Chapter Text
The bus ride to “Oxford” is passing quietly, as monumental as it is. They’re sharing a bus row (for the first time since the invention of buses), thighs touching, passing a wine bottle back and forth. They need to plan-- for all that the world’s safe, they’re in rather mortal peril-- but Aziraphale is feeling shell-shocked, and Crowley looks worse. (At least Aziraphale’s clothes are fresh, substantiated by the Antichrist himself. Crowley’s, on the other hand, have passed through a terrifying quantity of flame since breakfast.)
The demon keeps staring out the window, toes tapping bebop. Aziraphale is watching him, discreetly as he can. Better that than dwelling on the bookshop burning, or that they’re on their own side now, or even that it actually took the world almost ending to get an invite back to Crowley’s flat! No, far better to just watch the street lights and headlights pass across Crowley’s hawkish face, when he can risk a glance.
The bus pulls up right to a swanky bit of Mayfair, and Aziraphale chats the driver through the brain fog of turning around and heading home. He miracles an extra hundred pound note in his pocket for his trouble, then steps off after Crowley, who is slinking up the front steps of a brutalist high rise.
The lobby is dreadful-- all glass and concrete. Crowley hits “12a” on the elevator, and they ascend to the penthouse in silence.
A little hand wave at the top, and the apartment door swings open. “Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,” he intones, a bit of Nanny Ashtoreth’s voice coming out, and he ushers his chuckling guest into the entry hall… only to mumble, “Well shite,” at the sight of a perpetually-sizzling puddle of overcoat on the floor.
“Is that..?”
“Ligur, or what’s left of him, and yes, my insurance policy. Thanks. If he and Hastur had both gotten through that door I wouldn’t be here now.”
One SNAP from Aziraphale, and the holy water is gone, demon-grit along with it. “I’m sorry for doubting you.”
“Oh, let’s not tread that ground again tonight, eh? We saved the world, just a bit. Ta-da! Why don’t I get you a drink?” Crowley pushes the door the rest of the way open, into what must be an office and the rest of the flat.
In fifty years of idle musing, the possibility that Crowley’s would be a concrete minimalist cave with an indoor greenhouse somehow hadn’t occurred. “Oh, these plants are lovely!”
“Hush you, you’ll spoil them,” he grumbles, sounding oddly resigned. “Come on, booze is this way.” Crowley leads Aziraphale through from the plants, past a rather homoerotic winged sculpture, and into a chrome-laden kitchen. He bangs through three or four cabinets, until imagination and luck and perhaps prior labor result in an amber bottle and a pair of tumblers.
“Scotch for you, and now I need to be soot free. Make yourself at-- huh-- at home.” It’s usually a light phrase, meant to be casual, but they both hear the reminder of the burnt bookshop at the same moment; they choose to ignore it together as well. “Back in a mo.”
Those hips saunter away, and Aziraphale lets himself watch. He’s got a plan (thank Go- Sa- Agnes), but if he’s wrong then he’d rather have one more chance to stare at that fiendish backside.
Might as well have a look around, he thinks, after a shot or two of courage, and lets his feet drift about the flat.
There’s a sitting room, on the other side of That Statue. (Is Crowley baiting him with that thing? Gracious!) He’s excited to see a bookshelf, until he realizes it’s only got records and discs. There’s a futon, well-abused, and more art about.
After that, Aziraphale saunters back past that statue (ahem), down the hall and through the greenhouse, which truly is beautiful in its sparse way, to that peculiar office on the other side. Just a massive desk and enormous gold throne, and not much else (besides what must be an original sketch of the Mona Lisa), with another hallway beyond…
Oh.
Oh dear.
Aziraphale knows that sculpture, at the end of the hall-- knows that the eagle was not originally an art piece. It’s the lectern from that church that was bombed in the Blitz, the night Crowley saved Aziraphale and his books from some double-crossing Nazis. He must have come back for it later, and then put it up in his home, to stare at from his office chair every day since? Oh dear.
Of course, Crowley pops back out now, freshly showered and clad only in black trousers. At any other moment in human history, almost without exception, the droplets of water still clinging to his skin would have Aziraphale ready to discorporate, but his eyes are rather stuck in the past right now.
“Hey, angel, I was just thinking we could…” Crowley glances up, sees Aziraphale staring at the art behind him. “Shit. I can explain.” Those lovely golden eyes are the size of dinner plates.
“My dear boy, you don’t need to. I’m just surprised, a bit.” That clearly wasn’t what Crowley was expecting. “I didn’t realize that that night had been important for you too.”
“It was important for you, then?” He’s blushing, the way he does when he wishes he had glasses on. On a mortal, that face would be coy, but after six thousand years they both read each other too well.
“Of course!” There’s no miracle involved, but time is frozen now, just as surely as it was at the air base. Aziraphale has to decide-- no, he gets to decide what happens next. He has a choice to make, about how he wants this conversation to go… and he’d rather clear the air. Buck up, Hamlet. “That night was when I realized you… I’d felt it before, of course, but they always said demons couldn’t,” and Crowley’s face is slowly setting into stone, so Aziraphale does what he always does, keeps yammering on. “I mean, plausible deniability and all that, usually feelings could be wafting in from anywhere, but there was hardly anyone else feeling loving around that night. No one else was left alive, was there? So.”
