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This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
— T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
Here’s the thing: Crowley never liked being alone.
Well, certainly, to an extent. He liked the idea of solitude. Solitude was refreshing. Creative. Helped with the arrangement of little ideas for busying time. Little constants and routines, and privacy, oh, privacy. It helped maintain the safe detachment from his own over-eager mind and his yet more over-eager heart: alone, one could gush sweet threats at African violets, one could sleep through weeks and watch films that long since stopped being iconic (or never really were in the first place, claimed Aziraphale.) Alone one could drum impatient fingers on the smooth edges and curves of a very lovely Bentley and murmur y’all so self-satisfied, I don’t need you, mildly aware to whom it’s being murmured, but also safely convinced they can’t hear him anyway. (Or can’t be bothered to hear him. Still, same thing.)
But alone, there were also other thoughts. Thoughts more elusive, and infinitely more daunting.
…
Tempting Aziraphale to sssome lunch, as he’d so lithely dubbed it, wasn’t, perhaps unsurprisingly, the reason of the fallout in itself. No, the drive was smooth, Aziraphale’s voice sounded like a pattern he was pleasantly accustomed to, and Freddie Mercury returned to corrupt the Blaupunkt like a genuine prodigal son. The Ritz made a familiar fanfare of noise and colour, and the Pinot Noir was tangy at the back of Crowley’s throat. Which was alright. Everything was alright.
But he was still twitchier than usually (which was saying something) and all the more unnerved by the lack of recollection of anything that could’ve caused such tension.
(‘What was I saying?’ he’d said.
‘Don’t know,’ Aziraphale had said. ‘Nothing very important, I think.’)
Well, Crowley wasn’t sure.
And perhaps something was also in that Aziraphale was just a notch more angelically stiff than usual, and more infuriating in his total and absolutely enviable lack of discomposure. He was tilting his glass languidly in one hand, idly thoughtful. Not a thing about him seemed off.
Which, in itself, was disturbing.
Following the safest pattern, Crowley thought glumly, and somehow the idea made him feel a sting of resentment. He fixed his eyes ahead, on the white-clad waiter manoeuvring his way between the sparsely populated tables, shimmering in and out of vision like a blinking light. Next to him, Aziraphale was apparently trying to convey in words some vaguely troubling thought.
‘Still, something had changed,’ he was saying, in a mildly good-humoured voice. ‘Hardly any need for the arrangement, now, don’t you think? With that whole new no meddling policy.’
He touched his lips to the napkin in a slight movement, looking thoughtful and vaguely drowsy. Quite unexpectedly, a familiar sharp feeling of internal dissociation seized Crowley: he needed to grip his fingers on the table’s edge in order not to start. He felt strangled, suddenly, by the very presence of people around him, and newly too-bright lights; the scent of wine and Aziraphale’s lightweight voice. As though somebody stole the ground from beneath him, and expected him to remain unmoving.
Hardly any need, Crowley thought. Here’s to the line between need and want.
‘Hardly any need for an Adversary, either, come to think of that,’ Aziraphale continued, in the same affably surprised voice: like it was exactly the sort of a careless remark one could exchange over wine but before dessert, along other senseless and unimportant trivialities. Some frail spark of cold fury welled up inside Crowley; he rested his hand at the table, trying to stop it from shaking. And here’s to hoping.
‘Heavens, what and odd thought,’ the angel said. ‘I mean, what does one do?’
‘Oh,’ was the only breathy thing that managed to travel all the way of Crowley’s throat. He fixed his gaze back on the scurrying waiter, fiercely determined not to meet Aziraphale’s eyes. That would make it all a whole new level of unbearable.
Aziraphale let it slide without as much as a distracted glance. ‘Really, my dear, think of that. A whole worldview in need of rearranging. A whole system of routines. An—an utter reversal, so to say. I’d never …’
‘Oh,’ Crowley repeated, numbly. ‘So it is Game Over, Insert Coin after all, then,’ he said bitingly, unable to quite stop himself, even if he knew it would only make him feel more miserable. ‘I mean—alright, fair enough. You’ve never really struck me as a sentimental type.’
