Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

PART THREE: LAMENTATIONS

For you have forgotten the God of your salvation

And have not remembered the rock of your refuge.

Therefore you plant delightful plants

And set them with vine slips of a strange god.

In the day that you plant it you carefully fence it in,

And in the morning you bring your seed to blossom;

But the harvest will be a heap

In a day of sickliness and incurable pain.

 Isaiah 17:10-11

Crowley had memorised the varying textures and imperfections scrawled across the dingy old ceiling above his bed. Stared at them for so long their afterimage burned, searing and lingering, whenever he closed his stinging eyes.

He knew where hastily thrown-on paint covered the worst of the shabbily patched and crumbling plaster, shielding it from view until someone looked too closely and the damage would become more obvious than ever. Learned by heart the coordinates of countless broken bits dressed up by lies that couldn’t stand the test of time.

Just like him.

There were parts of Crowley he’d been deluded into believing he could change, that might heal. He’d finally tricked himself into thinking he wasn’t entirely shattered or broken beyond repair. But this last year with Aziraphale turned out to have been nothing more than a coat of paint. A thin, shoddy layer hiding the fact that not only was Crowley broken— he was ruined.

The remnants of him had been held together by cheap pigment meant to conceal shortcomings, and that had worked for a while. It always worked until something caught your eye— a scuff in the finish, maybe the hairline of a crack— and suddenly all of the blemishes, all the deformities rose to the surface, glaring and ugly and irreparable, until they were all you could see.

And all it had taken to see the truth about himself was one look from Lucius Morningstar. He’d immediately found the cracks and peeled back the chipping paint to expose the rot beneath till it was all Crowley could see, too. His faults, his flaws. His defects.

He had every single one of those memorised as well.

And his only consolation was that at least now, he’d no longer infect Aziraphale with his failings.

♰

The night before he left, perched on the bedroom windowsill and nestled against the frigid panes of glass, toes going numb from a chill he’d not felt at all, Crowley had looked to the stars. He sought them out just like he’d done when he was young, before they’d been twisted into a fucked up refuge from a supernova that always burned him anyway and could never protect him from being devoured by a black hole.

But since first stargazing with Aziraphale outside of the church last November, Crowley had fallen back in love with the night sky. He’d once again found joy and wonder and comfort within its twinkling velvet, and so he’d searched for that starlit solace that last night in Aziraphale’s home. Scanned the swaths of blueish violet for any constellation of guidance, for any glimmer of hope— but he’d found nothing.

He couldn’t see them at all.

His stars were gone.

And Crowley had known that by the next night, he’d be gone, too.

The ghostly murmurs of his past had kept him company as he’d stared out into the night. Low, silken whispers reassuring him that it was the right thing to do, leaving Aziraphale. A softly soothing coo, persuasion at its gentlest, that to once again accept he was nothing was for the benefit of everyone, and though it may have been too late for Crowley— it was and would always be too late for him, he knew, had known for so long even if he’d forgotten for a little while— it didn’t have to be too late for Aziraphale.

Oddly enough, Crowley hadn’t cried. He’d been crying so much over those last few days that his eyes were constantly tender, they’d been puffy and hurt even in the dim airglow of the clouded sky, but he hadn’t cried as he stared into the dark he knew was coming for him.

It was sort of like stepping into the cool, perfectly still blackness of a lake too murky to see through to the bottom. Resignation swallowed Crowley up like inky waters, and he’d gone without a fight, knowing that he deserved whatever they might be hiding.

By the time Aziraphale had come to stand next to him by the window, his chin slotting warmly onto the dip of his shoulder as loving hands cradled the numbing angles of his body, Crowley was already drowning.

Just like he’d known he would.

And when he’d told Aziraphale that he loved him the next morning, Crowley had meant it with all of his inadequate heart, with every fragment of his splintered self.

It was because of that love that he left later that morning.

The tears had come again with a cruel and exacting vengeance when Crowley tried to write the words that left more ugly, purpling marks on his already battered mind with every mark of the pen. Resignation took a step back as utter fucking agony assaulted him with all its viciousness, and he’d stood, bent over Aziraphale’s desk, and sobbed until the first piece of paper he’d dug out from a drawer was soaked. He’d needed another, he’d destroyed it so thoroughly, and it was too fucking apt of a metaphor for Crowley to handle. There in his hands he held a tiny piece of evidence that he truly did wreck everything he touched, anything he came in contact with. Drenched it with his bullshit till it crumbled.

With trembling fingers he’d set out a fresh sheet of paper, sniffling so fiercely his swollen, stuffy nose had hurt with it. He attempted to write what would be his last goodbye to the man he loved and who had— for a little while anyway— made Crowley feel like there was something good about him, that there was something good inside him. Like he was something.

But it had been a lie, it had all been a farce, and when Crowley finally finished writing, the side of his hand he couldn’t even feel smudged with ink, he’d carefully folded the tear stained, messy note and placed it on the bed he’d made after getting up, their— no, not anymore. Aziraphale’s bed.

He’d laid the rosary (after tearfully and selfishly kissing each bead goodbye, memorising their smooth texture against his lips) on top of the paper, gathered all of his things— his clothes, shoes, the other paraphernalia he’d brought from his flat— and walked out of the house.

Once he’d locked the front door, Crowley stared down at the old key in his hand, unsure if he could bring himself to part with it.

It was a simple but pretty thing, a proper old skeleton key that worked for most of the doors in Aziraphale’s home, the priest had informed him when he’d given it to Crowley last year so that he could come and go as he pleased. Crowley didn’t know if it was made of steel or iron, but it had a good weight to it, whatever it was.

He was already missing its presence, whatever it might be wrought from, mourning the shape of its lines pressing into his thigh from within his pocket.

He’d then pressed the oval grip of the key to his mouth, closing his eyes as he let it rest there for a few moments, the tears still falling. Another icon of Aziraphale he would never hold in his hand again, another holy relic Crowley had no right to kiss or touch, let alone keep.

Pushing it through the ornate brass letterbox that closed with a clang had felt like locking the door to this season of his life, like he’d thrown away the key so that he couldn’t tempt himself with frantically shoving it back into the lock in the future.

Crowley had then carelessly shoved all his shit into the boot of his shit car, but instead of getting in, had found himself heading towards the back of Aziraphale’s house, his feet refusing to listen to reason.

He’d shuffled through the gardens he’d been tending for months into a verdant splendor that were browning and waning until he’d spotted it through a blur of tears: the Christmas tree he and Aziraphale had planted while it was still quite cold.

One of the priest’s first and most meaningful gifts to him, that had made Crowley feel so understood and so seen, so held.

It had planted a seed in Crowley’s mind that chilly December day, a seed that had cautiously sprouted into the idea that perhaps it might be okay if he never fully healed. That maybe there were people in the world who could love a broken thing even if it would always be a shadow of its former, best self.

The fir was lovely and healthy, thriving in the soil despite the heat of the past summer and benefitting from Crowley’s meticulous pruning when needed.

He’d reached a shaky hand out, the very tips of his fingers grazing the feathery ends of a branch as he’d swallowed down a fresh flood of sobs.

“I’m sorry,” he’d whispered thickly, tasting salt on his tongue as he’d turned and walked away. The death of that hope— the hope that Crowley was worth loving and that he was maybe something instead of nothing— spreading bitter over his tastebuds as it withered into ash.

The burnt, chalky aftertaste of that death, that ending, seeped into every corner of his mouth as he drove.

♰

That had been two weeks ago.

Two weeks of solitude— or isolation, more like— back in his flat and effectively shutting out the rest of the world. Two weeks of stillness in Crowley’s chest where the flock of heartbirds he’d so poorly protected had either gone utterly quiet, suffocated into silence by the noxious reappearance of their long evaded poacher, or had flown far away, abandoning the caved in cage of Crowley’s ribs in search of a safety he no longer possessed.

And though he missed them terribly, though he longed for the melody of their birdsong and silken fluttering of downy feathers, Crowley knew they were better off, too.

His newly lonely days quickly took on a repetitive, soul sucking pattern of waking and sleeping, the latter eluding him until he eventually succumbed to exhaustion that left him queasy and sore at all hours of the early morning. He avoided leaving the flat as much as he could and abused various delivery apps for the sake of that aggravating need to eat despite his complete lack of an appetite. Being back in this space also resurrected Crowley’s previously constant worry about his finances even though he was alright for now, thanks to Aziraphale and his generosity—

Aziraphale.

Mostly, Crowley thought about Aziraphale. He thought about them.

Aziraphale had only called once— just after 2 am on the second night. Crowley had let it ring, staring at the flash of his mobile and shaking so badly his bed frame had creaked with the force of it, and watched the call as it went to voicemail.

The priest had left none.

And Crowley had been assaulted by a freshly torn-open wave of agony.

It made sense that he was so easy to let go of, and Crowley couldn’t fault Aziraphale for that even if it hurt more than almost anything in the world. After all, he’d begged him in his note to let him go, and Aziraphale had never, ever denied Crowley a request, not once. He had always respected his wishes to the letter, so Crowley wasn’t surprised that Aziraphale was listening to him, and it was fucked up of him to partly wish otherwise, just another example of how fucking selfish Crowley was when it came to Aziraphale. That call could’ve been accidental, even; it meant nothing.

Which was fitting.

Crowley knew Aziraphale wouldn’t come knocking, knew he wouldn’t crowd him. Knew he’d let him fly to where he couldn’t follow and just fucking prayed with all that was left of him that Aziraphale would find the strength to leave the church and live a life where he could be free: free to be himself, free to heal. Free to love whoever he wanted and who would love him the way he deserved to be loved.

He spent hours rewinding the months and pressing play on each encounter stretching out over the last year and a half, obsessively recalling every moment his fatigued brain could parse out from the waking nightmares of his failure. Looking for evidence of his manipulation of Aziraphale, searching for any questionable moment. Cringing at how he threw himself at a haunted man of God as soon as he’d gotten the chance. Curling up into a shivering, nauseous ball of self hatred whenever he came across a memory where yes— Crowley had acted in a way that was self-serving and perfectly impossible for a charitable man to ignore; didn’t matter if it was unconscious or not.

He stared at his mobile for what felt like hours throughout day and night, fighting with the incessant urge to call Aziraphale and ultimately pushing it away when he realised he had no more to say. Pathetically getting off to memories he had no business having and then wallowing in tear-streaked guilt as soon as his orgasm ended and the come on his sheets and stomach cooled to a tacky mess.

Crowley would then cry himself into an uneasy sleep post spectacularly sad wank as his body ached from the absence of that warm, solid sun cradling him from behind, an ache that was joined by fear whenever he started to drift off into dreams of black holes and terrible heights and galaxies that burned.

He didn’t know how long he could keep doing it all. Didn’t know when, or if, things might change, might get a bit easier; he sort of doubted they ever would, which was so disgustingly self pitying and melodramatic it made him hate himself all the more, but he really couldn’t help but think that way. It was the most excruciating thing Crowley had ever done, leaving his priest, and he was beyond fucked up here, in the after.

Still— in his head, it was the best thing. The only right thing. And it was that knowledge that kept him some semblance of going, he supposed.

Crowley was trying to stick with it. Tried to focus on the fact that there was a reason he was alone while also trying to ignore the alluring call of rectifying that loneliness in any other way.

