Archive of Our Own

And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods 

makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Love Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

The sun falls on the books differently. 

Aziraphale has spent two-hundred-and-nineteen summers in this very shop; at 5:44 in the evening, in the middle of these endless days, he knows which books will be yellowed, which spots of which walls will be washed of pigment, which dust mites will be illuminated in the golden light. Did Adam move the window? The shelves? Or had he, the boy who defeated Lucifer with a classic prepubescent defiance feared by human parents everywhere, simply moved the sun itself? 

Whatever’s happened, Aziraphale doesn’t like it. Change. Such a dreadful invention. 

(One of Crowley’s, undoubtedly).

However, 5:44 is sixteen minutes before six o’clock, and he feels like he deserves an early close, what with his latest interaction with the bratty Peely boys who live next door, in the next installation of what he calls the ‘Sharpie-Genitalia War’. He had lost a few Nabokov’s in the fight, but a checkmate means nothing in a game of chess. Soon, the board would be his. 

(Gabriel had said that to him, just last week, in the form of a fortune cookie message with purple ink. Aziraphale, it said, a battle won is not a victory in war. DUMBASS. Crowley’s had just been a poorly-drawn middle finger).

Aziraphale flips the sign at the window and grabs a well-worn romance from one of the shelves. He climbs the stairs to his flat, to the suffocating dark within it, to the wallpaper that’s not peeling anymore and the couch that’s just the wrong shade of brown. He miracles every light on, even the oven’s, but it’s not enough, the cast shadows the wrong shapes, the wrong angles. The wrong everything.

Yes, a nice cup of tea and a book is just what he needs, Aziraphale thinks. 

(But the books are different, too. His beloved first edition Wuthering Heights given to him by Brontë herself is no longer missing its seventy-third page. Now, the phrase “whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same” stares him straight in the face, as if smug, and he hates it in such an un-angelic way that it frightens him to his core).

(He rips it out just as he did in winter of 1847, all the same).

“... he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same… If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it… He's always, always in my mind.”

There is a freckle, right there, on his wrist beneath the notch of his right thumb, that Aziraphale has never seen on himself before. 

He notices it during lunch one day, specifically seventeen days after the End Of The World, as he dabs at a spot of gajar ka halwa that smudged his hand and, to his surprise, part of it stays behind. 

He frowns, but he isn’t the most observant man in all of England, angelic or otherwise, so he moves on with his meal. 

But then there are the freckles missing, or nudged slightly to the left, that are slightly more worrisome. He’s had this body for six thousand years; it’s not an exaggeration to say that he knows the back of his hand like, well. The back of his hand. Perhaps he’d had a few spots of that pesky human ailment, what was it, Melon Coma? It sounds dreadful. Perhaps discorporation had healed him of any human sickness that had snuck its way through his blessèd barriers, and he should feel grateful of Adam’s ‘creation’ of him. ‘Re-creation’, rather. 

But once the freckles are noticed, everything else comes to follow. His curls are a touch curlier, his hairline a smidge lower. His second toes are just the slightest bit longer, now toe-to-toe (so to speak) with his big ones. A wrinkle at the crease of his elbow has disappeared and reappeared on his palms, so now he has small folds beneath his pinkies, but his beloved palm reader died decades ago and he’s afraid of what he’d find if he looks up the meaning of the new little lines himself. 

Dreadfully lovesick, the occult tends to be. 

He asks Crowley, during one of their weekly meet-ups. Today, they are on the ferry to Calais, to stock-up at its magnificent wine emporium and revisit the Aquar’Aile, a restaurant overlooking the channel that serves simply the most delicious Marennes-Oléron oysters he's ever had. He can only dream about what Petronius could have done with them.  

“Crowley,” he says, as he watches a passing barge instead of his companion, “Have you noticed anything different about me this past, say, two weeks or so?” 

“Or so?” drawls Crowley, pushed up against the railing with his hips cocked to the side, like his spine is ready to slither out of his body. He, too, is looking out at the bay. “Not like you to be that broad, eh? Usually it’s ‘fifty-first’ this or ‘nine-and-three-quarters’ that.”

“That one’s Harry Potter, my dear boy.”

“Oh, right. One of mine.”

Aziraphale audibly sighs. “At this point Hell can have it, but that’s completely besides the point.” He fiddles with his sleeve, pulling at the cuffs so the coastal breeze can touch and cool his skin. “Crowley, I’m being serious . When Adam gave me my human body back… oh, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I feel like parts of me were left behind.”

Crowley turns his head at that, tilting his chin so his serpentine eyes glint over his sunglasses. The sea salt has tousled his sandy red hair, flipping it over his forehead in a boyish style he’s never tried out before. Aziraphale selfishly, confusingly hopes he doesn’t tempt it back into place once the ferry docks in France. 

“Left behind,” Crowley repeats slowly. 

“Well, not just left behind, but changed. Shifted. Scrambled around like I’m a fun little jigsaw puzzle.”

“Jigsaw puzzle?” 

“Good lord, is there an echo?” 

“Well I just- I don’t know what you mean, is all.” Crowley goes back to scanning the horizon, long fingers tapping a mindless rhythm on the handrail. Shrugs. “Could elaborate.”

“No, no, I want to know if I’m losing my mind or not.” Aziraphale turns towards him, smoothing down his waistcoat and miracling away the beginnings of sweat at his brow. “You know me fairly well, I’d say. I’d like you to look at me, really look at me, and tell me if anything seems… off.” 

Crowley turns as well, so his elbow is braced on the railing and he’s making a rather severe angle, long legs crossed at the ankles. Aziraphale wonders, certainly not for the first time, why the man can’t just stand properly. And then he leans in, and Aziraphale forgets what he was wondering about altogether. 

He takes a long sniff in the vicinity of Aziraphale’s collar. “You definitely smell the same,” he mutters, leaning back. He shoves up his sunglasses into his hair and squints, nose scrunching up, scrutinizing him up and down. The ferry tilts the slightest bit one way, gentle against the waves, then rocks back the other, and Aziraphale tries not to shift with it. “Your eye,” says Crowley finally. 

Aziraphale blinks. “You mean to say, as in, singular?” 

“Yeah, used to have a brown spot at the bottom of the right one.” He gestures lazily at Aziraphale’s face. “It’s swapped places.” 

“I always thought my eyes were completely blue!” Aziraphale says, just as fascinated as he is disturbed by flip-flopping irises. “Anything else?” 

Crowley twirls his finger in a spiral near Aziraphale’s head, almost offensively. “Your hair’s curlier. Did you finally use that conditioner I gave you last Christmas? I knew it would–”

“No, no, I haven’t gotten around to it, and again, thank you for the present, but–”

“What do you mean, ‘haven’t gotten ‘round to it’?” Crowley’s glasses drop back down to his nose, rather aggressively. “It’s May. And I’m a demon, I don’t give presents unless they’re in the form of rat pellets and roaches in restaurants we don’t like. Remember Jean-Carlo’s? They kept blasting pop music over the-” 

“Anyway,” Aziraphale says, pointedly, “You must have several millennia’s worth of knowledge stowed away in that serpent brain of yours, don’t you, Crowley? Noticing the smallest speck in someone’s eye? I never knew you to be so observant. Quite impressive.”

(This, being said of the demon who accidentally triggered the 14th century Red Turban Rebellion in China by complimenting their turbans (which were red), and mentioning off-hand that the Mongols thought said turbans looked silly. He has also set a grand total of seventy-nine beds on fire throughout the years by routinely forgetting that sheets are flammable and candles are things that catch other things aflame. Quite the Sherlock Holmes, he is). 

Crowley stutters over a complicated stream of vowels and velar stops, then settles on, “Yeah, well.”

They’re closing in on Calais, now. People shuffle by, caught up in their own little worlds, their own stories. “Do you suppose I’m going mad?” asks Aziraphale, rather desperately. 

“No,” Crowley says immediately, then hesitates. “I mean, well, not over this, at least.” 

“There’s a chance, then? That all these freckles and wrinkles and such aren’t just my imagination? I mean, you saw it yourself, didn’t you?” He gestures wildly at his own eyes. 

“It’s… possible that some parts of you got scrambled, when Adam recorporated you,” Crowley acquiesces. “Some pieces misplaced, y’know, some aesthetics thrown in. But you’re still you in there, I know you are. And these ,” he waves a hand between both of their bodies, “are just our mortal forms. These aren’t us, not really, so… try not to get too attached, yeah? Just be happy you’re not still stuck in that woman’s body, devil knows I am.”

Aziraphale sighs. “You’re quite right. Thank you, Crowley, I tend to get manic about these things.” He smiles, relieved, turning to the water and closing his eyes against the sun. “You know how I loathe the ever-changeability of the world.” 

Crowley mutters something under his breath, but Aziraphale doesn’t hear him.

When Moses received the commandments at the peak of Mount Sinai, Aziraphale very deliberately traveled west. 

Memphis was the “city of white walls” in Egypt’s New Kingdom, prosperous despite losing its status as capital nearly a millennia ago. It was home to craftsmen, artists, scholars, the children of clergymen to attend the House of Life, its reigning educational institution. Aziraphale was welcomed into priesthood immediately (given his universal divinity), even if his role is to tend to the Apis bull, a creature that lived within the temple walls as a living god. There are many gods in this land, actually; Aziraphale chose Memphis specifically for its worship to Ptah, the creator-god, who seemed the most familiar out of the bunch. He bore little to no resemblance to the Almighty, but. That was sort of the point of it, wasn’t it?

Aziraphale tries not to think too hard on it. His kind is very, very clear about idolatry. As such, he convinces himself that the business of gods is nothing more than a language barrier, and goes on with his priestly duties. 

He’s there in the Apieion of the Temple of Ptah, rubbing incensed water on the horns of the sacred god-animal itself on a sweltering summer day when he discovers that he’s content here. Not happy, nor euphoric, but… a sense of quiet fulfillment that wholly satisfies something he didn’t know the sliver of humanity in his corporal form was missing. He’s already planning on a quick pip over to Canaan to rapid-fire some miracles to preload some paperwork, keep him covered for the next decade or two, and the idea already puts a damper on this new contentedness of his. Memphis flourishes with the scent of ripening figs and imported pomegranates, and the rows of freshwater irrigation carries with them the perfume of the lotus flowers blossoming throughout Egypt. He’s visiting his favorite dinner stall tonight. Who could leave it now? 

He’s there, polishing bull horns and daydreaming about dates stuffed with creamy cheese and honey-roasted almonds, when it all goes to hell. So to speak. 

“Heaven’s appointed you as a stable boy, now?” 

Aziraphale jumps, nearly stumbling in a pile of divine poo in his spin to the courtyard. A familiar figure leans against one of the massive pillars, and dread slithers down Aziraphale’s spine, accompanied with the smallest bit of undeniable warmth. 

Crawly (not yet Crowley) hasn’t changed much since their brief conversation centuries ago during the whole ‘Job’ affair in Uz. His clothing is still black and drape-y on his wiry frame, though it ends at his knees and elbows now, his only acknowledgement of the desert heat. His vibrant red curls are still long and (admittedly) lovely, though he’s got some more plaits woven in, including twin ones at his temples that pull the stray hairs away from his face. Usually, Aziraphale can’t look at the demon for too long. 

Now, though, his mouth is agape and he’s staring at Crowley like he’s grown another head. “Crawly?” He asks, rather redundantly. “How on Earth did you find me?” 

Crowley saunters forward, slitted eyes lifting to rove over the temple walls, bleached brick and painted with colorful, sacred hieroglyphics. Aziraphale looks anxiously behind him, as only priests are allowed into the Apieion, but nobody pays the new visitor mind. As sacred as the Apis bull is, it’s equally as smelly, and the holy men and women were all too happy to delegate the task of its upkeep to someone else. 

“I missed the party at Sinai,” Crowley says, running his hand down one of the palm trees in the courtyard. “Decided to take a trip over the Nile, see how the Egyptians are doing after that whole ‘ten plagues’ nonsense. Wasn’t very clear where that all happened, though. The lamb’s blood thing. Egypt’s pretty big, you know, so I thought the biggest city was a good a guess as any.” Crowley glances back down to Aziraphale, raising a dark brow. “Felt a divine presence, and I thought to myself, I have a niggling feeling I know who that is.”  

Right. Ten plagues. The thing that solidified to Aziraphale that the Egypt that the prophets had spoken of and the Egypt that existed were two very, very different things. “Lucky guess,” he mutters. 

Crowley crosses his arms and leans against the palm tree, clearly settling for a chat. “Haven’t seen you for centuries, thought you got yourself discorporated,” he says conversationally, like he’s commenting on nothing more than the weather. Which is hot as blazes, by the way. “Even missed you at the funeral.” 

“Funeral?” Aziraphale frowns. 

Crowley blinks. It’s unnerving, seeing snake eyes blink. “Moses, angel.” 

Oh. Has he really been here that long? It strikes Aziraphale that he should have known that Moses had died, if he was paying attention. He looks at the bull, to its golden head ornament that represents the sun suspended between its horns, and then back to Crowley, to the eyes the exact same shade. “I’ve… been busy,” he says lamely.

“So you have.” Crowley peers around back the way he came, to the children playfully chasing after each other, priests sweeping footprints eternally from the dusty ground, the scholars pouring over papyrus documents in tandem. “Seems the plagues haven’t even made a dent, have they? I thought the whole ‘kill your first born’ thing and the infections from the ‘festering boils’ alone would have cut the population in half.”

Aziraphale has to choose his words very, very carefully. “The population is fine. Thriving, even, because they weren’t… affected by the plagues. At all.”

“Wrong city?” Crowley asks. “Surely there’s a roadmap ‘round here somewhere.”

“No…” Aziraphale says slowly, trailing off, hoping his meaning is starting to become clear.

“I’m not following.”

Of course he isn’t. “Well,” Aziraphale begins carefully, “Moses may have… embellished a bit. May have experienced his divinely inspired version of Egypt that perhaps doesn’t… quite… exist?”

Crowley’s expression drops into a look of shock that almost veers into delight. “You’re having me on.”

Aziraphale shakes his head tightly, eyes trained straight ahead to the sphinx statue inside of the temple, draped with rich fabrics and glittering jewels. Nope, absolutely not, he is not blaspheming himself today.

“So when Moses said—“

“Yep.” 

“The whole thing with the lambs—“

“More of a bull kind of city, really.” 

“Even Joseph—?” 

Rolling his eyes skyward, Aziraphale can’t help but huff, “Don’t even get me started on that one.”

Crowley barks out a laugh. Definitely delighted, then. “ Bloody heaven, angel!” 

“Keep it down, please!” Aziraphale steps forward, wringing his hands together anxiously. “The Ineffable Plan surely has room for metaphor, so don’t think I’m… at all critical of any of this. Moses had his reasons, of course, and in the end God gave mankind Her commandments, so. Everybody wins. The way the Israelites view Egypt is certainly not for me to decipher.” His voice has gone up an octave or two. 

