Mouseman25

The Bentley was never meant to fly. 

That had always been more of a guideline than a rule, really — the same way “don’t fall” had been a guideline, and “don’t go native” had been a guideline, and “do not under any circumstances, develop feelings for the opposition” had been the sort of guideline that entire theological frameworks crumbled around. So when Crowley hauled back on the steering wheel with both hands and the old black car lurched upward through a sky that was increasingly less of a sky and more of a wound in the fabric of something that no longer had a name, he supposed he was keeping a very consistent track record. 

The radio played “Don’t Stop Me Now.” 

Of course it did. 

“She’s burning faster,” Aziraphale said, his voice pitched carefully calm in the way it always got when he was in fact the precise opposite of calm. He was gripping the dashboard. His knuckles had gone white. His halo — he’d stopped bothering to hide it, somewhere around the time Uriel had been unmade — cast a pale gold light across the instrument panel. “Crowley. She’s burning faster.” 

“I see that.” 

“The Crab Nebula is gone.” 

“I know.” 

“Crowley—” 

“I know, angel, I can see it going, I can feel it—” And he could. That was the horrible part. He could feel each page like a cold draft through a window that didn’t exist anymore, a small erasure, a breath going out. Six thousand years of knowing the shape of the world, and now the world was being unknotted, thread by thread, and every thread was a small screaming nothing. It was worse than the Fall. The Fall had been an act of violence. This was an act of tidying. 

Michael had always been the worst kind of bureaucrat. The kind who genuinely believed in the paperwork. 

The Eternal Flame was visible now — a pillar of white fire that wasn’t fire at all, burning in the center of something that wasn’t space, at the coordinates of what had once been the middle of everything. It had no heat. It had no warmth. It predated the concept of warmth by a considerable margin, and regarded warmth the way a shark regarded the notion of friendship: theoretically aware of its existence, entirely unmoved by it. 

And there was Michael, standing at its edge, the Book of Life open in their hands, face tilted upward in the expression of someone who has spent too long in meetings about the apocalypse and finally, finally gets to see the deliverable. 

The last hundred or so pages were fanned in their hands. 

“Get me closer,” Aziraphale said, and there was something in his voice Crowley hadn’t heard there before. Something terribly old. Not the old of six thousand years on Earth, living among humans and acquiring opinions about restaurants. The old of before. The old of being present hen the hydrogen coalesced. When the first light said yes. 

“If I get you any closer the Flame will—” 

“Get me closer, Crowley.” 

He got him closer. 

The Bentley screamed. Not metaphorically — she screamed, every molecule of her magnificent 1926 construction protesting this particular aeronautical indignity with an eloquence that British engineering rarely achieved. The temperature gauges spun. The radio flickered. Freddie Mercury briefly became static became silence became Freddie Mercury again, urgent and defiant. 

“MICHAEL.” 

Aziraphale’s voice came out of him like a chord. Not a single voice — a chord, every octave he’d ever had, every tone from the dawn of the first morning. Crowley’s ears rang with it. The Bentley’s windscreen cracked in a single clean line. 

Michael looked up. 

In the white light of the Eternal Flame, the Archangel looked very small. That was the thing Crowley had never been able to articulate about Heaven’s soldiers — how small they looked when you stripped the certainty away. Michael had spent all of eternity being absolutely sure, and absolute sureness, it turned out, was a very efficient substitute for actually being large. 

“Aziraphale.” Michael’s voice was conversational. Politely surprised. “You’ve brought the demon.” 

“His name,” Aziraphale said, “is Crowley.” He had opened the car door. He was standing on the running board — actually standing on it, in the void between everything and nothing, his coat whipping in a wind that had no right to exist, his hair gone golden in the light of the Flame. “And I am asking you, as Supreme Archangel, as someone who has served Heaven since before this universe existed — please stop.” 