But even though he was physically alone, there was another voice that joined the relentless whirring of Crowley’s anxious thoughts, its intonation that much clearer now that he’d been refreshed on its intricacies so recently.

Crowley’s inner voice, the one that had been a pale imitation of Lucius more often than not for years, had been quiet for months, and he’d expected it to return with a vengeance as soon as he left the haven of Aziraphale’s arms— but it had, apparently, been forced into submission by the chattering memories of that day in the Bentley when Crowley’s facade was found out and decimated.

Lucius’ words, down to their exact intonation and pitch, had wormed their way inside his head where they’d been silkily whispering on a constant loop for days and days and days, and Crowley would be lying if he insisted he hadn’t been brooding over every single thing Lucius had said in the Bentley almost as much as he’d been thinking of Aziraphale.

He replayed it over and over again till it was a traumatising script Crowley now knew better than his own name: accusations that were horrifyingly true, Lucius’ cruelly cutting barbs and the moments where something reminiscent of fondness had eked through. That odd and fleeting shadow of regret in evergreen eyes that Crowley likely imagined, or that the sickening, pitiful and still well trained part of him so badly wanted to see.

And he thought about the very last bit, too. Thought about the carnivorous words that had burrowed and now itched everywhere that Crowley couldn’t scratch. That were spreading through his veins and eating him alive:

“— even broken things still have their uses.”

Fuck, Crowley ached to be of use.

Through the fog of his depression, he ached for that as much as he ached for everything else, or maybe even more: to be held by arms that were fulfilled by holding, to be made to forget about it all. To be fucked even if he couldn’t feel it. To not think and to be grounded by the guiding hand of a dominant energy he’d robbed himself of, but above all, to be of use.

Even his deep seated, screeching desire to be good had been shoved aside and silenced by the need to just be used.

And it was getting to the point, Crowley feared, where he was caring less and less and less where it came from. He was an addict that had been cut off from their supply, and even though he himself had done the separating, Crowley was getting fucking desperate for something, for anything else that might give him even the slightest of highs, for anyone who could be a fix even if they would get him hooked on something that might fuck him up worse than ever before.

Fuck, he needed to stop thinking.

He needed something other than what he’d been trapped in for days on end, that cycle of languishing, fixating, decaying and thinking, thinking, thinking. Always fucking thinking of how he fucked everything up and how he was fucked up and Aziraphale, Aziraphale, Aziraphale. Thinking about how he’d fucked things up for him as well, how the priest was likely hurting terribly still, if he’d not yet realised the truth.

He’d always thought the best of Crowley, always had done right from the very start like the angel he was— and how did Crowley repay him? By leaving him a fucking note, a note that was barely legible and probably fucking incoherent as well; Crowley couldn’t really even remember what he’d managed to scribble down through the tide of his tears. He could’ve done the decent thing and at least, could have at least tried to say goodbye face to face. Could’ve tried to explain it again in a way that would help Aziraphale understand, that wouldn’t end with Aziraphale insisting that Crowley had done nothing wrong like he’d done in the bathroom the first time.

He could have tried harder. He could have done more. Crowley could have made more of a fucking effort for the only person— the only person since his dad— who ever made an effort for him, but instead he turned his back on Aziraphale and ran.

But was that much of a surprise? Crowley had said it before, and he proved it time and time again: he was a coward. He knew that. He knew himself more than maybe he’d ever really admitted before now—

—but Lucius had always known him. Had always seen Crowley for what he was, and even after so much time apart, he still knew him, and, Crowley thought with a stomach heaving lurch, probably better than Aziraphale ever had. Lucius knew what defective and splintering flaws lurked beneath Crowley’s spineless surface, and yes, it made his skin crawl, to be so known by him, it made him so nauseous he couldn’t stomach anything substantial for days, but it also made him ache, ache, ache.

All he ever did now was ache.

♰

Nearly three weeks after he’d left the relationship where Crowley could no longer claim sanctuary, he hit a breaking point. Reached a hard limit he’d not known he had until he could not stand to lay on his lumpy mattress anymore, couldn’t go through it all again. His body and mind frantically safewording even though Crowley didn’t know how to make it all stop.

He swung his legs over and sat on the edge of his bedframe, calves trembling and twitching, shaking. Aching knees atrophying from the lack of doing what they were meant to do. The back of his skull pounding painfully in time with his quickening heartrate.

Through the prickling panic of needing to do something, Crowley briefly considered whether or not he wanted to tackle the enormous task of procuring more alcohol, of which he’d already consumed extraordinary amounts of these last few days, but ultimately decided against it. If irresponsible quantities of liquor on a mostly empty stomach hadn’t yet proved a reliable mechanism of dulling his thoughts, Crowley doubted anything would be different now.

Instead, he grabbed and stared at his (dying) mobile, its brightness turned all the way down for the sake of his sensitive eyes. Scrolled through the last texts he’d shared with Aziraphale for the umpteenth time before settling on the snapshot of the bench in St James’s.

Fuck, had it really only been three weeks ago, when he’d walked through the park?

And what followed— was that really all it had taken for his life to fall apart? Three days of trying and failing to forget the truth Lucius had unearthed within three minutes was all it took to destroy the only real happiness Crowley had found within the last decade.

Happiness that had all started on a nearly identical bench just about a year ago.

He’d been plagued by a jagged, close to impassable mountain range of emotions since that day, but now— now anger took a step forward for maybe the first time since that awful confrontation in Aziraphale’s bathroom, and the pulsing at the nape of Crowley’s neck mounted into a deafening roar.

Crushing points of searing pain cut through the too-fast, too-loud rush of blood in his head, and Crowley glanced down to see that both hands were digging into the flesh of each thigh, his mobile no longer in his palm. Each fingertip and thumb bored into the muscles to the point where he needed to grit his teeth, but at least his knees were no longer shaking.

There was something motivating about it, the driving fury. Fuming at himself and Lucius and for a brief, unfair moment towards Aziraphale made it impossible to sit any longer. The slicing repulsion towards his cowardly weakness forced Crowley’s feet to walk away from the pathetic nest of his failures, made him put space between himself and where he’d spent days crying and coming and obsessing and wallowing.

Crowley couldn’t take one more fucking second of it.

He donned the closest warmish jumper he could find followed by his sunglasses, the bruises left behind by his wrathful hands smarting but welcome catalysts. He bent with a wince, creaky back cracking, to tug on the boots closest to him and left the building, yanked outside by some unknown force that had Crowley gulping down a biting wind that really did call for a heavier sort of coat; Aziraphale would likely fret to the point of his heart giving out at his less than adequate outerwear, let alone his walking alone this time of night.

He choked down a sob at the automatic thought he no longer (or ever) had any right to. Shook off the chill of the air that slipped through the stretched fibers and kept walking.

Of course it was far from the first time that Crowley found himself aimlessly wandering the streets of London in the middle of the night, but it had been quite awhile, not since the days of walking to meet whoever wanted him for a night or an hour or two, probably. Still, the rippling sheen of dark pavement reflecting streetlamp halos was a trail that Crowley recognised even if he had no plans for where he was headed.

With every step, Crowley waited for the unbearable, irate itch crawling in his skin to let up at least a little. Surely something had to give eventually, right? But as time passed in a shuttered blur all around him, the hum of the city dialing down and the last of the loitering taxis beginning to thin out, he didn’t feel better. The fresh air his lungs had craved was seizing up in his throat with every breath, too cold to be much more than a nuisance, but Crowley kept going anyway, stubbornly refusing to turn back, unable to face the bed he’d made where he knew he would find no rest. Pulled inexplicably forward as the minutes turned into hours of some vague mission he couldn’t divine.

He hadn’t known where he was going until he was already there, rounding the corner of an immaculately kept street lined with townhouses both modern and historic. He was completely unsure as to whether it had been an unconscious decision or merely a repressed one as he glanced up and to the left where he knew that, at least in years past, there had been a camera that made knocking superfluous.

Crowley stared through his sunglasses at what looked like the glint of a lens, and his hands, buried in the pockets of his jeans, were clenched, tingling with that awful prickling as he stood there, waiting—

—and then the door opened, pulled back on its hinges to reveal Dr Lucius Morningstar standing there, still fully dressed in slacks and a turtleneck despite the hour of 2am-ish, taking up its frame and making the whole structure of the doorway and Crowley himself feel comically small.

Neither said a word as the silence between them stretched on and on for what felt like hours. In reality, it was likely less than a minute or two, but then again, time had never made much sense around Lucius.

The expression on his face as he peered down at Crowley was strange, nearly alien. Unreadable but fixed, rapt, and with signs of what might’ve been surprise written there, but Crowley wasn’t sure; he didn’t know what surprise even looked like on those features. Lucius was never surprised or so much as caught off guard, but his eyes were a bit wider than usual, his brow raised enough that Crowley noticed. Within seconds, though, it all disappeared, and his features rearranged into something more outwardly neutral, into his characteristic calm yet piercing affect that Crowley knew well.

But that flash of something, whatever it had been, made him feel slightly braver, just enough so that he could find his voice. Bright enough to illuminate the path to his rage.

“Y’happy now, yeah?” Crowley had intended to hiss, but his hoarse words trembled despite his best efforts, wavered like his body was shivering in the unseasonably frigid brisk of the mid November air and that unblinking gaze. “Y’got what you wanted out of your whole fucked up ambush— I left the only person who ever loved me in spite of what a fuckin’ waste of space I am, and now I’ve got nothing. Fitting, right?”

Now Crowley did laugh, ripping his glasses from his face in a burst of rare and reckless nerve, bitterly chuckling as he glared, uninhibited, up into the forest of Lucius’ eyes. Spurred on by his unprecedented silence and lack of rebuttal, that temporary courage flitting about in Crowley’s veins like it was frantically scrambling to make a difference before it evaporated.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing— tha’s all I am, thanks to you. ‘M not afraid to say it anymore,” the almost hysterical fury was back in full force, bubbling up into his throat like acid and biting at the back of his tongue as his teeth started to chatter. “I know ‘s t-true, an’ he— he’s b-better off. I know that. I wasn’t—”

His voice cracked as he looked to the left, breaking eye contact, unable to look at Lucius any longer as he already began to regret removing his glasses. Fighting to swallow the rest of that too-big, soul cleaving statement: I wasn’t worth it— wasn’t worth leaving a prison he hated. Pretty telling, that.

He blinked through welling tears, shivering as cold crept up his arms and legs and slithered down his spine. It had started misting at some point on his walk, but Crowley hadn’t known how fucking freezing he was till just now, the black jumper he’d worn damp and hanging heavy on his frame. The rain started hitting his back as he stood half-under the balcony that was right above Lucius’ door, picking up speed and intensity, and Crowley’s body began to thrum with renewed panic as its core temperature dropped. Remembering the times it had been left alone to grow cold in the sweat slicked aftermath of euphoria by the man now standing only centimeters away.

He inhaled as deeply as he could, desperately trying to keep hold of himself, the raw air catching in his throat as he licked his lips and batted at the tears falling hot and itchy over his cheeks. He hated that he was crying in front of Lucius again, hated that his feet had brought him here in some fucked up notion of— Crowley didn’t even know.

Maybe it was an unconscious attempt at reclaiming something he already knew he’d never get back. Possibly a pretty decent shot at self sabotage, self destruction— punishing himself— or some misguided idea of exposure therapy, like confronting Lucius might strip away his power and the stranglehold he had on Crowley and his psyche.

