ll fucking cheer,” Crowley finished. He opened his eyes, brought his hands up to run the pads of his thumbs over Aziraphale’s cheekbones, felt himself settling into where he was supposed to be, where he’d somehow against all odds found himself, with Aziraphale in his lap, with Aziraphale in his heart. “I’ll tell you the rest of it. I will. But I need time to… to work through it. To fit all these memories in.”

Aziraphale kissed him and then kissed him again, like he didn’t quite know how to stop.

“We have time,” Aziraphale said finally when he pulled back for air. “Oh, my dearest, we have time.”

“And, perhaps more importantly…” Crowley twisted around, groped for the bottle of wine on the table, which had miraculously avoided being knocked over by his right wing as he turned. “We have access to quite extraordinary amounts of alcohol, and you don’t have to pretend not to miracle away the hangover anymore.”

“You noticed that?”

“Not at the time. Only in hindsight.” Crowley didn’t bother with a corkscrew, just glared at the bottle until the cork shot out and made itself scarce. “Explains why drinking without you was never as fun.”

He hesitated.

“Well,” he admitted. “Drinking without you’s never been as much fun, to be honest.”

Aziraphale took the bottle from him, gestured so that the glasses flew into their hands, poured them each a generous measure. It was awkward, as close as they still were, but neither of them tried to move from the protective circle of their overlapping wings.

“Did we save the world today?” Aziraphale asked lightly as he set the bottle aside.

“I think Adam did most of it by himself,” Crowley said, looking at the ring on Aziraphale’s left hand, the way it glowed softly against the red of the wine. “Maybe the American girl helped.”

“All the same, it does seem as if the world has been saved.”

He tilted his glass in invitation. Crowley smiled and brought his own to meet it.

“To the world, then,” he said, sealing it with the clink of glass.

“To the world,” Aziraphale replied.

7

And Boughs Where Apples Made

They stayed in Tadfield for the rest of the summer. It was easy, now neither of them had to worry about human constraints. Crowley’s shop wouldn’t suffer any loss of business, and his stock would stay fresh and ready for sale. Aziraphale was always happy with any excuse to put people off coming in to buy his books.

They drank a lot of wine. Crowley caught Adam trying to steal his apples three times, and missed him twice more, even with the aid of demonic miracles, finding the telltale ribbons that Adam left tied in the branches to mark his victory. Aziraphale kept score on the whiteboard in the kitchen.

One day, Aziraphale dropped one of his favourite mugs. It shattered on the tiled floor with a loud enough noise to bring Crowley rushing in from the other room, and Aziraphale found himself unexpectedly in tears as he stared at the fragments of china.

“You okay?” Crowley asked, uncertain, and Aziraphale tried automatically to say yes, and found that he was shaking and mute in the face of an overwhelming and ridiculous grief at the sight of the shattered mug. “Oh, angel…”

Crowley bent swiftly, reached out towards the mess, and the pieces skittered back together as his hand drew near, the mug reforming perfectly just in time for him to pick it up by the handle and set it carefully back on the countertop. Then he took Aziraphale in his arms and held him as he wept and felt like an idiot and couldn’t stop.

(He’d broken too many things, over the years, that couldn’t be repaired. Oh, if Crowley wasn’t around, he could fix them with a quick miracle, but anything that Crowley saw broken had to stay broken, or raise too many questions. Aziraphale wasn’t exactly clumsy but he’d never had to be particularly careful before, had always been able to restore anything he damaged. And somehow it was always the things he loved best that he managed to destroy.)

Crowley was rubbing his back and murmuring meaningless comfort and Aziraphale couldn’t stop crying and he realised finally that it was because he was waiting for this to break, too, for the cracks to show, for some separation to occur, between the Crowley who held him and kissed him like they were a human couple, and the Crowley who’d kept a careful arm’s length between them for thousands of years.

Don’t make me choose, he thought in desperation, pressing his face into Crowley’s shirt, Oh don’t make me choose, between having him back and losing him.

“The mug isn’t a metaphor for whatever you think it is, you know,” Crowley said, far too good at reading Aziraphale after all this time (eleven years, six thousand years). “It’s just a mug, and it’s as good as new now.”

He kissed Aziraphale’s cheek, kissed away the salt.

“I love you,” Crowley said, the way he kept saying it, over and over, like he had for eleven years, like he never had in all those millennia before.

Aziraphale wanted to believe him. He did believe him. And he still couldn’t believe it would last. He feared it was the final echoes of a life of make-believe, that sooner or later, Crowley would settle back into who he’d always been, and step away, and Aziraphale would have to take everything he’d learned about his own heart in the last three and a half centuries, and stuff it into some dusty box, never to be opened again.

“It’s okay,” Crowley said, fingers gentle now in Aziraphale’s hair. “I’m here.”

Aziraphale nodded against his shoulder, and pushed back his fear again, and allowed himself just for now to believe in the certainty in Crowley’s voice.

Things would come back to Crowley at the strangest moments. He went to buy Aziraphale roses (he’d been bringing Aziraphale roses for years and felt nothing but joy in it) and he ended up a sobbing wreck in the village florist. He got home somehow, found Aziraphale reading in the study, threw himself into his arms and stayed there for a very long time.

“Why?” he asked finally, when he could speak, when Aziraphale’s fingers in his hair and kisses on his brow had soothed the memory of anguish. “That time, that first time in London, when you left. It was— it must have been Heaven’s fault, I know that now, but please, tell me the truth, finally.”

