Chapter Text
It is a fine summer day in London, and Anthony J Crowley is wallowing.
It’s been quite a good wallow, actually; quite a lot of staring out of windows, resting his head in his hand and then sliding that hand up and down his face, and sending complaints -- some verbal, some silent and fuming -- up to the Big Woman Up Top. It is, to be clear, not a brood. Brooding is a different breed of stewing. The form is somewhat similar (for a textbook brood, sit in a room, close the blinds, put your chin atop your fist pensively and grumble to an unseen other; for a textbook wallow, sit in a room, close the blinds, put your head in your hands and grumble to an unseen other), but only to an untrained eye, really. Brooding is for when the anger is directed outward; wallowing is for when it's inward. It's like dolphins and whales. Or is it rectangles and squares? Trapezoids and triangles? Anyway.
The point is that Crowley is not brooding. He would know; he's had plenty of practice in both fields. He was around for the invention of both terms, and had delighted in experimenting with their applications.
He had brooded over a wide variety of things. For example: God flooding the Earth, forcing Crowley to use many a demonic miracle to make room for the other locals in the Ark; Aziraphale and him getting into a spat over Shakespeare, leading to a short-lived silent treatment before Crowley caved; being bested as the Black Knight, which meant he had to abandon what was quickly becoming his favorite pseudonym; when Aziraphale refused to give him the holy water; that time a high-as-a-kite club goer called him a twink; when Aziraphale refused to run away with him the first time; when Aziraphale refused to run away with him the second time; when Aziraphale refused to run away with him the th-- well . Anyway.
He had also wallowed over a number of things, though more privately. For example: when disco died; when Aziraphale bought him those oysters and kept making secretive glances at him from across the table, like they were sharing in some clandestine adventure, just the two of them; when Aziraphale called him, for the first time, over far too many glasses of wine to be responsible for anything that left his mouth, his "friend;" after Aziraphale gave him the holy water, and the disturbingly meaningful conversation that followed; when Aziraphale refused to run away with-- well. You get the picture.
The picture being one of a Crowley who knows his stuff about wallowing and brooding and stewing. And this, right now, is a potent wallow. He’s kept it up for nearly forty-eight hours now, and in excellent form: the shades are drawn, only parted for intermittent bouts of pensive yearning; his phone is set to automatic voicemail; he’s even gone positively twenty-first century, a Sad Songs for When You Need to Wallow playlist mumbling through his gramophone. He usually goes for a more traditional route, but he’d already played “Landslide” far too many times for it to be healthy, and besides, he had reasoned as he queued up the playlist, a little change never hurt anybody. (Then Mitski started playing, and Crowley decided, yes, a little change did sometimes hurt a body.)
He had made a plan. A wonderful plan; a thorough plan. A plan that was a long time coming. Forty-five minutes coming, to be exact. He’d decided, about halfway through watching Aziraphale enjoy an entree at the Ritz, that he was tired of it. Fully fed up; he was at his limit. Six thousand years of torment, this far, no further: on the way home, he was going to talk things through with Aziraphale. He was going to, on an unusually slow (and, to Aziraphale, unusually pleasant) ride back to the bookshop, bring up their relationship, somehow, and eventually get around to the saying-of-the-feelings, and then… then… oh, he doesn’t know. He never really worked that kink in the plan out.
It’s not like he would ever expect Aziraphale to reciprocate or anything; maybe he wants him to, but he-- well-- he can’t sense love the way Aziraphale can. Not that he’s oblivious to anything either; he’s flirted with a few humans in the past, mostly to try and get benefits at bars and the like, and he knows the signs. It’s just, he has never seen Aziraphale really flirt. He’s too earnest for it. A compliment is just a compliment. A smile of pride is just a smile of pride. There’s no reading in between the lines when the lines themselves just say it all. It’s part of the reason Crowley admires Aziraphale so much. He just can’t imagine being so open all the time. Wouldn’t it sting after a while, being vulnerable like that? He’d tried it once or twice, and only while smashed drunk. The last time he’d tried it didn’t feel very good, either; not his angel’s fault, of course. There had been a world to save, after all.