The look of the angel’s wide bright eyes was perfectly blank. ‘Crowley,’ he said again, ‘my boy. I can’t imagine what you mean by that.’
Something possessive clutched at Crowley’s throat once again, throttling the cold rage in one move, and dampening into something akin to an equally frosty resignation. ‘No, I suppose you wouldn’t.’
Aziraphale appeared mildly annoyed now, but no more than he ever was when Crowley said something he thought inappropriate or uncomfortable, ‘Is it another of your little jibes? You could really lay it off for a moment.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I suppose I do owe you an apology.’
Suddenly, Crowley felt ill. Violently. ‘Can’t imagine what for,’ he muttered, looking decisively away. He was still gripping at the table, but the entire reality around him has begun to feel distant and unreachable, not palpable enough to properly cling to it. He desperately wanted to get away—from the Ritz, but first and foremost from Aziraphale, and before the latter could say anything more at that.
The angel’s voice remained ruthlessly composed. ‘Back in your car, we’ve had this discussion—about, ah, the nature of certain approaches to life. I must say I could’ve been a little harsh on you and given that you didn’t exactly let me explain—’
A short and bitter laugh wrung itself out of Crowley’s throat before he could think to stop it. Aziraphale’s eyebrows furrowed. ‘My dear, this is no laughing mat—’
‘No, no,’ Crowley cut him off, still laughing in an increasingly ill-feeling way. He forced his eyes upon his hand, splayed on the white cloth and taut from tension. The entire room seemed to be spinning. ‘No, it’s just—no offense taken. Whatever. I mean, come on. Look who you’re talking to.’
For the first time, Aziraphale’s steady voice wavered—but Crowley had lost enough of his fix on reality to have a chance to perceive that. ‘But that’s just the point, I …’
‘Angel,’ Crowley said, bile rising in his throat even as he stitched a cold little smile to his lips and raised the blank stare of black glass, ‘haven’t they taught you not to apologise for the truth, back in Heaven?’
Aziraphale didn’t seem to find an answer to that.
…
Here’s another thing: demons weren’t really supposed to deal with depression. They were not meant to as much as toe the line either, and definitely not balance on the tips of slippery snakeskin shoes between equal voids of hopeless ignorance and stifling knowledge. Not meant to become affected to any extent with any imbalance or tilt of Earth to one of the sides. Not meant to feel this helpless.
No, they were devised not to care for either of these and neither of others, but rather cultivate a sort of perfect, detached flippancy. A blatant negligence: that was the catch for deviousness.
Well, here’s another catch: flippancy worked damn well until Crowley remembered that as a system, he simply didn’t function as meant.
…
The air was piercingly cold as he drove towards the bookshop, wind slithering under his collar and grazing skin in burning little shivers. His hands were numb on the steering wheel. Aziraphale kept talking.
Usually, Crowley liked the idea of that, liked Aziraphale’s voice and his good-natured and endearingly abstract babble, but right now he very nearly prayed he’d just shut up. Otherwise, some brittle dark thing deep inside Crowley threatened to break and spill, and there would be no undoing that.
It was a miracle enough that he’d managed to persuade the angel to leave the Ritz before dessert. But then again, Crowley was nothing if not persuasive.
He flicked on the music as the angel paused to collect his thoughts and decide on the next topic—newly acquired titles or dust long overdue in the cluttered bookshop, a mouldy cocoa and overturned candles—and Crowley’s chest ached so much he had to physically restrain himself from breathing. In order be saved from the mildly offended silence and the questioning eyes from the left, he said, hoarsely, ‘Thanks hell he’s left bloody Mercury alone.’