Or perhaps Crowley was simply giving in to the inevitable; maybe he was accepting that he truly was a broken thing that would only ever be useful in whatever way Lucius deemed best, and that might be better than rotting away in his bed with nothing but his yearning for Aziraphale keeping his shattered heart company.

And through his inner jumbled justifications and droning anxiety edged with terror, Crowley realised that Lucius, for once in all the years of knowing him, was still quiet.

He hadn’t said anything, not one thing since he’d opened the door, and Crowley was unnerved, was thrown off by the silence coming from a man whose voice was his greatest weapon, but Lucius continued staring down at him without so much as a word.

Unease settled in the spaces between Crowley’s weary, too-heavy bones, and his shuddering breath came faster and faster, little puffs of white swirling into the cold before disappearing. He hadn’t realised how tense he was all over until now, so much so his limbs were aching with it. The inner push and pull between his fury and fear and the haemorrhaging, sucking chest wound of his heartbreak was as dizzying as the frightening newness of this— and as he swayed there on his feet, peripherals beginning to blur and shimmer with the threat of bleeding out, it pissed Crowley off all the more.

“Nothing to say? Christ, first time that’s ever happened,” he snapped, his voice strengthening ever so slightly even as his eyes continued leaking; he was so used to crying he barely noticed it anymore. “‘s it possible I’ve shocked you? Done something you hadn’t predicted, Doctor Morningstar? Better add that to your fucking file on me—”

Crowley trapped his trembling lower lip between his teeth as his words cut off, feeling like he was seconds away from disintegrating right outside of this fucking door. He was so fucking furious and so fucking tired, so tired of everything, so tired of thinking about everything and anything and Aziraphale and how Crowley fucked everything up and maybe it was for the best, really— maybe it truly was all for the best that he was here with someone who really knew what he was—

His waning bravado vanished as soon as Lucius moved for the first time that night, shifting in the door frame and uncrossing his arms.

Crowley startled at it, it was so sudden despite its subtlety, and Lucius actually froze, going perfectly still again. That was confusing, and Crowley’s brow furrowed as he tried to wrap his strung out mind around what it could mean.

It was as if Lucius thought Crowley might bolt at any second and didn’t want to frighten him off, like he was just as uncertain of what the Hell was happening as was Crowley, and wouldn’t that be something? For Lucius, of all people, to not know what to do, to question his own self?

That couldn’t be the case, Crowley thought wildly as his molars clacked together, the blustery wind at his back almost icy now, whipping faster and cutting through his wet jumper. Some vague part of him, through the building overwhelm, thought the air smelled like snow—

—he was moving again.

Crowley could hear his heartbeat ricocheting within his sore, fuzzy head again, could hear the frantically whooshing current of his roaring blood as Lucius inched out of the doorframe and a hand, massive but gentle, reached up to softly cup his cheek, its huge thumb tracing the jut of his cheekbone, the papery thin skin below Crowley’s eye that was bruised from crying for days and eventually, the tears clinging to his lower lashline.

The noise that trickled out from between Crowley’s teeth as Lucius cradled his face with an impossible tenderness, was as breathless as the rest of him.

It rattled the dilapidated halls of his memory, it shook him to his marrow, this version of Lucius, this stranger he didn’t know or maybe did know at some point years ago, bits and pieces offered to Crowley at the start that he was too blissed out and fucked up to remember they existed at all once they’d vanished without a trace.

It was beyond disorienting, but Crowley— pathetic, pitiful, weak— couldn’t stop his eyes from closing as he leaned into the touch, the desperation for anything other than the agonizing cycle he’d been trapped in for weeks taking over whatever rational thought he had left. Instead of cracking from trying to contain the misery of a vacant ribcage, it felt good to have those ribs graze against something warm and solid as Lucius stepped closer— even if that something was partially responsible for the destruction of the aviary in his heart.

He braced himself for it: for the onslaught, for the surely imminent crash that would have him struggling to breathe while begging for more. Crowley’s own body froze in place while he waited for whatever would happen next, as his mind started to slowly, mercifully go blank and the verdant edges of his vision began to faintly glimmer with a brilliantly gilded shadow.

Crowley braced for it, but it didn't come.

His pounding heart pulsed with that darkly reverberating gold, and he was still crying as Lucius continued to brush tears from his cheeks, his thumb gathering the wetness as delicately as if it were something unthinkably precious to him, and it was unthinkable, it was fucking unthinkable that any part of Crowley was precious to anybody, but especially to Lucius fucking Morningstar.

The reverence was eerily familiar yet complete foreign, coming from this source in place of his angel, and it felt unreal, it was disconcerting and it was wrong—

— it was a terrifying, incomprehensible relief.

“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” Lucius’ murmur, blooming low over his temple and blanketing his inked serpent with warmth, was so soothing, so sure it made Crowley’s nervous system forget to panic at his dangerously close proximity to the scar of his own making, “you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.”

Crowley found himself involuntarily dipping his chin in reply, like even the most unconscious segments of himself couldn’t help but agree, like his body had long known what his mind was sluggishly catching up to. His legs followed suit and began to buckle, knees twitching out of control as a powerful forearm curled around his waist and kept him from crumpling to the ground.

Through the drumming racket of his own heart and the other now pressed up against his ear, deep and resonant, Crowley listened for the distress calls of anyone who might be left in its chambers, for any feathered stragglers that hadn’t left him crying out in warning, but there was nothing. No canaries left to scream. No one left to suffocate with his deficiencies. A chest as empty as he was.

The dizziness swooned as he shallowly inhaled rich, woodsy plumes of smoke, inviting smouldering birch and pine into his lungs now that Crowley knew it wouldn’t choke anyone who mattered. Breathing in the Earthiness of skin-warmed leather and the sweetness of spring’s last daffodil asphyxiated by ash falling from a nearby grove of burning cypress until he was filled with it, teeth no longer chattering.

He was back where he didn’t have to do anything except be whatever Lucius wanted, didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than what he really was. And if that meant fully and unreservedly accepting that Crowley truly was nothing at all, well— in that moment, it was better than the alternative.

It was better, Crowley hazily mused to himself as fingers threaded into his hair, carefully detangling its damp and frizzing waves, than thinking himself to death on how he’d preyed on someone filled with light and love and pain.

It was better than clumsily slapping coat after coat of paint all over himself in a pointless attempt to hide the broken, damaged thing that he was.

And it was better to feel like he was getting exactly what he deserved.

One of the last things Crowley remembered thinking before he was thoroughly overcome with the vastness of that all encompassing embrace and enveloped in an inebriating darkness that was unexpectedly comforting, was why shouldn’t he accept that Lucius might be right?

Stepping past that last threshold of the doorway felt like Crowley was wading into that same starless sky he’d seen from Aziraphale’s window, but now its darkness was a familiar one, a welcoming void lined with midnight calling him home. Strong, steady arms slowly snaking around Crowley’s trembling torso in a fortified structure that seemed willing to house the nothingness that was him. Drawing him closer until he completely collapsed into the event horizon of Lucius’ chest, breaking apart against his clavicle and dissolving into fractured sobs that were muffled by his density.

Crowley’s own hands scrambled around Lucius’ back to grapple into the softness of his turtleneck, the only lifeline he could find in the velvety dark as he was pulled closer and closer. Reeled in until he was entirely flush with and by the immense, inescapable gravity of a temptation Crowley couldn’t withstand, but what did it matter, anyway?

He was already in Hell.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale clung to Seb’s ring after the accident.

He would stare for hours at its engraved details whenever he wasn't spinning it obsessively round his littlest finger, doing all he could to absorb whatever whisper of Seb that might’ve been left behind in curves of well-worn gold. Utterly terrified by the notion that if there truly were such things as spirits, Aziraphale might somehow let even the tiniest residual essence of the lover he’d lost slip even further through his fingers.

It became a sort of conduit to him, the ring; a tiny bridge that might have still connected the two of them in some amorphous sense of the word.

Even that link was nothing but a helpless hope, the comfortably snug band of gold encircling Aziraphale’s skin was a selfish consolation, and one he found he needed. As Seb’s scent began to fade from his favourite shirts and the cosy stillness of their once-shared closet, the ring remained a constant. And long after the cocktail of heather and orange blossom and thyme vanished entirely from all the places imbued with its sweetness, Aziraphale had a corporeal comfort to hold onto, something to squeeze until his palm was imprinted with a miniature halo that would last for hours.

He developed tiny tics revolving around the ring as a result, repetitive self-soothing gestures that occasionally kept the worst of the Hell at bay as weeks turned into years that stretched past a decade. Habits that stayed and settled into neatly packaged neuroses interlaced with numbness even after the so-called worst had passed. A coping mechanism at best and obsession at worst, but a lifeline nonetheless.

That particular facet of Aziraphale’s fidgeting had calmed since last winter, when his fingers had begun to refocus their attentions onto that which they were moved to touch for the pleasure of doing so, not the compulsion. Coppery waves reflecting gold and scarlet in the glow of the fire or beams of the sun, the journey between freckles that, when connected, formed cinnamon stippled constellations that outshone all the stars in the night sky. Slopes and hills of a body in repose or on the brink of rapture, long lines of finely boned fingers that always returned the affection they received and never failed to lace with his own. The tender curve of a smile against the reverent pad of his thumb.

But in the absence of his lamb, Aziraphale’s mind and his fingers needed something solid again. Another pocket devotional, a remnant of his newly lost saint. He needed the ritual of it, needed the closeness, and he found it in the gifted rosary that Crowley had left behind.

It was a life preserver around his hand, an anchor fashioned from mother of pearl beads Aziraphale carefully revered one by one. Twisting each perfect sphere at least once and sometimes twice as he made his way down the chain to the centerpiece and then the crucifix where he’d begin the process all over again. Whispering prayers over the course of the day, agonising over the state of Crowley’s heart and wherever his dove might possibly be (please, please let him be in the light, in warm, sun drenched skies; please let him be anywhere but the cold and dark). Aziraphale would plead to an unknown intercessor on behalf of Crowley, to any advocate of any higher powers that might exist or even the universe itself, Mary’s name absent from his tongue as his lips grew heavy and clumsy from overuse.

From then on, in the pockets of his vestments or whatever clerical attire, pearl mingled with the onyx of Aziraphale’s other rosary, tangling together there until he would carefully extricate cream from black when the time came to leave the church for the evening.

He cradled the beads in his palm as he drove home, denying himself the company of the radio to soften the silence that screamed itself deafening with his unworthiness. The rosary was an indulgence he didn’t deserve, but like Seb’s ring, Aziraphale didn’t have the strength to part with it. Other comforts, however, lent themselves to a once familiar practice in abstinence, and the priest fell back into self denial like he fell back into self blame: with strict and near-perfect adherence.

Clutching the pearly garland of Crowley’s rosy spirit close throughout the night was how Aziraphale passed the time between dusk and dawn, his fist an unworthy reliquary for the sacred relic he refused to relinquish.

Morning would come with the grey fog of exhaustion, the weighty, acidic queasiness of grief, and the dread of facing another day.

But Aziraphale had done this before, and there was a chilling familiarity to how easily he fell back into it, the patterns of perfunctory survival. After crying himself through the first night since discovering Crowley had gone, Aziraphale, puffy-eyed and sore all over to the point of misery, had rolled out of bed, shuffled into his bathroom, and slipped into autopilot as he’d done thousands of mornings over the course of eleven years.