Crowley ignores that. His eyes are narrowed, glittering with something frightfully wicked. “If Joseph never ruled Egypt,” he says slowly, “And if there’s no reference to Noah, or Moses, or even the entire bloody Genesis here , then why are you—“

Aziraphale clasps a hand over Crowley’s mouth, then stares at his hand, surprised (and horrified) by the reflex. His eyes are so wide he feels like they’ll pop out. “Please stop,” he asks desperately. 

Gaze nearly cross-eyed from how close they are, Crowley nods, once, very slowly. Aziraphale lets out a breath of relief. 

“Thank you,” he says. The condensation of Crowley’s breath is warm against his palm, and his lips are soft, which seem entirely dichotomous with how a demon’s lips should feel. Less leathery. He glances around, but the only thing watching them is the bull, who looks a bit scandalized by the events, if Aziraphale’s honest. 

“ Mph ng mrphsss phng?” asks Crowley. 

Frowning, Aziraphale says, “Come again?” 

Crowley rolls his eyes and grabs Aziraphale’s wrist, tugging his hand from his mouth. “I said, are you converting them?” 

“I beg your pardon!” Aziraphale snaps, now quite irate. He shakes his hand out of Crowley’s grasp and takes a step back. First he’s discovered, and now he must be bombarded with accusations by a demon, no less? Perhaps Armageddon has already begun. “You must have mistaken me for one of your kind, Mr. Crawly.”

Crowley levels Aziraphale with a look that is nearly fond, if he was anything else. “Demons don’t go around converting people, angel. Last I checked, that was your lot, wasn’t it? Does Jacob ring a bell?” 

“I wasn’t a fan of that one,” Aziraphale points out, then glances nervously skyward. “While violence is absolutely necessary in some… theoretical cases, the angel-fighting really put a damper on how humans viewed us. As in, ‘ accept this miracle or thou shalt have thy face punched’. Not how I prefer to operate, thank you.”

Crowley scoffs. “I was there by the encore. I can’t tell you what they were doing, but it definitely wasn’t fighting.” 

Aziraphale’s heard that rumor. He shakes it away and, with a tight smile that surely comes off as busy and important, runs a shaky hand along the bull’s back. Honestly, Aziraphale thinks exasperatedly. Are angels and demons even allowed to make small talk? “Anyway, it was nice chatting with you but I really must return to my duties. Mr. Hapi here won’t wash his tongue with mineral salts himself, you know.” 

Crowley takes the hint, pushing off of the palm tree smoothly, hips slinking this way and that. “Yeah, right, sounds fun.” He says gruffly. But a tension remains, enough to turn the summer air cool, squinted eyes fixed on his sandals scuffing the ground. He’s making no attempt to head towards the exit, and, well. Aziraphale can recognize stalling when he sees it, even in a demonic form. 

And at the end of the day, Aziraphale is an angel. He’s not built for letting others suffer. “Crawly?”

“You asked me how on Earth I found you,” he says slowly, like he’s tasting the words on his tongue as they emerge. “Seemed rather shaken, in fact. Were you…” He says the next part in a self-conscious grumble, “…hiding from me?” 

“Of course not,” Aziraphale says immediately, because it’s the truth. In a sense. He would be lying if he said Crowley never crossed his mind, but it was never out of fear, not directly. Crowley was just memorable. Even still, he can’t help but follow up nervously, “You’re not going to tell anyone I’m here, are you?” 

Crowley looks at him for a long moment, then sighs. It makes his face relax in tight lines, and Aziraphale is suddenly struck that they’re in this together, in a strictly circumstantial way. That they’re inhuman beings in human bodies, including the messy bits that come along with them, and Aziraphale… for a split second, he doesn’t feel like the sole of his kind on Earth.

It’s like seeing Crowley for the first time, but it’s also like never seeing him again, because an angel in a human body and a demon in a human body are even more dangerous than heaven or hell could ever conjure up. The weight of the human experience is enough to make an infinite being overflow, and there’s no holy books telling them what that’ll look like, no divine proclamations. For all Aziraphale knows, it would destroy them both from the inside out. 

“Who’s there to tell?” Crowley says quietly. He shrugs and deflates, and it’s like papyrus reeds being crushed beneath a monsoon flood. “You’re here already.”

Not a perfect soul, I am perfecting. Not a human being, I am a human becoming.

Egyptian Book of the Dead by Normandi Ellis

Even with Crowley’s help towards accepting his slightly-scrambled physical form, it doesn’t extend towards the bookstore, nor to the flat above it. 

It’s an intense sort of disturbance, one that contradicts two centuries’ worth of comfort and routine. Aziraphale still feels like he’s in a stranger’s home, sneaking through the halls with a heavy fear always in the periphery, haunting at the edges. He’s even slow and careful to open the biscuit tin, as if he’s just waiting for someone to pop out of it and cry ‘ah-ha, there you are, you imposter!’

It’s overwhelming. He wants to sleep, to give his paranoia a rest, but he miracles the exhaustion away just as he always does. With sleep, comes the nightmares, and he is simply not in the mood. 

When he decides to open the shop, bright and early on a Friday afternoon, there’s a customer already waiting.

“Anathema,” he greets with a surprised smile, peering outside on either side of the pavement. Alone, then. “You weren’t kept waiting long, I hope?” 

Anathema has been waiting for long, in fact. “Not at all,” she says, unwilling to upset an angel, literal and figurative alike. “Your hours aren’t online, so… I figured 1:30 was as good a guess as any.” 

“Internet,” Aziraphale bemoans, crossing his wrists as if warding off some sort of curse. “I don’t use it, I’m afraid. Much too complicated. My hours are right here on the window, free for anyone to read without having to navigate all of that...” He wiggles his fingers, “Flim-flam.” 

She takes a picture of the shop’s hours with her phone. ‘I open the shop on most weekdays about 9:30 or perhaps 10am,’ it states. ‘While occasionally I open the shop as early as 8, I have been known not to open until 1, except on Tuesday’.  

“Ah,” says Anathema. 

It begins to drizzle, so Aziraphale ushers her inside and waves a kettle of tea to make itself. He’s not this lazy, truly, but he’s taking advantage of heaven’s near-radio silence for as long as he can before everything crashes down around him. He’s sure it’s coming, but the timing is indeterminable. Like usual he miracles the anxiety away and, like usual, it doesn’t help a lick. 

Once the tea brews, Aziraphale brings a piping cup over to the couch. “Because you’re an old friend,” Aziraphale says conspiratorially, handing the cup and saucer over to Anathema, “I’ll let you buy a book. Just this once.” 

Anathema accepts the tea with a frown. “Isn’t this a book shop…?” 

Waving a hand dismissively, Aziraphale sits on the chair opposite of the couch. He takes a sip of his own tea before placing it on the coffee table and folding his hands in his lap. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He asks. 

“Well,” Anathema begins, running a hand down her burgundy skirt to smooth it down. Her sense of style is still decidedly reminiscent of the 19th century gothic (given it’s only been around a month now since Not-Armageddon), but she’s got some blonde in her hair now and an extra, secret shimmer in her eye. Love , Aziraphale thinks warmly. She continues, “I’m trying to… widen my literary knowledge, I guess? All I read growing up was prophecies and biblical texts. I want to discover myself, see who I am outside of ‘witch descendant’.”

Aziraphale hums. “Yes, yes, I understand.” After giving it a moment of thought, and realizing he doesn’t quite understand, he asks, “Now, by witch, do you mean…?” 

Historically, witches have had bad luck with religious figures, but. This one is clearly unorthodox, so she doesn’t feel as though she’s in danger of being burned at a stake. “Um, well. Aura reading, astrology, herbal remedies, mostly. I’ve been trying to take a break, see which practices I prefer and aren’t just going through the motions as I always have.”

“I see.” Aziraphale spent too many years in too many different belief systems to not believe in the validity of the occult, if just a little bit. “And my aura, has it… changed? Since we last met?”

Anathema stifles a sigh. So much for new definitions, she thinks tiredly. 

She takes a good look at Aziraphale. In fairness, his aura isn’t something she has to focus on, to seek out; it’s the lightest of blues, and so bright that it blurs him at the edges. Not bright like the sun; bright like opening the curtains at noon, like turning on your phone in the middle of the night to check the time. Initially so sensitive it feels like your corneas are going to melt out, but then you get used to it. Crowley’s is similar, only his is warmer, with something almost shadowy constantly slithering under the surface. Like a flame dancing, or a forest fire billowing violently in the wind. 

But Aziraphale isn’t any different from what she can tell. Still jarringly ethereal. “Nope,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s the same as it was the last time I saw you, from what I can tell.” She sees his expression drop a bit, so she hastily adds, “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he assures her. Of course his aura is the same; it’s just like Crowley said on the ferry to Calais, this material form isn’t him, not really. He can take some solace in the fact that, for the time being, he’s still of angelic stock. “I appreciate you for humoring me all the same.”

Anathema is painfully curious. Perhaps inserting herself into the business of strangers is genetic, prophetic or not. “Do you feel like you’ve changed?” 

“Well…” He decides there’s no harm in sharing his predicament with a human, given recent events. “When young Adam recorporated me in the airfield, I—That is to say, this body didn’t come back precisely the same.” He gestures to the interior around them. “My bookshop was burnt up during Armageddon, and Adam brought it back as well, thankfully. Only it’s… different. Just enough to ring alarm bells to me, but not anyone else. I am trying to get used to it, but I…I don’t know if I can.”

Anathema nods along sympathetically, and mulls over his words a fair amount after he finishes saying them. Finally, she shrugs. “Then don’t.”

“Don’t…?” 

“Don’t get used to it.” She gestures all around, too, to the peeling wallpaper and the dripping sink and the mismatched chairs at the wobbly table. “Redecorate the place. I mean, it’s lovely, don’t get me wrong, but what you’re describing… I think it’s a very human thing. Change is always happening to us, whether it’s our bodies aging, our homes carrying memories, or even–I don’t know, liking the taste of broccoli that you know you hated when you were a kid. If you don’t like the space you’re occupying, then what’s stopping you from changing it yourself?” 

Aziraphale, to his credit, doesn’t dismiss the idea entirely. “This shop has been curated for over two centuries, carefully molded to my shape, my routines. It’s the only place I can call home, really. And yet…” He trails off, fingers rubbing at a threadbare spot on armchair. 

“… You still feel like a stranger here?” Anathema finishes helpfully. 

Aziraphale looks all around them, to the knick-knacks he’s collected throughout the years, to the scuffed hardwood floor from thousands of customers tracking through, and even to the shelves bowing beneath books of different sizes and colors, organized in the perfect system. The chipped pillars, the vintage rugs dulled and dethreaded with time. To the couch Anathema herself sits on now, molded to a certain demonic frame. 

To know all of it is a retroactive mimicry, including himself, makes him feel something akin to grief. 

“I can’t think of a single thing I’d want to change,” he says honestly. “But I can’t imagine changing it would make me feel any more uncomfortable than I do now. It’s just a bit… overwhelming. Thinking of undertaking such a task myself.”

“Well… what about your partner?” 

Aziraphale frowns. Immediately his head is filled with Western films and Suits , both things that he’s been forced to watch on the ancient television set behind the counter. “I’m sorry?” 

“You know, your…” She trails off awkwardly, eyeing the ring on his pinky finger. “Your Mr. Crowley.” 

Oh. That sort of partner. She’s certainly not the first human to hint at something romantic between them. Lord Byron had been a memorable one, looking back through the ages; he’d invited himself into their nonexistent bed around a dozen times before Crowley tempted him off to Greece, and his untimely death. You win some, you lose some, Crowley had said at the news, unbothered, pelting a duck in the head with a chunk of bread. Bullseye.

“I’m sorry, dear, what was the question?” 

“Um…” She shifts in place, carefully placing her tea beside Aziraphale’s on the table between them. “It’s just. When I moved here I was pretty homesick. Spending time with Newt helped, not with the homesickness, exactly, but… turning there into home. Painting the walls, assembling the furniture together, planting a garden that seems to kill more than it grows. Jasmine Cottage turned from something foreign into something we both shared, and all the little imperfections didn’t really matter.” She smiles something small, almost secretive. “It took me finding a spare room full of broken computer parts yesterday to realize he finally moved himself in.”

Aziraphale feels like that’s a bit rude, but. That’s certainly not his place to say. “How sweet,” he does say, because it’s also that, too. “Crowley doesn’t live here, though. He has a flat up in one of those fancy skyscrapers. Very fashionable, very modern. You know.” 

Anathema tilts her head. “You live apart?” 

“Well, we’re not actually a couple, you see,” says Aziraphale quickly. He’s beginning to feel a bit humid under the collar. “We’re an angel and a demon, that’s not something we could do. I don’t think.”

“You… don’t think?” 

“Yes. I mean— no! No, we absolutely couldn’t, thank you.” He clears his throat and, clasping his hands together, sets himself to trudge on and dismiss the past few minutes from his memory. “Now, let’s go about finding you a book, shall we? Perhaps something by Austen?” 

“Hm,” Anathema says, giving him a narrowed-eye once-over that Aziraphale doesn’t care the slightest bit for. But then they go about discussing novels the furthest from the occult they can figure, and he tries to steer her towards ones he’d be willing to part with, and the visit becomes something quite refreshing. There’s merit, after all, in reinventing oneself as humans are apparently oft to do. However, after she departs with a modest stack of romance novels and a single needlework guide, his mind keeps going back to what she had said, what he had said, and the way she didn’t believe his assurances with the squinting of her pretty brown eyes. 

Rude indeed. Perhaps her and Newton are perfect for each other, he thinks, not at all defensively, and sets himself on finding a book he’s never read before in his collection.

Curiously, Aziraphale decides to give Anathema’s suggestion a try. 

He doesn’t think a change in decor will do much for his predicament with the freckle-hopping and switch-swapping eyes, but perhaps change is much more palatable when it’s lent into. He can’t notice the minute differences anymore if they're nestled in an environment where everything is different.

He starts small, first with the bookshop. He cleans off the shelves and stuffs his flat upstairs to the brim with his books, then regrets the massive miracle and hires men to handle the rest. First it’s simply peeling the already-peeling wallpaper. Then it’s burnishing the black spiral staircase a warmer sort of bronze, as well as the railings upstairs. Then he decides painting is a quick way to drastically change the space, actually, so he paints the pillars eggshell white and has the the cherry-red exterior changed to a cool, sage green. The mismatched bookshelves are put under a variety of stains to match them somewhat to the color of walnut. He donates his antique rugs to the local Turkish museum, has the hardwood floors stripped, repaired, and refinished a touch lighter, before discovering painfully that the floor is too slippery now. He notes that away for later. He keeps the layout more or less the same, the little haven behind the counter only ever occupied by him and Crowley, but he guts the side room of everything save the kitchen sink. He’s not sure what he’ll do with the space, but he’s not tripping over another wayward chair leg in the entryway, that’s for sure. 

