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When they left the Ritz, the sun had already sunk behind the buildings and was close to disappearing below the horizon. The sky was red and then purple and then grey as the color of it deepened into the dome of night. The streetlamps came on simultaneously around them and Aziraphale thought briefly of the time when someone had to come along on a very tall bicycle and light them by hand, or by stick. So ingenious, humans. Never let their desires get too far ahead of them.
Around the angel and the demon, the humans went on with their lives: laughing, rushing, arguing, singing, busking, driving, shopping, existing. The noise of the city pressed in and kept Aziraphale from feeling like he was too far removed from all of it. It was possibly the most beautiful night he had seen in the six thousand years he’d been on this planet—in the top five at least—but it was a night that was also sagging under the weight of an unexpected future. Aziraphale didn’t know if Crowley could feel it the same way that he could, time stretching forward from them like an exhale under duress.
Eleven years was quite a bit of time to get used to the idea of losing everything, regardless of whether you ever actually came to terms with it, even for beings as long lived as they were. And it wasn’t like he had been preparing for his own death. Not intellectually anyway. He had been certain his side would win, that he would somehow manage on without all of this, possibly without Crowley, which would have been the worst of it, but manage on all the same.
What he had not done was stop to consider what managing on would look like. If he had, it would not have looked like this. It would not have been him and his best enemy/best friend walking along the streets of London in a bright new coin of a world. The light pollution was still too much for the emerging stars to be visible, but the hundreds of years old buildings were shining well enough with their Adam Young imbued Grand Importance that it felt like the stars were present all the same.
“It’s all a decent attempt,” Crowley said, head tilted back so he could study the tops of the buildings as they passed, looking for cracks in the artifice. “Considering he’s probably never actually been to London proper.”
“I imagine he pulled from the general knowledge of the world,” Aziraphale replied. “The antichrist doesn’t know what Paris looks like, but the Parisiennes do. And anyway, even if there are differences, no one is going to notice. What is it you said to me, it’s reality?”
“That it is,” Crowley said. “Now.”
“It’s enough to make one want to go exploring. I’d rather gotten comfortable with the idea that I’d seen every part of this planet, but now that I know there have been changes to the very history of it, it feels a little like a challenge. Ah well, that will probably fade in a few days as reality settles.”
Crowley reached out and tugged on the elbow of Aziraphale’s overcoat to keep him from stepping into the street as a slick red car sped around the corner and squealed away as quickly as it had appeared. “Mind you don’t get discorporated, Angel. I’m not sure we could convince anyone to put you back to rights.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I do suppose we’ve just got each other to look out for now.”
Crowley tilted his head. Aziraphale wished he could see his eyes, but he could still tell by the twist in his lips that he was thinking very hard about something. Probably something he had thought very hard about before, because it was a face Aziraphale was familiar with. Though it usually only appeared after several bottles of wine.
He waited too long to let go of Aziraphale’s coat. “Er, sure,” he said hesitantly. “S’jus you and me now.”
That felt more like a question than a statement, but Aziraphale wasn’t sure he had the answer, so he gave Crowley what he hoped was an uplifting sort of smile and then crossed the street.
Crowley kept up, hands now tucked as deeply as they could be into the pockets of his tight black trousers. The streetlamps tossed a steady light onto the trees and pavement and people, but it didn’t sit steady on Crowley as he moved between them. His whole being seemed to shift in and out of shadow, light disappearing into the wrinkles in his jacket and the hollows of his form.
“We could go off, you know,” he said after a few blocks. “No one should come looking for a while at least, and it’s not as if we have to take any jobs we’re given, even if we do decide to sort of become free agents.”
“No, you’re right, we don’t have to do anything,” Aziraphale said, and the night sagged just a little more with the added weight of his wonder at that.
He was an angel. Angels had purpose. They did what they were told for the good of the world. Or the good of someone, at least. He had thought anyway. He wasn’t sure anymore. Is it better, he wondered, to do bad in the name of good, or to do good in the name of nothing? And how do you know you’re doing good if there’s nothing to measure it against?
Crowley made a noncommittal grunt in response.