Aziraphale shuddered and closed his eyes and clenched his fingers tightly in the back of Crowley’s shirt, but he answered, his voice low and wretched, his words faltering like a doomed ship on a treacherous reef. By the time he was finished, all they could do was cling to each other, both reliving that awful parting, both knowing how that lifetime had ended.

“I kept your letters,” Aziraphale whispered. “I’ve read them so many times.”

Crowley laughed hoarsely.

“I read yours until I knew them by heart,” he replied. He took a deep breath and let it out again. “No wonder you stayed away.”

Aziraphale made a broken noise, shook his head.

“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “I should have come to you. I should have come to you every time, I should have tried—”

Crowley kissed away his self-recrimination, stroked fingertips over his damp cheeks. There were moments when Aziraphale seemed his normal self, seemed relieved and delighted that the future stretched out in front of them, but he was more often fragile, and haunted, and looked at Crowley like he was waiting for Crowley to push him away. Like each time Crowley remembered something from one of his previous lives, it was another weight on a set of invisible scales that would one day tip them apart.

“I understand,” Crowley said. “I do. I understand, angel. And you came back, this time. You came back. It— it meant so much—”

He remembered a time, eleven years ago, when Aziraphale had held him like this, kissed him in reassurance, repeated the things Crowley needed to hear over and over until he finally started to believe them. He wasn’t sure how long it would take, to do the same for Aziraphale, but if it took the rest of eternity, he’d find a way to make him understand.

They had an upright piano in the back room of the cottage, an indulgence Crowley had protested at the time but that Aziraphale had insisted on and never regretted. He found Crowley sitting on the stool, glaring at the instrument as if it had personally offended him. Aziraphale made a questioning noise; Crowley grimaced, and a formless surge of fear seized Aziraphale’s chest.

“You’d think,” Crowley said, “having two sets of memories of learning to play would be an advantage, but I keep getting mixed up.”

Aziraphale let out a shaky breath. For a moment he’d thought… he’d wondered if that talent was some facet of Crowley’s temporary humanity, if it had deserted him now he’d returned to his true self. The prospect of never hearing him play again had, for that instant, been almost unbearable.

“Are they so different?”

“Yeah, they teach scales differently now, and some of the musical notation’s changed, and I swear I remember one of Mozart’s bits but I can’t find it anywhere…”

“How does it go?”

Crowley beckoned him over. The stool wasn’t really big enough for both of them - or it hadn’t been, until Aziraphale tried to sit down on it, and discovered it had become rather wider than he remembered. It was still narrow enough that they had to sit pressed close against each other, which both amused him and made his heart ache fondly.

Crowley began to pick out a melody, added in the left hand as his confidence increased, brow slightly furrowed in concentration. Aziraphale watched his fingers, mesmerised as always by how quick and clever they were, how they danced over the keys.

“Salieri,” he found himself saying, as the composition stirred his memory. “It’s Salieri, not Mozart.” He laughed under his breath. “He’s no doubt rolling in his grave even now, dearest.”

“We both know most of that rivalry was just gossip,” Crowley replied with a sideways grin, letting his hands fall into his lap.

“Yes, but he still wouldn’t appreciate the mix-up, especially given how much more famous Mozart has become.”

Crowley looked suddenly thoughtful.

“Did you know him? Before we met in Vienna? You never mentioned it, but—”

“No, I didn’t. I was… I spent a long time out of touch with civilisation, to be honest.” Aziraphale thought of the bright blue waters of the Aegean sea and the islands he’d hidden away on. “It was all new to me, when I met you there.”

The familiar shadow of old pain fell over him, began to drag his thoughts to dark places, to all the things he should have done and all the things he should never have permitted.

Crowley’s arm slipped around his waist; Crowley’s chin rested on his shoulder.

“What shall I play you?” he asked, breath warm on Aziraphale’s cheek. “Can’t guarantee I won’t mess it up, but I’ll have a go.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes and tried again to believe.

“That one that…” He blushed. “The one I used to think you’d written.”

Crowley laughed, and then made one of those noises Aziraphale had come to recognise as a moment of epiphany, of memories colliding and making something new.

“God— I mean— oh, whatever, I don’t think She cares.” Crowley grimaced and then laughed again, desperately fond and exasperated. “I finally understand how you got to 2013 without ever hearing Elton John. You’ve always been fifty years behind on popular culture, ever since they invented it in Sumeria.”

“I’ve caught up a bit,” Aziraphale protested.

“Yes, because I made you.” Crowley nuzzled affectionately against his neck, then reluctantly drew back so he could get his hands on the keys. “And you still get Queen and Prince mixed up.”

He started on the melody, found his confidence, leaned into the opening bars.

“You want me to sing it too?” he asked softly, glancing at Aziraphale.

He had a good enough voice and could hold the tune as long as he had accompaniment, but singing had never been the fun part for him. He’d only done it on special occasions, like when he sat down to play this for Aziraphale for the first time, and Aziraphale quite genuinely believed that it really was his song for several years.

“Yes,” he said, and rested his head on Crowley’s shoulder, and closed his eyes.

One of the strange but strangely wonderful consequences of Crowley’s overlapping memories was that he now remembered seeing Aziraphale for the first time, not once, but over and over.

He remembered seeing him on the wall of Eden, of course, a worried angel watching the humans trudge through the desert, remembered how he’d been drawn even then to his warmth, to the way he looked like he was wondering about things. Remembered thinking, it couldn’t hurt, could it? To try and talk to him? He doesn’t look like the smiting sort…

He remembered seeing him the Sicilian market, the Englishman who paused like he was holding his breath, who only exhaled when Crowley smiled and greeted him. He remembered thinking he wanted those blue eyes to crinkle around the edges, wanted to hear him laugh.