But once the chairs and tables are gone, he realizes that he’s rather tired, to tell the truth, and now has nowhere to sit or stand without slipping around like he’s on an ice rink. Unable to stomach the current state of modern furniture, Aziraphale visits a local thrift store. Or seventeen. For a few weeks the bookshop is less of a bookshop (if it ever was one to begin with), and more of a rotating proprietor of antique furniture and plush, fuzzy rugs. 

In fact, a pair of men are carrying in one of the said rolled-up rugs when Crowley strolls in, plant under his arm, eyes wide behind his characteristic shades. “Angel? You in here?” He shouts, sounding entirely bewildered. “Is this some sort of ransom demand?”

“In here!” Aziraphale calls from the side room. He’s bent under the antique sink that’s been out of operation for the better part of a century. “Do watch your step, my dear. It’s a bit damp.” 

“… Right,” Crowley mutters. He heads there, nearly dodging a rug-thump to the face.

It is damp in the tiny little side room that used to house the record player, a collection of tumblers, and the dinosaur of a computer that Crowley’s been trying for years to download a virus on (it couldn’t even do that ). Now it’s bare, except for the angel on the floor, fiddling with the pipes beneath the sink with a brand-new toolset at his side.

Crowley takes a moment to absorb it all. Then he sets the plant on the counter and crouches down next to Aziraphale, avoiding getting water on his clothing. “What have we here?”

“A pipe burst back in World War II,” Aziraphale says. He’s got his jacket off and sleeves rolled up, the most casual he’s willing to get, save for wearing a literal sheet for millennia. His clothes, hair, and the tile floor are all sodden with water. “I had miracled it tip-top back then but, well. I don’t think I really know how water pressure works so I somehow made it even worse. Not even Adam could manage fixing it when he recorporated the both of us. It’s just been dripping loudly for eighty years.”

“I know,” says Crowley. “I thought it was delightfully annoying.”

Aziraphale ignores him, taking a wrench and reaching up to tighten one of the bolts. He’s learned his lesson that the direction you screw evidentially does matter, if the tap water soaked down to his nether-regions is anything to go by. “If the powers of heaven and hell aren’t enough to fix these pipes, then perhaps some human ‘elbow grease’ is the solution, don’t you think?” 

A beat. “I think,” Crowley replies, “you’re having a midlife crisis.”

Aziraphale perches up on an elbow to shoot a glare without much heat. Crowley just raises both of his eyebrows in response. 

Clearing his throat primly, Aziraphale pokes his head back beneath the sink. “I haven’t seen your face in here in a couple weeks,” he says offhandedly. Some would say casually. “You’ve missed three of our weekly lunch da— meetings. A bit sudden. Doing that when both sides consider us enemies… Could have done with at least a note, to tell you the truth.”

“While I’m touched by your show of concern,” Crowley says bemusedly. “I’d only popped over to America, stewed discord on Twitter and irreparably damaged New York’s subway system. Saw the Statue of Liberty . Exposed an act of treason. General demonic stuff, old habits, all that.”

Tightening the final bolt with a soft grunt, Aziraphale asks, “Oh? Anything come of it?”

Crowley stands, his joints popping like dry pasta. He sighs theatrically. “Didn’t even go to court. For all that hoo-hawing about independence this and fireworks that, you’d think they’d have figured out a way to, I dunno, actually run a country. They’ve got fifty-three governments over there, did you know that? Talk about overkill.”

Aziraphale frowns and pushes out from under the sink, struggling to get to his knees. “I don’t think that sounds right,” he says. 

Without a word, Crowley hooks an arm around Aziraphale’s and tugs him up easily, other hand fluttering at Aziraphale’s side in case he tips over, not quite touching. Aziraphale always forgets that he’s much stronger than his lanky frame gives on, being a supernatural being and all. “Cross my heart,” Crowley says in a warm sort of tone, before letting him go.

Aziraphale’s own heart gives a little extra thump that isn’t quite proper, despite not needing a heartbeat to begin with. But, though he is an angel, he’s also (perhaps to a larger degree) British. He promptly ignores the feeling altogether. 

“I haven’t been to the States in years,” he says awkwardly, wiping his damp hands off on a dishcloth, wringing it in his hands. “I can’t say I particularly cared for my last visit.”

“You weren’t in the States, angel, you were in Mexico when the conquistadors came a-knocking.”

“Oh, Tabasco! Lovely area, delicious food. Tamales de Pejelagarto .” He lifts his feet, water dripping off the soles, and grimaces. “Talk about a place needing running water, though. All those beans.”

Crowley is looking his waterlogged form up and down. It’s hard to parse his expression behind those blasted glasses. “And the sink?”

“Ah, right. Yes, I do believe it’s fixed.” He puts his hands on his hips and inspects his handiwork. “It’s a bit thrilling, actually. Putting my hands on something, feeling around for the solution. You know?”

“Yep,” Crowley says, only a touch hoarsely.

Without further adieu, Aziraphale turns one of the handles to… absolutely nothing. He frowns and turns the other handle the opposite direction. Also nothing. Turns both squeakily in any direction they can go, then lets out a dramatic huff that could rival any iteration of Antonio from The Merchant of Venice.

“Bright side,” says Crowley cheerily, “It’s not dripping anymore, is it?” 

Aziraphale just snaps his fingers to miracle his clothing dry, his sleeves down, and his jacket back on. He nearly miracles the shop a single degree cooler to be capricious, but stifles the urge. “Last time I do something the old fashioned way.”

Crowley leans back against the counter, crossing his arms and grinning unabashedly at seeing Aziraphale angry, just like always. “How’d you say a lie like that without bursting into flames, I wonder?”

Aziraphale just tightens his lips. He’s not accustomed to genuine annoyance; when it comes, it’s potent, but also the furthest thing from angelic he never wants to get. “Our meals are on Sundays,” he points out, apropos of nothing. “It’s Thursday . Is there a reason you needed me today?”

A silence that goes on a bit too long. “Do I… need to have a reason?” Crowley asks eventually.

Hm. Sundays were the agreed-upon days of yester-year, when Heaven was too busy doing Holy Things and Hell was too busy doing Unholy Things for the optics of it all. A nip off to dinner wouldn’t be noticeable on Sundays. But if they’re not on eithers’ radar anymore… what does it matter, being as discreet as possible?

What does any of this matter?

“We don’t need a set day to have lunch, you know,” Crowley continues, awkwardly clambering up to sit on the counter beside the sink. Aziraphale nearly rolls his eyes at the flail of long limbs. Crowley continues, “Or dinner, for that matter. Occasionally brunch. I can just… come over whenever, and you can always ring me up night or day, you know that.”

“Of course we need a schedule,” says Aziraphale. “Apparently you’re prone to sailing off to America without a word, and I have a business to run—“

Crowley gives him a look .

“—I have… Things to do.” Not a lie. “Books to read, teas to drink, neighborhood children to prevent from drawing genitalia in all of my books.”

“How about this,” says Crowley, who pays the neighboring Peely boys in candy to draw genitalia in Aziraphale’s books. “I won’t randomly fly off to America anymore if you agree to keep my couch the same. And let me take you to dinner on decidedly non-Sunday days. Deal?” 

“Deal,” Aziraphale says immediately. 

It takes twenty-five minutes into hors d’oeuvres at Le Gavroche for Aziraphale to realize that Crowley 1. didn’t pry about the sudden remodel and 2. left his plant on the counter in the side room, right in a sliver of sunshine. Well, Aziraphale thinks, sipping his wine in a quietly pleased sort of way. Well.

Aksum was a trading town in present-day Ethiopia, on a plateau not far from the Red Sea. It still exists, in some capacity; sadly, much of its history has been lost to time and war, save for the religious remnants of kings past. By the fourth century it was the first kingdom in Africa to adopt Christianity, and the gospel spread rapidly down the Eastern coast in the centuries to follow. 

Aziraphale, however, doesn’t live in Aksum at that point. He’d arrived several centuries earlier, when the lands practiced paganism, though nothing was revered as much as the exchange of gold.

In fact, Aziraphale himself had discovered Aksum when the Roman Empire had established a trade network with India, opting to hop on a merchant ship following the death of Aurelius. One of the stops had been Eritrea, up and around the Horn of Africa; the final stop, actually. Aziraphale had been promptly kicked off the ship and, to his delight, found the landscape absolutely charming. It didn’t take him long to establish a life for himself, as quiet and isolated as it was. 

One summer morning he’s walking amongst the trodden ground to his modest home, collecting spare wheatgrass as he passes it by. Nestled into the crook of his arm is a baby tortoise that he… stumbled across in the market, so to speak. Perhaps behind the bars of its enclosure. It clearly had a cracked shell, which wouldn’t have sold for much, so. He was doing the community a favor by fabricating a distraction and carefully snatching it from the merchant stall. 

And look! Its shell is miraculously healed. Good news indeed.

His home isn’t much more than a flat hut, really, up on a dramatically steep hillside. The crag of the plateau above it is rocky, arid; there’s no hope of agriculture or development on its precarious edges, and as such this small corner of the kingdom is largely undisturbed. Which is useful, indeed, as the expanse of land has become quite the environment for a variety of animals Aziraphale has similarly rehabilitated, away from the hands of the exotic animal trade Aksum thrives on. Any human walking by blessedly looks the other way.

“You’ll find good company,” Aziraphale murmurs to the tortoise who, like all living things, understands him perfectly. “There’s only a couple of tortoises, but I have an entire colony of badgers who are quite friendly. Do you like badgers?” 

The young tortoise shrinks its head back into its newly-healed shell. Aziraphale grimaces. 

“Perhaps when you’re older,” he assures it. “I’ll keep you inside with me until you’re a bit more confident, I think.” He pushes open the door to his home and waves his hand to fill a divot in the ground with freshwater.

He’s not alone. 

There’s a woman there, shawl wrapped around her head as she’s bent over his desk at the back, shuffling intrusively through his documents. There’s blood dripping across her wrist, down her fingers to the droplets on the dirt floor. Aziraphale feels a flare of concern, and a small amount of indignation of having his journal read by another. Those thoughts are private . 

“Pardon me, ma’am,” says Aziraphale kindly, because the worry wins out. “Do you need assistance?” 

She freezes. Very slowly, she turns her head to look over her (bony) shoulder, and Aziraphale notes that her frame is a lot taller and thinner than the other women in the area, accustomed as they are to the fruits of trade. A foreigner, then. She says nothing, not immediately, so Aziraphale takes a step closer, now entirely out of concern. The veil over her face is black, but it’s sheer, and the eyes–Well, they look rather–

Aziraphale frowns. “Is… Is that you under there?” 

He doesn’t have to elaborate. “Wait,” Crowley hisses, pulling the shawl off of his head. His hair is longer since Rome, curls now brushing his shoulders. “You’re the man trading exotic animals?” 

“Heavens no!” cries Aziraphale, pulling the tortoise to his chest protectively. “I… rehome the ones they can’t sell, instead of just letting the poor things die. What kind of angel do you take me for?”

Crowley just stares at him. “So you steal them,” he deadpans. “And—Hang on, I passed by at least three merchants coughing blood into their gold-lined handkerchiefs. What are you doing about them?” 

Aziraphale gives him a sharp look, setting the tortoise down in its temporary enclosure. “Merchants are hardly lacking in funds,” He points out, tossing the wheatgrass into its dish. “And besides, there’s human doctors for that. These are all God’s creatures, you know. Big and small. Who’s going to help them, if not I?” 

Crowley simply blinks. He nearly looks impressed. 

With the shawl unwrapped, hanging loosely around his shoulders, the top of his chest is visible in the low neckline of his black linen shirt. The hair there is sparse and auburn, glinting copper in the low light. Aziraphale averts his eyes. 

“Were you here to tempt me?” He asks. 

Crowley leans against the lime-plastered wall. He always leans , like his legs are far too long and spindly to support him properly. “Maybe,” he says, in a coy sort of tone. “I was told there was an exotic animal tradesman in these parts that accounted for nearly a quarter of Aksum’s exports. Thought I’d release the animals, burn up the ledgers. Preferably in that order.”

“How noble,” Aziraphale says drily. Crowley gives a subtle bare of his teeth at the compliment. 

It’s quiet, save for the munching of the tortoise beside them. Aziraphale, uncomfortable returning Crowley’s stare directly, eyes his sandaled feet instead, noticing again the drops of blood darkening the dirt there. His long demonic fingers are all kinds of pink and red. “You’re hurt.” 

“What? Oh!” Crowley lifts up his left sleeve, to a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around the top of his forearm. “Backup plan, in case you arrived before I was finished. I’d be able to claim one of your creatures escaped and attacked me, which would explain away any chaos you’d arrive to, I’d imagine.”

Demons, like angels, took on mortal vessels to avoid driving humans insane at the sight of their true forms. Aziraphale knows more than anyone that human stimuli simply comes with the territory; exhaustion, illness, even pain. Aziraphale’s hands itch with compassion, an urge to heal, even if the recipient is his (im)mortal enemy. Despite that, really. 

And also, it’s a bit… charming, that Crowley was here to save the animals. Arson notwithstanding.

“Here, let me help with that,” Aziraphale says, stepping up into the demon’s space and laying a hand on his arm. “Not to worry, Mr. Crawly, I’ve healed thousands of wounds.”

“It’s Crowley –Oi, hold on!” Crowley clasps his hand around Aziraphale’s wrist but doesn’t push him away. “Aren’t you—Don’t you think something like this could discorporate me, or something? I’m the furthest thing from divinity you can get, and a miracle—“

“Not the furthest thing,” argues Aziraphale. “And your vessel is human, which is the only thing I’m planning to heal, so. I don’t think it’ll be a problem.” 

“You don’t think?”

Crowley’s skin is white-hot above and below his hand. There’s a scar at his bicep, his neck, the curve of his collarbone. Healing can never be a temptation, Aziraphale thinks sadly. He can’t help the rush of pity he feels, realizing that whenever Crowley’s hurt, he has to wait it out instead of snapping it away. That he has to feel the pain, live with it until it decides to fade on its own terms. 

How the wounds from Falling perhaps never quite healed, because they never could. 

“Please,” Aziraphale says gently. 

Crowley meets his eyes, then immediately turns his face to look through an empty window, awarding him a view of the Aksum evening. “Oh, all right. I swear, you angels are far too bloody magnanimous for your own— fuckingbuggeringhell—“

Aziraphale’s hand glows with divinity, pouring blessings of good health into the skin beneath it. He’s muttering in Latin under his breath, a training step he’s long since outgrew, but he wants to get his intention as precise as possible, careful not to let it leak into the demonic being occupying it. That, he presumes, would make things get ugly. 