Aziraphale was 98.5% sure that Crowley could not read his mind, but he had a habit of being able to pick up on the vibe of Aziraphale’s thoughts. This had come in handy over the last several millennia because it cut down on Aziraphale having to use his words, which frequently left him feeling wrong footed and incomplete. There were just some nuances it was easier to get across when one didn’t have a body holding all the meaning in.
They were nearing Crowley’s flat now and a small dread started to build in Aziraphale’s stomach, because nearing the flat felt a little bit like nearing the end. Not of the world, perhaps, but of the night, as Crowley had promised to drive Aziraphale back to his bookshop from there. But Aziraphale was not ready for it to be over. He was not ready to go back to his bookshop and give in to this feeling that when he was alone, he was now utterly and completely alone.
In the past, even when Crowley was sleeping or wiling or just off taking in his worldly pleasures in forms that did not include Aziraphale, Aziraphale had never felt alone. He always had the other angels, even though he didn’t like most of them. He always had God. He could always reach out to someone if things got too bad or too good. Now, even though those channels were still there, even though he could still feel them when he reached out, he knew that it wouldn’t be wise to use them for a good long while.
He didn’t want to be alone. He wasn’t very good at it.
Crowley’s gait slowed as they rounded the corner toward his front door, no doubt sensing the hesitation in his companion. “D’ya,” he stopped, swallowed, started again. “Do you want to come up?”
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Aziraphale said, reflexively. He gave himself a good mental kick.
Crowley sighed and gave him that thinking very hard look again. “Come on, Angel.” He pushed the door open and Aziraphale followed him up.
It was the second time he’d been to Crowley’s flat in as many days. Last night he had been quite fearful and a little tired. Tonight, he was quite tired and a little fearful. He still found the energy to side eye the statue in Crowley’s entryway, though the sheer intimacy of it no longer made him as uncomfortable as it had in years past. Crowley claimed it was a gift from Michelangelo for help with getting the statue of David just right and that it was futile to try to read anything into it. Aziraphale, who had also known the sculptor, thought he knew better.
There were certain books in Aziraphale’s shop that he lingered over. Ones that he came back to time and again when he was feeling lost or hungry or desirous of something he couldn’t put his finger on. They had become restful objects that reminded him of who he was, deep down. Aziraphale wanted to know if this statue was one of those things for Crowley, but it seemed impolite to ask.
If Crowley could sense that train of thought, he ignored it. “Tea, Angel? Or something stronger?”
“Do you have any brandy?”
“I can have whatever you need. A little life, coming up.” Crowley disappeared into the kitchen.
Aziraphale removed his overcoat and draped it over the back of the boxy, modern couch before folding himself into a corner of it.
When Crowley returned he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses, and this lifted Aziraphale’s spirits considerably. Crowley handed the drinking glasses to Aziraphale, filled them both with amber liquid, and then took one of the glasses back after he’d put the bottle down on the sleek black coffee table. He folded himself more compactly into the opposite corner of the couch and rested his head against the tail of Aziraphale’s overcoat.
Aziraphale sipped at the brandy and let it sit on his tongue for a moment. He let himself relish the warm smoke and sweetness of it, let himself be grateful that there was still such a thing as brandy. Or such a thing as uncomfortable leather couches for that matter. Such a thing as auburn hair against tan material.
“So,” Crowley said, lips almost on the brim of the glass. “Where to first?”
“I seem to remember someone insisting Alpha Centauri was nice this time of year.”
Crowley swirled the brandy in his glass and looked into it like he might be able to use it to divine the future. “You don’t want to start somewhere a little closer to home? There’s probably a train station somewhere in Wales with a fanciful new clock or something. Maybe a dragon as the new station keeper.”
Aziraphale highly doubted that there were any real dragons anywhere. Adam had a fanciful imagination, but he had also learned the difference between what was real and what he wanted to be real. That was more than a lot of other people, or angels for that matter, knew. It might be more than Aziraphale himself knew. Crowley was watching him with his golden, unblinking eyes and there was a pool of warmth slowly spreading in Aziraphale’s chest that may have been the brandy or may have been the gaze. He sat for several minutes trying to work it out, but not trying too hard.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said finally. “I feel like before it was very easy to know what I wanted, or at least what I should want. And now….”
