hello babies, welcome to earth

Aziraphale turns to look at him and he’s welcomed by a vision of black and scarlet. A striking contrast to everyone’s whites and silvers.

The man is wearing a pair of boots Aziraphale finds almost outrageous. They’re black suede, and end right over his knees. Their heels are just a little too high, and the suede wraps around lean ankles just a little too cheekily.

Crowley comes to Aziraphale’s rescue, helping him get into his costume before the masquerade. Except he’ll end up helping with a little more than that.

Words: 6,603

Status: Complete

Rating: Explicit

@chamyl

Aziraphale hand studies + Who We Are + crying

(lyrics from Who We Are by Hozier)

Part two of this series found here. More to come!

Aziraphale hand studies + Who We Are + crying

(lyrics from Who We Are by Hozier)

Part two of this series found here. More to come!

We start with their first bitter exchange, Aziraphale’s hurt pride leading him to say,

“Look, I know you’re upset with me.” “Yep.” “But I’m willing to overlook that.” (Oh come ON, angel. Come ON.) … “Close the door on your way out.” “But... you don’t have a door.” (Priceless.)

Then, though. Then. Crowley goes after Aziraphale almost immediately. And Aziraphale doesn’t expect it. Doesn’t know, at first, that it was Crowley who’d opened the door to the bookshop. Aziraphale’s “Crowley!” once he realizes it is an exhale—startled, gentle—and it absolutely murders me, the way he says Crowley’s name.

Their confessions start before that, of course—those rough, pained, raw confessions. Confessing their loss to others—sometimes, at the most inopportune times.

“I’ve lost worse things than that.”

“Heartbroken. World broken. What’s the point of anything?”

Muriel asking Aziraphale, “Why don’t you ask your… friend friend to help?” and Aziraphale hurrying to say that no, no, it’s out of the question—with that whole journey his face goes through as Muriel persists, “He might like to see you, anyway. Last time I saw him, he wasn’t in the best way, to be honest.” Then, Aziraphale finally turns to her, focused so completely on what he hears. “He seemed a bit… lost,” she goes on—and in a heartbeat, before she’s even gone out of the room, Aziraphale is miracling himself to Earth.

We go immediately from Aziraphale saying, “I needed Muriel. I needed someone to work with me in Heaven who was… nice.” “Ah.” to Crowley’s “You weren’t here. I wasn’t going to lose this place as well.” (Please, I beg of you. Somebody make a gif of the way Crowley says it, of the way he swallows at the end of it, turns his head.)

“I’ve come to get my friend back. And our c—his car.” (djkdfjkdf Aziraphale, you’re perfect.) “You’re a friend of his?” Brian Cameron says in disbelief. “No, he’s not.” “I rather think I am. I’m rescuing you. And liberating our Bentley!” (Perfect.)

Crowley hovering over Aziraphale’s shoulder for the whole competitive crossword solving business and his little smirk when Aziraphale brightly says, “Finished!”

How proud is he of his angel, do you think?

Years. Literal years that Crowley has been taking care of his bookshop. Has been dusting it, protecting it, keeping away vandals and rats. (Has he been dusting it by hand, this last while after his miracles were cut off? Aziraphale doesn’t know this yet, but if he knew.)

All these years, Crowley waited, and Crowley cared.

(Love the way Aziraphale announces to Brian: “I’ll take the car… and my friend.” I just bet that some part of Crowley, angry and hurt though he is, is warmed by this. By Aziraphale rescuing him, at just the right time. By Aziraphale repeating, over and over: my friend. my friend.)

And their car ride is key, I think, to them starting to understand each other. Nothing like a bit of forced proximity to begin untangling things. 

There is still plenty of hurt on both sides. They bicker. They exchange barbs and pointed comments.

“Right, let’s get it over with. So, where is Jesus?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” “Well, no. Otherwise, I wouldn’t need to find him! And I wouldn’t need y—“ “Wouldn’t need me. Nice. Gotcha.”

Aziraphale isn’t done speaking when Crowley interrupts him, but is anything he might’ve said better than anything else? “Wouldn’t need you to drive me goodness knows where?” “Wouldn’t need you to help me find him?” “Wouldn’t need you?”

Crowley has made his point, though. They go on.

(To the audience, their bickering is, as always, a delight. Even here. Even now. “What are we going to do? Ring a bell? Leave out snacks? Hang signs on lamp posts saying ‘Missing Messiah, can offer Small Reward?’”)

I do love Aziraphale trying to break the awkwardness by finding music that Crowley might like, in vain, and Crowley hitting right back. “Stop flustering me, I can’t—I can’t think straight!” Aziraphale wails. (Oh, I bet, angel. I just bet.)

Then, though, then they get to the real thing. The hurt. The “you can’t change anything, it’s all rigged, the entire universe.” The “you leave me to go back to sort out Heaven, and you’ve made it into more of a mess than it was already.” The “you could have avoided all this, I asked you to come with me.”

And Aziraphale finally, finally responds with something he'd never said this plainly before. “How could we have been happy, knowing that we were leaving all these people to goodness knows what awfulness? … I just wanted to save everything so that everyone could have a chance, including us!”

This is key. This is where Crowley starts hearing him, I think. Yes, things have gotten desperately bad, but also Aziraphale is finally admitting it openly: an ‘us’. He’d wanted an ‘us’, too, and he’d wanted everyone to have a chance. And he understands how important it is to Crowley for everyone else to have a chance, too—even if Crowley himself has given up on it, has resigned himself to the inevitable fate of the world.

Crowley starts hearing him.

“To Heaven? You most certainly are not!”

“You clearly can’t do this on your own, come on.” (The chucking of the ice-creams? Priceless.)

And the thing is, the thing is. Crowley says ‘you cannot do this on your own,’ because he would always say that. That’s what he does; that’s his armour. That’s him hiding vulnerability. And what he’s doing right now is very vulnerable: he is following Aziraphale upstairs, the one thing he said he would not do; going with him to the one place where he had said he would not go. What he is not saying, but what’s coming through so loudly in what he does is angel, I hear you. This time, I hear you, and this time, it’s going to be both of us, we are going to do this together. Despite the hopelessness, I am going to try. I’m with you, angel, I’m not going to leave you there alone.

Aziraphale said ‘this is for us’, and Crowley heard him.

(I wish we had more time. Of course I wish we had more time. To see a few more moments between them. It had to be Aziraphale, miracling Crowley an outfit for Heaven. Those skin-tight trousers, dear Someone. What else could we have seen, had we been able to follow their elevator ride? Have heard?)

And in Heaven, they’re both of them perfect. They could complete each other’s sentences. “Complaint duly noted and registered,” Aziraphale says to Saraquel’s objections. (A&C’s mirrored expressions in that moment kill me.)

“Will it make a difference?” Saraquel says, and Crowley answers in Aziraphale’s stead (this is what he thinks about all kinds of making a difference): “Oh, no.”

Aziraphale and Crowley start validating each other. “That’s brilliant,” Aziraphale says to Crowley’s suggestion that reality is being edited. Crowley, after arguing that Aziraphale is certainly NOT a master of disguise, has to concede “Oh, that’s actually rather good”—and coming from him, that is High Praise.