Crowley curses again, his hand on Aziraphale’s arm going lax. His head bumps against the wall behind him. “Oh,” he sighs, an octave higher than his speaking voice. “Oh. That’s good stuff, isn’t it.”

Aziraphale eyes him worryingly. “No discomfort? No inconvenient discorporation?” 

“Definitely not,” he groans. 

The glowing slowly fades. Crowley looks strikingly like the poster child for religious ecstasy. Aziraphale had bestowed such visions much too frivolously in the past, before he tempered the temperature of divinity that humans could handle. Euphoria, he had decided, was much better without seizures, though perhaps still with an orgasm or three. Half of Greece still refers to him as Dionysus.  

Crowley’s chest is heaving, his body still plastered against the wall, teeth nearly biting his lip clear off. There’s smoke vaguely coming from his ears. “Nng,” he manages, and–is that drool? 

There’s a brief moment that Aziraphale suspects that what he just did was a bit Not Good, cosmically speaking. Trying to help a demon and then nearly making him vaporize. Unless that was what he was supposed to do? No, he doesn’t think so, but he’s also fairly sure healing a demon wasn’t on the to-do list either. In any case, Aziraphale just worries he’s broken Crowley entirely.

But then Crowley drops his head back down and meets Aziraphale’s eyes, and his gaze is lucid, at least, if just a bit in reverence. “ Jesus, angel,” hisses Crowley, who just invented using ‘Jesus’ as a swear. The rest of the world will think it too soon for at least a millennia more. “Divinity like that needsss to come with a licenssse to carry.” 

“A what?” 

Crowley takes one look at Aziraphale’s baffled expression and can’t help but bark out a laugh, sagging against the wall until he’s slid all the way down to the floor. His eyes are entirely gold and black. “Forget it,” he sighs, going about weakly unwrapping his bandage soaked with old blood. “Been a long while since I’ve felt Her that close and personal. A long while.”

Wincing, Aziraphale kneels next to him on the floor. Their fingers brush as he reaches over to free up the wound more efficiently. 

Well, not a wound, not anymore. “How about that,” murmurs Aziraphale, lightly caressing the freed skin, entirely unblemished. “Perhaps you’re more receptive to the Almighty than you thought.” 

“Or angels,” Crowley says quietly. He hasn’t even glanced down at his arm. Aziraphale risks meeting his eyes, then promptly looks away, their depths much too close and worshipful to bear. 

Inexplicably, Aziraphale is filled with the urge to ask Crowley to stay. Just for a short bit, long enough to come down from whatever high he reached, enough to watch the sun set against the valley while sharing a bottle of tej, Aksumite honey-wine. Aziraphale was so intentional about isolating himself, of sequestering his own slice of Eden, that he didn’t realize how dreadfully lonely he was until he touched another body, shared human breath with the only inhuman being on Earth that was made from the same ingredients as him. 

And that being is a demon. Why is that being a demon? Ineffable Plan, Aziraphale reminds himself firmly. It’s not for me to ask. 

So instead, he agrees politely, “Or angels.” But he doesn’t pull away for minutes more, and neither does Crowley, and the sky still continues to shroud itself into darkness without their acknowledgement of it.

Aziraphale doesn’t know what to do with all of this longing. 

He’s not convinced humans were built to withstand it all, not without their bodies giving out. He desperately desires for something he cannot name, the disembodied feeling floating somewhere in the void outside of material comprehension, the brush of a hand, the sound of a laugh. He longs with a frightening intensity to return to the same skin that touched the Earth at its start. There’s no memories attached to this body, no imprints transcending time itself that he can still feel in the folds of the cosmos and think, there. That’s the part of my palm his mouth was pressed to. It just took thousands of lightyears to reach me now. 

He thinks of Crowley. Oh, how he thinks of Crowley.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Aziraphale is dying. He must be. 

It seems particularly cruel for the Almighty to draw it out like this. He’s laying on his couch (far too bumpy for his tastes) and he can’t seem to keep his eyes open. He’s slept before, of course he has, but it’s been so long that he can’t figure out how to induce it. Like trying to grab at the wind, or imagine a color inconceivable with these human eyes. He doesn’t even know where to begin. 

So, like usual, he calls Crowley, despite it being just hours from dawn. The phone picks up in the middle of the second ring. 

“Nyeah?” A sleepy voice grumbles. 

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale. It takes him an extra moment to find his words. “I… need your help.”

“Azi’phale?” Crowley sounds considerably more awake. “What’s it, where are you? Are you okay?”  

No, he most certainly is not. “I’m in my shop. Terribly sorry about how late it is, really, but. I fear your expertise is needed.”

“My–?” Crowley cuts himself off with a growl, and Aziraphale vaguely hears the words ‘hell’ and ‘bloody demons’ dispersed between a colorful variety of curse words. There’s thumping sounds, like Crowley is jumping around on one foot. The clang of a belt buckle. “Just–Don’t do anything, angel. I’ll be there soon, okay?”  

Grateful that the problem is being taken as seriously as it is, Aziraphale says, “Thank you, dear,” before hanging up the phone. 

Crowley makes it there in record time. He sprints in, hands curled up into fists, looking wildly all around the interior of the bookshop before zeroing on Aziraphale. “Angel,” he says, equally in anxiety and relief. “Aziraphale. Are they still here? What happened?” 

“I can’t get up,” Aziraphale nearly whines. 

“Shit.” Crowley rushes up to Aziraphale, dropping to a kneel and grasping a hand low on his shoulder, as if feeling his heartbeat. His fingers are tense where they press against his collarbone. “What is it? Paralysis? Torture?” His golden eyes rove over his prone body, before locking on his legs in horror. “Good Lord of Hell—Did they take your feet?” 

“My—Feet—?” Aziraphale pulls his feet out from under the plush armrest where they’d nestled in for warmth and wiggles his socked toes. “Still there. Who are you talking about?” 

Crowley tears his eyes back up to Aziraphale’s face, and, oh—he looks positively manic. “Th-the demons!” He sputters. “Or the angels! They’re both the same, anyway. Whoever made you… this.”

“What do you mean, this?” The way Crowley says it it sounds derogatory. 

“Just… just, tell me what happened, all right?” Crowley nearly pleads, if a demon could do such a thing on his knees. “Be specific. I need names.” 

“Names? Oh, well, all right…” Aziraphale nestles further into the couch, flinging an exhausted arm over his eyes. “I was reading a book by E.M. Forster when I realized that the staining on the bookshelves was completely dry. I think the brand of the stain is…Cabaret?” Aziraphale’s not sure that’s right, but. Crowley needed names after all. “So, since I was eager to see the bookshop all done up properly, I threw myself into the challenge, so to speak. I may have… overexerted myself.”

Crowley is suspiciously quiet. Aziraphale trudges on.

“It was the books, and the stairs, and I’m much too old to be taking that many trips. And then after I miracled all the books on the shelves, the flat upstairs seemed far too empty and dusty, but it was too late to hire the painters again, so I…redecorated myself. Using the power of the Almighty. For six hours. And next thing I know, I’ve collapsed on this lumpy couch, so uncomfortable I want to scream, and I haven’t been able to convince myself to get up because I am entirely. Too. Sleepy. ” 

Silence. A pin could have dropped, demon dancing atop its head or not, and it would have echoed through the shop. “You’re sleepy,” Crowley repeats blandly. 

“I think this is the end for me, my dear,” Aziraphale mutters miserably. He risks a glance from beneath his arm. 

Crowley doesn’t even look mad, or irritated. If anything, his shoulders relax slightly, as if a weight has rolled off them. His heavy exhale seems to go on forever, but then his lips quirk into a exasperated smile, and Aziraphale is so nearly struck breathless at the sight without his glasses that he has to close his eyes again. Demon eyes should never be allowed to look so incredibly fond . Crowley’s hand, as if by its own accord, trails up Aziraphale’s shoulder to cup the side of his neck. 

“When’s the last time you slept?” He asks, not unkindly. 

Aziraphale hums noncommittally. “When did Perrault publish Bluebeard ?” 

“How the devil should I know?” Then Crowley blinks and shivers, as if possessed. “Gah. It was somewhere about… 1700. You sent me his Mother Goose book about a dozen times before I finally agreed to read the blasted thing.”

“Oh! I’d forgotten it was part of a collection.” He settles into a small smile. “Did you like it?” 

“Yes,” Crowley says pleasantly, patting Aziraphale’s shoulder a final time before withdrawing completely. “Especially that Sleeping Beauty one. Y’know, the one where she sleeps. Just closes her eyes and drifts off to whatever stinky Parisian dreamland awaits her, completely relaxed. And asleep.” 

Aziraphale wrinkles his nose. “I didn’t care for that one.”

“Oh for Satan’s– C’mon, up you get.” 

Crowley wriggles his arm under Aziraphale’s back and helps him sit up, swing his legs to the floor so he can have his feet under him when he stands. Thankful for something strong and steady to lean against, Aziraphale can’t help feeling the slightest bit guilty for all the fuss. Despite the fact that he called him over to begin with. “Really, Crowley, don’t strain yourself.”

“I’ve stopped time before, you realize,” says Crowley wrily. “I can pick you up. If you need me to.”

The visual is undeniably appealing. Aziraphale locks it away to process it at a more proper time. “Not necessary,” he says tiredly. “Just get me to my bed, please, and we’ll be out of each other’s hair.”

Crowley grumbles something unintelligible but, arm firm around his shoulders, he leads them both out of the sitting area. 

They manage up the stairs without a fuss, though Aziraphale has to take them a bit slower than usual. Crowley is endlessly patient, and Aziraphale is stuck trying to figure out if that’s in-character for him or not, when they walk through the doors of his (newly renovated) upstairs flat. The aesthetic difference between it and the bookshop downstairs is jarring, to say the least.

“What the–” Crowley curses under his breath, his feet stumbling slightly beneath him. He does a full 360 turn of the flat, turning Aziraphale with him in the process. “Did you do all of this tonight? No wonder you’re ready to pass out.”

Aziraphale hums in the affirmative, head lolling against Crowley’s shoulder. “The view took me an hour to get right.”

“…Yeah, that’ll do it,” Crowley replies faintly. 

Admittedly, the interior is the furthest from Aziraphale’s usual style as one could get; minimalist, luxurious, and beige. Well, the beige is fairly consistent, at least. The furniture and countertops are white, as if never touched before, and the ceilings are higher than what should be possible looking from the outside of the bookshop. Half the walls aren’t walls at all, but rather floor-to-ceiling windows awarding them an expensive view of New York City in its pre-dawn hours. Though perhaps not that expensive; the view is severely limited by the skyscraper that juts intrusively across the street, a direct line-of-sight to the different offices that occupy each floor. Crowley would love a view into offices. That and a high-powered laser pointer, Aziraphale would lose him for years. 

They hadn’t moved in a minute. “Do you like it?” Aziraphale asks anxiously. 

Crowley scoffs lightly. “Do you?” 

What does that matter? Aziraphale’s having a crisis, midlife or not; his preferences are the least of his concern. But he can hardly tell the truth, can he? “Sometimes—Well, that is to say, change isn’t always—“ He’s much too tired to find the words, after all, so he waves them away, hoping the meaning latches on somewhere anyway. 

“Angel, it’s…” The only emotion that’s clear on Crowley’s face is something vaguely like bewilderment. “Are you even going to be happy? Living in a place like this? It’s, quite literally, every style you’ve complained about since the dawn of interior design magazines.” 

That’s a bit disappointing to hear. “It’s very you, I thought,” Aziraphale says quietly, a tad defensively. 

Crowley huffs out a humorless laugh. “What, cold? Lifeless?” 

The very descriptors appall Aziraphale to his very core. “No, my dear,” he argues. “Beautiful.”

Crowley just looks at him, brows drawn together as if Aziraphale was just speaking in tongues. No, scratch that—tongues are up hell’s alley, aren’t they? Crowley clears his throat and looks straight ahead, to the open doorway that houses a pristine white bed within. “Now I know you’re delirious,” he jokes awkwardly, before leading them into the bedroom. 

Aziraphale’s not entirely helpless , despite the evidence. He can get himself ready for bed. Crowley averts his eyes when he strips down to his pants and vest, and dutifully pulls the blankets back for him for him to climb into. The mattress is far more comfortable than the couch, like sinking into a cloud. Better than a cloud, even—Aziraphale would know the difference, after all. For the first time that evening, he feels hopeful that he’ll actually be able to manage falling asleep. “Thank you, my dear.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Crowley mutters grumpily, indulgently. And then, contrary to what Aziraphale expected, Crowley doesn’t leave. Instead he takes a seat at the foot of the bed, feet solidly on the floor, and twists enough so he’s facing Aziraphale.  

They just look at each other; one expectantly, the other something slowly growing more and more confused. Aziraphale opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again. 

“Am I…” He starts hesitantly. “Am I supposed to be doing something in particular?” 

“Oh, no, definitely not,” Crowley says sarcastically. “That is, unless you want to wake up another demon from his beauty sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” sighs Aziraphale. His eyes are red-hot and he can’t get himself to stop yawning. Dying, indeed . “I told you I needed your expertise, and, well—It’s hardly the first time I’ve needed your help last-minute, isn’t it?”

“Paris chimes a Notre-Dame bell on that front,” Crowley says drily. “And Spain. And Uz. And the Blitz. Can’t forget about Malta—“

“Oh, I hardly needed you in Malta, really.”

“I seem to recall you at the end of a bloody whip—“

Aziraphale rolls his eyes. “It was self-flagellation by proxy, my request , to show me what the Catholics were going on about. Wasn’t a fan. They seem to think Saint Paul came up with it for some reason. Grisly, but I felt nothing, really, just a few lashes for mortification.”

“So, a whipping. You were being whipped.”

“Did you hear me complaining?” 

“Is this whole debate—“ Crowley gestures frantically between them. “—Is this helping you sleep, d’you think? Should you get louder and more animated? Would that help?”

“I just don’t know how to do it!” exclaims Aziraphale, endlessly frustrated. “I close my eyes and nothing happens. I just keep… thinking, and wondering, and planning, and—oh, I feel like a child.”

Crowley turns around so he’s facing away, rubbing his hands against the tight fabric of his trousers. He verbally flails for an idea, like he’s putting random sounds together until they make a word. “Uh, I could, maybe sing you a lullaby—“

Aziraphale makes a faint noise of protest.

“—Or, okay. We could just stare at each other ‘til either of us passes out, then.” 

It seems as good of a plan as any, really. The curtains are drawn in the bedroom, but city still manages to peek through, the skyscrapers that stay lit up and the blinking lights of distant planes crossing the bay. Aziraphale tries to search through ideas in his groggy mind, grasp whatever fleeting thought he can manage. He finds one. 

“You could… tempt me asleep?” 

Crowley bodily recoils at that. “Tempt an angel? Tempt you? Nng, no, no thank you. There’s–there’s lines even demons won’t cross.”

