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Aziraphale had been back on earth for exactly one hour.
Sixty whole minutes, and he was still standing rigid as a soldier, agonisingly far from Crowley. He had spent most of those precious minutes trying to explain why he needed his old friend to help him one more time. Something about Heaven, something about the son of God returning and the end of eternity. All Crowley could hear was his heart thumping in his chest. All he could feel was that damn kiss, the one that it seemed to him had sealed the deal and sent Aziraphale back into the arms of the kin who hated and despised him. It tasted like the whiskey he had downed to try and drown out the memory of that awful day. It tasted like Chardonnay. It tasted like him.
“Are you listening to me at all, Crowley,” the angel asked imploringly. His tawny brows were furrowed, the little line between his eyes deepening as they searched him for any sign of understanding.
Crowley frowned.
“Why are you standing like that?”
“Like - Crowley, did you hear me? I’m talking about the Second Coming! I don’t think we can avoid it this time. I’ve been trying so hard. I've missed you so terribly! All I wanted was to protect the world from its makers, so that the people could go on living! So that we could go on living! I…I don’t think we finished our last conversation properly. I hoped we could try again.”
For the third time, by Crowley’s count, the angel winced, an act so minute that it would have been imperceptible for anyone other than his companion of millenia. Aziraphale was always proper, at least while he was sober and public-facing, but now he seemed almost frozen in position. And his hands - those soft, longed-for hands, with the silly, neat little nails.
“You keep reaching for your back, just a little, but, there! You did it again!”
Aziraphale’s blue eyes darkened. His clasped his hands together over his middle, the small ring on his pinky finger turning with its owner's self-conscious ministrations. His lips twitched. “I’m sorry. Gabriel was always telling me I gesticulate too wildly.”
Crowley stepped closer to him. Somewhere behind them, the sign on the door flipped, from Closed to Go Away.
Cautiously, he reached out. Gently, almost deferentially, he put one one of his calloused hands over Aziraphale’s.
Aziraphale looked around, eyes wide. “Crowley, I can’t be sure we're alone! You know He was watching last time, don’t you?”
Crowley nodded grimly. “He’s not here now, though. And something’s wrong with you.”
The angel laughed shakily. “Me? Crowley, when I came here you were passed out in the alley.” Tears suddenly sprung to his eyes, and he gripped the hand of his old friend. “Why didn’t you come in? You know you’re always welcome in the bookshop, wherever I may be.”
“I don’t need the bookshop, angel. I need you. What’s happened to you? Did they hurt you?”
For the first time since his return to earth, Aziraphale watched as Crowley removed the dark glasses from his eyes. His heart ached to see those yellow eyes look at him once more, then broke all over again at the pain he saw in them.
“My dear boy,” he started, quietly, “I am so, so…”
“Don’t say it.”
“Sorry.”
Crowley took a deep, shuddering breath, then refocussed. His mouth softened, just a little, just enough for Aziraphale to see that he’d been heard, in this at least.
“You come back from a little sojourn as heaven’s best bureaucrat and you don’t feel right. Aziraphale, I promise, I won’t even think about helping you again until you tell me the whole truth. What did you have to do to get this information, and don’t give me that crap the Metatron said. You and me both know he’s full of shit.”
Aziraphale’s eyes flickered up to heaven, a force of habit. But he caught Crowley’s eye and nodded. “It was not a matter of just being given the keys to the city. They wanted to know I would be…manageable.”
Crowley’s heart dropped. He looked again at Aziraphale’s awkward, almost pained posture. Anger coursed hotly through his veins. With immense effort, he tampered it down and spoke.
“Angel, take your shirt off.”
Aziraphale had the audacity to blush. “I hardly think that’s appropriate.” He looked up desperately at Crowley, pleading. “You know how I like my creature comforts.”
Crowley’s heart ached as he nodded. “That I do. But, please, show me anyway.”
Aziraphale sighed. “Oh, alright, but please, don't get upset. I let them. I needed them to trust me.”
“That isn’t trust,” Crowley replied, watching his old friend struggle with his bow-tie and jacket. “It’s torture.”
Aziraphale rolled his eyes, even as his face betrayed more pain.
On the second pearly button he stopped and looked at Crowley questioningly. His whole demeanour seemed to say, “Oh, would you?”