The circumstances might be different this time, but Aziraphale was still a seasoned expert in compartmentalising pain until it could be shoved into the wings as his pantomime went on and on. He was an automaton of his own making, mechanically directing his movements and actions in a way that didn’t require thinking or feeling, and his priestly obligations, already in place from the start in the aftermath of this tragedy, offered a routine the most shattered parts of Aziraphale reached for with tremulous hands.

It didn’t mean he could escape from it all; it merely meant that Aziraphale, patron saint of being left behind due to his own devices, could pretend to live through it until he couldn’t. He couldn’t escape it— the paradoxical presence of Anthony Jeremiah Crowley despite his absence— and he didn’t want to.

His life itself had been lovingly wrapped in Crowley’s gardens, gardens Aziraphale couldn’t resist wandering through both around the church and his home nearly every day despite drastically dropping temperatures, another indulgence bought and paid for with numbing extremities and a stiffness in his muscles that never seemed to ease. He soaked up the last traces of Crowley in the withering hues of browning foliage and the wilted, crumbling petals of dead roses, from the once verdant tangle of vines he’d woven through the trellis of Aziraphale’s own spine. They, too, had begun to droop and dry and crack once they’d lost their lifesource of golden light and beautiful hands that could raise the dead.

The Christmas tree they'd planted last year was the only spot of truly vibrant green behind the house, and Aziraphale had to forcibly stop himself from making it another one of his obsessions, instead restricting himself to just barely touching its fragrant needles so that he could carry its scent with him after walking away.

Even aside from gardens, there were few if any places Aziraphale could go where Crowley wasn’t somehow intertwined with the very structure of its being. He lingered in the mortar joining the stones of the church, he whispered within walls he’d once adorned in greenery and proceeded to hallow with his love. He’d made that prison so bearable Aziraphale had been happy to remain its captive long after he could have walked free.

His house was much the same, the joy of Crowley’s laugh still reverberating through the halls as the weeks dragged on, the divinity of his pleasure threaded through the fibres of cotton bedclothes with peppery sweet clove. Aziraphale berated himself for having ever washed his pillowcases, mourning the loss of the tears that over the course of the year had baptised their fabric. That had cleansed away the sins of Aziraphale’s past to make way for a love that healed and held.

And whenever Aziraphale would lay down in a futile attempt at sleep or simply because he could no longer remain upright, his body drained even if it wouldn’t cooperate when it came sleep cycles, he swore it was the sound of Crowley’s heartbeat echoing deep in his ears instead of his own, thudding as heavy and gorgeous as if he were right there, his chest Aziraphale’s pillow.

Crowley was everywhere, but he was never more far away.

And the additional dichotomy of Crowley still being here— still on this Earth, still alive but just away— was nothing short of torture.

When Aziraphale lost Seb, he’d lost him entirely— but this? This was a despair that had teeth of a distinctly sinister edge. Instead of entirely sinking into his heart right from the start, they were merely there, glinting in the background and poised to strike. Their enamel was set with the terrifying prospect of just how far Crowley might’ve flown away, every possibility worse than the last lurking between their gaps and infecting Aziraphale with the disease of what if’s.

And yes, Aziraphale had been plagued by what if’s before, too— what if he’d woken up even a little sooner that night, what if Seb had been in pain before he passed, what if he’d not known how completely Aziraphale loved him and what if he would blame Aziraphale for all eternity for letting him down— but the stakes of these particular what if’s were a matter of life, not death, and somehow just as high.

What if Crowley was struggling so badly he wasn’t able to function, what if he wasn’t eating or drinking as he should be (the latter less of a what if and more of a nauseating surety). What if he was fighting through insomnia just as Aziraphale was, what if he was cold in that tiny little flat that barely held any heat?

And what if, Aziraphale wondered more than anything else, his mind constantly looping back to this question that would give him no rest for almost the entirety of November: what if Crowley had gone back to what— or whom— he thought he deserved?

What if he’d done the unthinkable and returned to the Hell he’d been trying to escape for seven years?

What if, what if, what if?

Aziraphale tried to convince himself it wasn’t possible whenever he would land onto this turned-over, worn-through what if. That no matter how badly Crowley felt, no matter how— no matter how dark things might get, he wouldn’t go back to Morningstar. He wouldn’t. There was no chance, Aziraphale would decide for perhaps a solid ten seconds or half a minute at most. Crowley may be in a terrible place of mind, but surely nothing could be so bad to drive him back into Lucius’ arms.

After a year of teetering along the line of honesty, the priest had nearly forgotten his expertise in the pursuit of lying to himself. He’d been forced to remember when Crowley had tearfully asked Aziraphale why he’d not left the priesthood, and now, in regards to the possibility of his dove’s whereabouts, his aptitude at such a skill was as glaring as ever until it wasn’t— because there was a chance.

There was more than a chance.

And the mounting probability of that being the answer as to where Crowley had gone, and to where he was now, well.

That was arguably more debilitating than his dove's absence itself.

♰

In a predictable show of his weakness, during the course of the second night after Crowley had gone, Aziraphale had succumbed to that debilitation. It was another spectacle of the fragility that defined him in his lowest moments; he'd not made it even a full 36 hours before the last traces of his restraint eroded away, and he gave in. 

Gave into the relentless worry that had begun to border on hysterical fear and his need to know, his need to rule out the worst.

He’d felt similarly to how he’d done nearly a year ago, when Aziraphale hadn’t yet been aware of who had hurt Crowley and how, but had been rabid for answers. It was a familiar anxiety, but amplified, desperation that had been multiplied by however many kilometers it was to the rings of Saturn and all the way back to Earth. Aziraphale had been living with the knowledge of what Crowley had gone through for months now, and although he was honored to have been trusted to carry it, it made it no less devastating, and it had only served to fuel his panic in the hours following Crowley’s departure.

If he could just— if he could just know that Crowley had not gone back, then Aziraphale would never cross the boundary of contacting him ever again. He would push on, would be able to breathe enough so that he could stay alive and maybe find the way to move forward.

With his mobile in one hand and the rosary in the other, Aziraphale had dialed Crowley just as he'd been fighting not to do since the moment he’d left.

He’d been crouched on the edge of the sofa cushion, leg bouncing unevenly as the tinny ring echoed in his ear once, twice, three times. Rehearsing what he might say but knowing his throat would seize with the thousands of words that would never be enough the second he heard that voice.

Blinking away the tears that came so easily in the earliest hours of the morning as the last ring came to a cold, abrupt end, Aziraphale did hear Crowley’s voice, but only in the form of the drawling voicemail greeting he’d finally recorded last spring after the priest had good-naturedly badgered him into doing so:

“This is Anthony Crowley. You know what to do— do it with style.”

He’d not been able to end the call until the last beep indicating it was the time to leave a message echoed harsh and shrill in his ear.

Clutching his mobile to his shivery chest along with the pearls, Aziraphale had silently berated himself for not having the bloody courage to say anything at all and for violating Crowley’s request for nothing. He’d curled up on the sofa and stared unseeing into the dying embers of the fire until there was nothing but darkness and a creeping, frosty chill that settled into the teartracks on his cheeks.

Aziraphale hadn’t gone against Crowley’s wishes again, not in life. But in scattered stretches of the night, when his exhaustion would win out over his insomnia, sometimes he did sleep long enough to dream. And between fighting his way though clouds of choking, noxious smoke and the terror of an unseen menace in search of any sliver of light at all, the priest never stopped calling.

♰

Those early days of November crawled on despite the upheaval of Aziraphale’s world, trudging ahead with the same frigid determination of the cold snap they brought along with their dwindling daylight.

When the first glitter of heavy frost came early and caught the silvery, tentative morning sun as it crested over the drying grass behind the church, Aziraphale couldn’t keep his thoughts from wandering back in time. He couldn’t help but recall the late autumn of the previous year and how it had been so unseasonably warm he and Crowley were able to continue their chats on the bench by the duck pond which, the priest could see if he squinted with exhausted eyes, was beginning to freeze around its edges.

Winter had been kind enough then to delay its entrance until Crowley had been safely tucked within Aziraphale’s arms, when it could be chased with whispered heat and kisses and legs entwining beneath a down duvet warmed by the melding of their bodies.

Now the season had come rather far ahead of schedule, and Aziraphale had never hated the bitter cold so much. The only thing worse than the biting temperatures was remembering when their drop had brought the two of them that much closer together.

Aziraphale was starting to forget what it was like to be warm all the way down to his toes.

♰

More than four weeks passed before he was able to sit on their bench.

This delay was due to a myriad of reasons, a combination of more self denial and no small fear of existing in their spot on his own among them— most especially so close to the date of what he referred to in his head as The Beginning.

But once mass had ended and the church had been empty save for him and the phantom flutters of a shadowy dove flitting through the rafters, Aziraphale gingerly made his way down the slippery little hill against the wind.

Alone save for memories and a pocket filled with pearls, the cold of the wooden planks started seeping through his trousers as soon as Aziraphale settled himself on the seat.

As badly as he ached to lay a hand where Crowley used to perch in a usually more haphazard manner than not, Aziraphale held firm, resisting the temptation as he blinked through the sting of his eyes and stared at the frosting-over surface of the pond. Shivers wracked his body every so often when the wool of his coat and scarf proved no match for the glacial sorrow and numbing wrongness of the pond without Crowley.

It was now the 28th of November. A year and four days earlier had marked one full revolution of the Earth since his offer to aid Crowley financially, and Aziraphale had not been able to look out the windows of the church or even turn towards the direction of the bench on the 24th, knowing it would level him to have so much as one glimpse of it on the day.

Tomorrow it would be a year since they first stargazed together, a year since Crowley had broken down in the street but had so bravely trusted the priest to hold him through his panic and pain.

It marked a whole year of Aziraphale knowing what it was to have Crowley’s body against his, 365 days enriched with the wondrous knowledge that his own body could once again be right and could feel good when it was with Crowley’s. Twelve months of redefining gravitational force, of learning what it was like to be magnetically linked with someone after eleven years of never touching another person for more than a few seconds of a handshake or awkward hug.

He’d lived nearly an entire, lifegiving year blessed with the shepherding of his lamb and the honor of sheltering him in arms that Crowley made into something strong and useful and capable.

An entire year, and not nearly long enough.

Aziraphale shivered again, no longer able to make out the frosty details of the pond through the welling blur of his tears. He choked down ragged sobs that fought to escape from the thickening ache of his throat, overwhelmed by the significance of this spot and this time of year, moved by how much had happened as a result of his having one fleeting instance of being anything but a coward.

If only Aziraphale had been able to draw on that courage in the months that followed.

What had occurred on this bench— this humble sanctuary built from creaky wood and chats that started out tentative but quickly bloomed into his favourite part of the day— had opened the door to what would lovingly begin to lay down the path to his freedom, day by day, brick by brick. Morning by sacred morning waking with the architect who made it all possible and skillfully designed the path so Aziraphale could easily follow its curves and bends. Who lined it with sacrament-stained blooms and stepping stones of endlessly kind reassurances so that he might be brave. Who had done the miraculous and helped quiet the raging guilt of Aziraphale’s ghost— not silenced, but nurtured and calmed, had warmly held space for— but also resurrected the long dead parts of what it was to live.