“The plan—” 

“The plan,” said Aziraphale, with a gentleness that was somehow more devastating than fury, “was never this. I have read every version of the plan. I have stood in rooms where the Metatron spoke for God and I have watched miracles and I have—” His voice caught. Just briefly. “I have made every mistake that it is possible to make, trying to serve something I thought was bigger than myself. But this isn’t the plan. This is you, Michael. This is what you want. And I’m asking you — I’m begging you — don’t do this because you were afraid of what I was changing. Don’t unmake everything because Heaven felt like it was becoming unfamiliar.” 

Michael’s hands tightened on the Book. 

“The Second Coming was supposed to mean something,” they said, and for just a moment Crowley heard it — the grief underneath the bureaucratic certainty. Real grief. An Archangel who had believed so completely and so long that belief had calcified into something that couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and was now destroying the world rather than let the world ask questions it didn’t know how to answer. “It was supposed to be the fulfillment. And you were going to make it a — a party. A picnic. You were going to have him shake hands with people in a community garden.” 

“Yes,” said Aziraphale. “I was.” 

“That’s not—” 

“It was going to be lovely.” Aziraphale’s voice broke open. Not with sadness — with something that sounded almost like joy. “It was going to be exactly as lovely as anything he ever did when he was here, and I was so proud of it, Michael. I was so proud because for once — for once — I thought I had understood what all of this was for.” He spread his hands. The empty hands of an angel at the edge of everything. “It’s for them. It has always been for them. Not to test them. Not to judge them. Not to end them on schedule. It’s because they are extraordinary, and they know that they’re going to die, and they love each other anyway, and I have lived among them for six thousand years and I am still not done being astonished by it.” 

Silence. 

The Eternal Flame burned without burning. 

Crowley, who had not moved from the driver’s seat, who was technically still gripping the steering wheel with both hands because his body had apparently decided that was a thing that needed doing, felt something in his chest do what it always did in Aziraphale’s vicinity: go embarrassingly warm. 

“Give me the Book,” Aziraphale said quietly. 

“If I give you the Book,” Michael said, “everything comes back.” 

“Yes.” 

“Every page I burned—” 

“You haven’t burned the last ones. And the Eternal Flame doesn’t destroy what it unmakes — it holds it. You know that, Michael. That’s why you chose it. Because somewhere underneath all of this, you didn’t want it to be permanent. Because you’re not a monster.” Aziraphale’s voice was gentle now. “You’re just very, very frightened.” 

Something crossed Michael’s face that had no name in any language that humans had ever invented and several that they hadn’t. 

Slowly — slowly — they held out the Book. 

Crowley exhaled. 

What happened next was — not simple, exactly. Nothing about the restoration of existence was ever going to be simple. But it was faster than it had any right to be, because Aziraphale turned out to be very good at it, which probably should have surprised no one given that he had spent centuries perfecting the art of finding things that were lost. 

He sat in the backseat of the Bentley — which was hovering, technically, in what was technically still a spatial location, more or less — with the Book of Life open across his knees and his eyes closed, and he remembered. 

That was all. He just remembered. 

He remembered Alpha Centauri, specifically the smell of it, which was not a smell anyone had a name for but which Aziraphale had always privately thought of as ambitious. He remembered the exact specific amber of autumn in the Cotswolds. He remembered the way the light hit the Thames on a clear morning in October. He remembered a bookshop in Soho, and the weight of old paper, and the particular satisfaction of finding a first edition that everyone else had overlooked. He remembered a garden, and a wall, and a sword, and an apple, and a conversation that had changed everything about everything. 

He wrote it all down, in the Book, in his careful copperplate hand, and the universe unfolded itself back into existence like a letter that had only been waiting to be read. 

Crowley watched him do it. 

He told himself he was watching to make sure nothing went wrong. He told himself he was watching because someone had to, practically speaking. He told himself many things, and all of them were true, and none of them were the point, and the point was that six thousand years was a long time to watch someone, and Crowley was beginning to suspect he could have done it for six thousand more without finding anything tedious about it. 

“Crab Nebula,” Aziraphale murmured, frowning slightly at a page. 

“Still there,” Crowley confirmed, checking what remained of his metaphysical awareness in the direction of the Crab Nebula. “You got it back.” 

“Good.” A small, satisfied nod. “I’ve always liked that one.” 

“You’ve never said that before.” 