“Now it’s your own decision,” Crowley said, not unsympathetic.
Crowley had been an angel once after all, and while whatever was happening to Aziraphale was probably not quite the same as Falling, it was just as upending. The simple truth was that while Aziraphale had been busy trying to maintain the status quo, the status quo had not been as invested in maintaining him. The last week especially had put him in the habit of making rash decisions, and here he was in the aftermath, sitting across from one of those decisions and drinking brandy like everything was fine. Everything was not fine, but he didn’t know how to say that out loud without sounding like an actual eleven-year-old child, which he had never been.
“I told you fifty years ago. I will take you wherever you want to go.”
“To the stars then,” Aziraphale said.
Crowley blinked slowly in agreement and finished his brandy.
It was impractical to try and drag human approximate bodies four and a half light years, and neither of them knew what would happen to them when they got there anyway, so they did their preparations and just stepped out of them. Crowley, who had a habit of sleeping for decades and evading his home office, had a bedroom that doubled as a sort of safe room where they left the bodies side by side on a king-sized bed made up with incredibly soft black monogrammed sheets. If Aziraphale had been even a little less weary he would have poked fun at Crowley for those. He made a note to later if he was feeling up to it.
They were both much paler without their bodies, there being no blood to ruddy their skin. Aziraphale’s hair stayed more or less the same, but Crowley’s was longer. Not quite as long as when Aziraphale first met him, but there were still rather pretty ringlets in parts of it and Aziraphale realized that he had been missing those and the way they framed the sharp angles of Crowley’s face.
Aziraphale took a step back and imagined himself some clothing that was roughly what his body on the bed was wearing. Crowley did the same, but he left his hair as it was. In his celestial form his eyes shone all the way across and in much the same way the gold flecks the angels in Heaven painted themselves with did. They were, all in all, stunning. But then, everything about Crowley was usually designed to stun in one way or another. It was a thing Aziraphale had rather started to take for granted over the millennia, the attractiveness of his friend.
“So, do you know how to get there?” Aziraphale asked.
“Of course I do,” Crowley scoffed. “I put it where it is.” He held his hands up and concentrated on them until a black, light eating orb appeared between them.
Aziraphale got the sense that it was spinning, but he didn’t know why because his eyes couldn’t actually focus on it. There were very few things in the universe that uninhibited angel eyes could not see. It clicked suddenly, what Crowley meant for them to do.
“No,” Aziraphale said. “I refuse to go by quantum entanglement.”
“Yes!” Crowley crowed. “We’ll just travel down the knots and tangles like a rope.”
“Tangled up particles are not a map!” Aziraphale cried, taking a step away from Crowley and the pet disaster he was molding in front of them and the glee in his eyes. “We could come out anywhere! We could be eaten by dark matter! No one even knows what happens to beings who end up in it!”
“Ah, trust me, Angel,” Crowley said. Then he raised his hands above his head until the ball expanded to cover them both and before Aziraphale could say another word they were zipped down to half the size of atoms and hurtled away into space time.
The ride was like being inside of a ping pong ball in championship play, except darker as they ricocheted from one spinning particle to the next down a line of reversing spin. Aziraphale couldn’t see Crowley, but he could feel that he was nearby, a knowledge that kept his panic to a manageable eleven on a scale of one to ten. If he still had lungs, he probably would have come out the other end hyperventilating. Instead he merely fell out of the blackness and onto a rocky plateau of purple dust, yelling every rotten word he had ever heard Crowley use over the course of the six thousand years they’d known each other.
“Goodness,” Crowley said, stepping out in a much more dignified manner and wiping his hands together to erase the orb. “Do you pray to God with that mouth? You’re going to make me blush.”
Aziraphale pushed himself to his knees and glowered at Crowley. “Angels and demons don’t blush. Also, I hate you.”
“Those are both untrue and you know it.”