Aziraphale stifled a whimper with the hand not holding the rosary, gloves forgone in favor of being able to feel the mother of pearl on his skin and his fingers immediately beginning to tingle from the whip of the gusty chill. Patches of brittle grasses rustled around the perimeter of the pond, the broken, limp reeds rattling mournfully in the wind along with splintered bulrushes.

It was a bit of a sorry sight to be sure, all of the dying flora in need of a helping hand to prune back their stalks and stems back before winter fully clamped its icy maw around its banks. But Aziraphale couldn’t help but think it wasn’t close to half as neglected as his proverbial vineyard, its own fruitlessness having driven away the starlings and blackbirds and sparrows it had once nourished and sustained with its bounty.

He has laid waste his dwelling like a garden.¹

And it was on that bench by the empty, waning duck pond and engulfed by air trending towards frozen when it hit Aziraphale all over again a thousandfold, just how utterly and spectacularly he had destroyed everything.

He had taken the miracle of Crowley’s rosebud strewn pathways for granted. He’d greedily partaken of his healing, transformative touch, and yet he hadn’t secured its safety for either of them. Aziraphale hadn’t utilised the gifts he’d been given by Crowley, but had rebuffed them, had avoided the sublime path that had been laid out for him by his saint, that path that had led Aziraphale out of his labyrinth of self hatred and shame and right up to its exit, when he’d dug his heels into the ground and refused to go any further. And as a result, he’d not only become lost once more, but Crowley had been lost to him as well.

His lack of fervor and nonexistent proactivity had allowed for the sickly, cyanotoxic spread of his complacency. It had paved the way for the poison of another and arguably deadliest sin to crawl its way into estuaries of his veins where it had bloomed and thrived without his conscious knowledge until just now.

The conditions had been perfect for the growth of Sloth, the still, stagnant waters of himself made rich by the nutrients of Crowley’s love the ideal environment for fast-growing algae to feed and multiply and thicken and eventually suffocate.

Aziraphale’s stubbornly fearful reluctance to do the hard work that would lead to his living a truly authentic life had done nothing but advance the indolence in him, had made his dreams go hypoxic until they were entirely starved of oxygen and hardly a thought in his idle mind.

Aziraphale had done what was easy instead of what was right.

He’d not maintained the walls of his heart so that he could securely and safely house his darling dove within its chambers.

He had allowed his roof to cave in.²

And though he was undoubtedly mired in the sins that had been declared to be deadly by mere men millennia ago, Aziraphale knew in his soul he had committed the gravest one of them all, the only one that really, truly mattered to his heretical, on-the-verge-of-apostastic heart anymore in a slew of spineless choices:

He had failed his darling Crowley. Aziraphale had failed him as dreadfully as he’d failed his sweet Seb. As inevitable as the night that would always come to steal away the sun, over and over and over again, Aziraphale always failed the ones who needed him the most, including himself.

The gravity of this epiphany might have brought Aziraphale to his knees if he’d come to it even one day earlier.

He would have slipped from the bench and crumbled to the dirt, to hard ground where he would stay until the sun had set and the stars would begin to peek through an inky veil he’d deny himself the beauty of gazing upon.

But Aziraphale didn’t fall to his knees.

Instead he remained on the bench, feet flat against the Earth that had been blessed by the worn soles of Crowley’s boots, because amidst this wretchedness and lingering there with the comprehension of his shortcomings, was something else. Something that made it so he could come to this very spot when he'd not been able to do so until today. 

The faintest wisp of an ephemeral glow, the tinder of its origin gathered the night before. When Aziraphale had come to yet another revelation given to him by his memory, not God, whilst lying on the bed that no longer carried the warm, spicy-sweetness of his clove-drenched cedar.

A light.

Weakly flickering-in-and-out of the corner of his mind’s eye ever since. So tenuous he’d dared not think it would survive, and so much brighter than Aziraphale thought he would find amongst the ruins of his gardens and the wreckage of his nightmares.

The rosary in his pocket was no longer alone, not in spirit—

— it had been joined by the gleaming, ghostly afterimage of the tiny golden cross pin Crowley had first anointed with the rapture of his mouth a year earlier.

Last night, Aziraphale had realised— after leaping to his feet in midnight fit of tearing through both of his overflowing desks, digging in kitchen drawers and bedside tables and trinket dishes and searching between the cushions of the sofa and bed pillows and even scouring both cars until he collapsed in a sweaty, tachycardic heap in front of the hearth, heart pounding, fingers quaking— that the pin was not there.

It was nowhere to be found.

And in a house that had been stripped of its homely warmth by way of Crowley both removing evidence of himself and deliberately leaving behind any symbol of their relationship, Aziraphale felt the absence of the cross, arguably one of their first and longest established love tokens, in his bones.

He didn’t know why it had taken him nearly a month to think of it, the cross that had, since last December, not strayed far from where Aziraphale had pinned it that morning after their first night together: on the vintage leather jacket that Crowley was so fond of.

Its gold shine had been a near constant amongst a sea of black from then on.

Sometimes it would roam, either switching lapels or migrating to its interior layers to be pinned to the stretch of satiny lining that rested just above Crowley’s heart or secured safe and snug in one of the pockets— but regardless of its jaunts around the circuit of the jacket, the little cross never wandered far from its new home, not so much as for a day to Aziraphale’s knowledge.

He’d twisted on the floor till he was on his knees, then, rather close to where Crowley had loved to kneel for the priest, kneecaps partially eclipsing where the pile of the rug had been faintly compressed by the weight of adoring shins. His back, spasming and aching from the effort of hunting high and low for the better part of an hour, had been the only thing that kept Aziraphale from completely dissolving into a heap of fragile, trembling hope.

Hope that perhaps a miniscule part of Aziraphale was still with Crowley. Hope that he had either purposefully or unconsciously held on to a part of the priest, a part of them, a real conduit. Hope that clawed its way from the derelict bower of his chest. That survived the night and sprouted wings that weathered the windstorm of his failures.

Hope that perhaps it was not too late.

It had been too late for Seb, but maybe it wasn’t too late for Crowley. If he'd kept the pin— an unmistakable reminder of their devotion, a symbol of Crowley accepting Aziraphale's love, a tiny door left deliberately open— it might not be too late for Aziraphale to try and do something, this time. It may not be too late to exercise his agency and fly, and not just for Crowley’s sake, not just for their sake, but for his own, too.

He would understand if Crowley didn’t want to be with him because of Aziraphale’s endless mistakes and his taking Crowley for granted; in time, he could accept that. But what he would never accept was Crowley’s insistence that he had preyed on Aziraphale and lured him into his arms, and the idea that he might go on living with that poisonous falsehood, that twisted narrative in his head that he was unworthy of Aziraphale's love.

He needed Crowley to know that there was nothing that could possibly be further from the truth. Needed to make him understand that he’d never manipulated Aziraphale, but that he had loved and explored and discovered the priest in a way that transformed him. That he’d tenderly touched places inside him that Aziraphale had kept hidden not only from the world, but also from himself, and that those places— the locked-away, wasted things— had been the wounds most in need of tending. Crowley’s cultivating expeditions into barren parts long abandoned by life had awakened their desire to thrive, and now that Aziraphale could feel them and their pain, he would endeavour to no longer ignore them.

He needed to tell Crowley that not one fraction of his love had been in vain even if Aziraphale’s actions had told an entirely different story.

And if one of his worst fears had come to pass, then Aziraphale, more than anything, needed Crowley to know that whatever he thought he deserved, he didn’t deserve that. He deserved everything, and Aziraphale couldn’t stand to leave him alone in the dark where he was nothing, not without at least telling him one last time that Crowley was everything, and he was everything to him.

Aziraphale had failed time and time and time again.

But maybe, he thought as he started frantically digging through his pockets for his mobile, reluctantly relinquishing his hold on the rosary so that he could fumble his way over the display, maybe there was a real chance he could mitigate some of the very worst of his failures. Maybe it wasn’t too late to course correct on the wings of the hope he’d found in a missing pin shaped like salvation.

Nina answered during the first ring, and Aziraphale had never been so grateful for promptness.

“Nina,” he croaked, voice hoarse from disuse and the cold, “Nina, I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but— do you have a moment?”

♰

The sun had set entirely by the time Aziraphale’s mobile rang 40 paralysing minutes later, and he could no longer feel his freezing feet.

“Yes?” he whispered, eyes closing as he awaited the news, dread tugging at his heart in an anchor of queasy anticipation.

A beat, and then a barely-audible sigh.

“He’s not there, Aziraphale,” Nina sounded as weary as she did tense. “Looks like he’s not been for some time— nothing in the fridge, post piling up, that sort of thing. And his phone is off or dead; I keep trying.”

The air dragged its way out through Aziraphale’s chattering teeth in a thready huff, lungs deflating from Nina’s answer. His stomach lurched to the point where he needed to set his jaw against a threatening jolt of nausea as he told himself it could mean anything.

It could mean anything, Crowley not being there in his flat and unreachable by phone. He could be anywhere, and it didn’t have to mean he was where Aziraphale feared more than anything.

It could mean anything—

—but Aziraphale was already getting to his feet.

“I cannot thank you enough for having a look,” he murmured, wincing at the stiffness shooting up his legs and down his back as he started walking, a burning spread of pins and needles beginning to prick around his ankles and up his shins. “I— thank you, Nina. For everything.”

“Mhmm,” Nina hummed, and Aziraphale winced even harder at her next words: “Fuck, Aziraphale— I still don’t understand why you waited this long to call me.”

They’d quickly gone over it when he first called, Aziraphale explaining the confrontation between Morningstar and Crowley and how things had fallen apart so rapidly in the aftermath. He’d prepared for the brunt of expected disbelief that then transformed into indignation and even anger once Aziraphale admitted he’d only attempted to reach out to Crowley once. He’d tried to explain then, tripping over his words as he started rambling. Nina had cut him off, then, and not unkindly, but rather businesslike as she informed Aziraphale that she would go to Crowley’s flat to see if he was there.

“I know,” Aziraphale was embarrassingly breathless as he trudged up the hill, “I know it might seem entirely ridiculous, but I was so afraid of violating his boundaries in any way, and I— I do think a part of me truly believed that it was better to let him go. Better for him.”

He waited for an exasperated or even snapping reply as he finally made it to his car, but Nina was quiet for so long he pulled his mobile away from his ear to squint at the screen to see if she’d ended the call.

Just as Aziraphale opened his mouth to ask if Nina was still there, she spoke.

“You know where he might be.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Aziraphale whispered, pulling at the scarf that was suddenly too much around his neck till it hung freely round his shoulders, everything beginning to feel too warm, too tight. “I believe I do.”

“Right— I’m going over there. And if I find him, I swear to fucking God—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted softly but firmly as he hunted around in his coat pockets, fingertips still numb, “please don’t, Nina; not yet. If it should come to that, I’ll let you know, but— try to trust me, if only for one last time.”

“I know I’ve no right to ask anything more of you,” he added when Nina was silent, fingertips closing around the key to the Golf, “but—”

“Alright— just keep me updated, yeah? And let me know if I can help in any other way.”

Aziraphale nodded, wishing he could begin to express just how much she had helped him just now and knowing he couldn’t.

“Thank you; I certainly shall. And do say hello to Maggie for me, my dear.”

Nina promised that she would, and Aziraphale was about to say his farewells when she continued on.