He doesn’t know why, but Aziraphale immediately feels insulted. He never thought he’d feel hurt by the refusal of a demonic temptation, and yet… Was the thought truly so disgusting? “Well then,” he says primly, rolling over beneath the covers. “Now I know, don’t I?”

He feels Crowley’s baffled stare like it’s a physical thing. “Aziraphale, you don’t—” 

“Don’t what?” Aziraphale can’t help but immediately turn back around, pushing up on an elbow and squinting peevishly at Crowley’s back. “I didn’t realize I was so repulsive, is all.”

“It’s not that.” For the first time in recent history, Crowley’s cheeks are flushed and it’s not from alcohol. He’s bent over, elbows perched on his thighs, the curve of his spine smooth and dramatic. “Just… give me a second,” he manages. 

Aziraphale does. I’ll give you anything you want, he thinks, nearly mad with exhaustion as the night ticks on, as it often does. I’d bottle up stardust if I could. I’d pour divinity down your throat with a chalice if I thought you’d survive it.   

Eventually, Crowley speaks. “It’s a skeevy thing I do, you know,” he says uncomfortably. “Tempting. Mind, I can’t create desires out of thin air, but I can… nudge them into place. Create the perfect conditions for obsession, make it all-encompassing. I can make you want something so badly you feel like you’d go blind without it, that you’d die . I can do that with a—a bloody… shoelace. You’d go mad, wanting it in your hands.” He blinks down at his own hands, palm-up from where he’s hunched over his knees. “It’s invasive, and it’s literally built into my—Whatever it is that makes up these bodies. Chemicals, maybe. It’s easy enough to ignore when I’m tempting a human to, I dunno, stick their gum on the seat of a park bench, but… With an angel… With you…” He shakes his head, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

Aziraphale doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. If he does, the moment will be broken forever, and so will this Crowley, so vulnerable it makes Aziraphale’s teeth ache, makes his wings ruffle in the in-between space that houses everything he feels for the demon, the things that these fallible human bodies can’t bear the weight of. 

“So no, I won’t tempt you, angel. But…” He threads his hands together and turns his head, eyeing Aziraphale warily over his shoulder. “I can… stay? If you’d like.”

What a question. 

“Crowley,” murmurs Aziraphale. “I’d be honored if you did.” 

So he does. It’s quiet, and the old bones of the building shift and sigh around them. Crowley is as still as a corpse beside him, flat over the covers. Aziraphale wants to touch him. Aziraphale always wants to touch him. He’s too tired to ignore the urge, so as he nestles further into the mattress he slides an arm under Crowley’s pillow, draping his hand lightly over Crowley’s heart. That, with a stiffening of limbs and sharp intake of breath, brings the demon back to life. 

“Is this all right?” Aziraphale asks quietly. “Usually in the films, this is what they do. When they’re falling asleep.” 

Crowley swallows audibly. There’s the lightest of trembling vibrating through the mattress springs, as if coming from the ground beneath them. Slowly, like he’s trying not to scare a wild animal, he turns on his side to face Aziraphale, the reddish crop of his hair crushed against his pillow. He stares at Aziraphale’s cheek for a not-insignificant amount of time. 

Then, as though Aziraphale could be imagining it, Crowley reaches out to drape a long arm around the angel’s middle. 

“They do this too,” he says. His voice comes out nothing more than gravel.

Aziraphale dreams in bits and pieces. It’s like his soul, so disembodied from this new material form, is attempting to collect itself in the fragments Adam left behind. 

First it’s Spain. 

Crowley is anxiously pacing beside him, cursing the world while Aziraphale frantically packs his things away. He lives modestly, but there’s still things he would hate to leave behind; the drawings from the village children, the dented tin menorah he was gifted from his kind old neighbor, childless, who has long since passed. The manual packing is taking him too long, but his kind are much too close for miracles, would smell him out in the blink of one of his thousand eyes. It sets him on edge. 

“Bloody Sisebut–” Crowley growls, scuffing his feet at the floor, kicking the wall. They’ve come a long way since their knightly argument in Wessex, but this reunion is hardly a happy one. “Stupid name. Should’ve had him beheaded when I had the chance.”

“It’s not the king,” Aziraphale nearly hisses. “It’s the ideology that emboldens him. This isn’t isolated to Spain, Crowley, I’ve seen the plans for it all myself. Heaven’s planning on a worldwide conversion.” He says the next part far quieter, but just as purposeful. “Her will doesn’t extend to those who dare to question the divinity of Christ.”

Crowley winds on him dangerously. “Don’t say that,” he warns. “Never say that. In fact, go show your face out there, make sure Heaven knows you’re receptive.”

Aziraphale drops his bag to his mattress. “To the forced conversion of the Jews?” He says, horrified. “Have you lost your senses?” 

There’s shuffling downstairs, perhaps an official from the king seeking out Aziraphale to make a lesson out of him. But Crowley just stares at him, nearly disbelieving. “You’re angry,” he says wonderingly. 

So that’s what the feeling is in his stomach. It’s horrible, festering, painful, but he revels in its poison, now that it’s already taken effect. “They’re lashing them out there, Crowley,” he argues. “And I can’t do anything about it, can’t stop the king nor my kind backing him. Can’t disappear an entire group of people, can’t heal the ones that are hurt, not with the angels swarming out there.” He squeezes his hands into fists, nails biting into the meat of his palm. “I can’t. Do. Anything!” 

“Why are you angry?” Crowley continues, as if musing it to himself. “You’re not allowed to be angry, not like this. You’re an angel. I understand empathy, and pity, and even love, but—?” 

“And what kind of angel would I be?” asks Aziraphale. “If I left them here? If I had the power to stop their punishment, and I didn’t?” 

Crowley makes a sound of protest. “Don’t you see it?! You don’t have the power to do that!”

“But I have to try, don’t I?” Cries Aziraphale. He’s finished packing, though he has to leave his battered copy of the Hebrew bible on his nightstand. It’s fitting, in a way. “Who am I, if I don’t try?” 

Crowley’s restless. He looks out the window in exasperation, then winces and turns away, clearly regretting whatever he saw. “I came here to warn you, Aziraphale. Do with that warning what you will.” He says it like he couldn’t be bothered either way, but his eyes are pleading, and he goes to take a step forward before aborting it halfway. “Let me take you back to Wessex with me.”

“Wessex?” Aziraphale can’t help but scoff. “They’re baptizing any pagan they can get their hands on. It’s why I left in the first place.” 

“But it’s voluntary, angel,” Crowley argues. “It’s not whippings and mutilation, not yet. It’s… sharing the Almighty’s word and letting people choose to convert, or choose not to. Even a, a pagan king was just throned in Kent! We can… ensure it stays voluntarily. I’ll tempt people to paganism, you’ll bless whatever poor soul passes your way, and we can… Exist. Together.”

Together. 

Aziraphale couldn’t make an argument against that if he even had a hundred years. The anger has faded into an unimaginable grief. Crowley, seeming to sense that, grabs the bible and presses it to Aziraphale’s chest, picks up the packed case by the handle. He holds out his free hand, and says, “Last chance. It’s too late for us here.”

There’s screams from outside, the heavy sound of cord hitting flesh, the rolling thunder looming in the Mediterranean. Aziraphale closes his eyes for a long moment, takes a deep breath, then opens them. “All right,” he says. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Aziraphale–”

“Don’t you see? I have to stay. I can’t bear leaving, that’s… That’s perhaps the least angelic thing I could do.” He hesitates, then hands Crowley the bible in his outstretched hand. “Go, Crowley. I shan’t be long.”

Crowley starts to argue again. Aziraphale can’t bear it, so without a lasting look he darts from the room and leaves out the side stairwell, narrowly avoiding a member of Sisebut’s guard. He finds the bloodied people who have submitted in a waiting alley to await their baptism; he spends three straight days healing their wounds. He keeps a sharp eye out for a flash of reddish hair, thinks he sees it once or twice, but. That would be impossible, wouldn’t it? 

The ones who refused to convert are far past saving. Aziraphale prays that the Jews of Spain will find peace down their family lines, when all is said and done. 

It doesn’t work. Later, Aziraphale finds Crowley in England, which quickly goes downhill, too. The people are forcibly baptized, the pagan kings are murdered, and in a mere century, the Anglo-Saxans have Christianized the entirety of England. Aziraphale tries not to drown beneath it all.

In Malta, years after the Norman conquest of Sicily that locks it beneath Christian rule, Aziraphale lives amongst the Muslims. He learns of the Catholic practice of self-flagellation from the Christian Arabs, a new fad from the Benedictines in Rome that nobody buys into. Aziraphale tries it anyway, for reasons he feels are obvious. Crowley arrives and nearly tears apart the man demonstrating the appropriate power of impact. They part ways fairly quickly after that.

“Sorry,” mutters Crowley. 

“It’s all right,” replies Aziraphale, feeling oddly like a child who was caught doing something naughty. 

By the 13th century, the Muslims are forced to leave or convert to Christianity. Choosing neither ensures their execution. 

Aziraphale is commended for his work on Earth. 

Time moves on. 

“This is ridiculous,” groans Aziraphale. “Here? They’re coming here?” 

It’s 1519, and thankfully Crowley has long since given up claiming that he’s not searching for Aziraphale when decades go by without a reunion. Running into each other in pre-colonial Mexico by happenstance is a stretch, anyway. They’re only a century into the arrangement as it’s formally called, but there’s not a schedule, not really; it took Aziraphale nearly a millennium to admit to the advantages of it. 

“Sí, angel,” says Crowley, kicking his legs in the stream Aziraphale is lounging beside. He’s taken off his socks, and his calves glisten in the water as much as the splitfins swimming around his feet do. “About a week out.” 

Well. This is certainly not the picnic Aziraphale had always envisioned between them. Stomach soured, he pushes his plate of tamales de pejelagarto away on the grass. “My thoughts aren’t very proper at the moment,” he admits in a clipped voice. 

“Oh?” It’s like a snake catching movement in the night, how Crowley’s attention zeroes in on Aziraphale entirely. “Do tell. You know how to sweet-talk a demon.”

“Columbus died,” Aziraphale continues, unphased. “He’s done. Why is this land still being colonized? Spain can hardly handle their own population, let alone another country’s full of civilizations that have been prospering for thousands of years without their help, thank you.” He steals a look Crowley’s way. “How’s he doing, by the way?” 

“Hmm, who? Columbus?” Crowley tilts up his face to the sun, glasses pushed up into his hair. “He’s graduated from ‘hot coals’ to ‘hot fireplace poker’, so. I’d imagine he’s doing swell.”

Aziraphale feels an unangelic surge of satisfaction, and then immediately guilt. He looks out to the village over the river, to the colors woven through every piece of fabric and every stretch of wall, their love of creation however they interpret it. To the children digging under rocks for frogs, the women catching fish and farming their eggs, the men grouped together repairing the deteriorating home of one of the elders in the town. The Chontal-Mayans here value familial bond more than Aziraphale could ever conceptualize. 

“There’s no hope for these people,” he says sadly, “Is there.” 

They’ve had this exact conversation dozens of times. Aziraphale had thought for a terrifying moment back in Uz that Crowley was doing this on purpose. That Aziraphale was meant to stay and help, and by letting himself be ‘saved’ he’s effectively letting evil win. But then he’d seen Crowley’s haunted eyes in Sodom, his vulnerability way back in Memphis. The way his hand shook in the air in Spain, suspended between them like the branch of an olive tree. 

Now, Aziraphale suspects that he’s very, very important to Crowley. It’s the most terrifying thing he could think of happening, Armageddon included. 

“No,” replies Crowley. “Cortés is bringing around a hundred soldiers and his own ego. He’s desperate to prove himself as capable of leading his own army through the Aztecs.”

“But why?” 

Crowley shrugs, making a helpless noise. “Why do humans hurt other humans? Because that’s how they’re built, I think. Free will doesn’t have stipulations, angel. You accept the bad to accept the good.”

Closing his eyes, Aziraphale sends a general blessing over the town, weak and unspecific. He has no misconceptions that it’ll do a lick against the Ineffable Plan, but. It’s the most he can do, when faced with the inevitable promise of death and misfortune. It’s a pathetic effort in context. And yet, it makes him feel the smallest bit better. 

So he extends an olive branch of his own. “Perhaps I need to make a decision, don’t I?” 

Crowley hums in a quizzical tone. 

“I should be closer to home base, I think.” Aziraphale absentmindedly picks at the grass at his side, rubbing the blades together between his fingers. “Should find my nest, rather than try to fly from it all the time. I think my nomad days are behind me.”

Across the river, the children cheer at their latest discovery, a watersnake the length of a hog. Crowley is very quiet and very still. “Where,” he clears his throat. “Where were you thinking?” 

Aziraphale hides a smile. “Paris, maybe.” 

“Parisss?” Crowley hisses, spinning around on the grass. His shades drop slightly crooked on his nose. “You want to live in Paris? Oh–nyeah, ngk, okay, sure. Paris, angel, in case your formidable intellect missed the most basic of memos, smells terrible and doesn’t even–” And then he stops, narrowing his eyes in Aziraphale’s direction, who is trying very hard not to laugh. “You’re having me on,” he accuses. 

“I assure you–”

Crowley splashes at Aziraphale, getting his sleeve sodden in the process. Aziraphale lets out a surprised yelp of laughter, brushing off the water frantically before it sinks down to his skin. “My dear boy, your face,” he manages through the giggles. “As if I’d live in Paris. Whatever would I even do there?” An idea niggles at the back of his mind. “Oh, there’s crepes, aren’t there? Now there’s an idea.”

“I’ll show you crepes,” Crowley mutters, wringing out his sleeve of river water. 

“Really? Then perhaps London is a good choice, too,” says Aziraphale warmly. “As long as there’s crepes, anyway.” 

Despite everything, Crowley looks hopeful, though it’s carefully schooled into something more neutral, perhaps sardonic. Aziraphale thanks whoever will listen that Crowley still has things to be hopeful about. “There’s crepes,” he says seriously, a bit gruffly. “There’s more than crepes, actually. There’s– giant crepes. And any pastry you can think of, and–and all the imported wines in the world. You would adore London.” 

I do believe I would, Aziraphale thinks, for reasons that, again, should be obvious.

When Crowley offers Aziraphale his hand, he takes it this time.  

I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

Richard Siken

Aziraphale wakes up after only a few hours, if the late morning light streaming through the curtains is anything to go by. They’re almost in identical positions that they were when they fell asleep; Crowley’s head has migrated off of his pillow and has its full weight on Aziraphale’s shoulder instead, and their legs are touching beneath the covers Crowley eventually climbed under. His breathing comes out heavy, nearly a snore. Aziraphale can feel the air brush against the skin of his neck. 

Not for the first time, he wonders how long he’s been in love with Crowley. As usual, he can’t pin it under a lamp, narrow down the exact time and place it happened, but. But. For the first time, he decides that it doesn’t matter, not really. Maybe it was that night in 1941. Maybe it was at the wall of Eden. Or maybe, confusingly, wonderfully, it was from the very start of it all. 