Crowley reached his hand out and Aziraphale took it and let himself be hauled to his feet. Because they were no longer covered in skin and all its dampening effect, the touch left Aziraphale with a surge of residual fondness and exhilaration. Crowley, it seemed, legitimately loved travelling that way. It was a wonder he hadn’t managed to figure out how to make the Bentley go faster than light. But then, neither of them had driven it since Adam replaced it, who knew what it was capable of now? Who knew what any of them were capable of now?
“Come on,” Crowley said. There was an actual twinkle in his eye. “Let’s go see some sights.” He strolled across the plateau like he was walking through St. James Park, hands in his trouser pockets and face turned up to the light. He had an irrepressible grin that Aziraphale had not seen anything like on him in quite some time.
Aziraphale followed more unsteadily. The ground was jagged with reddish rocks, and between them blue and purple sands mixed with gleaming turquoise ice slush. They couldn’t feel the cold, but they still made contact with the surface, which meant Aziraphale was slipping through some patches and tripping over others. They could also feel the winds that whipped around them. It blew Crowley’s hair back from his face in auburn tendrils and blew sand and ice alike into intricate patterns around the rocks only to be rearranged again in a matter of moments. The sky was reddish-orange like a sunset, though he could see the closest of the stars was high in the sky.
“It’s quite ephemeral,” he said, trying to catch up to Crowley so he could walk beside him. “Hard to imagine a good tailor opening shop around the corner.”
Crowley slowed his stride just a bit to make Aziraphale’s life a little easier. Probably his ease with the terrain had something to do with the slither of him. He reached out in front of him and pulled a needle and thread out of thin air and handed them off to Aziraphale. “Anything is possible,” he said.
Aziraphale took the needle and thread and placed them into his pocket, because there weren’t any places to put his rubbish either and he didn’t want to litter on this pristine planet. It felt a little weird that they were here leaving their footsteps, but he was consoled by the thoughts that the wind would wipe their footsteps away anyway, and that they weren’t the first beings to walk this land. Aziraphale knew they weren’t because the land existed—which meant that angels had walked it when they created it—and because Crowley seemed so confident in where he was going, which meant he hadn’t been joking about being one of the angels who created it.
Aziraphale had always known intellectually that Crowley had probably had a hand in creating something in the universe. All of the angels who fell had jobs and places of rank at some point. He had been curious of course, but never asked Crowley about it because it seemed a sore subject. And now here Crowley was, clearly proud to be back in a part of the universe he had once touched, and to be sharing it with Aziraphale.
They walked the alien terrain for what must have been miles, up and down rocky outcroppings and very tall hills. Crowley was excitedly yammering on in a way Aziraphale had never heard him speak before. He told Aziraphale about that closest star, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf, which was a type of star that they’d worked extra hard on in R&D to keep the helium from building up in the core.
“Star like that can keep its shine for trillions of years,” Crowley said. “The sun’s only got a few billion left on the outside.”
“So you’re telling me I’ll have to go without tailors eventually anyway,” Aziraphale said. Without lungs the heavy sigh that was implied at the end of the statement remained silent.
“What pampered things we’ve become,” Crowley replied. As they trudged over the crest of the latest hill a cropping of what looked to be a mangle of bleached bones appeared at the foot of it. “Come on, we can rest there for a bit and I can tell you about the other two stars that you can see, just up there where the atmosphere is thinnest.”
They began the trudge down.
The bones were trees, as it turned out, though they looked more like windswept driftwood than anything Aziraphale would consider a proper tree. They all erupted up out of the spaces between rocks and then after a few feet of growth bent sideways at rough angles, growing parallel with the ground in thin pale lines that reached for the horizon. There was hardly a crook in a branch suitable for a bird to build a nest in or a squirrel to curl up on. Not that it mattered. Aziraphale hadn’t seen any animals on the planet so far who might need those crooks.
Crowley dropped down next to one of the curved, white trunks all the same and crossed his long legs as he leaned back into it, as comfortable there as he would have been against any tree in London.
Aziraphale sat down gingerly next to him. “It is quite incredible,” he said.
