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Tick.
Aziraphale reviewed all the lessons Crowley’d given him in the technique, reached deeper than he ever had before, and as the clock stopped, stepped aside. Crowley nearly lost his balance, but Aziraphale reached out for him, and they whirled on the common axis of their hands till they had switched places. “Will you focus? This is not the time for this fight, we’ll have to have it later, when everything is safe.”
“Everything will never be safe! If you wait for that we’ll never - wait. Wait.” Crowley looked around the shop, through the front windows, where Soho had stopped in mid-stride and Metatron waited, coffee in hand. A look of glee suffused his features. “Angel. Angel! You stopped time! You did it! I knew you could do it!”
“I didn’t have a choice, did I? He’s watching, and you’re not listening!”
And just like that, they were fighting again. “Oh, you’ve got that one backwards! I’m the one trying to put everything on the line and you’re the one saying Hold that thought -“
Oh, that was the outside of enough! “Really? Putting everything on the line? You? When were you going to tell me you were living in our - your - the car?” He tried to dam the words up, redirect them back on track, but all his dams were breaking, this was too much to deal with, he’d never been any good at at at at any of it and everything was too much and too fast - “I was the one touching you every chance I got! I was the one saying us, we, our, our car, our bookshop, us, together, you were the one not allowing any of it, you were the one throwing the difference in my face every time you spoke to me, and and and you wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let us be Us, you haven’t been happy! But horrible as that is, right now it doesn’t matter! Metatron, the offer is, something’s happening, we have to go back to Heaven or how are we going to know how to how to how to -?”
He choked, hiccuping on tears. Had any of that even been intelligible? He felt as if his whole body was turning to sludge, all his eyes weeping in every plane of existence, but Crowley had him wrapped up now, in arms and in wings, and was rocking him, but it wasn’t soothing, not when every sinew wrapping him quivered with tension. “Shh, shhh, shhh, angel -“
“Stop calling me that!” Aziraphale screamed and threw him off, feeling the terrible divine glow, still half awake from being called on to blow up the halo, building inside him. “It’s! Not! My! Fault! You’re the one who wouldn’t drag me down! I jumped out of Heaven! I possessed a human! I forgave you! I walked into Hell and I walked out again and I’ve tried and tried and tried not to be gratuitously good and why isn’t it enough? Why isn’t anything I do ever enough? I get it, all right, I should have Fallen and you shouldn’t have, but I can’t be grateful for it anymore and I never asked for it and I I I don’t understand why you have to keep harping on it, you’re the one who said Our Side first so why can’t you let go of a completely arbitrary difference?”
“Aziraphale! What are you talking about?!” The sunglasses were gone again, the burning beautiful furious eyes right up in his face, and Crowley shook him.
Aziraphale let him, all his strength focused on not letting time start up again or the divine light burst out or his corporation shred itself under the strain. “We haven’t got time for this,” he sobbed, “I can’t hold everything for long, but I haven’t called you demon or foul fiend or anything but Crowley, not once, and you never say my name, just angel angel angel like a constant slap in the face -“
“That’s not - I - tbmsdjklf -“ Crowley snapped the fingers of his left hand, snagging a bottle of single malt out of the cellar while holding Aziraphale up with his right. “Here. Take a good long pull, and let me have some of the weight of the timestop - there we go - we’re all right -“
“No we’re not! We’re a mess!” Crowley holding half of the time stop was a tremendous relief, though, giving him room to shove the radiance right back down where it belonged.
“All right, so we’re a mess. But we’re both a mess together. There. One more swallow? Good. I thought you liked being called angel.”
The alcohol suppressed the radiance, focusing the body on existing. “Why would I like it?”
“Because - well - c’mon! It’s a, wotsit, an endearment. Something, y’know, you call your your your partner or whatever.”