“Please don’t give up on him, Aziraphale,” she said softly, all traces of earlier frustration replaced by a quiet but earnest conviction, “he’s worth fighting for.”

That stopped Aziraphale dead in his tracks as he opened the car door, and it took everything not to rail against the notion that Nina could ever even begin to think that Aziraphale did not believe that Crowley was worth everything.

“It was never a question of his worth, my dear,” Aziraphale eventually replied, clearing his throat of the indignation he supposed he had no proper claim to after weeks of inaction, “but rather entirely one of my own.”

He opted not to add that didn’t know the answer to that particular question in regards to himself, instead bidding her goodbye and driving off towards his first stop of the evening, one hand on the steering wheel and the other plucking at his clerical collar, pulling it from his neck and shoving it carelessly into the back of the glove compartment and out of his sight.

♰

Within minutes, Aziraphale was hurrying into Night of Cups in desperate need of something to steady himself.

He’d done a poor job of hydrating and feeding himself of late, and he wasn’t sure whether the oddly intense craving for a coffee was due to his craving the taste and caffeinating effects, or because its robust, rich scent was one he associated so strongly with Crowley, and most especially the particular blend that Tracy offered, another motif of theirs he hoped might steel his nerves and fortify his resolve—

“Where’s your young man?”

Aziraphale startled at Tracy’s whispered query as he paid, eyes darting around to see if anyone else might have heard, but they were alone. While he and Crowley had often popped in for tea or coffee together over the last year, they still made an effort not to be too obvious just in case, the café’s close proximity to the church calling for caution.

Of course Tracy had known they were together, but to her credit, hadn’t given them away, even if she was never able to resist at least a wink or two in their direction, something Crowley had always found incredibly amusing, sometimes winking back or throwing a waggling brow her way if it wasn’t at all crowded to her gleeful delight.

Aziraphale had often had the sense the two of them could cause all manner of chaos together if given the chance.

“He— he’s not—” he stammered, nearly knocking over the filled-to-the-top cup while scrambling for an answer, “he wasn’t my—”

But his automatic refusal dried up into ash on his tongue, and suddenly Aziraphale was far more worried about bursting into tears than keeping up the useless charade, the emotions that had perhaps been flash-frozen by his springing to action thawing somewhat as he stood still in the tranquil, overly warm café. He cleared his throat and looked away, needing a moment. Privately relieved he’d not managed the lie, wondering if the words might have actually killed him right there and then.

“Oh, lovey,” Tracy clucked her tongue sympathetically, “I know we’re not intimately acquainted—” Aziraphale couldn’t help but lightly cough at the phrasing, corner of his mouth twitching, “— but you do have a friend here, should you need one— and pardon me for saying so, but you very much look as if you’re in dire need.”

That did pull a quivering sort of chuckle from him, and Aziraphale smiled ruefully in spite of himself, nodding.

“Quite right; thank you, Tracy. And I do apologise for falling to bits on your poor counter,” Aziraphale scrubbed a hand down over his face from hairline to chin, the tip of his nose still chilled, “it’s been— well, it’s just been quite a difficult time recently, is all.

“He’s gone,” he finally admitted in a hushed murmur despite there being no one else inside the little café, still more than half afraid to speak it into existence to anyone else. “He’s gone, and I—”

Raising the coffee, Aziraphale inhaled its wonderfully familiar aroma before taking too-large of a blistering sip, grimacing at his mistake. How the Hell Crowley managed to down endless, freshly brewed cups of the stuff without batting an eye had never ceased to amaze and slightly concern him at the same time.

“I should have done more about it,” Aziraphale admitted after swallowing with some difficulty, fingers warmed by the cup in their grip and the bloom of pleasantly bitter, toasted nuttiness that had been missing from his home for too long. “Should’ve done quite a lot more for quite a long time, really.”

He took another hesitant sip, this time far more careful to hopefully avoid scalding what remained of his tastebuds before setting the cup down with a weary sigh.

Tracy hummed but said nothing, and after a moment of companionable silence, reached over the counter and blanketed Aziraphale’s unoccupied, still-cool hand with her pleasantly warm one. Her nails were painted a glittery violet and she wore arguably far too many cocktail rings to be considered anything but a hazard in a coffee shop.

He braced himself for some sort of chiding lecture or scolding that might make him feel impossibly worse than he already did, but neither came as Tracy softly squeezed his fingers the way a close family member or dear friend might.

“Courage, Father,” she said simply, her smile small but heartening and kind eyes crinkling round their darkly lined edges as she looked at him with a fondness which Aziraphale wasn’t sure he’d done much of anything to deserve. He was struck by the similarity of the moment with the memory of that early morning last year when he’d rushed to this same counter and was met with the same baffling encouragement.

‘Try to be brave, Father, even if it’s terrifying— especially if it is.’

Aziraphale nodded, looking down into the rippling abyss of the coffee through the same wave of feelings that threatened to crest into a tsunami and squirming under the recently regenerated discomfort of being addressed as Father.

Though he dearly missed hearing it from his dove, he would be happy to never hear it from anyone else again, and Aziraphale decided on a whim to use this moment to test out the atrophy of his courage, to see if it was as shattered as he feared, or if anything newly unearthed inside him might be brave.

He rotated his wrist and returned the pressure of Tracy’s hand, lightly squeezing her delicate be-ringed fingers in his own as he exhaled, shallow and wobbly.

“Aziraphale,” he murmured as he met Tracy’s gaze again, tone rather cautious at first, but more determined by the syllable, the offering of his name instead of his title feeling more like a harrowing leap of faith rather than what was really a very small step in the right— not easy— direction, “my name is Aziraphale.”

Chapter Text

Years of meticulously studying the human psyche were all at once rendered useless to Lucius Morningstar as he stared down at something he had failed to foresee:

Anthony Crowley was on his doorstep.

And he wasn’t a figment of Lucius’ 2am imagination—

— not this time.

He slowly got to his feet from where he’d been lounging in the den, eyes still glued to the screen in his hand, the fire on its last ember and his scotch its last dregs.

The late hour wasn’t so in the least for a perpetual insomniac masquerading as a night owl, but as Lucius studied the slightly blurry video feed of the shivering man standing where he’d not stood for years, there was a moment when he thought he might have drifted off to sleep and was dreaming after all.

It was as good an explanation as any, but his waking life had been testing his long-held beliefs recently, and most especially in regard to the concept of fate, which looked to be tallying yet another willowy, redheaded mark in its predetermined favor.

Lucius swallowed the last of the whisky with a frown, the taste losing its palliative richness in the face of his unsettling.

He was rarely caught off guard in any real way, and that was by carefully crafted and honed design. In his adult life he’d experienced precious few instances of this phenomenon, but nearly every time he had, it had been in response to or because of Anthony, and he didn’t know if he could ever reconcile with that fact.

Lucius had known him for seven years and yet here he was, still able to shock him. Still so remarkably skilled at rattling him, at snipping through the thicket of thorns encasing his fortified core. A deceptively harmless looking shrike effortlessly hopping from barbed branch to barbed branch and poking its way deeper into the gnarled heart of him in search of weaknesses to impale— and all likely done with little or no premeditation.

It was as difficult not to be impressed by that as it was to not resent it.

Lucius stood at the top of the stairs, tapping the mahogany banister with deliberate fingertips and breathing deeply as he weighed his options. Uncomfortably ruffled and irritatingly tense. Closing his eyes so as not to be distracted by the songbird tapping at the window of his temperance.

If he was thinking clearly, Lucius would wait. He would stay where he was, would continue to watch the footage and gather as much information as he could surrounding a situation he’d not considered feasible outside of the occasional, spirit-laced nocturnal musing. He’d make a decision only once he was confident in its exactitude; he knew better than to throw himself into the ring without knowing the motivations of an unexpected opponent.

It appeared that Lucius, however, was not thinking clearly; as he descended the staircase, he was hardly thinking at all. Instead he followed without question the tugging pull that compelled his steps downward, betrayed by instinct that overcame intellect and dulled by genuine surprise for the second time in a week, to say nothing of his long ingrained pattern of throwing any and all rationality to the equivalent of rabid dogs whenever Anthony Crowley was involved.

And if there was anything truly good in him, Lucius would turn around and go back from where he came. He’d shut off his mobile and effectively blot out the tantalising light trying to sneak its way into the darkness of the hour. He would replenish his near-empty tumbler before spending the rest of his night flirting with the idea of sleep and convincing himself that this was unequivocally for the best.

But Lucius wasn’t good— he never had been. Good had been an unattainable standard dangled too high above his head ever since he could remember trying and failing to reach it. Good had never been an option, and good intentions only ever went so far.

So in the absence of good and the withering company of adjacent intents, Lucius stalled behind his closed door, feet firmly rooted to the spot as his mind sped through the endless labyrinth of scenarios and prospects and choices he couldn’t untangle into anything coherent other than the two clearest, warring whispers of don't do it; don’t open the door and open it, open it, open it.

He already knew that he shouldn’t open the door for at least a thousand reasons. The back of Lucius’ head ached with that knowledge as much as it spun with the additional truth that there was not one single thing on Earth that could keep him from opening that door, least of all himself.

Lucius hadn’t met a wolf that could resist a lamb that came to its den willingly— he wasn’t sure such a thing existed, the concept as or maybe even more mythical than dragons and chimeras and his having any penchant for goodness— especially not when the lamb in question was temptation incarnate, a cruelly bespoke, corrosive test of his otherwise iron will.

As his reckless fingers curled around the molded brass of the door handle, Lucius fought to arrange his face into something objectively neutral, keen to avoid showing any of his compromised hand. The pacing, stalking predator in him sneered with triumphant lupine delight as Lucius at last exhaled through his nose, slow and deep, and again gave in to what he never should have succumbed to in the first place— which was probably the most predictable thing of all.

He opened the door to a rush of frigid, raw night air, its icy blast rushing over his face and skittering down his spine—

—and there he was, still standing there and undeniably corporeal, perfectly aligned in Lucius’ sights and more real than any dream could hope to be.

He crossed his arms as he stepped into and slightly leaned against the door frame, unable to tear his eyes away from Anthony J Crowley, who was shivering under an oversized jumper that couldn’t offer any real warmth from the biting, misty bitterness of the November night. Lucius' jaw flexed at that, then doubly so with disdain aimed inward at both his noticing the inadequate attire and his immediate, involuntary concern.

He could also see in the curve of a dark brow that he’d not been wholly successful in hiding his own incredulity, that he’d revealed enough to inspire its pinching together as Anthony, Lucius assumed, met his eyes through the sunglasses obscuring his own.

Fuck. This was not off to a good start.

Lucius shouldn’t have acted so spontaneously; that was often when danger loomed closest, and he should know this after nearly five decades of substantiating evidence. He did know it, but there was no turning back now that he’d opened the door to welcome in his favourite risk.

And for the first time in— he couldn’t even remember how long— Lucius said nothing.

His safety had come to rely on having the first and last word, and it was one of the best strategies to both seize and keep control of a situation, but his throat wasn’t cooperating as he stared down at the lamb glaring up at the wolf, his fury and sorrow and desperation as obvious as his trembling.

Anthony was, as Lucius had assumed based on what little he could make out through the mobile camera, clearly not well. He was a shadow of the vision Lucius had seen a few weeks ago (Lucius felt the sting of an extremely specific twinge of remorse at this, one he imagined might compare to the likes of witnessing the rubble of a bomb you yourself had previously set to blow— which wasn’t that far off from the truth, he supposed).

