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Aziraphale wakes up, which is a distinctly disconcerting feeling when one doesn’t often sleep in the first place. Added to his discomfort is the fact that he’s on the floor, limbs sprawled every which way, with a pounding in his head that makes him think he forgot to sober up before falling asleep.
“Ugh, really, my dear,” he grumbles, pushing himself upright. “Just how much did we have to drink?”
He expects to open his eyes to the back room of the bookshop, but he doesn’t. There is no worn-thin carpet beneath his hands, no aged coffee table or yawning loveseat, and certainly no snake-eyed demon draped on a flat surface nearby to poke fun at Aziraphale for being a messy drunk.
In fact… Aziraphale doesn’t know where he is at all.
“Finally awake, are you?” a familiar voice snaps.
Aziraphale’s heart sinks. He turns around to find himself under the scornful scrutiny of Archangels Uriel and Sandalphon.
What on earth?
“What, um, are you doing here?” He pushes himself to his feet, looking around at the unfamiliar room they’re in. “What am I doing here?”
“I don’t know what’s happened to you to make you so different,” Uriel tells him shortly, “but if you haven’t Fallen yet, you can probably be rehabilitated.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, and Aziraphale doesn’t know where to begin.
“Ah, no thank you,” he decides to go with, straightening his waistcoat for something to do with his hands. He’s terribly uneasy, bordering on frightened, with having been summoned here by them in the first place. It’s safe to assume he won’t want any part of their plans to rehabilitate him, whatever that could mean. “I thought we had agreed I was best left to my own devices. I’m perfectly happy on Earth.”
Going on as if he hadn’t spoken, Uriel says, “You’re never going to be a proper angel while you’re running around with a demon, of all things.”
Aziraphale goes cold at the mention of Crowley. He finds himself listening more intently now, preparing himself for fight or flight.
“You’ll see,” his estranged sibling tells him, as if to reassure. “He can’t actually care about you, Aziraphale. He’s not capable of it. I’ll prove it to you, and then you’ll come home.”
“I don’t care about all that,” Sandalphon says with a cruel smile. “I’m only here for the show.”
Uriel waves a hand, and something appears in the middle of the floor. It’s Aziraphale, or a likeness of him, sprawled in a heap like a discarded puppet. Its eyes are vacant and staring. There’s a sword driven through its chest and the burned outline of wings outspread on either side of its body.
Aziraphale feels sick just looking at it.
“You’ll see,” Uriel tells him. “Just watch.”
Their terrible plan is beginning to take shape. Horrified, Aziraphale surges forward, beginning to say, “You mustn’t—” when he runs headlong into what feels like a brick wall.
The hard collision all but bounces him back, sending him staggering. Eyes stinging, Aziraphale looks down at where a binding circle lay at his feet. Dormant until he tested the lines, it’s glowing with holy white light now. The work of an archangel, and well beyond his power to break.
Aziraphale tries his luck against it anyway, gritting his teeth through the sharp recoil.
Uriel and Sandalphon watch him with a remote interest, like he’s a little animal doing something clever, and Aziraphale shouts, “Don’t do this! Let me out!”
“But it’s just getting good,” Sandalphon says gleefully, and that’s when Crowley’s bright presence appears on the scene.
Aziraphale feels him coming before the others do. He whips around just as the door bursts open, his lovely demon flying through like a mad thing.
“I got your message, angel, could you have been anymore cryptic? And what are you doing way out here any… way…”
He stops dead when he sees the archangels, his face twisting into a snarl.
“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls, hoping against hope that Crowley might hear him.
Crowley doesn’t so much as twitch in his direction. Goddammit, Aziraphale thinks with a venom that should surprise him, and throws his metaphysical weight against the barrier once more.
“What have you done with Aziraphale?” Crowley hisses, more serpent than man now, despite what his body may look like. They will certainly be having a talk later about his lack of self-preservation in face of two archangels, but for now Aziraphale can only watch in terror as Crowley begins to stalk. “You both think you’re hot shit. I know he’s here, I can feel him.”
“Or what’s left of him, anyway,” Uriel says flatly, and steps aside to show Crowley her creation.
The look on Crowley’s face breaks Aziraphale’s heart.
“No,” he mutters. “No no, angel, no.”
He’s across the room without moving, skipping through space-time like he’s forgotten how to do it the mortal way. He crashes to his knees in the ash around the corpse and his hands tremble as if they don’t know which direction to fly in first.
His yellow eyes are stark and wild. The sword impaled through the puppet’s chest is flung violently away by work of a crude miracle, and only then does Crowley touch him.
Human, so human, in the way his fingers fumble against Aziraphale’s wrist for a pulse. Searching out the familiar heartbeat, the reassuring proof of life.
“Crowley!” Aziraphale screams it so loud it all but tears his throat. “Lord, spare him this! Let him hear me, please!”
The Almighty isn’t granting prayers today. Crowley is kneeling in what he thinks is the burnt-out remains of Aziraphale’s grace. His fingers are sooty and dark with feather dust.