(If he pushed, he remembered the real first time, the one Aziraphale had buried, remembered that even in that moment of confusion and alarm, he’d been struck by how the stranger had looked at him, so fond and so full of familiarity.)

(He had to push to find the details of Copenhagen, too, to dig out the memories Aziraphale had delicately and mercifully hidden. He remembered the man who’d walked into his shop and gazed at him like they’d known each other always, remembered the way his heart had stuttered and found a new rhythm.)

He remembered seeing him in that smoky salon, hovering at the back of the room, eyes always on Crowley. He remembered playing up to the attention, adding extra flourishes to his performance, choosing his pieces with care when he realised that Aziraphale would be back next time. He remembered taking his courage in his teeth and threading through the guests, a deep sense of rightness filling him as he slipped up on Aziraphale’s left. He remembered his disappointment when Aziraphale fled; his delight when he came back.

He remembered glimpses of him, moments he’d barely registered at the time. The sense of being watched among the goldenrods, though when he looked up, he caught only a flash of impossibly white-blond hair vanishing among the ranks of soldiers. One day in his villa in the Algarve he’d gone to put out the lamp and had the strongest urge, just for an instant, to rush outside, to throw open the front door and call out, to say wait, don’t go to the empty air.

(He remembered the last seconds of an agonising death, when gentle hands had eased his pain, and he’d seen shining wings above him, and known peace despite his terror. He chose not to bring that to mind as often as the others.)

He remembered knocking on the door of the bookshop that had miraculously escaped the ravages of the Blitz, arms full of tulips, head full of schemes and plans, and then seeing that face, those eyes widening in startled recognition, feeling his heart jump like an electrified thing, feeling everything in him cry you, it’s you, it’s you again.

He remembered Aziraphale walking into his shop and saying, there you are…

He could recognise it now, the way that every lifetime had added weight to the next, the way that every time he’d seen Aziraphale, it had cast echoes forward. How he’d felt that faint stirring in Sicily, a deeper recognition in Copenhagen, outright longing in Vienna. How when Aziraphale had come to him this time, in London, his whole world had tilted and changed its axis, taking Aziraphale as its new north without a second’s hesitation.

No-one was supposed to experience this, to go around and around through human lifetimes like a train on endless tracks, with the shadows of each life throwing themselves long into the next. What Azrael had done was a far greater insult to the order of the cosmos, in Crowley’s opinion, than anything he himself had attempted.

But then, he could admit he was biased.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure what prompted it, but one day Crowley dragged him into the bedroom, made him sit down on the edge of the bed, and insisted he get his wings out. He then set about grooming them to the same standard as his own (which he’d spent some hours on a few days after the Apocalypse) while Aziraphale sat stunned and tried not to make too many embarrassing noises.

Neither of them, strictly speaking, needed to do this by hand, any more than they needed to visit the barber or bathe or buy clothes, but like with so many other things in their long lives on Earth, they’d acquired habits. Aziraphale’s was to subconsciously keep his wings in a state of basic functionality and not worry too much about how they looked; Crowley’s was to sit down with several mirrors and a slightly alarming variety of implements, and do it all by hand until he was satisfied with the stylish result. He’d had to improvise this time, since his collection of brushes and combs and long-handled back-scrubbers was long lost. Fortunately, human innovation had reached new heights in the meantime, and Crowley seemed happy enough with the results.

He didn’t use any tools on Aziraphale, preferring to just run his fingers through his wings and smooth the hair-thin barbs until each individual feather lay sleek and neat in its place. It felt wonderful, soothing and tender and desperately intimate. They’d had their wings out around each other so many times, over the millennia, enjoying the chance to be in their own true forms out of the sight of humans, but it would never have occurred to Aziraphale to do something like this, and Crowley had never so much as suggested it before.

But then, Crowley had never so much as suggested kissing him before, had never tried to take his hand or hold him in his arms or—

The shivering dread rose up in Aziraphale again, the sick expectation in his stomach, and he heard Crowley murmur softly as his shoulders tensed.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, trying to return to the loose relaxation that had been creeping in.

“‘S okay. D’you want me to stop?”

“No,” Aziraphale said too quickly, too desperately. He closed his eyes and swallowed. “I just… what brought this on?”

“I thought it about before,” Crowley admitted, extra gentle as he stroked through some of the longer feathers, tugging a little in a way that felt amazing. “When I realised you were never going to do it yourself. Since, I dunno. Since we stopped having them out all the time, and you stopped paying attention to yours. Made me want to grab a brush every time I saw them.”

“You never offered.”

“Well, no,” Crowley said, in a tone both amused and a little sad. “Sometimes it was hard to get you to even be in the same room as me, I wasn’t about to scare you off with any crazy ideas about touching.”

Aziraphale turned suddenly and without really meaning to; Crowley yelped and ducked to avoid being smacked in the face with a freshly groomed wing.

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s fine.” Crowley caught his hands, ran his fingers gently over the palms. “Look, I just thought… this was something we’ve never done before. I thought it might be… nice. To do something that isn’t…”

He trailed off, but Aziraphale understood. Something they’d never done Before or After, as themselves or as their human shadows; something without the layers of meaning and memory and regret.