No longer wreathed in ivory and pearl but draped in black, in gloom, Anthony’s thin cheeks were ashen with that particular complexion born of drinking too much and eating too little. Flickering eyes shielded behind smoked glass made it even harder to assess the circumstances, both hands were jammed into his jean pockets and his spine was rounded into an abysmal posture. All of him was wet, Lucius noticed right away, not just the jumper; his river of usually fiery hair hung lank and darkened around his face and down over his shaking shoulders, weighed down by the rain that Anthony seemed altogether unaware of.

A wounded lamb dragging itself to the wolf’s den, but the opposite of meek as it opened its soft mouth to bare harmless milk teeth that made Lucius’ canines throb.

“Y’happy now, yeah?” Anthony spat, words wavering but volleyed with a venomous hiss Lucius was helplessly taken with.

I think I’m happy that you’re here, or as close to happy as I can be, he thought in a sickening moment of unguarded honesty, utterly enthralled by what he was seeing, what he was feeling. Afraid to blink for fear he’d miss any of it. Afraid.

“Y’got what you wanted out of your whole fucked up ambush— I left the only person who ever loved me in spite of what a fuckin’ waste of space I am, and now I’ve got nothing. Fitting, right?”

There was scarcely a second to process the fallacies of that statement and the itchy sort of guilt attached to them before Anthony reached up with an unsteady hand (nails speckled with the remnants of some dark polish presumably picked and peeled off by nervous fingers; Lucius forced himself not to wince at the sight) and tore his glasses from his face, unveiling swollen, scarlet-rimmed candleflame eyes that squeezed Lucius’ faulty voicebox.

Fuck, those eyes. Liquid amber shot through with inclusions of pain, time capsules Lucius had filled with relics of the hours he’d stolen from Anthony’s memory as well as littered with the artifacts of his own inhumanity. Eyes that accused. Eyes that haunted. Eyes that Lucius often, over the course of the last seven years, saw when he closed his own.

The sentries of his battlements were sounding an alarm Lucius could hardly hear over the howling, locked-away yearning that screamed itself hoarse whenever it remembered it was still alive. That shrieked until its shredded vocal cords formed taciturn splinters that lingered in his throat for years and scratched whenever he swallowed.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing— tha’s all I am, thanks to you. ‘M not afraid to say it anymore,” Anthony’s eyes told a different story, their bronzed edges beginning to shine with tears that Lucius wanted to feel on his skin. The tips of his fingers prickled, jealous. “I know ‘s t-true, an’ he— he’s b-better off. I know that. I wasn’t—”

Anthony’s voice broke along with his eye contact as he looked to the left, and Lucius’ eye was drawn from his mouth to a sliver of skin peeking through the curtain of sodden, lank auburn.

Between reddish tresses sat the tiny serpent that coiled over the scar Lucius could almost make out at this angle. An embossed slash of pearl glinting under a scrawl of ebony ink.

He glanced down to where his own right hand was tucked within the crook of his bicep, eyes involuntarily focusing on his middle finger. It was bare now in contrast to then, when he’d worn the ring whose oxidised silver had come away coppery in an eruption of panicked, lost composure.

His molars ached with the effort of keeping a straight-ish face, the sting of bile rising in his esophagus as Lucius bit down the urge to flex the memory out of his fingers not helping matters.

He’d meant what he said in the Bentley, that day. It had been a remarkably misguided move, expressing his regret and admitting to Anthony that he shouldn’t have done it, but Lucius had been as struck by the sight of the scar then as he was now, so struck that for a moment, all he could feel was the nauseating, caustic guilt crackling and grinding in the joints of his hand.

‘Not my finest moment’ indeed—

“Nothing to say? Christ, first time that’s ever happened,” Anthony snapped, his voice gaining a bit more ground even as his tears began to flow in earnest and he started swaying ever so slightly on his feet (Lucius’ attention dropped there for a moment, watching in wait for his balance to tip too far). “‘s it possible I’ve shocked you? Done something you hadn’t predicted, Doctor Morningstar? Better add that to your fucking file on me—”

He caught his bottom lip between his teeth, chewing on the flesh there as his words cut off into silence and Lucius swallowed his own: I never could have predicted you.

He was fast reaching his limit of speechlessness and stillness, much too long a sitting duck, spine beginning to crawl with the need to move and the need to act. It was all too much; this was all too much. It was too much to be confronted the way he deserved. It was too much to expect himself to fight this. And it was too much to be so agitated by Anthony’s borderline-hypothermic state, he was shivering too much—

Rivulets of raindrops joining with Anthony’s tears were accelerating the rust that had begun to creep through the foundations of Lucius’ weakening walls, spreading russet and abrasive and loosening the armour of his forearms just enough that he was able to uncross them, slowly exposing his torso—

— and immediately freezing at Anthony’s reaction, at his startling so abruptly he almost lost his unstable footing as a result.

Lucius went still as a statue, determined not to do anything that might make Anthony bolt, anything that could make him walk away even if that might be the smartest thing for all parties involved. He didn’t want to risk ending whatever the Hell was going on here, and Lucius still didn’t know what was going on— he still couldn’t quite believe what might be happening, he didn't know what to make of it all.

He didn’t know what to make of the fact that he wasn’t feeling at all smug when he very much should be, in theory. Lucius had the answer now to one of the questions he’d been hypothesising for years, and it was in favour of him, of his influence, his skill and ability to control. At least part of him should be delighted at this turn of events, should be elated that he had truly left such a gloriously deep impact on the only person he’d ever wanted to be his.

But Lucius didn’t feel smug.

He didn’t even feel particularly victorious.

The only feeling Lucius could reliably identify out of the raging, raptorial tempest of emotions beating against the cage of his ribs was that he wanted.

Lucius wanted Anthony closer. He wanted him back in his arms and he wanted to keep him there. He wanted to lick every tear to better absorb the mineral he’d been deficient in for seven years. He wanted to gentle Anthony’s rattling teeth with the heat of his own mouth, wanted to transfigure his shivering from cold into trembling with need only Lucius could satisfy. Wanted the gorgeous, breathtaking pleasure that Lucius should never have in his hands again. He wanted to soothe the pain that was at least partly if not totally responsible for Anthony’s being on his doorstep, the pain that Lucius had caused. Another careless blow flung out of pathetic desperation.

He wanted who had once been his everything and whom Lucius had broken into nothing when he’d realised just how far he’d fallen and how much was at stake. Whom he’d released when he could not shake the dread of what else he might do, and the unanswered question of all he could be capable of, of how much worse he could be.

Lucius wanted precisely what he should not have, and here was another opportunity where he could make a case for himself having even a temporary capacity to be good, but Lucius reached out as he’d done in the Bentley— only this time, he reached with the intent to comfort, the desire to console.

He studied Anthony for any additional signs indicating he didn’t want Lucius to touch him, but there were none; just a stillness save for his clicking-together teeth and the billow of his hair as a gust of wind whipped between them, brisk and serrated.

Lucius inched forward from his place in the doorway, reaching until his fingertips grazed the frosty quiver of Anthony’s jaw and his palm fused with a too-pale cheek that felt small in his hand. His thumb softly traced a freckled cheekbone and even softer still the violet hued skin below Anthony’s eye, the slip of tears kissing its pad a balm Lucius hadn’t known for far too long. Within seconds, the vibrating jawline tucked in his grasp settled, Anthony’s teeth ceasing their chattering.

He would remember the breathless, shattered little sound that poured from Anthony’s parted mouth at his touch long after he’d forgotten the depth of his own failures. Lucius would remember how it drew him even closer, how it encouraged him to gather more of the tears he wanted to both keep and banish. He was mesmerised with it, the ablution of tenderly brushing away their wetness, with the nearly ritualistic fervor tingling through his fingers as his skin absorbed their saline cleanse. Indulging in a reverence he’d not known his hands were even capable of.

When the blotchy, tearslick skin of Anthony’s cheek began to lean into the cup of his palm like it wanted more of Lucius, not less, he stepped even closer, shortening the distance between them until the middle of his ribcage grazed along the quaking plane of Anthony’s sternum. Leaning in so that his chin just barely ghosted over the arch of an eyebrow, Lucius closed his eyes and savoured the nearness of him.

“Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he murmured, entirely under the spell of his own weakness and want, snake-charmed by proximity of the inked scar below his mouth that he was tempted to kiss in silent apology, “you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.”

He realised that more than a small part of him really did believe in that statement; whether it was the part of him that was fueled by voracious hunger or the scattered remains of smaller, more fractured bits that might have at one point been hopeful and gentle things, Lucius didn’t know.

And when Anthony’s forehead bent in a nod as his knees finally buckled, Lucius was ready for it, dropping an arm to wrap around his waist and holding him up from crumpling to the ground, Anthony melting into the crook of his arm like it was meant to hold him.

The warning bells installed throughout the limbic system of his brain were blaring, their ear-splitting clanging almost enough to overshadow the pounding of his heart, but Lucius refused to let go.

Instead his fingers further rebelled, slipping into damp spidersilk hair and delicately detangling knots they found along the way before coming to rest at the back of Anthony’s skull to support his slumped, heavy head. The warmth emanating from the forbidden nape of his neck made Lucius’ thumb twitch. Slim shoulders shook against the steadiness of his own as cresting waves of sobs began to crash into the shoreline of his breastbone, ragged bursts of breath plunging below his surface like diving seabirds.

This moment— this final moment of calm between two storms beginning to merge— was more than likely the last best chance Lucius had to reverse what he’d started. The last chance to turn back, the last chance to jump for an unreachable virtue with outstretched fingers. The last chance to do anything that might begin to count as some scrap of fallen-short atonement for his seven-year-ago self.

There was so much of that seven-years-ago Anthony standing there, too, when he’d been sucked nearly dry of the verve Lucius had stolen from him. A present day wraith of the thrall he’d dismissed when he could no longer ignore the damage done, come back to tempt Lucius into something resembling a decent man.

But how could anyone be decent when faced with giving up their hold on what made their always-steady heart falter— who would ever readily relinquish the nebula of his aching from his arms, starry with vulnerable and luminous need of him?

Slam the door in his face, block the haunted lanterns of his eyes from your memory, the last vestiges of Lucius’ integrity demanded, pounding on his anterior cingulate cortex with frantic insistence, subsist on this last press of his body against yours and commit it to what remains of your good intentions.

He’d opened the door, but he could close it, now. He could pull away from Anthony like he’d done countless times before when he’d needed Lucius the most. He could end this before it truly began—

—another shuddering sigh bloomed through the thin cashmere of his turtleneck, suffusing tear-steeped wool to slither along the channel of Lucius’ clavicle in a serpentine lure. Tendrils of irresistible heat unfurling from the mouth of a siren drawing both of Lucius’ arms to curl around Anthony’s torso until he was entirely enveloped in the embrace that had prepared to never hold him again.

He nearly jumped when Anthony’s limp arms shifted, only just suppressing a shiver of his own as ghostly hands fluttered over his spine, their fingers tentative at first before pressing down, molding to Lucius’ back where they did the unthinkable and grabbed at the fine knit.