It didn’t matter, Crowley found, that he didn’t know where he was going with the plan. You don’t have to work out step five, after all, if you never finish step one. He had tried, of course. He really had intended to go through with it. After dinner, he’d been a proper gentleman -- footed the bill, not that it mattered, opened the passenger side door for Aziraphale, nearly died when a grateful smile slid smoothly onto Aziraphale’s face. But it was just -- then they were in the car, and he was driving Aziraphale home, and Crowley couldn’t figure out where to start. What was he supposed to say? Hey, Aziraphale, funny thing, just thought you ought to know, I’ve been fervently in love with you for the past three- to six-thousand years. Fancy that! Anyway, what d’you want to do for lunch tomorrow? Absolutely un-fucking-tenable.
“Crowley? Are you alright?” Aziraphale had asked after five-or-so minutes of near silence, pulling him out of his spiral at the wheel.
“Hnh?” Crowley responded, intelligently.
Aziraphale sighed. “You’re acting a little strange, my dear.”
Crowley could have screamed. “Strange?” he said-not-whimpered instead, feeling a little lightheaded.
“Well, yes. You’re unusually quiet, for one thing.” Crowley opened his mouth to respond, but Aziraphale barreled forward, “You keep making as if you’re about to say something, and then- nothing. You-- for Heaven's sake, your driving is even tolerable right now--”
At that, Crowley turned his head away from the road to look at Aziraphale in near sincere offense, bringing the poor man moments from a heart attack -- “Eyes on the road, Crowley, honestly !” -- and successfully diverting his attention from the matter at hand and toward flustering about road safety. At least, for a little while. They got within a few short blocks from the bookshop before it started again. Some punk song Crowley liked very much was on the radio, but he couldn't quite hear it over the loud feeling of Aziraphale's eyes studying him with renewed interest.
"What is it now?" Crowley asked, glancing at him from behind his sunglasses. When Aziraphale didn't respond, he said, "You're staring again."
Aziraphale blinked a bit, like he hadn't even realized. "Sorry, sorry. It’s nothing."
Thank God . Crowley started to pull onto the side of the road just outside Aziraphale's place, slotting the Bentley carefully between a Harley and a Jeep. Damn Jeeps. Take up so much space. Who's the one who did that, anyway? Was that a Heaven or a Hell thing? Not that Crowley really cared, but it was all that was keeping him from thinking about--
Aziraphale sighed as Crowley threw the car in reverse. “It’s just that…” He watched Crowley with peculiar focus as he turned to look behind them, avoiding eye contact with Aziraphale by locking eyes with the Forester. "I just…"
Crowley put the parking brake on and turned to look at Aziraphale, whose sentence had trailed off at length. He had this expression on his face of pure consternation. It was quite cute actually; there was a little line between his eyebrows where they drew together, a little line, and Crowley thought about reaching over and smoothing it out with the pad of his thumb. It deepened further as Aziraphale took a thoughtful breath and said, far too meaningfully, "Sometimes, I just don't know what goes on in that head of yours."
The misplaced weight of his words hit Crowley's chest like... like, a... like something really heavy, that winds someone when they get hit with it. For a few moments he couldn't even think of what to say -- well, no, not quite. He knew what he wanted to say: There was just too much. What does that mean?! What does anything you say ever fucking mean?! You say such simple shit and it never sounds simple and it tears me to bits! or, No, it's all quite simple, really, when you get down to it, it's really all quite simple and it's mostly about you. But it all just got stuck up in there, like a wad of gum jamming up an overworked garbage disposal, like a cat choking on its hairball, terrified and betrayed by its own bodily functions. I don’t know yours either, he wanted to say. I don’t know yours either and I desperately, desperately want to.
