Work Text:
It was like a dream, walking through the bookshop again after so much time spent away from it. The bookshop was dark under the Soho sunset, the soft light fading out of the windows and leaving almost artistically placed streams of a warm orange glow cascading along the shelves, highlighting the details in the spines of Aziraphale’s beloved books. It was as silent as the pristine white halls of Heaven, though it was nowhere near as empty. Still, the void that had been steadily growing in the place where his heart should have been remained all the same.
Aziraphale moved down the aisles in slow-motion, wistfully sliding his fingers across the spines as he walked, sometimes letting his fingers linger too long when it came to his old favorites. There wasn’t one book or piece of furniture out of place. Not even a spec of dust had touched any of it. All of it was exactly as he had left it.
All of it, except for one thing.
It wasn’t out of place or unexpected so much as Aziraphale thought that he had lost it and didn’t know if he would ever see it again. It was the most precious thing in his life, far more beloved than any book, more cherished and admired than any author. Aziraphale had decided a long time ago that he would give up everything he had ever collected, everything else he had ever loved or would ever love, as long as this one stayed safe until the day that the universe itself ceased to exist.
Aziraphale had forgotten to breathe in that moment, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to, anyway. His softly trembling lips curled into the first real smile that he’d had since the day he had left. When he opened his mouth to speak, he nearly couldn’t find the words. He’d almost forgotten how. When he finally managed to get it out, it came in the form of that soft whisper reserved only for those moments in the earliest of mornings spent lying in bed next to the love of your life.
“Oh, Crowley.”
He was standing at the end of the next aisle with his side turned to Aziraphale. His hair was different now. He’d grown it out. It was resting on his shoulders, now. The color had faded a little bit. His roots were coming in black. They’d never done that before—at least, Aziraphale didn’t think they had. Two braids had been done up around the crown of his head on either side, coming together in the middle with half of the rest of his hair in a tight ponytail. It was as wavy as always. His style hadn’t changed much at all in the last few years—but then again, neither had Aziraphale’s.
He was scanning the shelves intensely as if to make sure that every last book was where it should be. He had his glasses off. If he had heard Aziraphale at all, he made no effort to show it.
Aziraphale’s smile faltered, if only for a moment.
“I thought I might find you here,” he continued in a voice that was still a whisper, still as intimate, just not so quiet. “Don’t… Don’t tell Muriel I’ve told you this, but they’ve been sending me messages about you. Said you come all the time to help them look after this place. I didn’t… I almost didn’t believe them, at first, but then I thought—well, that really would be just like you, wouldn’t it?”
Crowley finished inspecting the last row on the shelf in front of him and then flicked his eyes back to the other side, away from Aziraphale. Nonchalantly, he turned around and then walked behind the shelves to get to the next aisle up. Aziraphale followed him and stood at the opposite end of the shelf, hoping that Crowley would have to walk closer to him, eventually.
“You’re always looking out for others,” Aziraphale said, louder this time, with the sort of desperation that comes from trying to coax a dying fire back to life. “Even when it doesn’t suit you. Even when you don’t need to, or even when… when you definitely shouldn’t. It’s always been one of the things I’ve liked most about you. One of the things I’ve admired you for. It’s a trait I’m quite… quite jealous of, actually. Which is why I wanted to—”
Aziraphale sighed, half out of frustration and half out of distress, and looked down at his feet.
“I mean, not that it matters, what I wanted to do. But the thing I need to do now, is, erm… well, to apologize.”
Crowley stopped in the dead center of the bookshelf and then reeled around to scrutinize the one behind him.
“Unless, of course, that’s not what you want to hear right now. I know I sort of… well, sprung this on you,” Aziraphale said, curling his hands into outward-facing fists and then popping them open, leaning towards Crowley. “Believe me, I’m trying to get out of the habit of, well— that. But I wanted to know… I mean, what can I do? Where do you—where do you want me to start ?”
Crowley’s eyes narrowed. He curled a slender finger into the top of a book’s spine and gingerly pulled it off the shelf. His nails were painted black and had been filed into a slight point. Aziraphale couldn’t take his eyes off them. Crowley pushed the other books on the shelf together and then slouched off to place this one back wherever it truly belonged. Aziraphale followed him once more, the smile disappearing completely from his face.
“Cr—Crowley, please.”
A deafening silence rang in his ear as Crowley continued to ignore him. Aziraphale felt the room stretching beneath his feet, taking Crowley farther and farther away from him down the hall, searching endlessly for the place where the misplaced book belonged. The dream was quickly turning into a nightmare. Aziraphale knew it had been too good to be true. He could feel his blood roaring in his ears.
“Oh, Crowley, please,” Aziraphale cried, his facade breaking, his lips beginning to tremble, “won’t you say something to me?”