They drove in silence from that moment onwards, a silence radiating from among the lines of the show must go on and if Crowley read this silence right—and he did, because if anything, he was attuned to these little falterings of Aziraphale’s demeanour all too acutely by now—there was a smidge of accusation, and a disappointment in the air.
And it was all, Crowley thought, phenomenally unfair.
There’s something to say for a demon that dislikes idea of hatred, and it’s nothing in the way of a compliment. And Crowley had only ever felt genuinely hateful for this particular world while he stood devoured slowly by fire, the air thick with the scent of a burnt constant, there in the miraculously resurrected bookshop. Like ground from his feet—that, then, felt like the end of the world. How did Aziraphale put it? A whole worldview to rearrange.
Only, Crowley didn’t want the rearrangement to mean a beginning of an amicable departure.
But it’s alright, he decided as he watched the angel’s sturdy figure fumbling with the keys in a wan pool of yellow light from the lamp post, tips of his curling hair trembling, lit up in the air, it’s better than the alternative.
Objective number one seemed to have been achieved, too, because he managed to lose Aziraphale before giving in to the hollow ache already spreading from his chest across the nerve endings; managed to drive home—home?—before dissipating into smaller pieces; manages to close the door before gasping.
…
The lock clicked and gave away, and the roar of the engine told Aziraphale Crowley was already driving away. He seemed in an interminable hurry, and the angel thought numbly of connotations on the theme of being burned by something, and possibly repelled.
He pushed the doors, feeling inexplicably disturbed.
The inside was dusty and dimmed, homelike. Aziraphale shuddered.
‘That,’ he said to the thin air, ‘went smashingly.’
…
Crowley had never liked the idea of Aziraphale at all.
The angel’s radiance of the justified (or whatever the hell it was supposed to be, bloody blinding goodness perhaps) only made Crowley feel more unbearable and heavy; even more of an aberration than a counterpart.
Crowley liked Aziraphale himself much more. He liked all the ways and crooks in which the disharmonies settled: the ruthless streak as he commandeered for the end of Adam’s life, clashing with the soft concern about Newt and Anathema. The terrifyingly calm hostility in those bright eyes as they fell upon an intruder in the tabernacle of his bookshop.
He liked the pedantic air, the touch (more like a grope, really) of vanity and the awful self-consciousness. He liked the culinary indulgence and too-crisp-to-be-ethereal humour dampened thinly with a veil of genuine good will. He liked how it all balanced out and became forgivable, endearing even. The little flaws composing a heavenly being: Crowley liked the optimism of that.
He liked Aziraphale’s bordering-with-chubby figure and soft hands, innocuous eyes and offended little noises he made. He liked the glasses sliding down his nose and the distractedly polite look of someone who hadn’t been listening at all but was nevertheless fervently determined to remain amiable to the person talking.
Crowley also liked to hope Aziraphale found the thought of him, if not equally alluring, then at least something less than despicable.
Which, after all these years, seemed equal parts naivety and a given.
…
Aziraphale drummed his fingers on the crusty pages of the book. He felt as though the sentences printed before his eyes made less sense than they should, but couldn’t decide on the reason behind that. He was impatient. His thoughts skimmed to rather different, unconnected phrases—judge not, be not hasty. Questions: who asks to kill without standing before the victim?
He felt restless. He felt like he was breaking a promise, but really, what else would he supposed to be doing? There was no promise. There was nothing more to do. Nowhere to be.
He’d even tried to test the waters on that vastly new plane, judge the frail possibilities—to no avail. He thought back to the continuously tensing up and biting Crowley at the Ritz, and the cold air as the music cut him off in the car.
He’d done all he could, and more. And it felt hollow.
…
Crowley liked the idea of sleep. He tended to like the execution of the idea as well: liked the sticky, cloying cloud of omnipotent incoherency enveloping his brain. A state of bodiless detachment, endless swaying in almost palpable inexplicability. Ineffability, perhaps, but in a damned good way.
But something had stolen the pleasure from him; reshaping it occasionally into what he now couldn’t help thinking of as abject terror.