Aziraphale whisked tears from his cheeks and other damp places with a handy wad of feathers (he really needed to preen on top of everything else). “It’s a job title. A stupid name for a stupid side. Just as meaningless and arbitrary as demon. We had to remind each other of our roles for thousands of years, so we wouldn’t slip up, so no one would realize - but we don’t have those roles anymore. We quit. Or I thought we had. But no, you had to keep - on -”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything?”
“What does it matter now?” Aziraphale sent the bottle back to the cellar, properly resealed, feeling the burn along nerves that firmed up to feel it.“We don’t have time for this fight. I’ve been trying to tell you. I don’t know what’s going on, but something’s up in Heaven or Metatron wouldn’t want us there.”
“I’ve got news for you, he doesn’t want me at all.” Crowley’s face was closing up again, but at least the sunglasses hadn’t reappeared. “That was in no way a good faith offer.”
“Of course it’s not! But I’ve got I’ve got habits I could feel them reasserting themselves I can’t go up alone!”
“You can’t go up at all!”
“I have to, or how am I going to find out what’s going on and protect the humans from it?”
“I don't know, but if you go up there, as soon as you find out what’s going on and show the least bit of disapproval they’ll wipe your memories like they did Gabriel.”
“What? Beelzebub took Gabriel's -“
“Oh, crap, right, I never had a chance to tell you what happened when Muriel and I went poking through the files -“
“When you what?”
“Long story. When archangels voted on Armageddon Mark Two Gabriel voted Naw. Because he didn’t want to fight Beelz, apparently. The rest of the committee condemned him to demotion and memory loss, but he and Beelz were prepared for that, which is where the fly came in, but he went and lost it because Gabriel’s not bright and Jim was a total idiot.”
Aziraphale swallowed down a number of questions in the course of taking a long deep breath and steeling himself. This would all have to be gone into in depth at some point, but for now, if Crowley’d already gathered the necessary intel, then maybe - “Did you get any details of the how or the when?”
“Nope, they didn’t discuss that in the bit of the files we accessed, and Saraqael was not forthcoming.”
Oh, bother. “It gives us a place to start, anyway. And you know, it really isn’t out of the question that we could make some positive change in Heaven - once your Fall is undone -“
“They won’t undo my Fall because I won’t let them!” Crowley’s eyes flared up again, and his feathers bristled. “I told you! I’m not that angel anymore!”
“And you think I am?” Aziraphale retorted. “Nobody’s the same after six millennia! You’ll still be you, just like you were still you after you Fell -“
“No I wasn’t!”
“Yes you were! You keep saying you weren’t but I looked, when I recognized you, when I kept running into you, I tried to see how the demon was different from the starmaker, kept telling myself you must be different, but you weren’t! Except that you’d been thrown away and taken up a a a new aesthetic and bore a perfectly reasonable grudge against those who sentenced you unjustly. I know you, dear, and you are the same person you always were. I should have known that, when you recognized me -”
“I didn’t!”
“You must have! On the wall. You wouldn’t have slithered up to a complete stranger that way, if you didn’t remember -“
“I - don’t know why I slithered up to you,” admitted Crowley. “I knew it was stupid, but - I needed to talk to somebody. Something about - I dunno, looking at you was like a bell ringing and I - And we were sort of under truce anyway. Between engagements. No actual war on. How did I know you? Or you know me? Or - what were we? Before?”