“I’ve always thought it.” He turned a page. “I haven’t said a great many things. I’ve been working on that.” 

The radio had come back on. Freddie Mercury, uninterrupted now, finishing what he’d started. 

Outside the cracked windscreen, stars were reappearing. 

Michael, when it was over, stood at the edge of the Eternal Flame and looked like a very old building after the scaffolding had been taken down — smaller than expected, but also, somehow, more itself. 

“What happens to me,” they said. Not a question. Not quite. 

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale said honestly. “That’s above my authority. It always has been.” He paused. “But I don’t think the question is what happens to you. I think the question is what you do next.” He tilted his head, in the way he always did when he was choosing words carefully. “Heaven needs to change, Michael. It needed to change before I was given this job, and it needs to change now. The question of whether it changes well depends rather a lot on who is left inside it, willing to do the work.” 

Michael looked at him for a long time. 

“You were always the strangest of us.” They said finally. It didn’t sound like an insult. 

“Thank you.” Said Aziraphale, as though it wasn’t. 

Jesus — the actual Jesus, who had spent the last several hours being extremely patient about all of this while hiding in South London — was retrieved from a community garden in Peckham, where he had been having what witnesses would later describe as "a very nice chat with some bloke about compost." He seemed entirely unbothered by the whole situation. He shook Aziraphale's hand. He shook Crowley's hand. He looked at Crowley with an expression of friendly, total comprehension that made Crowley feel profoundly seen in a way he found extremely uncomfortable, and then he said something very quiet in Aramaic that Crowley would not translate for anyone later, no matter how much Aziraphale asked. 

The Second Coming, when it happened — on a bright Thursday in late May, in a community garden in Peckham, with almost no preparation and a great deal of cake that someone had brought because someone always brought cake — was not what anyone had planned.

It was better.

They didn’t talk about it until they were back in the bookshop. 

That was where things tended to get resolved, eventually. The bookshop had an unusual talent for it — something in the walls, perhaps, or the particular quality of the dust, or just the accumulated weight of so many years of two beings refusing to say what they meant in a space that had slowly become the most honest place either of them knew. 

Crowley sat in his chair. Aziraphale sat in his. Between them, on the little table, a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Aziraphale had opened without comment, and two glasses, and the silence that was currently doing the work of a very long conversation. 

“I should apologize,” Aziraphale said. 

“You shouldn’t—” 

“I should, and I’m going to, so please don’t interrupt me, I’ve been practicing.” Aziraphale looked at his hands. “I have spent six thousand years believing that there was a correct way to do things, and that if I could just find it— if I could work hard enough, be good enough, serve faithfully enough — then everything would come right. And I kept asking you to wait. For me to be certain. For circumstances to be better. For it to be the right moment.” He exhaled slowly. “And then I accepted a promotion, and I watched your face, and I thought — I’ll explain later. I’ll make him understand. It’ll be alright.” A pause. “I had the same thought several times during the last six thousand years, actually. I’m beginning to see a pattern.” 

Crowley said nothing. 

“The truth,” Aziraphale continued, still looking at his hands, “is that I was afraid. Not of Heaven — or not only of Heaven. I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped waiting for permission. Because if I stopped waiting, then I would have to admit that I had already made my choice, and I’d made it a very long time ago, and the choice was—” He stopped. He looked up. His eyes were very bright. “Well. The choice was sitting in the other chair. Wearing extremely tight trousers and pretending to read a magazine he held upside-down for forty-five minutes.” 

A beat. 

“I was reading that.” Crowley said. 

“You absolutely weren’t.” 

“It was a very abstract piece.” 

“Crowley.” 

“Fine.” He set his glass down rather harder than necessary. “Fine, yes. I know what you’re saying. I’ve known what you were saying for — for considerably longer than I find comfortable to admit, actually, given how long it took either of us to say it out loud.” He looked at the ceiling, which was easier than looking at Aziraphale, except that it wasn’t really, because there was a water stain up there in the shape of something he’d always found personally significant. “For the record. When I walked away in the street. After.” He stopped. Started again. “It wasn’t because I didn’t want to stay.” 