Crowley gave him a grin and tilted his head back against the wood so that he was looking up through the bent branches at the sky. Aziraphale scooted closer to the trunk so he could do the same, careful that their shoulders didn’t brush so he didn’t overshare any annoyance or doubt. He didn’t want to be the thing to bring Crowley down.
“Where is home then?” Aziraphale asked.
Crowley swept his eyes across the darkening sky and then pointed in the opposite direction of the red dwarf. “There, just in front of the Heart Nebula, though they’re both difficult to see from this distance. Even with our sight.”
“How far away is that one?”
“Much farther than home. About 7,500 light years.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe that we all actually made all of this. I know we did. I remember the long days of it, but there’s just so much universe and what seems like so few angels and demons comparatively.”
“Think of how the humans must feel.”
“The humans have made rockets that can touch some of this. I think mostly they feel a challenge.”
Crowley hummed. He was so much more unguarded up here than Aziraphale had ever seen him, as if he was reverting to what he had been like before all of this was ripped away from him. Aziraphale hadn’t known him then and he was a little sad about that, but he wouldn’t trade that Crowley for this one if God Herself tried to make him.
“Maybe,” Crowley said. “But probably some of them just feel tired, and some of them feel awe, and some of them feel love, and some of them feel disappointment. Bloody brilliant, humans. They’ve figured out more than either side wants to give them credit for.”
“That is the truth,” Aziraphale said.
They lapsed into silence as the rest of the darkness fell. The binary stars grew brighter in the sky along with every other star and planet out there. A meteor shower ripped across the plane of the horizon like distant fireworks. It wasn’t that much different from stargazing on earth, except there was no other light to crowd out the pin pricks of radiance.
Every time Aziraphale’s mind drifted to Crowley he tried to bring it back to heel by counting the stars above him. He never got more than a hundred or so in before his thoughts wandered away again. They had been friends since the beginning, and he had hardly ever seen Crowley this carefree. He knew that being a demon weighed on Crowley in a way it didn’t appear to weigh on most other demons he encountered. He knew that Crowley liked the odd chance to do good. The Arrangement had been his idea after all, and it had taken Aziraphale entirely too many hundreds of years to work out why.
There were probably six thousand ways that Aziraphale had not been fair to Crowley over the course of their friendship and some of that time he had let himself believe that whatever callous or cowardly thing he was doing or hiding just wouldn’t affect Crowley that deeply because Crowley was a demon. He was ashamed to admit that for a very long time he didn’t see Crowley as his equal, as someone worthy of the affection that he had so ill-advisedly (or so he believed at the time) wanted to give Crowley from almost the beginning.
And that was nonsense, because the reason he’d wanted to give that affection away in the first place had been because Crowley was kind to him when no one else was. Crowley, even when he was grousing or complaining or peacocking about to make a point, was always kind to him. He was in less danger with Crowley than he was with most of the other angels in Heaven.
Crowley hated to admit it, because he had a job description to live up to, but he was a good person. He was a thoughtful person. And he was a deeply involved, deeply invested person. Crowley did not do things by halves—not wiles, not miracles, not world saving, and not friendship. Crowley had saved Aziraphale countless times over the years, even when it might get him into trouble, and Aziraphale had not spent nearly enough time thinking about the why over the how.
Aziraphale obviously did give Crowley the affection he harbored for him and had for millennia. It’s why he refused him the holy water for so long, for one thing. But it was also why he let him into the bookshop whenever he wanted and offered him jobs he knew Crowley would enjoy more than he would and picked up things here and there that he thought Crowley might like. They weren’t ever presents per se, because he didn’t want to crowd Crowley’s minimalist life with a clutter of reminders of himself, but they were absolutely enticements. Things he knew Crowley liked that he let Crowley know he had so that Crowley would want to keep hanging around.
He was on the cusp of a realization about himself that he didn’t think he would find very flattering. He pushed it away.
“Crowley,” he said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about any of this before the world was going to end?”
Crowley didn’t say anything for several long moments. Aziraphale had just about worked up the nerve to ask a different, less invasive question when Crowley finally answered.