Eventually what came out of him was, "Truth be told, not much, usually.”
Aziraphale smiled then, closed-lipped, and shook his head in acute angles. “I don’t think that’s true,” he murmured, his eyes falling from Crowley’s. He unbuckled his seatbelt, opened his door, and stepped onto the street with a gentle, "Good night, Crowley." Then he was gone.
On the way home, Crowley kicked himself.
Then, when he got home, he kicked himself some more -- hence The Wallow.
This always happens. Always with these puzzling little double-conversations where he’s unsure if he’s read too much or too little into the content. Sometimes, god damn the man, Aziraphale just says the most mundane things, but there’s so much behind it -- so blasted much that Crowley just never knows how to sort through. You go too fast for me, Crowley. There’s a little Crowley in the back of his head sitting in front of an enormous movie screen playing that moment constantly. He eats popcorn, sips red slushie, and tries desperately to understand what had gone wrong. He remembers the whole thing to every hand-written letter.
He remembers the slight tingle of Aziraphale’s heavenly presence mingling abruptly with the atoms of his Bentley. He remembers the shock that passed through his body as he accepted the flannel thermos, and the tenseness of Aziraphale’s every muscle, and the way he kept saying -- as he always did -- that he didn’t want Crowley to get hurt, like somehow, Aziraphale was the shepherd to Crowley’s lamb, like he was not the Snake of Eden but the fragile animal that Crowley knew lived beneath the surface of his skin. The whole interaction left him feeling rather raw in a way he didn’t know what to do with. He had tried to push it away, into the back of his memory, but it rubbed at him, like slightly too-loose shoes bobbing up and down against his heels, leaving blisters. ( How long have we been friends? Six thousand years! The bloody Turkish Empire could have risen and fallen tenfold in that time.)
After he left Aziraphale’s bookshop, another little Crowley jumped up, grabbed a tub of popcorn, and moved into a theater just down the line to start its deep dive into another new, oddly tender moment. He felt raw once again -- vulnerable, really, like a turtle wobbling around on its back, legs flailing slowly and belatedly and uselessly through thick, swampy air. He felt like Aziraphale had picked him up by his spine and read him, then graciously decided to let him lick his papercut wounds. He felt like he had been laid entirely bare. And this is when Aziraphale says he doesn't understand Crowley. He shudders to think how it would feel if Aziraphale actually knew everything, if it was all somehow even clearer than it was then and is now.
Moments like these always remind him so much of so many things. The first that always comes to mind is the Garden. The rain, grotesque and new, was about to fall. Neither him nor Aziraphale knew what it was going to be; the only water they had ever encountered was of the holy variety, and the precipitation was to fall from just where all that guck usually came from. He hadn’t expected Aziraphale to offer him his wing so readily. For a moment, he looked back to the Garden, wondering if he’d have to duck for cover. But of course Aziraphale didn’t give him the time to scamper off. Instead, that beautiful, golden-hearted bastard, he’d offered Crowley shelter. A demon. He’d offered it to a demon -- the first one he’d met in his life, too. That kind of trust, just…
Crowley has long since forgotten how to be gracefully vulnerable. He’s seen Aziraphale do it so many times that by now he probably should’ve absorbed the knowledge socially. Seen him open up for the most unremarkable things. An old lady thanking him for walking her across the street. A herd of ducklings quacking in joy after being reunited with their mother. A favor Crowley did him. This last one had created a sort of Pavlovian tick within Crowley, who now finds himself unable to keep from flitting about time and space, trying desperately to find ways to make Aziraphale glow with happiness. He has, Crowley thinks with a wry, self-deprecating smile, become something of an expert in pining after Aziraphale.
He has, in point of fact, become much, much more than an expert.