He swayed on his feet, leaning against the counter in his whitely kitchen.
Exhaling through his nose, he watched the tangy, barely even translucent wine trickle down the glass in a muddled droplet and spill over on the pristine counter. He swallowed. He knew he would be dreaming the worst sort if he tried to sleep today; and reality was presently becoming much too much to bear.
He shook off his suit jacket and tore off his tie; drained the glass in one burning take. A warm stinging spread at the back of his throat, dissolving into increasing numbness. He refilled the glass, stared at the bottle, and cradled it to himself as he stumbled towards the couch.
He pushed himself into the corner of cold leather and drank until it turned slick and burning under the exposed skin of his elbows and ankles. He breathed with a terrible consciousness, focused on the very mechanism.
Crowley was both afraid of dreams and addicted to them. He wanted them, even the worst sort. They made him feel considerably less like a pattern, and more like a conscious individual existence. He treasured these experiences of the abstract gamut of terror: Crowley had always preferred to know and fall, rather than cough in the suffocating bliss of ignorance.
But there was yet another catch, because everything seemed to have catch for Crowley: he didn’t want to do it alone. He didn’t want to die alone, or live alone, and he didn’t want to remain the only one aware of his dilemma. He wanted a witness—and there was only one being in the entire world capable of standing witness and bearing it—and, if not an absolution (never an absolution) then at least, he wanted an acceptance.
And what does it make of me? He pushed his face into the crook of the sofa. The alcohol was taking over the nerve system quite properly now. He whispered, ‘I don’t know.’
…
Here’s a different catch: Aziraphale tended to be not entirely truthful, even with himself.
He claimed, for instance—claimed to himself solely, but the point still stood—that he liked the idea of Crowley.
The idea of something inherently vile being fundamentally not vile at all. The idea of a bad assumption driven into a bad impression, and a string of worse consequences. The idea of a deeper layer existing where it ought not. It all felt just the right amount of pleasing and ineffable; and Aziraphale almost believed it was all about that.
And yet it was hardly the idea that was captivating to Aziraphale, but rather it’s messy and loping personification.
So, here it went: deviousness, but underlined with a genuine fondness for being alive. Nervousness and overthinking intertwining with a childish excitement. All of it so oddly human within the blatant inhuman ways: yellow eyes, lithe as anything, silky dark hair. Sharp teeth, but in a smile. Oh, the devil.
Crowley looked like something one would like to soften with a sponge and possibly ask to calm down: all pointy angles and something in the way of agitation contained in the crooks and sinews. He looked laid-back, but in the sense that he’d been laid on a flaring surface of teething anxiety that prodded him to jump up occasionally. He looked a little bit of perpetually lost, and mildly like someone who would choose to sleep through a century just to shy away from having to continuously exist.
No, Crowley didn’t look like that, especially not at first glance, but that was exactly what Aziraphale could see in him anyway.
And here it went: Aziraphale didn’t like the idea of Crowley at all. He claimed he did, but in fact it nothing less than unnerved him. It made him uncomfortable, dampening the lines and thresholds Aziraphale preferred untouched.
But truth be told, Aziraphale liked Crowley.
…
A puppet, a snake, a half-rotten leaf pushed by the wind. Freedom so terrifying now, all of the sudden: a suffocating sense of being able to choose but left with no bearable options. And he was supposed to have chosen already, wasn’t he?
Various places: hollow, blue, noisy. Changing: he plague, great wars, small wars, murders, the slept-trough century and the drunk-through century. Aziraphale’s cold eyes and hands over the white tablecloth. Cold at him. An incapacity to love, or to speak.
And his life, too: so different from how it was. He sunk in a mauve armchair, not quite as he really was, a notch less jumpy. More focused. And Aziraphale was there—because of course he would—pouring his never-ending tea with a sense of utter calmness, talking of inscriptions on the last pages. Somehow more approachable, more palpable than in reality, captured in a cluster of Crowley’s memory. Somewhere close, and yet still over a threshold Crowley was never able to cross, because the thought of reaching out overwhelmed him. And he still couldn’t speak, not for the lack of capability, but rather the lack of anything he could say.