Lucius realised it was likely the closest he’d ever been and ever would be to God in the sense that right then— supporting the full weight of Anthony’s body with his own, absorbing his every tearful, shivering convulsion, greedily taking in each tremble and not turning back for anything— he could no longer vehemently deny Her existence with absolute confidence.

As he shepherded Anthony through the doorway and into his home, something that until ten minutes ago had been an impossibility, it only confirmed what Lucius had very recently been made to consider: that along with fate, God truly might exist, too, and if She did, well.

She had to be some combination of ignorant or cruel, to risk blessing his arms with what Lucius had already almost irreparably broken once before.

Lucius was familiar with cruelty. It had been one of his first companions, had brought him up along with its cousins resentment and revulsion. He’d borne the brunt of its subtleties from a cutting mouth and heartless hands that forced him into fluency from the time he was very small. Cruelty lived in the blood spawned from his malignant marrow, his mother tongue gifted to him from his mother’s tongue.

He’d spent years studying other dialects in an attempt to overwrite what was engraved on the walls of his veins, but after decades of trying to forget its dialect, Lucius now knew that you never could completely unlearn your parent language.

But the pack of voices baying in the back of Lucius’ skull as he vaguely contemplated the divine and Her potential heartlessness began to fade when the head he was cradling in his palm surged up and leaned in, chapped lips seeking his own hovering a breath away as the shaky hands clawing at his back tightened and twisted—

—a faint and resigned echo of a sigh that might’ve belonged to the absent father— Lucius hadn’t been able to remember the sound of his voice for years, now— who eventually left when his latest vice of choice could no longer blunt the blade of his wife’s contempt or temper his indifference to the child she hated—

— the shockingly sharp, sneering resonance of the mother, that brilliant child psychiatrist mother whose love had a limit, whose infinitesimal patience dried up into boundless scorn the second she realised that being a parent was to forgive and nurture, not to forcibly carve one’s offspring into her idea of the perfect son—

As always, she was the last to get a word in before there was a humming lull soon filled with the dulcet tones of Anthony’s need:

All you’ve ever done is suck the light from everything good around you— even before you were born. It’s in your nature, and you will do it again, and again, and again—

“Touch me,” Anthony breathed, the plea settling as soft as falling snow into Lucius’ mouth, trembling but enduring. A tiny robin holding its bedraggled own against the first icy gales of winter. “Please—”

Don't touch me, his mother hissed from the vaults of Lucius’ memory, one final jab. A fleeting flash of her beautifully manicured hands shoving his little ones away piercing through the grasping, grappling of Anthony’s own hanging onto the back of his shirt, spreading and kneading and holding on so tightly. His lovely fingers sculpting Lucius into a lifeline instead of a downfall.

And then at last, the only voice Lucius could hear both within and outside of his mind was the one belonging to the only person who had ever truly loved and wanted him.

“Please, Lu—”

Oh, fuck.

It really was too late.

He simply would never be able to resist Anthony, not like this; not when he was arching into Lucius while begging for his touch, not when he was pulling Lucius in when others only ever pushed him away.

His brain was clotted with carnality and the longing he had no right to, and any stragglers of rational thought liquefied as Lucius’ hands answered the plea without any thought, gliding down the curve of Anthony’s back to corset his waist, pulling him flush with his body and slipping a knee through the undertow of eagerly parting thighs. This series of conscious surrenders all culminating in his chasing away the last remaining sliver of space separating tearshine lips from his own until Lucius’ mouth was brimming with Anthony and the air they breathed become one entity to be passed back and forth by the slick slide of slotting-together tongues.

Anthony opened for him like a well-oiled lock opened for its master key.

There was no hint of stiffness in his jaw or neck as his head tilted to the left to accommodate the angle and their heights, no friction or pause. Anthony’s mouth and the way it leveled Lucius hadn’t been changed by the passage of time, either; if anything, it was as much a time capsule as his eyes, holding on to so much from the past it was almost as if the years hadn’t passed at all.

It was the oasis it had always been, a velvet warmth welcoming Lucius in from the dark. A perennial summons that made him more of an animal than he already was with its wanton softness, calling for the primal things that lurked among the hypervigilant ones within him and taunting them until their bloodlust could no longer be contained. Until Lucius was so hard he had to fight not to grit his teeth against the overwhelming pressure of it and wondered if he could come just from kissing and the intermittent brush of Anthony’s thigh against his straining cock.

Perhaps they’d been tangled together in this hallway for seven years, caught in a maelstrom of timeless need as they fell further into the depths of what terrified and beguiled Lucius more than anything. Even as— or maybe especially as— Anthony dissolved into whimpering putty in his arms, he was a force, artillery that demolished the strongholds Lucius had thought to be impenetrable; maybe it wasn’t out of the question that he could stop time itself, but far more likely that Lucius had never left that stretch of months where he’d danced between the worlds of devotion and destruction.

He was understandably greedy at first, his fingers roving all over in a determined, self serving mission to have as much as he could and to give Anthony the touch he so badly needed:

— sealing to slender hips made diminutive in the span of his grip, thumbs sinking into valleys of hipbones through denim, swallowing down the whine he received in reply—

— devouring the deluge of broken, tearful gasps erupting over his watering tongue as Lucius rocked Anthony over the apex of his thigh, the slim ones bracketing its length shaking as badly as they’d been earlier out in the cold but warming fast—

— waltzing up an amphitheatre of ribs to a heaving chest that chased his palms and lightly encircling the neck that disappeared in their grasp, an effortless eclipse—

— and then slowing to an unhurried caress over Anthony’s temples and scalp, gluttony all of a sudden annihilated by sentiment and reborn a bone-crushing tenderness.

Lucius was blindsided by visceral phantoms of past pinings as he cupped Anthony’s cheeks and kissed him even deeper, trying to lick into the center of him to taste what it was that made him so damn immolating and so fucking good. The desire to sustain Anthony with his own breath, that Lucius could give him the oxygen to be taken in by his blood was another immense craving that he didn’t know what to do with, fuck Lucius had never known what to do with all of this, with all of this everything.

It made him want to crawl into Anthony’s heart to see if he could truly ever feel safe, there, and it left Lucius wondering if any part of him could protect Anthony from his own wasteland of a heart.

Even the ivory, enamel ridges beneath his tongue filled him with a strangely nostalgic, flayed-open ache for Anthony’s baby teeth and the wish that Lucius could have kept them for himself, that he could’ve resorbed them into his own chest to bind with the bones protecting his twisted heart. He wanted them more than he’d ever wanted the ones carelessly torn from his own mouth, ripped-from-the-root-blood running over the lacquer of his mother’s nails like some fucked up hematic topcoat.

(It was a bittersweet comfort to know that at least Anthony had a father who would have done all he could to make the process painless, who would have eased any and all growing pains like a parent should—)

Anthony was desperately grinding against Lucius’ thigh now, bucking and making the pretty little sounds his memory hadn’t done justice in preserving. The disquieting reverie woven by Lucius’ yearning to have and to hold was torn apart by Anthony breaking the seal of their kiss to mouth at the sensitive skin along the edge of the turtleneck’s collar, his teeth grazing hungrily over a spot that made Lucius’ toes curl.

“Make it stop,” Anthony mumbled against Lucius’ tachycardic jugular between swirls of his tongue and sucking bruises, his mouth hotter than any other part of him, the fading chill of his hands still seeping through cashmere as they roamed over his back, “please, please make it stop—”

“Make what stop,” Lucius urged, heart fluttering with what it hoped would follow, needing to hear it.

Anthony’s suckling mouth dropped away from where it had been lavishing his neck, his cinched brow slumping against Lucius’ collarbone.

“My— my head,” Anthony’s voice shattered against his chest, nose nuzzling into his sternum, its cold-reddened tip forcing a shiver through Lucius, “shut it off, I— please, jus’— just turn it off. Like— like y’ used to.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

His right hand slid down through to prowl over the nape of Anthony’s neck, the violent shiver snaking up through the length of his whipcord spine to tremble under his fingers another temptation Lucius could never resist.

He tilted Anthony’s chin up with the index and middle fingers of his other hand, gently guiding his head up and back.

“Look at me,” Lucius murmured, thumb dragging over the jut of Anthony’s bottom lip he’d sucked into a plump, shiny pout of pink. Cock flexing at swollen, puffy eyes flying open to meet his own without so much as one second of hesitance as their gold ringed pupils focused on him, glassy with tears, “good boy—”

He couldn’t withhold the praise he knew was so deserved, that had always been so deserved but that Lucius had previously needed to ration and then ultimately deny when his supply of oxytocin started to dwindle, when the shallow well he couldn’t dig any deeper began to run dry of all relevant hormones required to foster trust and bonds and love and all the other things Lucius couldn’t do. When he could no longer stop his brain from perceiving the threat that was vulnerability and the danger of being known, adrenaline and cortisol releasing in a hormonal torrent that tore him in the directions of fight, flight, fawn and freeze, his HPA axis misfiring and dysregulated more often than not for as long as he could remember.

Anthony’s whine, strung out and needy in response to the praise, could have woken Lucius from the dead. It could pull him out from the deepest darkness of himself and into another one entirely, one edged with gilded authority and the comforting safety of dominance, and it released a flash flood of those chemicals that made him feel like he had a chance— like they had a chance.

“—tell me again,” Lucius implored as his thumb traced the bony contour of a delicate upper vertebrae, his hand reacquainting itself with the neck it had been separated from for too long. “Tell me what you need me to do, little duck.”

Tell me you need me.

His largely unfamiliar need for reassurance was something Lucius elected not to analyse too closely in the moment, instead telling himself he simply needed Anthony to articulate it a second time, what he wanted— just to be sure. Lucius might be a monster, but he wasn’t that sort of monster.

“Please,” fuck, that begging— inebriating, devastating. Another danger to Lucius’ failing security measures but one he couldn’t keep from burrowing through his defenses; he never could. “Need you to turn my head off. Put— put me under. Fuck, please, Lu—”

Lucius’ fingers curled, their tips gradually sinking into lean muscle quivering beneath soft skin, his palm melding around the plinth he’d sculpted to respond to its very specific grip, to this particular clasp in this exact spot.

“I can’t take it any more, I can’t f— f-fffffuckinggg—”

The old script rewrote itself in the flame of the moment, the bloom of Anthony’s moan slurring hotter than Hellfire along his jawline as Lucius squeezed.

It was still as effective as it had been back then, back when they’d explored and settled on specific components that would help usher Anthony into that gold washed, deeply altered headspace of trancelike submission: the lithe line of the smaller body against his melting into something buttery and pliant, Lucius scruffing his kitten until he was a soft, mewling little thing in his grasp, sweetly docile and oh so yielding. His own state of mind smouldering into that distinct state of hyperawareness entwining with the narcotic cocktail of control and being needed.

And maybe this time could be different; maybe this time Lucius could be different, he thought, conveniently disregarding his gift of persuasion and how skillfully he could use it even on himself.

Maybe in one timeline out of endless, a wolf could love a lamb.

The jury was out as to whether Lucius could delude himself into thinking that meant a wolf would ever truly overcome its instinct to tear into a willingly offered neck. That an entanglement between predator and prey would end in anything but slaughter.

Lucius shouldn’t have opened the door.

But as he looked down into the dripping-honey embers of Anthony’s eyes, spreading midnight pupils blossoming with euphoric surrender just for him, Lucius knew that in every universe, he always would.

“Kneel.”