It doesn’t take long for Crowley to stir, his limbs stretching taut like the strings of violin, arm hard and rigid at Aziraphale’s stomach. There’s a groan caught in his throat, like he’s writhing in pain rather than returning to consciousness. 

It’s more dramatic than Aziraphale woke up, but. It’s endearing all the same. 

“Good morning,” Aziraphale tells him. 

“Mm,” Crowley hums, relaxing back into place. He blinks up blearily at him, golden eyes unfocused. “Angel,” he mutters in greeting. His voice is rough, higher than normal. “D’you sleep?” 

“I slept,” Aziraphale assures him quietly. He uses his spare hand to reach up and brush lightly through the demon’s smushed, copper hair from where it lies flat against his forehead. Nothing like the carefully roguish style he normally sports. “You use hair product, don’t you,” says Aziraphale, bemused. 

“Noo,” Crowley immediately protests. “No, actually, I… scare my hair into place.”

“Hm.” 

“‘M very evil and frightening.” 

“Oh, of course. Even though you did gift me conditioner last Christmas…” 

“Conditioner you haven’t used,” says Crowley. “Shows how much I know about hair products.” He yawns. Blinks a couple times, as if it took him some morning small talk to return him to the present. He glances down at his arm and the way his legs are threaded around one of Aziraphale’s, and that nearly tenses him up, almost makes him pull away. But something else ends up winning out in that serpent brain of his, and, like his strings are cut, he melts deeper into the mattress instead. Aziraphale breathes a sigh of relief. 

“I like the bed,” he says against the fabric of Aziraphale’s vest. 

The tone is clear. ‘ I like the bed despite how much I dislike everything else you did up here’, it proclaims . Aziraphale sighs. “I was hoping you’d like more of it,” he says. “I’m glad you’re partial to the bedroom, though, at least. It took me several tries to get it right.”

“Oh, sure,” says Crowley innocently. “Which one took you longer, I wonder; the view, or the bedroom?” 

Aziraphale pauses, mentally adding it all up and masking a grimace. “I spent a lot of time on the bedroom,” he admits.

“Fascinating.” Crowley tilts his head up so his nose juts against the curve of Aziraphale’s jaw, inhales long and quiet in another stretch. “Big plans, have you?” 

Aziraphale blushes. He uses the hand on Crowley’s chest to jab at his side playfully. “I assure you, I was focused on the aesthetics of the space, nothing more,” he says. “Stop trying to turn everything I say into something suggestive.” 

“Demon,” sighs Crowley.

Later, Aziraphale sits on the couch while Crowley prowls through the flat, inspecting Aziraphale’s handiwork down to the crown molding. He seems to keep getting caught back at the windows every few minutes, at the view of New York from higher than birds usually fly. They’re at the perfect angle where sunlight won’t ever reflect off of the office building, awarding Crowley a daylong view of the miserable people inside of it. Something he sees makes him chuckle under his breath, and then he immediately spins on his snakeskin shoes to the open-floor kitchen, unwilling to admit it.  

Aziraphale’s given up pretending he’s reading his book. He places it on the coffee table in front of him, folds his hands in his lap, and settles in for a proper watch. 

“Stainless steel,” muses Crowley, teeter-tottering over the stove to peek up at the vents above it. Checking for what exactly? If you ask him he’ll tell you something ridiculous, like slugs. “Smudges easily.” 

“Hmm,” replies Aziraphale. 

“You’ve a space between the stove and the counter,” he continues. “Food’ll get stuck in a gap like that.” 

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Aziraphale assures him evenly, “Considering I have never and will never use the stove.” 

Crowley drops back on both feet and shoots Aziraphale a frown. “I might,” he points out, like Aziraphale should have thought of that first. 

Aziraphale can’t help but chuckle, muffling it in another sip of his tea. From the electric kettle Crowley gifted him years ago, mind. Much more enjoyable than fiddling with all sorts of knobs and smells from the stovetop. “My dear, if you knew how to cook, I believe I would have figured that out by now.”

“I don’t ‘know how to cook’,” Crowley says in that mocking way of his. “But how hard can it be? I’ll–find a recipe online. Make us lunch, or something.” 

“Today?” Aziraphale feels a rush of hope that Crowley will stay longer. 

“Uhmm,” Crowley shrugs, mutters a few more sounds. “Could do,” he says gruffly. “M’schedule’s open. Would need to run to the store, though. The only thing you’ve got in your fridge is milk for tea and an inordinate amount of face masks.” 

Clearing his throat, Aziraphale says, “Those were a gift.” 

Crowley snickers at that. “You think I didn’t notice when we switched bodies?” He sounds absolutely delighted. “You don’t think I tried one out for myself? Cucumber and–mint, was it?” 

“Witch’s hazel,” grumbles Aziraphale. “I’d been saving that one.” 

“It was luxurious. Couldn’t stop touching my–your face afterwards.” Then Crowley wrinkles his nose. “Still a bit weird, actually. What we did. When you think about it.” 

“What? Go inside each other?” 

“Angel,” groans Crowley, but there’s a flicker of devilish appreciation in his eye. “Don’t–don’t say it like that.”

“Like what, dear?” Aziraphale asks, blinking up at him with wide eyes, a cherub from the Sistine Chapel. He perches his cheek fretfully in his hand. “‘Putting our essence in each other’s bodies’?” 

“Guh.” Crowley’s face is a wonderful shade of pink. Point two, Aziraphale thinks with an improper amount of glee. “I’m–You’re– Now who’s the suggestive one?” 

“I have no idea what you mean.” 

They decide to walk together to the nearest market to pick up ingredients for lunch. On the way Crowley looks up recipes on his phone, nearly cursing with annoyance when the page is filled with pop-up ads and a novella about the author’s childhood, before remembering that that fad was one of his, too.

“I don’t care what your grandmother’s zodiac sign is,” Crowley bemoans, scrolling frantically down his mobile’s screen for the ingredient list. “Oh, great—now she’s crying about a dog that died in a movie about a volcano. How is that even related to quiche?”

Without looking up he goes to open the door for Aziraphale, then blinks in alarm when the door slides open automatically. 

“After you, dear,” says Aziraphale, careful not to laugh. 

They decide on a sort of curry with chicken, coconut milk, pumpkin, and about a dozen other ingredients. Aziraphale is just happy to accompany Crowley through the vague bewilderment of his first market visit. Aziraphale loves grocery stores, loves seeing the little labels of snacks with animal mascots and the fresh sandwich rolls that are always so warm they fog up their case. Sometimes he walks through stores just to look, and snack on the endless amount of samples. 

Crowley, on the other hand, storms through the store with a purpose, pausing only to stick out his tongue to the children being pushed in prams. “What’s the organization, here?” He asks Aziraphale, basket hooked over his arm like it’s something off the runway. “Alphabetical?” 

“…Let’s start with the produce, shall we?” Aziraphale leads him away with a hand to his back.

Back at the flat, Crowley immediately begins on lunch. When he cooks, Aziraphale learns, there’s none of his blasé gestures and devil-may-care attitude (pun intended). He’s methodical. He squints down at the recipe constantly and measures out every ingredient to exact, perfect ratios. He manually sharpens the knives between each use. He uses the timer for every step that necessitates it. He cleans as he goes. In the kitchen Crowley is, in a word, a complete and utter angel. Aziraphale will never dare voice it. Crowley would sleep away another decade in stubbornness if he did. 

“What?” Crowley asks him, apropos of nothing. He’s letting the chicken broth simmer the vegetables and the coconut milk, and he’s got his sleeves pushed up his arms handsomely. 

“Hm?” Aziraphale asks, almost dazedly. 

“You’re staring.” 

“Oh dear,” says Aziraphale, completely unapologetic. “How rude of me.”

Crowley begins to smile something slow, bright, and lovely, but he schools it with a bite to his lower lip. Aziraphale thinks of the way he looked two millennia ago, pressed up against the wall with Aziraphale's blessing healing his wounds, the only demon to experience divine ecstasy and live to tell the tale. How Aziraphale's hands itch to do it again, and again, and again. Crowley opens his mouth as if to say something, but then stops and spins around instead to go back to stirring the curry.

“Shut up,” he says to the stove, flustered. 

Aziraphale does shut up. He also continues to stare, and eventually, after they’ve eaten their chicken pumpkin curry and drank their Chenin Blanc aged in oak, Crowley allows himself to be stared at and smiles, too, without trying to hide it.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

It becomes a bit of a routine, Crowley cooking in Aziraphale’s flat. Crowley lounging in the bookshop while Aziraphale pretends to work. Crowley wordlessly slouching off during the night to burrow himself in the big fluffy bed. Aziraphale doesn’t sleep regularly in the slightest, but he’s partial to naps, which Crowley is more than willing to join him for, too. Strictly to show him how, of course. Aziraphale has a terrible memory these days. 

It’s nice. It’s more than nice, it’s–it’s everything Aziraphale had never dared to wish for. Everything he had changed every inch of the bookshop and the flat for, save for Crowley’s favorite couch. 

He should have expected it all to go downhill from there. 

It’s a warm night and they’re sharing a dinner made up of arugula & olive oil puttanesca, lemon caper toast, and a bottle of Semillon; dry, slightly sweet, and cool enough to sweat. The skyline outside is purpled like a bruise, clouds pink and streaming out from the horizon in ink-like smudges. Like everything else Crowley’s cooked, dinner has turned out delicious, so Aziraphale tells him as such. 

“It’s just science,” Crowley mutters into his wine glass, embarrassed as always. “Isaac Newton was one of mine.” 

Aziraphale tsks at that. “Can Sir Isaac saute garlic and anchovies to perfection?” 

A beat. “Probably not,” says Crowley, carefully unruffled. “But give him an apple and watch him go.” 

They laugh at that. Well, Aziraphale laughs–Crowley just grins in response before sinking his white, white incisors into a bite of toast. Aziraphale feels pleasantly warm at the sight, though it may just be because he’s on his third glass of wine. You never can tell, when you’re looking at Crowley.  

“Are you beginning to acclimate to the flat?” Aziraphale asks after a few moments. 

Crowley is carefully quiet. His glasses are folded into his neckline, pulling it down a bit past his sternum. He looks around the room from his vantage with his jaw in his hand, a wide, lazy sweep of his eyes. He scratches at his chin and says, slowly, “I like the view, and the bed. I like the bookshop. The green was a good choice, and the rugs. Erm. Love my couch.”

Aziraphale sips at his wine, and the look he’s giving the demon may be described as a glare by some people. “Very diplomatic,” he says blandly.

Crowley shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s just… too…” His gaze lands on a bright, undecorated wall, and he grimaces. “I dunno. Cold.” 

“It’s not cold,” says Aziraphale defensively. “We just have… different tastes, is all.” 

“But we don’t have different tastes,” argues Crowley. “I tolerate what you like, and you like everything. You see? It works out perfectly.”

“Really, my dear. I don’t like everything.” 

“Ah, yes. You’re absolutely right. You dislike open floor plans, lack of color, and America.” Crowley somehow manages to spin some spaghetti on his fork off of Aziraphale’s plate without him noticing. He pops it into his mouth, licking the oil from his lips. Aziraphale watches the movement. 

“Agree to disagree,” he says distractedly. 

“My favorite kind of agreeing,” replies Crowley. 

The quiet is comfortable, and Aziraphale can’t help but think . Aziraphale has been thinking something very hard for a long while; a few months, admittedly, but. That’s a long time to think about something and not do anything about it. With nothing else to do, nothing else to fear from, it spans longer than the millennia he simmered with his regard for Crowley. Suddenly it becomes too much to bear by himself, not when this thought involves the both of them. 

“What if,” Aziraphale begins, ever so carefully. “What if I… sold it?”

“Hm?” Crowley asks between a bite of bread. “Sold what?” 

“The bookshop.” 

He stops chewing. His brows and mouth draw carefully into a frown. “Come again?” 

He says it a bit cautiously, like a man who heard Aziraphale perfectly the first time but is giving him a chance to explain the misunderstanding. Unfortunately for him, ‘selling the bookshop’ is as unambiguous as it gets. 

“It’s not that I don’t love it,” Aziraphale quickly assures him, because it’s the truth. He loves his bookshop like he loves cinnamon-roasted almonds, loves the way people huddle together to watch a satellite passing by the night sky. The mice he couldn’t bear to miracle away from his cupboards. The advertisements that jets pull behind them in long banners. Edible flowers. He loves with such entirety that, when he fell in love with Crowley, he didn’t notice it at first. Not because it was nestled inside of everything else, but because it was so different that it slithered into his heart without alerting him of its existence beforehand. 

There’s hardly words for all of that, so he continues with, “Given the circumstances, I’d like some distance between the main entrance to heaven and hell, you understand. And, well…living in the city. It’s lovely, truly, but–It’s all quite a lot, isn’t it?” 

“They aren’t coming for you,” states Crowley, looking at Aziraphale in such a severely bewildered way that they might as well be strangers. “They think you’ve gone fully native. And, you’ve changed up the shop so bloody much anyway it might as well be new; what’s the point of doing all that over? Stay still and—enjoy yourself. Stay here . They’ve agreed to leave you alone for now, isn’t that enough?”

“Yes, Crowley, for now. What if someone comes up with a creative way to, I don’t know–mix holy water and hellfire? Smite us both on the spot?” 

“Then we die!” Crowley nearly shouts. “You can’t live our life, your life, in fear of–of hypotheticals! ”

Your life, Crowley had corrected himself with. More lines in the sand, more divisions stretched taut between them. Would Crowley not go with him, if he decided to leave London? Would Crowley firmly, stubbornly stay in place despite–despite everything? Aziraphale had thought they’d grown closer, but–perhaps he’s been foolish. Wishful thinking to a destructive degree. 

“I don’t–” Aziraphale stops, twisting his fingers together on his lap. “I don’t think there’s space for me here anymore.” 

“... So that’s it, then. Five hundred years in London, and you—You’re—“

“I’m what?” asks Aziraphale. 

“Running away,” Crowley spits, pushing away from the table. “I thought you outgrew this back in the 16th century.” 

It comes with the implication that not only is Aziraphale a child, but Crowley’s so much more mature than him that they’re still on different sides, after everything. It makes something sharp and dusty bristle inside of him. It makes him dislike himself almost as much as he dislikes this conversation. 

“That wasn’t very nice,” says Aziraphale quietly. 

“I’m not very nice,” says Crowley, standing up and striding into the open space that nearly makes up the entire flat. “And that’s the rub, isn’t it?” 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says exasperatedly. “Must we? I’m trying to tell you something important , and you’re–”

“Six thousand yearsss,” Crowley interrupts, because he’s spiraling, now, and Aziraphale hasn’t yet mastered the art form on how to stop it. “Six thousand fucking years of this. Everything’s changed, angel. Heaven, hell, Armageddon, the bookshop, this flat, your–your bloody left eye!” He’s starting to get a bit static-y. “Everything’s changed, but nothing’s different, is it? Nothing will ever be different!”  