“I know.” 

“I couldn’t stay and pretend that was all right. Watching you go back. I couldn’t—” He stopped again. There was a significant and undignified pause during which Crowley contemplated his wine, the ceiling, and the general unfairness of having survived six thousand years and the literal apocalypse only to be undone by something as embarrassingly human as this. “I missed you,” he said finally, at the ceiling. “Every day. The whole time. I took up gambling and drinking and I was honestly terrible at both of them, and it didn’t help even slightly.” 

Silence. 

Then: “Anthony.” 

He looked at Aziraphale. He hadn’t called him that in — he couldn’t remember. Centuries. Maybe ever. 

Aziraphale had gotten up from his chair. He was standing in the space between the chairs, which was not a large space, and which was now occupied entirely by an angel looking at him with an expression that had no name in any language, but which Crowley had spent a very long time memorizing the exact shape of. 

“I made you wait,” Aziraphale said quietly. “For a very long time. And then I left. And you deserve better than that. You deserve someone who—” His voice went slightly uneven. “Who says it. Clearly. Without making you guess.” 

“Angel—” 

“I love you,” said Aziraphale. Simple as that. The way you’d state a fact that had always been true and simply hadn’t been said yet. “I have loved you for so long that the shape of it is just the shape of how I understand the world. You are — you are my constant, Crowley. You always have been. And I’m sorry it took me this long to say so plainly, and I will quite understand if you need time, or if you’re angry with me, which you have every right to be, or—” 

“You’re doing it again,” Crowley said. 

“Doing what?” 

“Apologizing and then pre-emptively managing my response so you don’t have to feel the full weight of saying it.” He stood up. Which put him considerably closer than the space between the chairs had been designed for. “Stop managing it.” 

Aziraphale stopped. 

Crowley looked at him. The bookshop was golden around them — late afternoon light through dusty windows, the smell of old paper, the familiar specific quiet of this particular place that had always felt like a kept promise. Crowley had been in every great city in the world. He had watched civilizations rise and fold like linen. He had seen the whole long arc of human history, brilliant and terrible and funny and strange, and he had spent most of it orbiting this one specific being as though he were a planet that had forgotten he was supposed to be free. 

He’d done it entirely on purpose, was the thing. 

“Yeah,” he said. “All right. For the record: same.” He made a vague gesture that encompassed, in no particular order: the bookshop, Aziraphale, the last six thousand years, the general direction of the restored universe, and everything he’d never been good at saying. “All of that. Every word. Back at you.” 

Aziraphale laughed. It was an unsteady, relieved, slightly tearful laugh, the laugh of someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had just been told they could put it down. 

“That’s the least romantic declaration in the history of any world,” he said. 

“Six thousand years, angel. I think we’re past romantic declarations.” 

“We’re absolutely not.” 

“We’re so past them—” 

Aziraphale kissed him. 

It was not a particularly dramatic kiss, as kisses went. There was no soundtrack — or actually there was, because the radio was still playing, and it had moved on to something by the Proclaimers, which was so perfectly absurd that Crowley felt a wave of affection for the universe so overwhelming it nearly knocked him sideways. It was just a kiss, in a bookshop, between two beings who had been finding reasons to touch the same books and sit in the same rooms and stand slightly too close in the same gardens for six thousand years. 

It lasted a while. 

When they separated — slightly — Aziraphale had the expression of someone who has been proven right about something important, which was an expression he wore with what Crowley could only describe as the most infuriating serenity imaginable. 

“See,” Aziraphale said. 

“Don’t.” said Crowley. 

“I’m not saying anything.” 

“You’re absolutely saying something, with your face—” 

“I’m saying nothing. I’m merely—” He gestured at himself. At the general state of affairs. At the bookshop around them, which remained exactly what it had always been: dusty and overstocked and slightly impractical, a monument to the stubborn insistence that beautiful things deserved to exist. “I’m merely noting that I was right about this being worth the wait.” 