Uriel and Sandalphon are watching the scene raptly, as if waiting for Crowley to break character, to stand up and dust his hands off and say “ah, well, so my evil plan turned out to be a wash.”
But he never does. He doesn’t even seem to remember they’re there. He might as well be alone in all the world, so possessed he is by grief. He hauls Aziraphale’s body up into his arms, bows his head, and begins to weep.
Aziraphale’s holy core burns within him, bursting at the seams and straining so ferociously against the archangel’s binding that it’s a wonder he doesn’t melt his human body clean away with the effort.
“It’s enough!” he cries. “You’ve seen enough! What more could you possibly want?”
“Disgusting,” Sandalphon says gleefully. “Whoever heard of a demon mourning?”
But demons were the first to mourn, Aziraphale thinks, dazed by such willful ignorance. They were the first to have lost.
“But it isn't real,” Uriel says slowly. “It can't be.”
Crowley goes abruptly, terribly still.
His shoulders freeze in the middle of a sob. He’s a creature of sudden stone, an anguished work of art. Aziraphale is pressed hard against the barrier between them, blinking wetness from his eyes, trying to see what’s happened, what changed.
Crowley’s lips part, the forked edge of his tongue darting out almost too quick for the eye to follow. He kneels there, his awful collapse of limbs and sorrow, his arms wound around the shape of Aziraphale, and scents the air again.
Then he lifts his head. There’s no chance for anyone to react before Crowley stops time. There are still the sounds of traffic outside, and rain, and Aziraphale himself is still present and aware; so it’s only the archangels that have been displaced from the steady onward drum of the universe.
It’s silent. Aziraphale’s heart is the loudest thing in the room, pounding against his chest.
Crowley lowers the body gently to the floor, his hands lingering, the curl of his fingers reluctant. When he finally lets go he does it with a painful yank, and he pushes himself to his feet as though gravity is somehow ten times heavier where he's standing.
His eyes are burning yellow, like sulfur, like the bright warning bands of a venomous reptile. He doesn’t move the way a human would, or even the way a snake would; he moves like he’s rearranging the fabric of space and time in tiny step-like increments, bearing him closer to where Uriel and Sandalphon are still standing like sculptures.
Aziraphale watches as Crowley draws right up to them. He studies Sandalphon’s face closely; the archangel’s mouth is twisted in a sneer, caught in the act of throwing Aziraphale a look of hateful triumph.
And then, following Sandalphon's line of sight with utmost deliberation, Crowley turns his head and looks directly at Aziraphale.
Their eyes lock, and Aziraphale’s next breath chokes him. Crowley’s expression puts Aziraphale in mind of natural disasters, of wars and kingdoms put to torch, floods and plagues and children drowning. The demon might as well be desolation itself, given blood and bone and a suit to wear, a bleak, yawning absence where there should be a wily, mischievous good nature.
Even the day the world was scheduled to end, when Crowley holed himself up in a little bar and wept himself sick among bottles and bottles of clear spirits, wasn’t as bad as this. Nothing could be as bad as a corpse.
“Crowley!” Aziraphale sobs, pushing himself forward. The barrier is hot against his palms, on the cusp of burning, and still he pushes forward. “I’m right here, Crowley, I’m here! I haven’t left you, sweetheart.”
Crowley must not hear him. He certainly doesn’t see him, scanning the empty space with his eyes. But there’s a seed of something unquelled inside him, something rebellious. A tiny kernel of what might only be denial, what might just be hope— elbowing its way through all the despair, making room for maybe and what if because the alternative is too much to bear.
Crowley starts to walk, with his hands outstretched before him, fingers splayed and searching. Each step is deliberate and determined, and his eyes are off-focus now, an inch or two to Aziraphale’s left, but he’s headed in the right direction.
“That’s it, my darling,” Aziraphae whispers. His voice is a wreck. He hates to be trapped here, aches to meet Crowley halfway. He’s as close as he can get, clustered against the wall with all his might.
There’s only a moment where Crowley falters. When he steps into the dust of the archangels’ cruel trick, where the outermost tip of an angel’s wing is burned into the tile. His stride stutters, and his eyes dart away to the shape of his dead husband on the floor, and Aziraphale could scream.
He is terrified that Crowley’s burdened faith might desert him before he’s made it all the way. There is nothing he can do to give Crowley strength, no signal or sign he can provide that this painful march will be rewarded.
Please, he prays. He sends it outward this time, not upward.
It seems to reach. The demon’s mouth screws up. He staggers forward two quick steps, a third, stepping over the dust and moving— unknowingly, hopefully— in the right direction.
Aziraphale shuffles to the side so that Crowley is directly in front of him. He’s holding his breath when Crowley finally reaches him. His long fingers meet resistance in thin-air, and he chokes. He presses his palms to the invisible wall, and Aziraphale mirrors him.
“You’re there, angel?” Crowley whispers. “You hear me?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale whispers back. “Of course I am. Of course I do.”