He couldn’t say, please, would you not leave me? He couldn’t say, look, I can be alone all they want, you know, but not without you.
And anyway, the fire rose around them and swallowed them before he could try.
…
He woke up briefly in a fit of tremors, sticky on the cooled-off leather. He dragged himself upwards, staggered to the kitchen, and found another bottle.
It had a name, this feeling, and it was an inevitable loneliness.
Crowley keeled over by the sink and threw up. He couldn’t stop trembling.
...
Aziraphale had never in his entire life broken into anyone’s flat before. And he had most especially never prised a door open with the sheer force of his inconspicuous physical body. And certainly not while wielding a brown paper bag full of vaguely warm breadstuff and a wine bottle, at that.
It later occurred to him that had he focused enough, the door would have likely let him in without all that fanfare. But as it was, the fanfare seemed the only thing that could have been done. Dramatic entrance-wise, and Aziraphale’s-inner-and-increasing-nervousness-wise.
He hadn’t been entirely sure whether he was doing the right thing as he hastily left the bookshop; in his flustered mind-set hardly even remembering to properly lock the front door or hide the best books from sight. And neither had he felt sure as he purchased a staggering—and fairly uneatable, he had to admit, certainly not in one take—amount of scones and other variety of bread to accompany one of his oldest and most fawned over Bordeaux.
Actually, all Aziraphale was more or less certain of was that he had screwed up royally on some very subtle level, as Crowley would likely phrase it, and very nearly let this shortcoming tumble downward into an irreparable disaster. He was also rather convinced that in order to remedy that blemish, he needed to see Crowley. Right away.
Which presented a problem, because he and Crowley didn’t exactly tend to pop each other’s visits at their respective accommodations. Well, unless Crowley had some particularly urgent thing to communicate and felt the need to express that by pointedly loitering by the window pane in his sparkling Bentley—innocuously attracting actual customers that Aziraphale would have to keep firmly discouraging until he came out and joined the demon.
(‘Feeling up to sssome gluttony?’ Crowley would then typically say, and Aziraphale would answer something mildly scolding that wouldn’t matter, because he would most possibly be feeling up to just that, and besides, he always felt safer to clutch at something while giving it full attention when Crowley drove. Everyone liked a false sense of security.)
Hence, strolling up to Crowley’s flat at nightfall in a nervously contrite manner that probably turned out more as baffled—as it tended to be with Aziraphale’s expressions; he rather thought he simply had that kind of face—was not a particularly safe idea.
Aziraphale could have been smashingly wrong in his faint ideas about Crowley experiencing some sort of an existential dread, and even more mistaken in the notion that his deeply poor attempts at assessing the situation between them had contributed to it. Especially given that he had a lingering sense of being late with the apology it as it was.
Which led to one rather unpleasant conclusion that he might be asked to leave, the occurrence of which would put yet a firmer strain on the feeble thread of whatever mysterious relationship he and Crowley had struck up in the past. And wanted to cultivate.
Well. Aziraphale wanted. Crowley remained as cryptic with any possible answer as ever.
He mulled this dark scenario over in his head as he walked, and the worrisome nature of the whole thing prompted him to cautiously consume one of the scones along the way, just to keep himself busy.
But any nature of doubtful thought evaporated quite thoroughly from Aziraphale’s head as his eyes registered the utterly impossible sight of Crowley’s Bentley parked haphazardly across the curb—the curb, outdoors, no less!—without as much as an attempt at clamping the wheels.
His blood ran cold. Ran freezing, even. In a moment of very rare self-consciousness, it occurred to Aziraphale what it must feel like to be human and entirely devoid of any control upon one’s own situation altogether. Ineffable, he thought in this cold terror, eyes skittering upwards to the dimmed windows of the apartment. Or simply insufferable.