“I...I thought there might be too many questions,” he said. “Questions like that, certainly, but more pressingly questions from our superiors. I didn’t want to tell you if I couldn’t show you, and I couldn’t show you as long as upstairs and downstairs would both notice we’d buggered out of the solar system together.”
The way Crowley said the word ‘together’ tugged roughly on something in Aziraphale’s chest.
“There’s only so much plausible deniability I can bluster through off the cuff.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Aziraphale said. “I’ve heard you bluster through some real pieces of work, my dear.”
Silence again, but when Aziraphale turned his head Crowley’s eyes were closed and he was smiling. Not his usual sharp grin, but a genuine, soft sort of smile.
“You wanted to share all of this with me?” Aziraphale asked. “This whole time?” He felt like an idiot. A careless idiot.
“I want to share everything with you,” Crowley said quietly. “That’s why I asked you when it was important.”
Aziraphale prided himself in being the sort of hedonist that took every bit of pleasure he could from every moment available to him. He didn’t feel this was a knock against him. He was far from the only angel with pride issues, and being a hedonist was easy to do when you were an immortal being who didn’t have to sleep or maintain health or clock into a job for too many hours of the week. And now here he was, four and a half light years away from most of his small pleasures, but closer than he’d ever been to the one pleasure that had been a constant in his life as far back as he cared to remember.
He shifted and casually bumped his shoulder against Crowley’s, testing the emotion in the water. The burst that came from the contact was warm and unrestrained. Aziraphale leaned away from the tree and turned to face his Other, his Enemy, his Friend. Crowley’s eyes were still closed. Aziraphale reached out and brushed a curl away from Crowley’s forehead.
Crowley opened his eyes and looked at him. He didn’t move. He simply watched and waited to see what Aziraphale was going to do next. Aziraphale traced the side of Crowley’s forehead with his finger, and then he cupped his cheek with his hand. Crowley turned his face and pressed into the touch.
The feeling that moved through Aziraphale was overwhelming. It was a giant, shifting sand dune of emotion that wound its way through his mind and heart the way a snake moves through the desert. It wound its way up the place where his spine would be if he was in his body and squeezed. It was the fondness and exhilaration from earlier pressed up until it was deafening. It was the laughter that always hid just behind so many of their petty arguments. It was the joy of discovering some new love or obsession and knowing exactly who to share it with. It was the fear of being alone that he’d felt earlier in the day, only doubled on itself into an impossible chasm. It was the hope that came with believing fear didn’t have to be succumbed to just because it was there.
Most importantly, it was the two of them on the garden wall as the first rain began to fall on the earth. Aziraphale remembered offering his wing up in case Crowley wanted to stay out of it, but he had wanted to feel every second of it. He had felt so lucky to be one of the first beings in the entirety of existence to know what rain felt like, to have helped work so hard on an intricate and beautiful piece of machinery and finally be there when it was switched on. Only this time he was getting it from Crowley’s point of view, this time it was tinged with a bemused sort of awe that couldn’t believe its luck in finding another being who made decisions they weren’t sure about but believed in all the same.
“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said.
Crowley’s hand flew up to clap over Aziraphale’s. “Don’t let go,” he said.
“No,” Aziraphale agreed.
He shifted again until he was leaning sideways against the tree. He slid his hand down to Crowley’s shoulder and across his back as he pressed their foreheads together, letting his weight come to rest against Crowley the way it had so many times in the past. He wrapped his free arm around Crowley’s waist and held on to him tightly, as if he was worried this planet’s winds would blow them away from each other. Crowley clung to the arm across him with both hands as if daring the wind to do just that.
Not that they needed to worry. What was a little wind in the face of a bond that not even Heaven and Hell had managed to tear asunder?
There were no windows in Crowley’s bedroom—windows were not safe—so Aziraphale didn’t know what time it was on earth when he returned to his body. He didn’t know what day it was either. They could have been gone for a day, they could have been gone for years. He hoped it wasn’t the latter, because that might make some things to do with the bookshop bothersome, but it would have been worth it regardless.