Crowley’s head snapped towards Aziraphale and his eyes locked on to the angel. The harsh coldness of his stare shocked Aziraphale to his core. Crowley had never looked at him that way before. It had given him a much needed reality check. Suddenly, the room returned to its normal size, and Aziraphale realized how close he was standing to Crowley.
Crowley turned his head away again. There was a long pause as Crowley parted the books on a new shelf to make way for the one in his hand. Aziraphale stopped breathing again as Crowley put the book back and tucked it in safely between the others.
Then, “Do you know what it feels like to Fall, Angel?”
Aziraphale swallowed hard and stayed silent. He felt like he was suffocating, which shouldn’t be something that was possible for an angel to feel. Crowley turned his head to look at Aziraphale again.
“Have you ever seen it happen? With your own two eyes?”
Aziraphale shook his head slowly. His voice caught in his throat and he nearly choked on his words as they tumbled out of his mouth. “N-no,” he said at first, his voice hoarse and strangled. “No, I… I wasn’t there, when… when most of it—happened.”
Crowley turned fully around to face Aziraphale. He seemed quite a bit taller than the last time Aziraphale had seen him. Aziraphale couldn’t tell if Crowley had altered his shape, or if it was a hallucination caused by the burning hostility that Crowley’s aura was drowning in.
“It starts with your wings,” Crowley hissed. “They burst into Hellfire without so much as a warning. It’s the kind of white-hot pain that makes you feel like you’re freezing to death. The kind you can’t scream for, no matter how hard you try. You can feel the skin burning and rotting off your back. Without those wings, you’re too heavy for Heaven to carry. The ground opens up beneath you, and suddenly you’re falling, falling, millions of lightyears at a time, so fast that you can’t move, but it doesn’t feel like you’re going anywhere. It’s like you’re stuck in an endless black hole. No stars. No planets. No people. Just you, and eternity, and the crippling loneliness that comes with it. And then suddenly you hit the ground, except you don’t. You certainly feel like you’ve just slammed into some planet hard enough to cause your molecules to separate and explode, but then the ground swallows you up, and it’s hot, and it’s sticky, and it’s boiling you alive. And when you get to the bottom, as you’re lying there, completely helpless, knowing that if you moved an inch you would end up drowning in your own vomit just moments later, your new wings come in. Sprout right out of the gaping holes in your back where your old wings just were, flesh still coagulating and everything. And even when all that’s done, you still have to come to terms with the fact that for the rest of your life, you will be a demon, forced to dedicate your life to being the most disgusting, vile, murderous, monstrous being you could ever imagine just so you can save your own skin. And even then, sometimes that isn’t even enough to save you.”
A tremor ran through Aziraphale. He’d heard stories of the Fall before, but never like this. Never that graphic. Never with that much sorrow. Never from Crowley.
Crowley took one step back from Aziraphale but didn’t take his eyes off the angel.
“And I would spend my eternity reliving that feeling over and over again if it would take away the pain I feel from what you’ve put me through.”
Whatever had been left of Aziraphale’s heart was certainly gone now. He raised a shaking hand to his open mouth as a shattered breath left him. Tears welled up in his eyes but he did everything in his power to hold them back. This was his fault, after all. He didn’t deserve to cry.
“Oh, Crowley, I’m so sorry,” Aziraphale said. He didn’t know what else to say. Words were not enough to make up for what he had done. For the agony that he had caused.
He wanted to reach out to Crowley, to grab Crowley’s hands, fall to his knees, and beg for forgiveness. He wanted to hug Crowley; hold him so tightly that there would never be a question of if he was going to let go again. He wanted to kiss Crowley with all the love and tenderness that their first kiss should have had. But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the right to any of that. Crowley was here, standing right in front of him, but Aziraphale had still lost him.
“It’s a little late for apologies now, Angel. About five years too late now, actually, if you ask me,” Crowley said, and turned away from Aziraphale. All of the warmth was gone from his voice. There was no familiarity in the way that he said Angel anymore. It was bitter and biting.
“ I know, ” Aziraphale said desperately, “but there has to be something I can do. Whatever it is, I will do it. I don’t care what it is or how long it takes. Whatever you want from me, you’ll have it. I promise. Let me make this right, Crowley. I’ll beg for your forgiveness however you want me to, even though I know I don’t deserve it. And I know that things might never go back to the way that they were between us, but whatever’s left, I want to save it. I want to fix it. Please, Crowley. I’ll do anything.”
There had to be something left, after all, or Crowley wouldn’t be here. It had been made very clear those five years ago that there were a lot of things Aziraphale didn’t know about Crowley. That didn’t change the fact that there were still a lot of things Aziraphale did know about Crowley. He knew that Crowley had a tendency to leave when he was scared, angry, or upset. He also knew that no matter how many times Crowley left, he would always come back to something that he cared about. And he knew that Crowley stopped coming back when he stopped caring. The fact that Crowley was here right now, and the fact that he had been looking after the bookshop all this time, it meant that he still cared. It meant that there was still hope.