It struck him forcefully how hunted the expression on Crowley’s face had been, back at the Ritz, and how detached his voice sounded at the car. Then he thought further back, and remembered something else entirely, a tiny wistful note in a voice that tried very hard to be nonchalant.
(‘We’ll be in touch then, shall we?’)
Stupid righteousness. Agnes Nutter could have advised something about that.
Aziraphale inhaled sharply. ‘Dear me, have I been thick.’
And, with both speed and grace that an angel could possess but that Aziraphale in his persisting physique would never strike anyone sane as possessing, he hurled up the shiny white staircase.
...
There was a giant, reverberating noise, like a breaking and fall of something large or like a gun-wound, and Crowley shuddered, coiled tightly and vibrating, a low whine at the back of his throat. He was too absolutely sloshed to distinguish between the Noise and the seizing panic growing inside him; and so perceived the combination as the keening of a dying reality. Nothing had worked out, then, nothing was saved in the end—this is the way the world ends, and I'm alone, and I'm damned—
‘Oh dear,’ said a miraculous voice, almost ringing from beneath the hazy cloud of Crowley’s incoherency, but still undeniably breathless and alarmed. ‘Oh my dear. Oh, Crowley, what have you done?’
Crowley exhaled shakily and uncoiled slightly from his tight bundle of nerves and limbs; looked up blearily with his ill-focused eyes.
Aziraphale was sprinkled with something white and windswept. A tartan scarf was tied haphazardly about his neck and he was wielding a wine bottle and a brown lump from which a baguette seemed to be poking out. He looked profoundly troubled, and, in the drearily white light poolimg from behind Crowley’s drawn blinds; profoundly bloody angelic.
For a moment, he didn’t even seem particularly corporeal at that.
‘Oh, gee,’ Crowley said, vaguely, letting his forehead fall limply to his hands again, ‘now, what a way t’go. Asssirafell. You’re my escort? My final—finale—the boatthingy. The river crossing. Or was that not ...? God. How good s’you. Good s’bloody you.’
‘Oh, dear boy,’ was what Aziraphale repeated, before rushing forward, the bag and bottle discarded somewhere along the way. Crowley felt a strong gust of fresh air, cinnamon and Aziraphale hit his lungs, and grew even dizzier.
That’s not how the world’s end was supposed to smell. That was the scent of his life.
...
There exist different kinds of terrible consciousness the world, and Aziraphale had experienced nearly every one of them as he fell loudly into the white and pristine flat, only to be welcomed by an utterly dead silence; and then, as he meandered almost blindly through the stuffy empty white air, to a stuffy empty white bedroom and muddled empty bottles.
But there is a single way one can feel when they see that—even though it had been swaying towards the precipice—nothing had yet crumbled, but merely lay quietly awaiting the descend.
He’d found Crowley in the kitchen, curled up on the floor with his damp hair and face buried in pale hands, and it was terrible, but it was better than any of the unspeakable alternatives.
He was breathing: out of habit perhaps, or out of illness, but the movement allowed Aziraphale to breathe out in relief as well.
‘Oh, dear,’ he had choked out, and watched the numbness stir, blinking owlishly at the almost discarded reality.
For any dithering or delusions, an answer to the question—Should I have?—came with impressive eloquence through those bleary yellow eyes. Yes.
Aziraphale had rushed forward without another thought.
…
Crowley slurred. Somewhere midway through the existential dread that Aziraphale prophesised, he’d faltered and stumbled across at point at which it was no longer possible to sober up and dull the sufferings.
Aziraphale thought he knew what the inside of Crowley’s perception looked like at the moment: splintered by the past and stitched together carelessly into a frightening haze.
When one was absolved from the only conclusion their fear had formed upon a traumatic episode—he could not remember what it was that Crowley had been trying to say back in St. James, but the certainty of the thought that it had been unimportant seemed suddenly far-fetched—there was bound to exist a hole in its wake. And Crowley had always been impossibly attuned to that sort of matters.