Malcolm Gladwell writes in "Outliers" that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert. It's usually after that point that the practitioner will "make their big break," as it were. The Beatles, for example -- they were never really Crowley's favorite band, he was more of a punk fan, but he couldn't deny the fervor that swept the English-speaking world when they debuted. By 1964, around-about when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" hit the chart and the band started to make it big, they had performed something like twelve hundred times. Given the average length of a concert -- usually an hour or two -- that amounts to somewhere between twelve- to twenty-four-thousand hours of performance practice. But that's generally excessive; Bill Joy, sometimes called the Edison of the Internet, placed his practice time pre-expertise at "maybe ten thousand?" hours in an interview with Gladwell. Ten thousand hours. Keep this figure in mind: it's time for a quick math problem.
Crowley and Aziraphale have known each other, Crowley would estimate, for around six thousand years. But that’s not quite exact enough for a studious mathematician. The Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at 9:13 in the morning. Seven days later, Adam and Eve ate an Apple, found themselves graciously gifted a flaming sword from an unknown interloper, and promptly took an extended vacation from the Garden. It was on this day, just after the Apple had been bitten and just before the first rain took its first tentative steps onto the virgin Earth, that one demon, then Crawly, now Crowley, and one angel, Aziraphale, met.
It was a rather nice day. All the days had been nice. The birds chirped contentedly, the branches of the trees leaned heady and inviting with fat fruit, and one lean, satisfied reptile slithered his way ramblingly along the wall enclosing the Garden, basking in the sun. It had made about halfway through the sky by that point. Crowley remembers this specifically because he couldn’t help feeling maybe a little smug at having already finished his temptations for the day at such an efficient pace. We’ll call this maybe noon, on Sunday the 28th of October, 4004 B.C. This is where it all starts – a little over six thousand years ago, since we’re going to nitpick. As of today, the 26th of June, 2019, at 2:43pm, that will have been 6,014 years, 8 months, 2 days, 2 hours and 43 minutes, not accounting for leap years.
In Gladwell’s terms, that would be –-
6,015 yrs x 365 days x 24 hours + 8 months x 30.5 days x 24 hours + 2 days x 24 hours + 2.72 hours
-- 52,697,306.72 hours, or, in units of 10,000 hours spent practicing, which we will call Gladwells , about 5,269.73 GWs. That is, to be clear, nearly 5,300 times the amount of practice any revered master in the history of the world spent practicing for their magnum opus. The amount of time shared between the two of them is the equivalent of 5,300 Leonardo Da Vincis painting 5,300 Mona Lisa s , 5,300 Beatles es going through 5,300 dingy, late-night performances, 5,300 teenage Bill Joys programming late into the night in front of 5,300 ancient computers . Crowley could rustle up a small army of classical artists from Hell and ask them to impart the whole of their knowledge and experience, and after the last one described the last second of their artistic career, Crowley would have still spent more time thinking about Aziraphale than all of that combined.
Fascinating. All this time and he still hasn’t gotten to Hold Aziraphale’s Hand.
--
The gramophone, having now run out of tracks on the playlist and with a proponency to -- much like Bentley -- mock him, decides that now of all times would be an excellent time for one of the Beatles’ greatest hits. Crowley shuts his ears and screws his eyes tight against it, wondering why on bloody Earth he ever decided to give his shit a sense of humor. He sends a strongly worded thought to the gramophone, but the gramophone doesn’t care. As though to laugh at him, it ticks the music up a few decibels. Crowley then reminds it that he can send it with just a snap of his fingers up to the North Pole, with all the cold and the polar bears and the lack of electricity, at which point it shuts up completely, leaving Crowley to his thoughts in dead silence.
“Good lord,” Crowley says to no one. “I’ve lost control of my life. I’m arguing with a record player.”
“Crowley? Is that you in there?”
Crowley stiffens. That’s Aziraphale. He’s in no state to have Aziraphale seeing him; flounced against his couch, all despairing, gramophone sulkily playing ska-punk to the corner. He has a passionate, if momentary, thought of miracling the door shut, getting himself collected, and maybe jumping through a window. Of course, there’s no time for that -- Aziraphale just sweeps right into his room, barely a knock at the door frame, and whatever happened to ringing doorbells?