Aziraphale felt a little sick as that long-held assumption dissolved, taking with it one of the few secure places his mind had. “We weren’t, there was no chance for us to be Us. It was the one time, not long before everything went bad. I was passing by and you called me over so you could crank up a nebula. I told you about Earth and the time limit and it upset you.” And the starmaker had hardly looked at him. “I suppose, well, after all, I have never been a, a memorable person. Anybody might forget me and your attention was on your work. But you - you were the most - I was stunned - so happy, and then so indignant when I told you how short the time would be, and - Crowley, I know you didn’t deserve to Fall. I tried and tried and tried to tell myself you did, but when I looked at you all I saw - there’s never been any difference." Please, please, please, admit it, this of all things has to be true! "So I knew all those stories about demons being broken and remade, they were only stories -“ Crowley was shaking his head and Aziraphale’s stomach was sinking, but at least he had a stomach to sink, he wasn’t disintegrating under the stress of all the forces acting on him anymore. “And then I disobeyed, directly, working with you to save Job’s children, and I deserved to Fall but you had mercy on me -“
Crowley’s face writhed. “Nina’s right, we really don’t talk enough. And you’re right, Metatron will notice this time stop sooner or later - he’s looking straight at it, so we still can’t talk, but you’ll just have to trust me - I was broken, and I was remade, and that’s how I became me. The idea of you Falling is absurd and obscene but if I get made into an angel again, that’s just as absurd and obscene and also impractical because we couldn’t trust me to be me still.”
Aziraphale wanted to fall apart again, but he couldn’t allow that. Not when the situation was that much more desperate than he’d realized. “Then I I I I’ll have to go alone.”
“No!”
“Yes! And I know, I know I’ll probably make a muck of things -“
“No, you won’t! Because you mustn’t! I swore to you, when we switched places, I swore to you, you’d never have to go back there to all their stupid abusive crap and you don’t! I won’t let you!”
Aziraphale made himself stand straighter, adjusted his waistcoat. “You can’t stop me. No. Crowley. This isn’t about Us. Us being Us is important, but not more important than - we made a commitment. To the World. To Humanity. To the only place it is actually possible for Us to be Us. Without the World there can be no Us, and there is nothing I won’t do for it. Do you understand me? I would do anything for you, except abandon the World, and I will do anything for the World, including abandoning Us. If I have to.” He tried to stop there, but the whimper got out past his lips anyhow, and he wanted to kick himself, because he could see Crowley getting a brilliant, terrible idea as soon as he made the sound.
“You don’t have to,” said Crowley, taking his hand and raising it between them, heart-high. “Listen. It’s very simple. I go to Heaven. You stay here.”
Aziraphale huffed in exasperation. “They won’t let you in without me.”
“Not if they know it.” Crowley grinned, one of his mad accelerator-to-the-floor grins, and suddenly Aziraphale was looking into his own eyes, shining with that glorious devilish light. “My memory may be spotty, but I remember enough to do some damage.”
Oh. Well, that was different. Aziraphale closed the last of his extra eyes and opened serpentine ones. “Then let’s go up and make some trouble. Together.”
Crowley shook Aziraphale’s head. “Oh, no, an- sweetheart.” Aziraphale’s heart did not have time to melt. “Somebody needs to stay here. Look after our bookshop, and our car, and our neighbors, and keep an eye on Hell. Where they seem to have an ongoing desertion problem, which is only going to get worse without Beelzebub at the helm, and somebody’s going to do something stupid any day now, whether it’s a rogue demon feeling his oats or someone from the Dark Council trying to get back into control.”
“But I don’t know how -“
“I should be able to talk to you through the radio in the car. We can advise each other. Don’t go giving people lifts. Where’s our glasses?” He reached into the air and plucked them out, plopping them onto the nose Aziraphale was using.
“I can’t let you go in alone!”
“You can’t stop me, and you can’t come with me, or I will give the show away,” said Crowley, with an absolutely infuriating grin. “Because I’d do almost anything for the world but it can go hang if I can’t keep you safe and if you go to Heaven you’re not safe."
"And you think I will be here? With rogue demons feeling their oats?"
"Oh, you can manage a few demons! Before this is over you’ll see that I’m right and you’ll do the dance, you’ll see.” He released his grip on time.
Aziraphale staggered under the return of the strain. “Anthony J Crowley, stop this at once! You do not get to make decisions like this for both of us!”
“This time, I do,” said Crowley, as Aziraphale lost his grip and the momentum of Crowley’s body had built up before the time stop struck him from behind driving him forward -
Tock.
-30-