“It is nice,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley smiled, kept stroking his hands like he’d stroked his wings, and suddenly something cracked and something like bravery or desperation sent Aziraphale scrambling forward into Crowley’s arms, his voice like the tumble of water spilling from a collapsing dam. “When you kissed me in Sicily— when you kissed me in Vienna— I thought it was because you weren’t really yourself, because you didn’t know who we were—”

“Angel,” Crowley whispered, holding him tight. “No. It was because I didn’t have any reason to be afraid. I didn’t know we were on opposite sides. Weren’t you listening, that night the world didn’t end? I’d have married you in Rome and I’d have kissed you a lot sooner. Maybe on that wall, when you were so worried about your sword, just to see if it would cheer you up—”

Aziraphale made a startled noise against his shoulder, and Crowley laughed and hugged him tighter.

“Only half-joking,” he murmured.

“I was listening,” Aziraphale replied weakly. “I was. It’s just…”

“I know.” Crowley’s fingers found his wing again. Aziraphale trembled under the soft, deft touch. “It’s okay. We’ve got time, remember? I’ll keep telling you.”

Adam came around often, even when he wasn’t conducting fruit-related raids. He was remarkably relaxed about everything that had happened, except that sometimes Crowley had the feeling that he was being inspected, that Adam was checking on his progress.

“You know,” Crowley said one day as they were throwing a ball for Dog, “I’ve seen hellhounds. I’ve never seen one like this.”

“Dog likes being Dog,” Adam said, either a child’s simplicity or a philosopher’s wisdom, it was hard to say. “And I like being me.”

“Hmm.” Crowley miracled the ball out from behind the bush where it had vanished, and immediately received Dog’s rapt attention. “I like being me, too. Thank you. For what you did.”

Adam shrugged, as bashful in the face of praise as any pre-adolescent.

“Thank you for the stars,” he said.

The first time Crowley had the nightmare again, he woke Aziraphale from his own dreamless sleep by bolting upright and crying out in horror. His eyes were wide and entirely yellow, no hint of white, and for a moment, held no recognition of his surroundings.

Aziraphale followed him out of the nest of covers, gentled him until his panting breaths eased and his shaking ebbed.

“It’s that first death,” Crowley said finally, with a shudder. “The very first one, in the Great Plague. Fuck. No wonder I couldn’t read that bit in the Decameron.”

Aziraphale shivered in sympathetic horror, even as he felt a wave of a terrible, selfish relief. Since Crowley had first tried to describe the nightmare to him, he’d been so afraid it was the memory of succumbing to influenza, abandoned in London and never knowing why he’d been betrayed.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale murmured, as much from that guilty relief as from his own ineffectiveness. He smoothed damp hair from Crowley’s face, miracled away the sweat that had soaked his pyjama shirt. “I can’t— stop them anymore—”

“Wait, is that what you were doing? This whole time?”

Aziraphale nodded. Crowley made a complicated noise and dragged Aziraphale back down into the covers so he could wrap himself around him in a distinctly serpentine fashion.

“Thanks,” he mumbled into Aziraphale’s neck. “Thank you. It was so much worse when I didn’t know what it was.”

He had a way of doing this, of getting his arms and legs just so, that shouldn’t have been comfortable but was, and that made Aziraphale feel as enclosed and encircled as if he were wrapped in Crowley’s wings.

“Maybe it’ll fade now,” Crowley went on with vague optimism. “Or I can, I dunno, repress it or something.”

“Is that healthy?”

“Ask me again in a hundred years.”

Sometimes, the memories that struck Crowley were ones he’d had with him for years, given sudden new depth as his mind slowly rethreaded them into the much larger web of recollections. Like when he triumphantly brought in the first ripe-enough apple (small, but gloriously red) before Adam could get to it, and then stopped mid-step, and started to laugh.

Aziraphale had learned to recognise when his mirth was triggered by some emerging memory. He just raised his eyebrows, and waited.

“I offered you an apple,” Crowley managed at last. “Oh, angel, your face.”

Aziraphale smiled, and if there was still something hesitant about it, it was at least warm and amused rather than bittersweet.

“I almost kissed you then,” Aziraphale said. “I wished that I had, after.”

Crowley gave the apple an assessing look, then took a bite. Sweet, not as sweet as the later yield would be, but sweet enough. He held it out to Aziraphale.

“Want to try again?”

Aziraphale blushed, actually blushed, to Crowley’s deep delight. He took the apple, never looked away for a second as he bit into it just where Crowley’s teeth had marked it. Crowley found himself swallowing rather harder than he’d anticipated, felt his knees get a little weak.

And then Aziraphale insisted on eating the entire rest of the apple, and Crowley couldn’t even bring himself to protest, because there it was, that spark of mischief that had been too long absent from Aziraphale’s eyes, that hint of stubbornness, that well-hidden desire to tease.

There you are, he thought, grinning as Aziraphale finally deigned to kiss him, tasting of apples and the faintest traces of self-satisfaction.

“Angel,” Crowley said, far too gentle and careful, and Aziraphale froze in the middle of making tea. “There’s something you should know.”

Aziraphale flinched, but said, “Yes?”

He heard Crowley get up from the kitchen table and come towards him. Warm arms wrapped around Aziraphale’s waist from behind.

“When I died in Sicily,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale closed his eyes against the pain of it. “It was quick, angel. It was over before I even knew it was happening. I didn’t have time to be afraid.”

Aziraphale took a shaky breath, leaned into Crowley’s embrace, let himself be held up.

“Copenhagen,” Crowley went on. “Yeah, I had dreams, I had these wisps of memory. But my life was all right. I learned the names of the stars. And when I died, it was quiet. It was peaceful. I thought about seeing Venus for the first time through that telescope. I thought about the constellations. I had this idea I’d end up among them. I wasn’t afraid, that time.”