Crowley let out a strained breath. “Come here, then,” he said, stepping forward to help Aziraphale out of his shirt; his armour here on earth.
As the cream shirt fell down his shoulders, Aziraphale put a warning hand on Crowley. “Don’t be too angry at them,” he said, gesturing up “I know you were right about them.” He licked his lower lip nervously, and looked up again through his dusty blond eyelashes. “But I did this for the world. Our world, Crowley. Our world.”
Slowly, he turned around.
Even as he predicted what he would find under the comfort-worn undershirt, Crowley felt his whole being shudder as he pulled it slowly up and off his friend.
Gashes.
Two deep gashes for wings.
Crusted with blood and gold. Twine pulled the wounds coarsely together, criss-crossed in two mocking plaits down Aziraphale’s strong back. At their edges, something black leaked, hot and rancid.
“Say something. Please.”
When the former demon didn’t reply, Aziraphale spun around to face him. “It's not that bad, Crowley, I'll be right as rain in no time!”
Crowley choked, and said something incoherent.
Aziraphale pawed his face, and the shock of that tender touch was enough to render him speechless all over again.
“It's going to be alright, Crowley. I know it is, because we’re together. We can fight them all. I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right with you and make the earth safe for a long, long time to come. Are you with me? ”
“Your wings.” Crowley almost sobbed, remembering the angels gorgeous, palomino wings. Always so messy, until Aziraphale finally allowed him to preen them, around the turn of the century. “They mutilated you!"
Aziraphale nodded, but his eyes remained bright as he wiped an escaped tear from Crowley’s stubbled cheek. “I recall they did a similar atrocity to you, my boy, and you are just as wonderful as ever you were.”
Before he could object to the praise that left him weak at the knees, Aziraphale put a finger to his lips and hushed him. “Besides, I never needed my wings to fight.”
Crowley swallowed hard.
"Do you really mean it?”
“Which part?”
“All of it. You and me against the great plan all over again. And…wanting to be here, with me?”
Aziraphale smiled and put two firm hands on Crowley's upper arms and squeezed. Then he looked down at his bare chest, scattered with blond hair, and blushed again and, to Crowley’s amazement, laughed. Like Adam, back in the garden, naked and unconcerned.
“I’m serious, angel, I can’t do this unless you’re all in. And if you are, you should know how I feel. I know it's too strange flesh and vile bodies and all that for you, and it's too human, and it's not becoming of a demon, but I love you in a human, fleshy way and that’s just the way it is, so, so…what?”
Aziraphale had covered his mouth with his hand. Crowley could see him almost shaking to contain himself.
“I mean it, Aziraphale.”
“I know. I know, my dear, dear boy. And I assure you, my love for you…it is human as the blood in my veins. Here.”
He took Crowley’s hand and placed it resolutely on the warm skin of his chest.
“Feel.”
Crowley squirmed, then felt it. That familiar thud. Aziraphale’s heart beat just like his, and he could feel it. Miraculous. Alive.
“And as for the rest of it…well, I really do want to try that last scene again. A little gentler this time, if you don’t mind?” he said, eyebrow twitching upwards in that infuriatingly bitchy way that made Crowley want to ravish him right here and now, apocalypse be damned.
He smiled. Properly. Butterflies flew uninvited in his belly as he looked down slightly to the angel he had adored since the Beginning.
“You’ll have to ask, nicely, of course.” Aziraphale said primly, eyes twinkling.
“Oh, alright. Angel. Aziraphale. Will you please put that smart, pretty little mouth on mine or so help me - umph.”
He’d barely finished speaking when he found his words muffled by a kiss.
This time, they kissed like two lovers on the brink of discovering everything. They kissed like the world was about to end, and only their love could stop it.
Aziraphale buried his hands, with surprising ferocity, into Crowley’s hair. Crowley keened into the angel’s mouth like a language. His hands avoided the painful remnants of his stupid, noble sacrifice in heaven, falling inevitable lower until the angel broke the kiss with a real, hearty giggle.
They looked at each other, panting and half-blind with lust and love, and their foreheads came to rest together. Nothing had ever felt more natural.
“I’m with you, angel.” Crowley promised. “To the end of the world. And the next one, and the one after that too.”
Holding each other closer than they had ever dared, an angel and a demon smiled.