‘What?’ Aziraphale said breathlessly, half-willing to listen but mostly preoccupied by the task of propelling Crowley firmly on the hand he’d sneaked under his arms, and lifting him up.
It was a fearsome feat: Crowley was pliant and warm, which was a considerable relief for Aziraphale’s visions of stiffened cold limbs; but he was also heavier than his bony frame would indicate, and he did little to help in hoisting him up other than lean desperately into Aziraphale’s touch and murmur something that sounded vaguely wretched and hissing.
‘M’fine,’ he now mumbled, head resting heavily on Aziraphale’s shoulder. ‘Shouldn’t’ve gone all th’way, you. D’sssomething happen? An Arma—Armegnn—the, uh, Dun-thingy. Did? Thought t’might.’
He trailed off then, with a brittle sigh. Aziraphale secured his grip on the bony wrist and pulled them both upwards. Crowley swayed precariously on his feet, but his knees didn’t give way. Which was a good sign.
‘No, no end of the world for us, at least for now. Nothing happened,’ Aziraphale said soothingly, trying to assess the distance to Crowley’s bedroom and the energy that manoeuvring the demon thither would require. ‘Nothing commonly thought to be … er, ground-breaking. Mind you, I did come to a rather essential conclusion, regarding—well, matters of the rather more private kind. But that’s not, uh—let’s leave it for later, maybe, when you’re ... when ... oh, Crowley, dear boy, what’s happened here?’
I know what’s happened here, Aziraphale thought at the same time, clutching desperately at the trembling muscle of Crowley’s weakend arm, I’m the last blasted fool in the history of creation to have let it happen.
But he still had to maintain some sort of a pretence lest the demon decided to retreat back into his hollow shell. Flippancy it was, that he wanted to aim for? Be it flippancy, then. Two could play this game: Aziraphale just so happened to be paying a visit to the neighbourhood, and he just so happened to have been entertaining a fancy for demolishing a door.
‘Later?’ Crowley hissed, almost laughing, but the laugh came out more like a strangled cough, ‘S’no later. S’nothing. S’all—been nuff.’
‘My dear, I think that’s quite an overreaction,’ Aziraphale said anxiously. Then he demanded, ‘Have you intended to do this all day? Get yourself … in a state like that? Couldn’t you have given me a warning?’ He began to sound slightly desperate.
Couldn’t I have noticed the warning I was given?
‘Nuh.’ Crowley exhaled noisily, blurred eyes falling back closed. It was odd to see his face like that, even out of the eye’s corner. Like someone had spilled milk over the sharp angles and muted them, and it didn’t look right. ‘Dunno. S’just—didn’t want to do that. All that, all that life.’
Aziraphale was tense. ‘But why?’
‘Why?’ Crowley echoed, and Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he was even following him at all. But then he said, in a very small voice, ‘Alone?’
And then he quietened, breathing in an audibly laboured way.
…
Aziraphale half-led, half-carried Crowley to the pristine white bedroom sunk in greyish light, and laid him on the rumpled duvet. He took off the snakeskin shoes and unbuttoned the cuffs of the shirt, watching Crowley’s chest rise and fall to a faint rhythm. As though following an automatic reflex, the demon sighed and moved languidly, burrowing himself among the sheets and curling up beneath them.
‘Shouldn’t’ve come,’ he repeated feebly, face pressed into the pillow. ‘Wouldn’t, y’know. Wouldn’t die. S’not something I could do, s’too hard. I’ve never even …’
He trailed off again, as though losing the energy to try and follow through with a thought too grand to express while in such a state.
But Aziraphale thought he understood the idea: I would not have the courage. I’m not of the right stock for that.
The sentiment, though he’d clung to it fiercely for a plenitude of past and flurried years, presently made him sick.