Aziraphale nodded, barely breathing.

“London, oh, I can’t pretend it wasn’t awful, Pestilence came for me herself, you know, she held the grudge for all that time… I worried about the bookshop. I hoped it would all still be there when you came back. I never doubted that you’d come back, even if I wasn’t there to meet you.”

Tears streamed down Aziraphale’s face and he didn’t even try to stop them. Crowley pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. Aziraphale could tell how hard this was for him from the pauses, from the way he breathed, but he ploughed on, determined.

“You took my pain away, in Ypres. You took my pain away, that second time in London, and oh, angel, you don’t know how long I’d been living with that pain, what it was like to be free of it for those last months, what it was like to go softly and think of you in my final moments.”

“Crowley—”

“You made it better,” Crowley whispered into his hair. “You made it easier. Thank you.”

One afternoon the weather broke and it rained for hours (which surely had nothing to do with Crowley telling Adam that flawless summer days were all well and good, but hosepipe bans were an undesirable consequence). They leaned into each other on the sofa and talked for hours about the things Crowley had missed in the last few centuries, comparing his human recollections with Aziraphale’s angelic ones, darting back and forth across history with no regard to continuity. Crowley heard the way Aziraphale hesitated sometimes, tried to frame things in a less revealing way, tried to hide his first-hand knowledge, before he remembered that he didn’t have to anymore.

At last he fell silent, and Crowley could tell he was turning something over in his head, so he just sipped his tea and enjoyed the feeling of his arm around Aziraphale, the warmth of him, and the knowledge that they could do this again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that…

“What… what was it like?” Aziraphale asked suddenly. “Being human, I mean. Really human.”

Crowley thought for a while before answering. Aziraphale gave him time in turn, leaning his head against Crowley’s shoulder while he waited.

“It’s not as different as you might think,” Crowley said finally. “Not really, not at the core of it. There’s just… a lot of the questions are the same. Some of the answers are different. It’s… harder work, I suppose, with all the day-to-day things you have to do just to survive. And the beginning part is weird, let me tell you.”

“You mean childhood?”

“Yeah.” Crowley grimaced into his mug. It was easier to talk about now, at least, now that he could view his human parents - this lifetime and others - through a more detached lens. “Though I think that was… some of that was my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

Crowley sighed.

“I think they always knew that I didn’t belong,” he said quietly. “I had brothers, in Copenhagen. They used to call me a changeling. It was like that every time. Whatever Azrael did, I think it… forced me into their lives. Sometimes they hadn’t even wanted kids. Sometimes I just wasn’t what they expected. Some of them were kinder about it than others.”

“Oh, my dearest.” Aziraphale turned towards him, pulled him closer. “I’m not sure that was your fault. It’s my understanding that… well, that it’s sadly rather common, among humans.”

“Good thing it wasn’t like that for Adam,” Crowley muttered, burying his face briefly in Aziraphale’s hair. “Sometimes, I— I keep thinking about how close it all was, how it all could have just gone to hell—”

“Me too,” Aziraphale whispered. “Sometimes I think about what could have happened if— if we’d arrived a bit later, or if Adam hadn’t realised what had been done to you—”

Crowley shuddered. He miracled both their mugs onto the nearby table so he could wrap Aziraphale properly in his arms.

“Do you ever wonder,” he said after a while, “if it was all… part of the plan? All of this?”

“I do wonder,” Aziraphale admitted. “I kept finding you. And there were the flowers. Over and over…”

They sat in silence for a while, drawing comfort from their closeness.

“I have to know,” Crowley said suddenly. “Did you invent that whole language of flowers nonsense?”

“Me? Why would you think that?”

“Seems like your sort of thing. Making everybody puzzle out crossword clues everytime they want to give someone a bouquet.”

“It is not,” Aziraphale replied indignantly. “I had nothing to do with it. But I thought it was rather nice.”

“You’re not the one who had to overthink every wedding arrangement for the last eleven years.”

Aziraphale laughed, then grew serious again.

“Will you keep it, do you think? The shop?”

“I…” Crowley tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I liked it, but it was hard work. Suppose I could cheat a bit now. Or do something else.”

He glanced out of the window. The climbing rose he’d been cajoling for years had finally covered the garden wall properly and had been blooming sweetly all summer. The raspberry canes he’d planted for Aziraphale were getting in one last round of fruit before autumn set in. There were daises and clover in the lawn, but Crowley had always rather liked their soft whiteness, had never understood the desire for uniform, bland grass. He’d been thinking about getting a greenhouse set up in one corner and trying his hand at something more exotic.

“I like the garden better,” he said. “Cut flowers die. Everything here keeps coming back, year after year.”

“It’s a lovely garden,” Aziraphale replied. And then, softly, almost shyly, so that it took a moment for the impact of the words to register, “The best I’ve ever seen.”

Aziraphale didn’t know when it happened, when he truly started to believe, but he knew it had happened the night Crowley said, out of nowhere, “We should go back to Rome. Do it properly this time.”

Aziraphale made a face, remembering their last visit.

“I wonder if maybe its time has passed, dearest.”

“Nah.” Crowley got up to refill Aziraphale’s glass. “Lots of new things to see. Lots of old ones to talk about. We could get oysters. Raise a glass to old Petronius.”

Aziraphale felt his eyes well with tears, but for the first time in… he didn’t know how long… instead of resignation and weary sadness, he felt a prickle of defiance, irritation, a rebellious surge of no, stop that, I’ve done enough crying for several lifetimes.