“You made me wait on purpose—” 

“I made both of us wait, and I am sorry for it, and we are going to discuss it at length over dinner—” He was already moving toward the kitchen, because he was an angel and some things were sacred. “ — but first you need to eat something, because you have the look of someone who has been gambling and drinking in an alley for two years—” 

“I’ve been fine—” 

“You have not been fine, you’ve been miserable, and I can tell because I know exactly what you look like when you’re miserable—” 

“I was very stoic about it—” 

“You were stoically miserable, which is the very worst kind.” Aziraphale paused in the kitchen doorway. He turned back, and his face was — open, in the way it so rarely was, all the careful management of expression simply gone. Just him. Just this. “Stay,” he said. 

Crowley looked at him. 

Outside, London was doing what London always did: going on. Cars and voices and the distant particular music of a city that had been more or less continuously inhabited for two thousand years and fully intended to keep at it. The universe was whole and turning. Jesus was apparently considering attending a series of community meetings, which everyone agreed was very much in character. Heaven was having some significant conversations about governance. Hell was, as far as anyone could tell, sulking. 

The bookshop smelled of old paper and the particular quality of dust that accumulated only in places where someone had chosen, on purpose, to stay. 

“Yeah,” Crowley said. “All right.” 

He meant: yes. He meant: of course. He meant: I was always going to, I’ve been staying in one way or another for six thousand years, you absolute impossible angel, and I would do every single ridiculous minute of it again without changing a single thing except possibly the part where we didn’t say it out loud for quite so long. 

He meant it the way he’d always meant the things he said to Aziraphale — sideways and dense with implication, a code that had been built up over millennia until it could carry the weight of anything. 

Aziraphale heard all of it. He always had. 

“Good,” he said, and went to make dinner. 

Later, the bookshop was lit with the soft light of an evening that knew it was going well. Two glasses. One bottle, mostly gone. An argument about whether the Principality of Darkness was more or less organized than the Department of Celestial Affairs (Crowley: more, on the ground that at least Hell had the good sense not to use the word principality). The radio on, softly. The city outside. 

Crowley had his feet up on the little table and was reading something he’d found wedged between a 1952 edition of Bleak House and what turned out, on closer examination, to be a handwritten manuscript with Aziraphale’s copperplate on the front cover. He’d asked about it once and been told, with considerable dignity, that it was private, and had elected to take this at face value while making a mental note to ask about it every few decades until the answer changed. 

He watched Aziraphale out of the corner of his eye. The way he moved through the bookshop — tidying, occasionally speaking to a book that had ended up in the wrong section, running his fingertips along spines with an expression of soft and specific happiness. The way he’d been doing it for the better part of a century. The way Crowley had been watching him do it for most of that time. 

He thought about Michael’s face at the edge of the Eternal Flame. About God’s plan, which remained, as it had always been, ineffable — but which had a strange persistent tendency to point, from whatever direction you approached it, toward this bookshop and these two chairs and this specific quality of evening. 

He thought about six thousand years. 

He thought about what came next, which was more six thousand years, more or less, assuming the universe maintained its recently-restored cooperative attitude, and felt something settle in him like the last piece of a very complicated sentence finally finding the right word. 

Aziraphale looked up and caught up gazing. 

“What?” he said. 

“Nothing,” said Crowley. 

Aziraphale smiled. It was a small smile. The kind that knew it was the right answer. 

He went back to his books. 

The radio played on. The city went on. The universe, mended and whole, turned its enormous slow patient turning. 

And in a bookshop in Soho, at the end of the world that wasn’t ending after all, two beings sat in two chairs and said everything they needed to say in the language they’d been building together for six thousand years — the language of staying, and of knowing, and of choosing, again and again, the same answer. 

Aziraphale, Principality, Angel of the Eastern Gate, and newly appointed Supreme Archangel of Heaven, knows when he leaves Crowley behind that he is making a mistake. He also knows it may be the only way to stop The Second Coming from, well, coming. With a bigger war on the horizon, this time for all the marbles, Aziraphale takes matters into his own hands. Meanwhile Crowley, devastated and heartbroken, only wants to sleep the pain away. But when an old colleague comes knocking, he may not have that choice. The world is ending again, and stopping it just might depend on an angel and a demon finally learning how to talk about their feelings.