(‘There seems to be this great sense of love. I can’t put it any better than that. Especially not to you.’)
‘You know, more than anything, I wanted to properly apologise,’ Aziraphale found himself saying, in a tone so flat in could only be a veil for something rather raw underneath. ‘Because I got it all wrong at Ritz. That whole affair with knowing … knowing about that feeling in Tadfield. That love. That was a stupid thing to say. Incredibly. To anyone, but especially to you. Human incarnate, you’ve said, about Adam, and you saw that in him before I even considered rethinking getting the boy slaughtered—the Adversary, really, what … what nonsense. About you, who are probably the only—’
‘Angel,’ came a very muffled sound from the pillows. Crowley’s eyes remained shut. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on ‘bout. None.’
Aziraphale swallowed. His heart was doing something funny and human, and it was more stressful than enlightening, if he was being frank. But that’s ineffability for you, he thought, cringing. And besides, any epiphany that lasted the entire walk through London was bound to feel unnerving.
‘You mean … a blasted a lot to me, Crowley, really,’ he said, in the same strained voice that would probably convince anyone who wasn’t currently trying to fuse with a damp pillow that Aziraphale was saying something utterly matter-of-fact, rather than coughing up his own heart. ‘And I’ve been trying to—ah, what I mean to say is, it’s an awful way to go about something like that, trying to deny something. Deny who some one is. Which, turns out,’ he gave a wan, unnoticed smile, ‘might just be more than I’ve ever been. Funny, that.’
Crowley sighed, or coughed, or perhaps simply stirred. His lids fluttered but he didn’t open his eyes. ‘Not true,’ he muttered. ‘I jus’ wanted … well, I dunno. I wanted. S’nothing noble, I’d sssay. M’not really any good.’
Carefully, Aziraphale lowered himself to the bed and sat down. He untied his shoes and took off the suit jacket, laying both meticulously down on a chair—there were some borders that just wouldn’t do with crossing.
Then he lifted his legs onto the blankets and reclined tentatively into a more horizontal position, folding his hands on his lap. Crowley made no noise or movement to acknowledge this absolutely heroic and ridiculous thing Aziraphale had just done, but merely tensed a little, persisting in silence.
‘Well, then,’ the angel said, in a very low voice, ‘I think that makes two of us.’
Another strained breath came out from Crowley’s half-buried face. Aziraphale braced himself, heart hammering in his chest. Now that he’d persevered and wasn’t pushed away, not quite, he might as well follow through right there: right into the seamless anticipation. No need for rushing anything, but even less so for dawdling. There’d been centuries of that already.
Very slowly, and very deliberately, he reached over to stroke his fingers through Crowley's hair. His forehead felt damp and feverish under Aziraphale’s touch.
Crowley twitched at that, moved almost imperceptibly closer and leaned into the touch. All of it almost involuntary: catlike, sleepy and yearning for warmth; seemingly settling into a new alter ego, having lost the semblance to the snake somewhere along the way.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Aziraphale whispered, and his voice snapped. The flatness gave way at last: he sounded confused, and brittle. ‘With you.’
Crowley released something that might just have even been a very nervous and breathy chuckle. ‘You’re asking me?’
‘Yes,’ Aziraphale muttered, throat tight. ‘I’ve never ...’
‘Angel, come on,’ Crowley then said, and somehow, he managed to sound much clearer and infinitely more present right now; almost unbearably. No attention to be diverted, no evasions. Yellow eyes flashed hazily in the darkness: but they looked warm and hesitant. ‘Me neither.’
Aziraphale closed his eyes, letting himself move lower and closer, one hand sneaking around Crowley, fingers of the other brushing through his hair again. Crowley sighed again, drawing complimentarily closer and nuzzling Aziraphale’s hand. And finally, slowly relenting from the seizing tension.
No, there is no pattern to follow here, Aziraphale thought briefly, it’s all improvisation now, blind and so hopelessly hopeful.
He thought he rather liked the idea.