“That could be nice,” he said, blinking once, hard, dispelling the tears unshed. “Perhaps we could… take one of those winemaking tours, or something.”

Crowley snorted in amusement.

“Any excuse to get sloshed before lunchtime,” he said cheerfully. “Sounds good to me.”

His eyes were so lovely in the low light, almost umber, soft with an open affection he’d never dared show in the time Before. Crowley hadn’t resumed his habit of wearing sunglasses, had said offhandedly that it felt too strange after so long. To see him like this, now, like Aziraphale had seen him so many other times through history - lit by some dimly flickering flame, leaning close to pour a drink - but with all that love in every line of his smile, all that silent promise in the way he let his fingers linger on Aziraphale’s when he passed back the glass.

He believed, and it was like breaking, and it was like finally being made whole.

Crowley drove them up to London for the day as the summer was waning and Adam and the others were grumbling about having to go back to school soon. Aziraphale wanted to check on a few things in the bookshop, and Crowley found he had an urge to look around their flat, to see it from his new perspective on the world. He left Aziraphale fussing over something at his desk, and went upstairs.

He knew there had been no living space when Aziraphale had first bought the building, was sure this door had once led to a closet or something equally mundane. He climbed the carpeted stairs cautiously, almost afraid they’d vanish under his feet, but although he could feel the old echoes of miracle work in the walls, they had existed for long enough that they were in no danger of fading away.

Crowley stood in the sitting room and looked around, and thought about the day Aziraphale had invited him up here, all nervous and watchful, and Crowley hadn’t been able to understand why, had wondered why they’d never come up here before to spend the evening. He knew now it was because the place hadn’t existed before that day.

He ran his eyes over all the familiar furnishings, the knick-knacks Aziraphale couldn’t resist, the art prints Crowley had contributed in a burst of decorating enthusiasm a few years ago, the books that always crept in and formed drifts for a while until they were relocated back downstairs, the flat-screen television that Crowley had coaxed Aziraphale into installing despite his natural inclination towards something much smaller (and possibly in black and white). And for the first time, he saw how much of this place had been made for him, how much devotion Aziraphale had poured into the form of it, from that window that caught the afternoon sun just right for napping, to the sofa that was exactly the right length and depth for Crowley to really stretch out on.

And he finally understood why so many things seemed to have a subtle snake motif, and it made him laugh and wipe tears from his eyes at the same time, and he rushed downstairs to find Aziraphale, unwilling to be apart from him for another single second.

He found him standing in the secret room, looking over it all with a lost expression.

“I suppose this isn’t really necessary anymore,” Aziraphale said, as Crowley came up gently behind him, slotted himself against his back with a chin on his shoulder. “I don’t have anything to hide from you.”

There was a weight to the words, of more than books and flowers and boxes of old letters. Crowley caught his breath, wrapped his arms tightly around Aziraphale’s middle.

“We can find other places to fit it all in,” he replied. “As we go along. It doesn’t have to be right now.”

Aziraphale nodded, but there was something building in him, Crowley could feel it, a tension and a determination.

“What did you think, when you first came in here?” he asked.

“I thought—” Crowley hesitated, but answered truthfully. “I thought of Bluebeard. The flowers— like all those dead wives.”

Aziraphale nodded.

“It’s like a tomb,” he said. “It’s no place for the living.”

He snapped his fingers, and before Crowley’s eyes, the flowers wilted, then withered, then crumbled to dust. All except the bouquet he’d made eleven years ago, which Aziraphale took down from its shelf with careful hands.

“But I’ll keep this one,” he said softly. “You put so much love into it.”

Crowley made a noise against his shoulder that he couldn’t even classify in his own mind. He hugged Aziraphale tightly, breathed him in, silently promised himself that for every one of the flowers that had been destroyed, he would bring Aziraphale ten more.

“Let’s go to dinner,” he said. “I want to take you out somewhere really good.”

Aziraphale smiled. The bouquet vanished from his hands; Crowley knew instinctively that it would be waiting for them back at the cottage.

“The Savoy?” Aziraphale suggested. “Claridge’s?”

“The Ritz,” Crowley replied with sudden certainty. “I bet a table’s just opened up. Miraculously.”

Aziraphale laughed, and turned in his arms, and kissed him.

“I don’t know how I got by without you,” he whispered against Crowley’s lips as they parted.

“You’ll never have to again,” Crowley promised, and took him by the hand, and led him away from the past.

Edain came out of Midhir’s hill, and lay

Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,

Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds

And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,

And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made

Of opal and ruby and pale chrysolite

Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,

Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,

Because her hands had been made wild by love.

When Midhir’s wife had changed her to a fly,

He made a harp with Druid apple-wood

That she among her winds might know he wept;

And from that hour he has watched over none

But faithful lovers.

The Harp of Aengus, William Butler Yeats

Author’s Notes

This story surprised me, to say the least. Not the level of angst per se, but because Good Omens didn’t seem like a particularly obvious target for it, to be honest. What I love about the book and the series is how comfortable and practical the characters are, and how certain they are of their friendship and love for each other.

To this day I don’t know quite what made me decide to throw all that out the window and inflict as much pain as I could physically cram into the words. A chance conversation with my sister gave me the basic idea of “immortal character running into their soulmate who’s human and keeps being reincarnated and doesn’t know”. I wrote Flowers for Anthony all in one go, absolutely possessed by the heartbreak I could feel in the idea, and then I seriously considered not posting it, because it was so painful and so outside my usual way of writing the characters. And then when I did post it, I wavered over whether to continue it, not because I didn’t know where to go next - I actually had the whole basic outline of the series in my head pretty much from the start - but because there was a certain artistry to just leaving the short story as it was, and never answering the questions it raised.