“Crowley, are you-- oh, good heavens; are you brooding again?” he huffs, apparently having answered it for himself, and Crowley grumbles, “I’m not brooding, ” quite honestly, because he isn’t, and he worked too hard on this wallow not to protest. He doesn’t bother to correct his terminology, however; that sort of conversation would end in all too much unpacking of statements, and he doesn’t want to clutter up the room. He sits up gracelessly and takes off his glasses to squint at the angel as he bumbles past. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Sitting here with the shades drawn,” Aziraphale tuts, striding over to the windows and flashing in the light, adamantly ignoring Crowley and his groan. “Positively gloomy.”
“I was getting some shut-eye,” Crowley objects, motioning vaguely as he shoves his glasses back on. Then he repeats, “what are you doing here?”
Aziraphale fusses with the drapery a bit, then turns round and fusses still more with the sleeves of his shirt. “Well, I called you quite a number of times, for one thing.”
“Come on, now, don’t be cross.”
“I’m not cross!” Aziraphale says, crossly. Then he sighs. “I called you quite a number of times, and you didn’t pick up, not even after the voicemail like you usually do, and, well…well."
Oh, oh. Something in Crowley’s chest spreads its wings and flies. A wide, smug grin smears across his face. He leans back on the couch, regarding Aziraphale upside-down, sort of like a child, or an overdramatic scarf.
“Don’t look at me like that, you old snake.” Aziraphale squirms in place, vaguely scandalized.
“You were worried about me,” teases Crowley. “You were,” he starts again with a snicker, but gets cut off unexpectedly-- “Of course I was!”
The room falls morbidly silent for a moment, the two of them too focused on staring (or, in Aziraphale’s case, adamantly not staring) at each other to speak; it’s broken only when Crowley’s sunglasses tumble off his head and clatter hollowly to the ground. Aziraphale’s gaze travels erratically upward in a stream of frustrated energy as he struggles to gather himself and start his next sentence. Eventually it finds its way out of his mouth with all the rhythm and pomp of a stately, but ultimately under-practiced marching band.
“We have been friends, for six, thousand years, Crowley. And after both of us being ab duc ted by our respective -- agencies, of course a silent spell would-- would--!”
Crowley finds that his mouth has abruptly decided to take a labor strike on him. “W--uh, I-- I’m sorry, Angel, I didn’t mean to twist you. Honest,” he adds, performing complicated acrobatics with his upper body over the arm of the couch in an attempt to right himself without breaking eye contact. His right hand scrabbles against the dark tile floor and eventually closes round an arm of his glasses, while the other grips fresh stress lines into the red leather cushions. Aziraphale, for his part, just shifts uncomfortably in place.
“No, I’m just...glad you’re alright.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
Crowley stares at him a moment longer, tapping his sunglasses against the couch and rolling his lower lip between his teeth. Aziraphale looks rightly put out, his brows still drawn together, his hands still wringing below his waist. It just won’t do to see him like this -- it makes Crowley’s skin crawl. “How about lunch?” Crowley asks, trying to drive the heaviness from the room. “My treat. I’ll drive, even.”
Aziraphale’s eyes flick up to Crowley’s, and a small, mischievous smile sneaks up on his face, catching his crow’s feet off guard. “I hardly think your driving is a treat,” he points out, unable to stop himself.
"Oh!" Crowley stands quickly only to stagger back just as fast, his hand clutching his chest. “You wound me, Angel,” he moans.
“Just get the car, you daft fool.”
“Oh! Such harsh language! You’re sure you aren’t Fallen?”
“ Crowley! ”
Crowley’s laughter bounces against the high ceilings of the flat, and as not-cross as Aziraphale wants to be, he can’t help joining in.