A crack forms in Crowley’s frozen face, and his jaw goes slack. He remembers to breathe, and then starts sputtering. “Eighty years, angel. Eighty! Why didn’t you say anything?”
“What could I have said?” His voice sounds so small to his own ears, it’s a wonder it reaches down the hall.
“Oh, I dunno, how about, ‘I love you too,’ maybe?” His hand keeps twitching to reach out, but his feet are glued to the cold floor. He knows something is wrong, Aziraphale realizes, just not what.
“I couldn’t, my dear boy. I’m so sorry.” The worst part is that Aziraphale knows the faces he should be making, the words he’s supposed to say. He knows how to give Crowley everything, or the truth, but it can’t be both.
“What, our sides? They don’t matter anymore, angel! At least, not for tonight?” His heart is breaking already, Aziraphale can hear it, but he’s still daring to hope.
“It’s not that-- not just that.”
“Then why?”
“Because I don’t love you!” Glass shatters, somewhere. (It might just be them.)
“Well that’s just tickety boo then.” SNAP, and Crowley is fully dressed, glasses/armor in place. “My heart bloody on a platter, and you homeless, and both of us likely facing execution in the morning! Lovely time for a confession. Couldn’t you have told me during the war, or kept your blessed mouth shut?”
“I know how it sounds, dearest. Wait, please.”
“Dearest?” The word bites, it mocks, it animates the air between them. “That’s cruel, even for you.”
“I deserve that,” he says tightly. “Please, can I explain?”
“Maybe to the plants. SomeBody knows, they’ve heard me pining for you often enough. I’m sure they’re curious to hear how the story ends. Me, though? I think I am going to drink until I don’t feel it when they come and pour holy water on my head.” He strides past, ducking around the desk.
“I can save us, tomorrow.” The promise vomits out of him. “I don’t think it’ll work if you hate me, though, so I need you to let me fix this.”
Crowley stops at that, turns back. “How much of a sadist are you?”
It’s meant to be a barb, Aziraphale knows, but it’s also an opening. “I don’t know, honestly. I barely know myself. As you’re well aware, Up There doesn’t encourage self-discovery. I’m just starting to figure myself out, and you, and us, because ‘ineffable’ isn’t fucking good enough.”
The expletive was a cheap tactic, but it’s worked. Crowley is actually listening now.
Aziraphale takes the tiniest step toward the desk, toward him. “Can you imagine something, for me? I don’t know how else to explain it-- I’ve never tried, not out loud, but…” No reply, but he’s not expecting one yet. He lets himself look at the eagle lectern, steadies his mind, and wills the words to come. (He doesn’t dare pray, not for this.)
“Imagine being a tadpole. You were born swimming. You breathe through water, you eat and drink through water, you move through water. You have no idea there’s a world outside the wet-- what it could look like, how it could feel. It’s beyond your ken-- until you find yourself transformed, launching into air and sunlight.”
Aziraphale lets himself fidget, lets his hands worry at his sleeves. “I am love, Crowley-- for God and for Her Host, for Lucifer and His Fallen, and for humans and their trifling wonders. I walk love, I speak love, I breathe love, I hardly notice myself feeling it anymore. Love is universal-- it’s background noise, it’s an assignment from the head office. Love is just work.”
“But you, dear boy?” He risks a glance, and feels Crowley’s predatory stare even through the glasses. “For you, I leap from the water, feel the sunshine on my face. This is something else, something grand and unique and unknown. This, I only feel for you.” He sidesteps the throne, inches closer.
“I crave you, you wily serpent! I desire you, I need you, I ache for you. I always have, since Eden. Your lovely hair, your lovelier questions.” Crowley’s hand flies to his mouth, trapping some sound inside.
“I thought this was just another of my failings, that I was succumbing to lust and doubt, that I was Falling… But I’ve spent this last decade daring myself to believe in you, inch by inch. I’m starting to believe in us, in our side. I’m sorry it took me so long to catch up, but I’m here now, I swear it.”
It’s just the desk between them now, and Aziraphale lets his palms rest on it, lets himself lean forward. “I choose you, Crowley. Not out of some obligatory feeling or divine mandate, but because you are right for me and I want you. You were the first choice I ever made, and you’ll be the last, darling. I choose you! I choose us.”
Crowley’s face is wet beneath the glasses. “Oh, angel.”
“Come here, darling. Please let me hold you.”
The obvious, human thing would be for Crowley to walk around the desk, but instead he tumbles over it like the pile of vertebrae he is and lobs his face right into Aziraphale’s chest. They cling to each other, they weep. Aziraphale eases them back onto the throne, and they crumple together.
“I’m so sorry, dear one, I am. I was so afraid to tell you, can you ever forgive me?”
“Always, angel. Always.”
Something like an hour later, their feelings even out enough that they can find their own limbs, their own faces, and begin to unwind from each other.
“I seem to recall you mentioning that you have a plan?”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Not so much mine as Agnes’s, but I think it’ll just do...”