But I’m not really that sort of writer. I don’t like angst for angst’s sake, only as a means of coming through to a clear morning and a new day.

Some questions I was asked after finishing the series:

Why did Aziraphale keep finding Crowley? Why were there flowers every time?

Wibbly wobbly time and destiny stuff, basically. I have a theme I keep returning to in my writing, the idea of there being a ‘wrong’ kind of reincarnation, where the person keeps coming back exactly the same, and certain patterns repeat in their lives. The correlation to that, for me, is that the serial reincarnation is so unnatural that it starts to warp the world around it, sending echoes of those patterns up and down the flow of time. So Crowley wasn’t consciously causing the flowers, they were essentially aftershocks - or foreshocks - of what was going to happen in each life. (This being Good Omens, of course, you could also speculate that God may have been directly involved.)

What name did Aziraphale use during the Vienna/London years?

Alexander. Crowley called him Aleksi.

Why did Death hate Crowley so much?

He didn’t, actually. That’s one thing I slightly wish I’d made clearer. Death’s attitude here was more like a completely alien morality system: he sees the world a certain way, he doesn’t understand why Crowley doesn’t, he attempts to show him that he’s wrong. Crowley attributes his actions to spite or revenge because that’s what it feels like (and that’s certainly Pestilence’s motivation), but Death was actually quite neutral about it all. Crowley won’t have any problems with him going forward.

Why did Adam look at Crowley and ask what was wrong, when he’d only ever known Crowley as human?

Because in that moment, Adam was seeing the world on thousands of layers of reality, and he could see that Crowley wasn’t really human, he was this twisting mess of repeating lives and memories.

What does “Pray for us, Icarus” mean?

It’s a line from the song “Fall Together” by Thea Gilmore:

Chain smoking, Bible quoting, dressed for a funeral

Pray for us Icarus, been talking with our mouths full

(Let's fall together)

Call up the law 'cause I'm betting on a fight

If we're gonna do it then we're gonna do it right

(Let's fall together)

I interpret this as, “we are about to fall in flames, so please, Icarus, pray for us, since you know exactly how that feels”.

Soundtrack: falling, falling, flying

Listen on Youtube

Listen on Spotify

Flowers for Anthony

01. Fall Together - Thea Gilmore (Crowley)

Were you in love? Were you mistaken?

02. Take You Down - Illenium (Aziraphale)

I know that you won't understand

but you need to let go of this hand

Who Pluck'd Thee From Thy Stalk

03. Time After Time - Eva Cassidy (Crowley)

Watching through windows, I'm wondering if you're okay

04. I Almost Do - Taylor Swift (Aziraphale)

It takes everything in me not to run to you

Like a Sunless Garden

05. Sicily: Bells for Her - Tori Amos (Aziraphale)

Can't stop what's coming, can't stop what is on its way

06. Copenhagen: Icarus - Bastille (Aziraphale)

This is how it feels to take a fall

07. Vienna/London: Blue Caravan - Vienna Teng (Aziraphale)

He said, “go where you have to, for I belong to you,

Until my dying day.”

08: And After: Hurts Like Hell - Fleurie (Aziraphale)

I loved, and I loved, and I lost you

And it hurts like hell

09: Christchurch: Long & Lost - Florence and the Machine (Aziraphale)

Is it too late to come on home?

Herein a Blossom Lies

10. Violet Hill - Coldplay (Crowley)

If you love me, won't you let me know?

11. This Love - Taylor Swift (Crowley)

These hands had to let it go free and this love came back to me

That Dares Not Grasp the Thorn

12. A Sorta Fairytale - Tori Amos (Aziraphale)

Like a good book, I can't put this day back

13. Haunted - Poe (Aziraphale)

And I will always miss you

14. Who Wants to Live Forever - Queen (Aziraphale)

Touch my tears with your lips

Touch my world with your fingertips

O Rose, Thou Art Sick

15. Echoes of You - Marianas Trench (Crowley)

Echoes of you, echoes of you

Repeating from the beating of your telltale heart

16. Unity - Shinedown (Aziraphale)

Have you ever been lost in a sea of despair?

And your moment of truth is the day that you say, “I'm not scared.”

17. Armageddon: Doom Days - Bastille

When I watch the world burn, all I think about is you

18. Creation's Shadow: The Shaking of the Sheets - Steeleye Span

It may be in the day, it may be in the night

Prepare yourselves to dance, and pray

That when the piper plays the shaking of the sheets

You may to heaven dance your way

19. 1665: My Last Breath - Evanescence (Crowley)

Holding my last breath

Safe inside myself

Are all my thoughts of you

20. In My Remains - Linkin Park (Crowley)

Now in my remains

Are promises that never came

21. Cosmic Love - Florence and the Machine (Aziraphale)

The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out

You left me in the dark

22. Glimmer - Marianas Trench (Crowley)

I can see a glimmer of, a glimmer of us

And Boughs Where Apples Made

23. Things We Lost in the Fire - Bastille (Crowley)

The future's in our hands and we will never be the same again

24. This Is The Future - Owl City (Aziraphale)

Release your high hopes, and they'll survive

'Cause this is the future, and you are alive

Other Works Inspired By This Series

Some incredibly talented people have made art for these stories, and others have recorded podfic or translated the fics into other languages. These are the ones I have links for.