He has both hands braced on the counter, hunched over heavily, holding up his entire weight. His shoulders are imperceptibly shaking, but Aziraphale can perceive it. Can feel his anguish like it’s his own, because it is his own, too. 

“We can’t keep doing this,” says Crowley. He sounds absolutely miserable. “I can’t–You have no idea– This. It’s tearing me up, Aziraphale. Ripping me apart.” 

“What?” Aziraphale asks, stomach dropping somewhere near his ankles. “This relationship?” 

Crowley huffs out a sardonic laugh. “Is that what you’ve decided to call it?” 

Perhaps Crowley was right. Six thousand years isn’t enough time for them to change, not in the way a handful of months attempted to. Aziraphale has no doubts of his importance to Crowley, despite how much the demon tries to play it off–but perhaps the motivations are where miscommunication festered. Perhaps companionship isn’t a relationship, and perhaps fear of being alone isn’t love. They’re both so incredibly lonely. Aziraphale’s not built for it, and that’s worst of all; that he can be newly-born, but the root of his being can never adapt to these immovable constants. 

Aziraphale doesn’t know how to love without loving entirely. Suddenly, he feels the weight of six thousand years in his soul, though this body isn’t even a year old. This body. This blasted body.

So he says, quietly, “I suppose not.” He tilts his head down, nearly a bow. “I mis–well. I thought wrong. My apologies.” 

Crowley just stares at him for a long moment. At some point in his pacing he had returned his glasses to his face. He opens his mouth, as if grappling for words, but he doesn’t manage any sounds. Aziraphale remembers the feeling of the whip hitting his back. 

“That’s it, then,” says Crowley softly, almost tenderly. Then his jaw steels, and he shoves his hands into his pockets. “That’s–Ngk. Huh.” 

Aziraphale doesn’t see Crowley leave, it happens so quickly. Perhaps he stormed out; more likely that he disapparated somewhere far away, somewhere Aziraphale wouldn’t go looking for him. The thought fills Aziraphale with an instinctual sort of panic he can’t find the words to explain. He looks at the flat around him; the fuzzy carpet Crowley had dragged up from downstairs, the laser pointer perched on a chair nudged up against the far window, the kitchen that’s been gradually building a library of cookbooks on its own. How the walls are as empty as the flat’s always been, Aziraphale its lone occupant for two-hundred-and-nineteen years, save a precious handful of weeks. 

How everything has changed. How nothing is different.

But then, when Aziraphale feels brave enough to go downstairs, he steps into the ignored side room with the broken sink and finds a garden instead. The plant Crowley had brought over wordlessly after his trip to America, but also dozens more now, lush and miraculously flourishing in the limited sunlight streaming through the blinds. How they seem to lean towards Aziraphale the moment he enters, like sunflowers do when you look at them long enough. 

How Anathema had said with a secretive smile, “It took me finding a spare room full of broken computer parts yesterday to realize he finally moved himself in.”

“Oh,” sighs Aziraphale suddenly, pressing his back against the wall, hand fluttering to his chest. He remembers how he didn’t miracle the mice away from his cupboards because he didn’t want to remove them from their home. “Oh, dear.” He asks the plants, “Neither of us are built for this, are we?” 

The vines of a devil’s ivy wrap around his ankle weakly in a sense of comfort. 

“Right,” Aziraphale says, adjusting his bowtie with a determined nod of his head. “I’ll be back later, dears. You’re growing so beautifully, I’d hate for Crowley to miss it.” 

He smiles, and one of the orchids bursts into bloom.

Surprisingly, Aziraphale finds Crowley in his flat, both in quite a state of disrepair. He’d been expecting to sleuth there for clues, not find the demon on the first try, but he’s certainly not complaining. Clothing and knick-knacks are flying all over the place when Aziraphale enters, only to miraculously land in a bottomless suitcase by the door. 

“Crowley?” He calls.

He has to duck his head before getting thumped with a pair of red-bottom heels. 

“Crowley, you’re being ridiculous.”

Still no reply. The throwing slows to a halt, though, so Aziraphale risks venturing into the bedroom where the items had been coming from in the first place. Crowley is sitting in his open, gigantic closet, back to the doorway, arms wrapped around his knees.

Aziraphale feels his heart nearly split. “Crowley–”

“ I’m being ridiculousss, am I?” Crowley hisses. “You, faffing off to heaven knows where while I’m—“ He huffs. “Unbelievable.” 

“Crowley, if you’d just listen–”

“No. After everything— ” He cuts himself off with a choking sound, before shaking his head in irritation, like he’s trying to dispel himself of water. “No! I’m packing my things, angel. Don’t expect me to wait around for you.”

“You’re–you’re leaving?” Aziraphale’s heart stops for a moment. It doesn’t make a lick of difference, not for men who don’t need a heartbeat to begin with. Not even a fortuitous fainting spell could save this conversation. “You…” He struggles to find the words, then settles on, “You can’t.”

Crowley looks over his shoulder at that, eyes hard and angry. His glasses are broken against the far wall. “Hypocrite,” he spits. 

Aziraphale feels like tearing his hair out. “You didn’t even let me explain.”

“I don’t need you to,” says Crowley, spinning back around to continue ripping clothes off their hangers and throw them behind him. This time they avoid Aziraphale entirely, giving him a wide berth like he’s contagious. ‘I don’t need you’, Crowley’s words imply. Aziraphale doesn’t believe he could say the same, not even if they went without talking for six thousand more years. 

“First your orders sent you to Egypt, even though Egypt isn’t really Egypt, apparently.” Crowley starts. “Bloody lambs. You begged me not to tell hell you were there, and–and I kept that secret, Aziraphale. I kept it with my life. And after that, you could have trusted me, told me all the remote places heaven sent you so I didn’t have to–have to agonize that you’d been punished. Search the fucking globe three times over for you.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that–”

“Do you think I had a choice?”

Crowley’s standing at that, chest heaving, teeth imperceptibly bared. Aziraphale has lost his footing rather quickly here, if he had ever had it to begin with. It’s as if they’re speaking two different languages–wrong metaphor, given Aziraphale’s fluent in every single one. Well, besides French. It’s like Crowley’s speaking French, even though he hates Paris, and Aziraphale can’t get it through his thick demonic skull that they’re both saying the same damned thing.  

So Aziraphale says, feeling like he’s barely holding on, “I didn’t think. That’s the problem.”

But he deliberately ignores Aziraphale. “They’ve cut the strings, Aziraphale. Nothing’s the same as it was, you’re–you’re free now. What could you possibly need to leave for—“

“It’s because nothing’s the same, Crowley!” exclaims Aziraphale, who can’t stop his eyes from welling up, his voice from coming out rough, and– oh, this is not the way he wanted to say things, not what he had in mind when he’d taken the bus over and miracled it faster than the speed limit. “That’s–That’s precisely what I’m talking about! That’s the ‘rub’!”

“Angel, if it’s about–” Crowley swallows, fingers all twitchy at his sides and mouth dropping into something terribly self-conscious, “If it’s about the–the napping, or the cooking, or the– being around, I’ll stop. We’ll go back to every other Sunday, if that would–If things would be better then.”

“It’s not about that,” says Aziraphale, feeling so incredibly full of too many emotions that he has to drop on Crowley’s bed that’s much too firm. “I have a different body, I have a different bookshop. My family attempted to set me on fire . And there isn’t even anywhere to go anymore that the Almighty can’t reach.”

“Change the body!” Crowley nearly shouts. “You’ve already changed the bookshop! And you don’t need a family who wants to destroy you. All you need is m—“ He stops. 

Hope blossoms somewhere in Aziraphale’s chest. “Exactly,” he says. “You’re all that I–”

“Hang on,” interrupts Crowley. He turns to look at Aziraphale, his eyes entirely gold and wide, so wide. His mouth is partially opened into something akin to shock. “Anymore?” 

Aziraphale frowns with a sniffle. “What?” He asks.

“You said,” Crowley says, taking a step closer that’s almost dangerous, almost like a warning rattle. “You said there’s nowhere you can go anymore where God can’t find you.” 

Aziraphale just looks at him tiredly, defeatedly. He could go for one of those naps right about now. His palms at his lap face upwards, fingers curled in supplication, like he’s saying, this is all I am. This is all I can give you.  

It’s as if Crowley’s stopped time again. He looks as Galileo did way back in the seventeenth century, when he discovered that the Earth isn’t the center of the known universe after all. So arrogant, humans are. His eyes are incredibly wide, darting around unfocused as if he’s flipping through a backlog of memories and events. Spain in 616 before Sisebut forced the Jews to convert. Malta before the Muslims were expunged in 1224. Mexico, a week before Hernán Cortés tore through it in 1519 before overthrowing the Aztecs entirely, emboldened by Pope Alexander VI’s Inter caetera; Spain can murder these people in the name of the Church.

How Aziraphale had lived in Egypt and Aksum in relative peace, before the gaps of christianization got narrower and narrower. Until there was nowhere to go anymore. Until there were no more ‘befores’. 

“You were given orders, I thought,” Crowley says slowly. “To go where the Church isn’t, to spread miracles and–maybe plant the seeds for an easier conversion down the road. To be the last beacon of kindness before everything went to shit. To do that without my intervention.” He looks at Aziraphale directly now, expression starting to unshutter. “But you didn’t have orders, did you?” 

Crowley has no windows here. No views of New York, or a tropical rainforest full of snakes, or–or even London. Aziraphale doesn’t blame him. He’s never cared much for London. 

“No,” Aziraphale says sadly. “I didn’t.”

Crowley stands in the doorway of the closet, sagging against the frame. The past thousands of years, the gaps, the reunions. How Aziraphale hadn’t begged ‘don’t tell hell I’m here’ in Memphis; he’d said ‘don’t tell anybody.’ Heaven included. God included. “You were… hiding . ” Crowley says wonderingly. “Weren’t you.”

“Crowley…”

But Crowley is emboldened now, fresh off of the epiphany thousands of years in the making. “You sought out places without a religious connection, without–without a connection to Christianity . Africa, the Americas. You built–you nested into your own sanctified places of worship. Not of the Almighty, but something completely different, something like– sanctuaries. Sanctuaries where nothing could find you.”

“You found me,” Aziraphale can’t help but add, tears falling properly now. “Every time.”

Crowley takes one look at Aziraphale’s face, and his expression drops into something horrified. “Oh, shit, angel.” He takes three long strides over to drop to his knees and wrap his arms around Aziraphale’s shoulders. “Don’t–don’t. Don’t do that.”

Aziraphale’s sobbing in earnest now, shoving his face wetly into the side of Crowley’s neck. He is also emboldened by feelings that have taken thousands of years to reach the surface. “Don’t go,” Aziraphale cries into his skin. “Please don’t go. I wasn’t serious about selling the bookshop, I was just wondering aloud, really. Terrible habit. I’ll break it, I swear–”

Crowley huffs against his hair, arms tightening around Aziraphale’s back, like he’s crushing them back into one person. “It wasn’t–” He makes another huff again, this time sounding a bit more shaky. “It wasn’t actually about the bookshop? Or the flat above it.”

“But it’s your home, too,” Aziraphale argues. “I’m sorry it took me so long to realize it, my darling.”

Something shivers up Crowley’s spine at the endearment. “It–It is. Our home, okay, it is, but it’s not–” He groans quietly, like the words cause him physical pain to speak out loud. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It could be a–a padded cell with, I dunno, a toilet in the middle and a bed too small for the two of us, and I wouldn’t care.” 

Aziraphale blinks away the tears, pulls back to meet Crowley’s eyes properly. “That’s–that’s ridiculous, Crowley,” he protests. “Of course you’d care. You’re all–” He gestures around the stylish flat, to the handsome way Crowley adorns his material body. How his own falls lackluster in comparison. “You.”

“Me,” replies Crowley sardonically, “The demon who spent months slowly moving in, thinking you didn’t even know you wanted it yet. Trying not to ‘go too fast’. Thinking I was being sneaky.”

“Crowley,” says Aziraphale exasperatedly, fondly. “I was quite aware of what I wanted, but thought you were just–I thought you just didn’t want to be alone, or need something familiar. After Armageddon, nothing was familiar, and… I couldn’t bear it.” He reaches up to cup Crowley’s face, rub his thumb over the brand at the curve of his jaw. “I spent hours miracling my flat into something you’d like, something you’d–well, something you’d want to live in. Surely that’s obvious.” 

Crowley’s lips twist into something vaguely begrudging. “I had a feeling,” he admits, leaning his face into Aziraphale’s hand. “I really do like the flat, if we add enough you to it. Another reason you should–” He swallows. “You should stay in London.”

How had Aziraphale not seen this? He thinks of the plants, how they tilted closer to Aziraphale when he walked into the side room, believing he was the sun itself. He thinks of how he had created a flat the antithesis of what either of them liked, and they fell into it together all the same, despite that. How Crowley had been saying something quite loudly for six thousand years, not in French but in a language Aziraphale was unwilling to understand, in fear of it being code for something else. How had he doubted the way Crowley felt, when Crowley had been doing little else but showing Aziraphale how much? Fools, the both of them. 

“If you knew I changed my entire flat for you,” Aziraphale says earnestly, “Then why didn’t it cross that lovely mind of yours that wherever I was going, I was planning to take you with me?”

Crowley’s eyes immediately widen, and then flutter closed on their own volition. He grimaces and leans forward, knocking their foreheads together gently. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, as if he’s got something to say that he’s preparing himself for, something like…

“...Oh,” he says. Aziraphale hears the words behind it all the same. 

They stay like that, Crowley kneeled down and Aziraphale on the mattress, breathing in the air between them, fingers curled in each others’ clothing. Aziraphale thinks–well. He thinks about doing many things, all of them only possible if he were a great deal braver. He says, because he cannot think to say anything else: “I still want to sell the bookshop. There’s too many people in London these days, and visiting Tadfield–well, smaller towns have their charm.”

“Ngk,” Crowley says distractedly, his hands graduating from holding fabric, to the meat of Aziraphale’s sides themselves. “Yeah, yeah, of course.” 

“I’d like for you to help me with our new home, actually. On the ‘Internets’, finding something lovely for the both of us.” 

“Hng.” He’s nudging their noses together in a decidedly wanton manner.

“You understand, don’t you?” Aziraphale tilts the angle of his hand so his thumb is rubbing the high jut of his cheekbone, just beneath the hollow of his eye. “I don’t think anybody could part me from you if they tried. I’d–well. I’d do something unangelic.”  

