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For a while, after the world didn’t end, they just sat on the bus together and didn’t speak. Humans got off at the stops; other humans started to get on and then found themselves inexplicably changing their minds and stepping back onto the pavement, befuddled faces disappearing into the night as the bus pulled away.
They were alone and about an hour out from London when Aziraphale closed his eyes and slowly, cautiously, rested his head against Crowley’s shoulder.
It was another twenty minutes before he said in a small voice, “I’d like to stay at your place.” And then, surer, like someone stepping nervously out onto a stage and finding that they knew all the lines after all: “I would like that very much indeed. It was very kind of you to offer.”
Crowley almost argued with that. Saving the world from Armageddon or not, he was still a demon. He didn’t do ‘kind’. Selfishness, low-level spreading of chaos, that was his thing. For example, right this minute he was miracling up a ten-mile tailback, ruining the evenings of hundreds and hundreds of humans, just so he could have a little longer sitting here in the quiet with Aziraphale warm against his side.
Maybe that particular example wasn’t going to prove his point.
“All right,” he said instead. “Good.”
They were almost home – a destination that was going to be quite the surprise to the happily oblivious bus driver – when Aziraphale nudged the back of his hand against Crowley’s, and laced their fingers together. Crowley squeezed his hand, and didn’t draw attention to the fact that that had taken him two hours. From a certain point of view, it had taken six thousand years.
“It’s a big flat,” Crowley said lightly. “Lots of room for bookcases. I should’ve always had books around the place, really. Show the plants what happened to all those trees that weren’t pulling their weight.”
“That would be lovely.” Aziraphale tried to smile, a wistful, pained thing. Crowley had the odd thought of trying to catch that fleeting look and hold it there, with his fingers, with his own lips. “What a shame our former sides aren’t likely to leave us alone long enough to redecorate.”
“Redecorate,” Crowley repeated, more to himself than the angel. The word had made him imagine, all in a flash, his flat transformed: warm lighting and piles of books and half-drunk cups of cocoa and some atrocity of a tartan blanket over the back of his sofa, but beneath that oddly appealing mental image there was something at the back of his mind, a thought like a loose thread that he couldn’t quite catch.
Choose your faces wisely, Agnes Nutter had written.
Long after, although it would take centuries before he’d admit this even to Aziraphale, he would wonder if there hadn’t been some divine spark at work that night. Nothing so grand as a miracle. Just a little nudge in the right direction. The tiniest sign that somebody Up There – the somebody Up There – was looking out for them both.
“We’re here,” Aziraphale said, although both the bus pulling around the corner onto Crowley’s street and the loud expletive from the driver had already clued him in. The angel stroked his thumb across the back of Crowley’s fingers, and didn’t let him go.
“I think,” Crowley said, “I’ve just had an idea.”
The hope and trust that dawned across Aziraphale’s face made Crowley hesitate, thinking hard about what he was going to say next until he was quite sure it wasn’t going to come out as by the way, I’ve loved you since the beginning of the world.
“We’ve probably got at least till morning before they come for us,” he said. “How fast do you think you can learn my walk?”