Other Fic Formats

Podfic (Audiobook) by Gorillazgal86

Russian Translation by Varfolomeeva

Chinese Translation by Softgem

Spanish Translation by YumeUshka

French Tranlsation by SlyKing

Fic Inspired By

The Book of Prometheus by lyricwritesprose (T) - A role-reversal of the basic premise, in which Aziraphale is the one being reincarnated as a human, while Crowley thinks he was destroyed centuries ago.

Pink Carnations (mean “I’ll never forget you”) by raiining (G) - When I first posted Flowers for Anthony, it was labelled as a oneshot, and raiining wrote me a fix-it fic while I was still debating whether to fix it myself. :)

The Pianist and the Serpent by rokikurama (T) - An AU-of-the-AU in which Crowley’s situation has a different cause and solution.

Exhiliration is the Breeze by Stephquiem (G) - Crowley’s POV on his lives in Like a Sunless Garden, because what we definitely needed here was More Pain.

Animatics

Scarborough Fair by pinkpiggy93 (Hoa Thu Hong) - A music video based on Like a Sunless Garden with absolutely stunning hand-drawn watercolours.

Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall by fishfingersandscarves - A gorgeously stylised music video covering the whole series from start to finish.

Art

Comic: Flowers for Anthony (Part 1) (Part 2) by pinkpiggy93 (Hoa Thu Hong) - A two-part comic adaptation of Flowers for Anthony in beautiful hand-drawn watercolours.

Art by ciaran-polar

Art by cloversart

Art by hollow-head

Art by itsqueeruptown

Art by jasmin-mcpines

Art by oemuff / more

Art by pinkpiggy93

Art by rozugold

Art by singasongrightnow

License Notes

This ebook is not to be sold, but it may be freely distributed by any method that does not involve payment. The text may not be copied to other formats such as websites or social media, or posted under someone else’s name, with or without alterations.

This ebook may not be uploaded to any self-publishing or print-on-demand service (e.g. Lulu, BookBaby, CreateSpace). Doing so would assert a copyright claim that isn’t appropriate for fanfiction, and could get me into a lot of trouble.

About the Author

Name:

Helen Bright

Fic pseuds:

Atalan, Helene, Rosei Aki (Shousetsu Bang Bang), childofatlantis (LJ)

Other pseuds:

brightwanderer, seaskystone

I won’t bore you with a profile, this page is just here because I’m practising my ebook formatting for when I release my original fiction. You can find me online in the following places:

Website: www.brightwanderer.net

Twitter: www.twitter.com/brightwanderer

Tumblr: brightwanderer.tumblr.com

AO3: archiveofourown.org/users/Atalan/works

Also by Atalan

You can find all my fanfiction on AO3. I also write original fiction as Helen Bright.

Instructions Not Included

Fandom:

Good Omens

Rating:

T (Teen and Up)

Warnings:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Wordcount:

68,110

“They'll leave us alone. For a bit.”

One year after the Apocalypse-That-Wasn’t, Crowley and Aziraphale have settled into a new routine: keeping an eye on supernatural happenings in the world and preventing Heaven or Hell from interfering too much with humanity. It’s not a bad job - despite occasional rains of fish - and if there are some unspoken things they really ought to talk about, well, they have all the time in the world now to get around to that, right?

At least, until the Archangel Raphael turns up on their doorstep looking for help... and it starts to become clear that the world is changing fast, and so are they.

Or: Crowley and Aziraphale start a detective agency. Shenanigans ensue. Slowburn continues. Apparently, there is plot. I have some thoughts about Heaven, Hell, and humanism. There will be stupid jokes and a healthy sprinkling of angst.

Vol 1 of the “A Certain Celestial Agency” trilogy.

Untitled Stardew Omens Fic

Fandom:

Good Omens

Rating:

E (Explicit)

Warnings:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Wordcount:

43,267

Crowley has decided to give up on life in the city and move to the countryside. Aziraphale is intrigued by the new arrival in Pelican Town. Fluff ensues in such enormous quantities I am compelled by law to recommend a dental check-up after reading.

A series of Good Omens/Stardew Valley ficlets I posted on tumblr as I played through thunderheadfred's Stardew Omens mod (which replaces Harvey with Aziraphale as the town doctor). Knowledge of the game provides some additional context for the NPCs etc but really it's all about the ineffable farm romance here.

Note: E rating is for the end of chapter 4 only. The rest of the fic is all very tame.

One Night In Bangor (And the World’s Your Oyster)

Fandom:

Good Omens

Rating:

E (Explicit)

Warnings:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Wordcount:

17,381

“All right, I know I’m going to regret asking this,” Aziraphale says. “What exactly does this wager entail?”

Crowley grins like the cat that not only got the cream but has absconded with the entire cow.

“The pot goes to whichever demon can get an angel into bed by the end of the evening.”

AKA The Fic That Tumblr Made Me Write. Heaven and Hell share a corporate party once per millennium. This time someone’s had the bright idea of issuing a challenge to the demons of Hell. Crowley has no intention of missing the opportunity; Aziraphale’s just enough of a bastard to make him work for it.

The Rose and the Serpent

Fandom:

Good Omens

Rating:

M (Mature)

Warnings:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Wordcount:

55,795

AU, retelling of “Beauty and the Beast”. Quite honestly, sending Aziraphale off into the forest to be held hostage by a giant snake in a cursed castle isn’t even the worst thing Gabriel’s ever done to him, and at least it means a change of scene. But then neither the snake nor the castle turn out to be quite what he’s expecting…