Next to him Crowley opened his eyes and shifted his muscles, stretching and refilling every nook and cranny of his physical form. It was a great deal harder to fill in his form than Aziraphale’s, Aziraphale now knew, on account of how many sharp angles there were.
Over the years, Aziraphale had slowly worn his body into being all gentle slopes and soft landings in much the same way he’d worn the overstuffed chair in his back room into a perfect balance of lumpy and plump. Crowley’s body might as well have been his blasted watch, all jagged and impossible. It was quite demonic of him, how he never made anything too easy, not even for himself. Like, for instance, how he had just dragged Aziraphale across the galaxy just to tell him something he could have told him back at the bookshop after four bottles of champagne.
Even so, the part of Aziraphale that missed attending poetry salons in the late 1800s had to admit that wouldn’t have been the same. Words, tools of the devil, he was certain of it.
Crowley settled onto his side so that they were facing each other. His lids were low. He ducked his head and yawned. “Hey, Angel.”
Aziraphale got the impression that Crowley was stubbornly holding on to his idle sleepiness as a way to keep the world from intruding on this new thing between them. Aziraphale himself did not know how to do that, yet, but he would not try to drag Crowley from it. Not this time.
“Mon ange,” Crowley said.
His voice was a little rougher through his physical lips than through his celestial ones. The ease that Aziraphale had felt in Crowley on Proxima Centauri b was already starting to evaporate away and leaving the dryer, more sarcastic demon Aziraphale had known all this time behind in the salt residue. This was fine. Aziraphale had loved Crowley before he had known Crowley could be so unguarded, and he would continue to love Crowley even if that version of him never reappeared. For the next several billion years at least. He was confident on their odds against Heaven and Hell should it come to that again. Slightly less confident on their odds against the sun.
But maybe humanity would have moved on to another star by then. Maybe one day there would be a park around a bent and twisted tree the human race didn’t yet know existed. Maybe Heaven and Hell would have moved on to another game altogether and they would be called home in peace. It wouldn’t do to dwell on it. The maybes would come unbidden, it was what they did with the time before them that mattered.
Crowley reached across the empty sheets between them and placed his hand on Aziraphale’s cheek. The only warmth that Aziraphale felt from it was the body heat of skin on skin. He knew that, for a while at least, he would be chasing the exquisite simplicity of being able to know Crowley’s mind by simply brushing against him.
Aziraphale didn’t even begin to know where to start that chase. Crowley, who had spent his entire existence pushing the limits of speed and good sense, apparently had a few ideas. He pushed forward and pressed his lips to Aziraphale’s.
The kiss was warm and soft. There wasn’t a transfer of coherent thought, but the emotion was there all the same. No questions, no hungry desires, no eager pushes for more than Aziraphale could give, just a simple statement of fact. I am here for you. I am here for you. It was the opposite of the fear Aziraphale had of being left alone. It was the promise of being known. There was a flutter in his gut like a dead dove being magicked back to life.
By the time Crowley pulled away Aziraphale’s lips were tingling. It was odd and utterly beautiful to know that after six thousand years his body could still surprise him. That Crowley could still surprise him.
Aziraphale shifted so that he could be closer to Crowley and something stabbed him in the thigh.
He gasped and rolled onto his back, reached down to check his pocket.
He pulled out the needle and thread Crowley had given him on that other planet. He started laughing when he realized what it was, and placed it onto the bed between them. He hadn’t noticed at the time, but the thread was the same iridescent turquoise color as the snow they had slipped through.
“Will miracles never cease?” he said, shaking his head.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Crowley said. “Where to next?”
Aziraphale ran a hand through Crowley’s hair and Crowley leaned into the touch.
“What about a train station clock tour of Wales?” he asked. “I heard a rumour there may be some fanciful clocks to see. Maybe even a dragon in a small cap.”
Crowley grinned at him and it was an echo of his true smile. He placed his hand over the needle and thread. “Grand. I’ll just add this to our bags in case any of those dragons need help replacing a button, shall I?”
Aziraphale rested his hand on top of Crowley’s. “You should do whatever you want,” he said. “All I ask is that you let me do it with you.”