Crowley looks down. The circle is a lurid, vivid glow at Aziraphale’s feet. Crowley can’t possibly see it, but he’s always been far too clever for his own good. With a snap of his fingers, the floor begins to crack. The tiles bearing Uriel’s handwork rupture as if in a miniature, localized earthquake, and the second the lines are broken, the barrier disappears, and Aziraphale falls forward against Crowley’s chest.
“Oh my God,” Aziraphale gasps, gathering him up in shaking handfuls, hauling him close. “Crowley. I have you. I have you.”
It seems to take a moment for Crowley to process Aziraphale’s sudden appearance. His arms are slow in creeping around the angel, his embrace a trembling, tentative thing. But he takes a breath— breathing in deep, nose pressed into cloudy white curls of hair— and seems to come alive again.
When his fingers grow claws, and his broken halo burns the air around their faces brassy and hot, and the secret self of him threatens to push out of its tight mortal confines with every second, Aziraphale breathes a sigh of relief. What should probably rightly be horrifying is instead the sweetest comfort he knows.
“There you are,” Aziraphale says, swaying their bodies side to side. He thinks he could stand there holding Crowley until the next end of the world and Crowley would let him.
Over the demon’s shoulder, Aziraphale has full view of the archangels who tormented him. If Aziraphale were capable of hatred, they would know the full force of it. If he could bring himself to bring them harm, he would make them hurt.
“I can feel that,” Crowley mutters, muffled against Aziraphale’s neck. His voice is thick and wet. “Leave those unholy thoughts to me, angel.”
Aziraphale presses a kiss to the side Crowley’s face, right above the snake sigil. It’s the only spot he can reach without peeling his husband off him and he has no plans of that.
“How did you know? How could you tell?”
Crowley’s eyes give away how he’s hurting, despite how much practice he has had over the millennia in schooling his voice to perfect dispassion. He looks like he would like to tuck away out of sight again, but the cradle of Aziraphale’s hands keep him still.
He turns his face, pressing into one of Aziraphale’s palms. His lips part there against the salt and skin of hands that have spent all of history keeping him still.
He says, “Didn’t smell like you.” And suddenly Aziraphale understands.
This body has carried him soundly since the Beginning. Even if his core had been burned away, the body left behind would have presumably smelt like his cologne, or his books, or whatever it was he’d eaten last. Of course, it’s something the archangels would overlook. It’s something they wouldn’t think to copy. It’s something intimate and human.
‘I know what you smell like,’ the demon had snapped at him not long ago.
Oh, to be so known, to be so loved. Aziraphale could cry for days if he let himself linger on the notion.
“Let me take you home, sweetheart,” he says, speaking the words into Crowley’s hair. “Where I can keep you close to me.”
Crowley hums what is probably an assent, but when Aziraphale glances into his eyes, he finds them turned away from his own and uncomfortably fixed; staring without blinking at the archangels who let him think Aziraphale was dead.
Aziraphale touches Crowley’s face with his free hand, a brush of his fingers against a sharp cheekbone. Love swells in his chest like pain.
“You’ll have to let them go sometime,” he says with a lightness he doesn’t feel.
“No I don’t.”
Truly, the remarkable creature might find it within the realm of his imagination to trap them as they are for eternity. But…
“I don’t want them on your mind, darling,” Aziraphale says, both gentle and unrelenting as he turns Crowley’s face back towards his, so that those yellow eyes have no choice but to follow. “I don’t want them in your thoughts. Let them go.”
Crowley bares his teeth, sharper and longer than usual, and snaps his fingers. A wall of hellfire appears at his whim, curving around Uriel and Sandalphon in a vicious mockery of the trap that had held Aziraphale, standing at easily ten feet high.
“They can puzzle their own way out,” he sneers, and only then does the time in the room reorient itself to the rest of the universe.
Aziraphale doesn’t wait a moment longer. With a thought, he brings them home to the flat above the shop. The bed has turned itself down for them, pillows plump, sheets smooth and cool.
He walks Crowley backwards, lays him down. Crowley's hair is a glorious spill of red against the pale pillows, but his eyes are still manic and afraid, his fingers clutching fistfuls of Aziraphale's clothes as if to keep him from disappearing again.
“As long as you need, Crowley,” Aziraphale assures him, pressing their foreheads together. “I’ll hold you just like this as long as you need. We can lay here until the end of the world if you like.”
Crowley makes a watery sound that might have, an hour ago, counted as a chuckle. “Until you get peckish, you mean.”
Humor is always how they've dealt with a blow. Aziraphale smiles at him, thumbing a rogue piece of hair back behind Crowley's ear.
“For you— and only for you, mind— I would be willing to go without.”
“Hah!” Crowley's death grip on Aziraphale's shirt has loosened. The hairline slits of his pupils have rounded out a bit to something less likely to panic. He's giving himself, ever so slowly, back into Aziraphale's hands. “Who are you, and what have you done with my angel?”
“It's me, love,” Aziraphale says. “I'm here.”
It ruins their little joke, but he has to say it, now that he can.
Crowley's eyes get very bright, the same way they did in the Garden, and Aziraphale is certain that Crowley heard him loud and clear this time.