Crowley just looks at him, eyes darting wildly over his face, his eyes, his lips. Aziraphale thinks for an exhilarating moment that Crowley’s going to do something brave. But then, with a sound high in his throat, he rushes forward and embraces him again, this time pressing his lips to Aziraphale’s temple. “I know I said change your body,” he mutters against his skin, “But maybe–don’t? I… I rather. I like this one.”

Confusingly, wonderfully, ineffably, Aziraphale feels his heart jump back to life.

Not anyone, you're the one

More than fun, you're the sanctuary

'Cause what you want is what I want

Sincerity

 

Souls that dream alone lie awake

I'll give you something so real

Sanctuary by Joji

In the end, on a warm July morning the bookshop sells for a shockingly large amount of money. Perhaps it’s only shocking to Aziraphale–Crowley had handled all of the finances, and Aziraphale is so used to miracling everything that he still thinks a loaf of bread costs half a penny. 

“Good lord,” says Aziraphale when he sees the final number. “Is this enough for our cottage, do you suppose?” 

Crowley has been overseeing the moving process, making sure everything the moving crew stuffs into the truck is appropriately secured in. He loves the subtle torture of micromanaging. Their possessions mostly consist of Aziraphale’s (now private) collection of books, Crowley’s wardrobe, and a few choice furniture; the couch, the fluffy bed. Crowley’s throne from his (also sold) flat downtown, of which Aziraphale is trying to come up with a polite way of telling him it’s definitely not going in the new place. 

“Hm?” Crowley leans over to look down at the signing papers Aziraphale’s holding, even though he already knows the number. He looks fetching in a short-sleeved black t-shirt. “Angel, with money like that, we could buy a mansion.”  

Aziraphale wrinkles his nose. “I don’t want a mansion,” he says. 

“How about a cottage in East Sussex then?” He says, circling around Aziraphale like he does when he’s feeling particularly devious. He wraps his spindly arms around Aziraphale’s waist from behind and perches his pointy chin on his shoulder. “One that’s a stroll away from a farmer’s market, and only a few minutes’ drive from the sea. One that has–well, for starts, a wine cellar. An apiary. I daresay we could even buy a boat, after all’s said and done.”

“Nothing gauche, Crowley,” Aziraphale protests. He’s thinking of things with sails, multi-million yachts, or ferries that honk loudly and smell terrible. 

“Nothing big, don’t worry. Just enough for two, with perhaps a little bench in the back to lounge and read in the sun.” He shuffles closer, his words brushing the shell of Aziraphale’s ear. “Take ourselves over to France whenever we like.”  

Aziraphale can’t help but close his eyes. “You said demons can’t tempt angels,” he says wrily. 

“If I recall that wasn’t my exact phrasing,” he mutters. “‘M not, though. Tempting you. Perhaps–Well, maybe it feels that way because–”

“Mr. Anthony?” One of the moving men interrupts awkwardly, carrying a voluptuous monstera in its terracotta pot. He seems mildly perturbed by how the leaves are caressing his face. “Do you want these in the truck as well?” 

“Hm,” he grumbles peevishly, withdrawing from his embrace to stalk past Aziraphale. “We’ll return to that later,” he throws over his shoulder, waist slinking in a way that should be ridiculous. 

Aziraphale gulps. 

The drive is relaxing in spades. Crowley still goes much too fast and nearly hits pedestrians for the fun of it, and they lose the moving van somewhere in the M25. But once they reach the open span of road outside of London, Aziraphale can’t stop himself from smiling. Crowley, too, but he doesn’t acknowledge it–simply grabs Aziraphale’s hand over the center console, threading their fingers together, and lets the Bentley roll the windows down halfway. 

The cottage is a lovely little thing in the country, somewhere near Alfriston hours south of London. The air smells like the sea, but not the sludgy parts by the more trodden area of the channel–more like salt, and wheat, and something confoundingly like lotus. The real estate agent is there when they arrive, and the signing of papers is a deceptively simple affair. Crowley hands him a paper with an extra zero than expected, and the agent makes his departure quickly after that, perhaps afraid Crowley is going to change his mind. They’re left standing in front of the home– their home, creeping ivy and pale violet paneling and all. 

“Lovely,” Aziraphale sighs. Because the pictures online didn’t do it justice, not one bit. 

Crowley grins at him, unabashed and so, so bright in the summer sun. “I knew you’d like it,” he says. “C’mon, let me show you inside.” 

In the end, let it be said that Crowley is the bravest one of them both. Mere moments after they unlock the front door for the first time, Crowley drops the keys on the floor, backs Aziraphale into the door until it clicks shut, and then kisses him within an inch of his immortal life. 

“Mmph,” Aziraphale yelps, then sighs and lets his eyes slide shut. Their noses catch, their teeth clack, like their movements are simply overlapping rather than collaborating. But then Aziraphale slides a hand into Crowley’s hair, gently yanks to push and pull Crowley into a proper angle, and, oh–now it’s a proper snog. It’s thrilling, in a way Aziraphale’s never been thrilled before. 

Crowley’s mouth is moving in a fiercely tender way that belies his soul, the parts he’s not built to express with words. Every sigh, every nip, every brush of a tongue lets the light in, lets the dark corners of his immaterial self experience the sun, and this– this is what bodies were made for, Aziraphale thinks. This is the stuff life was created from at the beginning of time. The way epics are told without using language, the way love is poured and drank from each other like cyclones over a warm ocean. 

Aziraphale grabs Crowley’s hair again, though this time his fingers tighten for the sake of it. Crowley groans into his mouth, pressing impossibly closer, and– Oh . That’s new. 

“Impressive effort,” mutters Aziraphale coyly.

Crowley shivers, hands fumbling between them, grabbing at Aziraphale’s sides beneath his jacket. “Shh,” he hisses, like he’s trying to tell Aziraphale to ‘shut up’ but can’t quite get himself to form the words, voice and lips so disconnected from each other. Aziraphale just kisses him again. 

Eventually Crowley pulls back, eyes entirely gold, looking extremely close to he did the time in Aksum when Aziraphale healed his arm and (now, looking back on it) definitely gave him an orgasm. 

“We’ve never done that before,” Aziraphale says, quite redundantly. “I’d like to keep doing it.” 

A sound is caught in Crowley’s throat, something that could be a moan or a choked-off laugh, depending on how you squint at it. “Just give me a minute,” he says between wracking breaths. “Just–hm. Hoo.”

“Are you all right?” Aziraphale asks in alarm. “You’re–you’re smoking.” 

“It’s the divinity,” Crowley groans. There is indeed the smallest amount of smoke coming from his ears. “Very, ah, divine. It’s not that I don’t like it, but it’s just–it’s like microwaving my bits n’ bobs.”

Aziraphale raises an incredulous brow. “And you like that?” 

“Yeah? Maybe?” He’s wriggling uncomfortably in place, but he keeps doing it against Aziraphale, which surely means something in the grand scheme of things. “I’ve never–Not with anyone. But I think it’s a you thing, not a sex thing, y’know. Feeling like I’ve got a shock collar on.” 

“How about we find your limits?” Aziraphale steps back into Crowley’s space, pushing him to the door this time. “I can be very thorough, you know. We’ll get you squared away in no time.” 

“Hng,” Crowley replies. 

Unfortunately, that’s when there’s a knock at the door behind them. Aziraphale jumps away from it on instinct, pulling Crowley with him. Already visitors? He thinks, just a tad bitterly. So much for the quiet countryside. But then he feels the rumble beneath his feet more than he hears it, and spots the moving van through the gauzy curtains in the next room. “I do believe our things have arrived,” he says primly, stepping back to straighten his clothing.

“Movers here,” a man announces from the other side of the door. 

“Coming,” Aziraphale calls back. 

“I’ll kill them,” Crowley says seriously, eyes widening in emphasis. “I’ll do it, and we can head to the bedroom–”

“Without a bed, dear?” 

Crowley does a little wiggle and a wince that says he regrets the tight pants for once. The door knocks again. This time, Crowley shouts, “I said I’m coming!”  

“Not yet,” comments Aziraphale, carefully schooling his expression. 

Crowley gives him a dark look that evolves into another kiss, nothing more than teeth and heat, and when Aziraphale escapes his clutches he promises, “Later”, before he swings the door open. Aziraphale can’t help the flush that crawls up his neck at that, a ripple of anticipation and of nervousness that nearly undoes his material and immaterial parts at the seams. Blinking it away to no avail, he decides to occupy himself by looking for mice in the cupboards during the wait. In a house like this, it’s almost guaranteed. 

Later, when they’re lying in the big fluffy bed with their bare skin pleasantly tacky and only a little bit charred, Crowley says, “Angel?” 

Aziraphale’s been dozing off for around twenty minutes now. He thinks the sleepiness stems from briefly shedding his corporal form into one of light and love and euphoria, nearly blinding Crowley and cutting out the power for the entire Sussex county… Then again. It could just be one of those pesky human endorphins after an orgasm. Twenty minutes is how long it must’ve taken for Crowley to figure out how to say words again. “Mm. Yes?” 

“I have to ask,” he says carefully. “Why London?” 

“Hm?” Aziraphale makes an effort to wake up properly. He cards through Crowley’s mussed-up hair, feels the crunch of the product and decidedly says nothing about it. “What do you mean, dear?” 

“Well,” he starts, long fingers scratching through the sparse hair on Aziraphale’s chest. “We’ve established that you spent millenia hiding from the Almighty–”

“Really, Crowley,” Aziraphale complains, “Think of it more like… vacationing.”

“–In places She can’t find you,” he finishes, unperturbed. “Which, y’know. Is impossible, which just proves my running theory that you’re the favorite child amongst the angels–”

“I most certainly–”

“Hush, love, let me get to it.” He notices that he just called Aziraphale an endearment (well, a different endearment), and grimaces like he’s eaten something sour, though his ears begin to pink. Aziraphale can’t stop himself from pressing a kiss to his head. “Uck. Anyway, what I don’t understand is why did you decide on London, after everything? It was–and I’m including the Vatican in this–perhaps the most religious place you could possibly decide to live. It’s practically the pearly gates.”

Aziraphale is quiet for a moment. “To be honest, my dear,” he says, “it’s because you asked me to.” 

Crowley almost buys it, but then he frowns. “I asked you back in… Spain, was it? 7th century abouts? You only stayed in Wessex for a few years, and then pipped off again to, I dunno. Antarctica, maybe. Try again.” 

“Ah, yes,” Aziraphale says, and despite everything they’ve been through (including the last forty-five minutes), he feels nervous. Because the truth is, he’d been thinking of moving to London for years before he finally ‘bit the bullet’, as they say; Mexico was a sort of a last hurrah, in retrospect. Wanted to see what that blasted Columbus was on about. Discovered that, like Egypt, it was depicted much more differently from religious figures than what it actually was. The tamales were lovely, though. “Why I moved to London…” He says slowly.

Now it’s Crowley’s turn to jab his fingers into Aziraphale’s (much softer) side. “Stop stalling,” he warns. “You can’t tell me that it was the smell that attracted you to London.”

Aziraphale wrinkles his nose. Before plumbing, when people would just toss their… excrement out of the window. A terrible, terrible time to live in the city, if you ask him. “You have to promise that you won’t take this the wrong way,” says Aziraphale eventually.

“Off to a great start so far,” says Crowley. 

“Oh, quiet.” Aziraphale takes a great big breath, like he’s preparing to jump from a giant cliff. Bad analogy, as he has wings, but. He’s terrible with heights. “I wasn’t hiding from the sacred,” he begins. “It’s–I was bathing in it. The places I traveled to, they were a bastion of divinity, of love, of the Almighty not as I’m expected to love Her but in the way that I do.” He rubs his hands up and down Crowley’s side, slotting his fingers lightly into the notches and divots of his ribcage. “You said I was escaping, hiding, running away, and I need you to know that perhaps I was, but. It was never from Her, and it was never from you.

“I don’t… care for London. That is to say, I love the people of the city, I love its quirks, its thousands of restaurants, even the pigeons. But it’s not where I would prefer to live. I think there’s only one single thing in the city that made me want to stay, and he’s not there any more, he’s in a bed in Sussex looking…” Aziraphale softens. “Absolutely bewitching.”

Crowley’s looking at him with an expression that tips just this side of devotion, eyes ardent and even slightly damp. “How could I possibly take that the wrong way?” 

“Because,” Aziraphale continues slowly, like Crowley is a particularly slow lower-level angel, “I’m saying that I decided to move to London not because it was holy, but because you are.”

The expression drops immediately. “I–” He spits. “How–I’m the pinnacle of unholiness.”

“Of course.” 

“You–How could you even say that? Next time I might–I might explode.” 

Fondness unfurls from Aziraphale like his wings did, just earlier, and he wonders if he’ll ever be able to figure out how to contain it, now that it’s out in the open. He thinks back to what Crowley had been saying earlier, which is particularly difficult to remember, but he’s able to get to it all the same. 

“The bookshop is just a place, Crowley,” he assures him, settling further into the bed and knocking their heads together comfortably. “Places are temporary. At some point or another, they fall. Or they’re gutted, repainted, refurnished into some semblance of a new place. They change. It’s as you said, my dear. It was never about the bookshop, or the flat above it.” 

Crowley’s eyebrows draw together, a tight line folding between them. “Then what was it about? What was all of it about?” 

Aziraphale tilts his head, smiling at him in a way that could make Crowley set off the outdated smoke alarm, if he doesn’t learn to reel it back in. 

Crowley swallows, but doesn’t seem entirely satisfied. “I thought the bookshop–I saw it up in flames, angel. It’s practically your sanctuary that was destroyed and then–brought back different. Nearly entirely new. You don’t even change your outfit, how could–? I thought the redecorating was just your terrible way of coping.”

“It was, a bit, wasn’t it?” Aziraphale muses tiredly, contentedly. “I don’t think words can really sum up my emotions about all of this. I don’t think they’re meant to.”

“It was your sanctuary,” Crowley repeats absently, as if musing aloud. “You should be–inconsolable, maybe. Right now.”

“Do you want me to be?” 

“Pff. Of course not, I’m just,” he waves a hand lazily about the room around them, bare except for the bed and his boxes of clothing. His blasted throne. “I think my brain’s all wobbly still. Caught up on divinity, sanctuaries, and–and Antarctica.” 

“You keep saying that,” says Aziraphale. “ Sanctuary. I don’t think it means the same thing to me as it does to you.”

Crowley tilts his head back to Aziraphale. “What’s it supposed to mean, then?” 

Aziraphale can’t stop himself from rolling Crowley over onto his back, peppering kisses on his face until he manages his lips. “A sanctuary isn’t the place , my lovely boy,” he sighs into the juncture between them. “It’s never the place.”

And Crowley can be content with an answer like that. He makes a small noise into Aziraphale’s mouth, presses his knobby hands into whatever skin he can reach, and pushes and pulls like he’s trying to fossilize Aziraphale into the concave of his chest, join their bodies in an all-encompassing, immaterial way that ensures they can never be split again. Missing freckles and all.