But somehow, all of that hope drained from Aziraphale when Crowley turned to look at him once more. Crowley’s gaze was paralyzing. It felt like Aziraphale had walked into a trap.
“Oh, I can’t forgive you now, Angel. Forgiveness is a weapon. You turned it into one.”
Aziraphale felt as if he had impaled himself on his own flaming sword.
“Then—then that’s all the more reason you should forgive me!” he said wretchedly. “Shout at me, scream at me, say every horrible thing about me that you can possibly think of. All of your anger, your pain, your sadness, take all of it out on me. Forgive me, Crowley! I deserve it!”
“See, that’s the trouble with your lot, Aziraphale,” Crowley began, his tone as even as ever, “you all use forgiveness to hurt people. To break them. To control them. One mistake is all it takes. Doesn’t matter how big or small. One mistake makes them unworthy. Broken. Dirty. Then you come around saying things like ‘Oh, but it doesn’t have to be this way. If you listen to us, follow us blindly no matter what, pledge both your Earthly life and your immortal soul to us, and defend us no matter how much we hurt you, you can be forgiven. You can be whole again. Holy again. Just do whatever we ask of you, and we’ll forgive you.’ And you assume that because you’ve hurt me, I must want to hurt you back.” He swallowed, his calm demeanor finally cracking, just for a moment. “Well, I don’t.”
Aziraphale shook his head. “That’s not—that’s not what I was thinking at all, Crowley. I know that you wouldn’t—”
“Do you, Aziraphale?” Crowley interrupted, raising an eyebrow. “Do you know that I wouldn’t hurt you? That I wouldn’t want to? Because if that’s the case, well, it just makes all of this worse, doesn’t it?”
“Crowley, what are you—what do you mean?”
“It isn’t just about the day that you left, Aziraphale. I mean, it’s been our whole bloody six thousand years together. At first it didn’t matter—we were just doing our jobs, I couldn’t blame you for not trusting me. But there came a point, somewhere down the line, where I thought… I thought that you knew, for real, that I wasn’t really a demon. That I was a good person. And sure, you would call me one every once in a while, when I had done something nice for you. But whenever you didn’t get your way, it was always ‘you’re a demon, you’re the bad one, you’re evil, may you be forgiven, I forgive you .’” His voice had started to shake. His presence seemed to shrink as his energy went from icily apathetic to a tidalwave of heartbreak. “It didn’t matter what I did,” he continued weakly, “how much I loved the world, how much I loved all of the people in it, how much I loved you. I’ll always be a demon to you. I’ll never be good enough. I just wish I’d figured that out about six thousand years sooner. Would’ve saved us both a lot of time and energy, don’t you think?”
Crowley had had five years to think since Aziraphale had been gone. In the grand scheme of things, five years was nothing to an immortal being. It might as well have been the blink of an eye for Crowley. But all the other years that Crowley had spent on Earth, he had spent with Aziraphale. Five years was the longest he had ever been without Aziraphale while he walked this Earth. Those five years had been miserable. Worse than the fourteenth century, almost. But he had learned a lot more in those five years than he had learned in the decades and centuries that had come before it, especially when it came to him and Aziraphale. He realized that it was always going to end up like this. He had been stupid not to see the signs. He’d ignored them, always looking at Aziraphale through rose-tinted sunglasses.
And suddenly, Aziraphale was reliving every terrible thing he’d ever said to Crowley. Every time he had tried desperately to cling to his moral high ground. Every time he had felt backed into a corner and had taken it out on Crowley. Every time he’d had the chance to come to terms with the fact that he and Crowley, for all intents and purposes, were on their own side, and had decided to keep the distance between them instead. He had been selfish, and a coward, and he had treated Crowley so despicably because of his own fears and insecurities. He had always banked on the fact that even if Crowley left, he would always come back. He didn’t know why Crowley had stuck around for him this time. Aziraphale didn’t deserve him and never had.
He stepped forward, reached out to Crowley, then quickly pulled his hand back, feeling Crowley slipping through his fingers—though, Crowley had never been within his grasp at all.
“I’m so sorry, Crowley,” Aziraphale said again, finally letting the tears that he had been holding back spill forth. “I know that means nothing, especially now, but—all the awful things I’ve said to you before, they were never really about you. They were always about me. I know that doesn’t make it hurt any less. I really have always known how good you were, Crowley. All our lives together, I’ve always thought that—that God was wrong to cast you out. You’re better than any angel I’ve ever known. More loving. More compassionate. And I was always so scared for you, and scared for myself. I always thought, what would they do to you Down There if they knew the kind of person that you really were? And why didn’t Heaven care about you, and how would I defend you, or myself, if they ever found out about our Arrangement? So I always—I always pushed you away when I thought we were getting too close. I didn’t know what else to do. But when I would call you evil or said that you were bad, I never meant it. Not even once. You’ve always been the person I’ve trusted most. Always the person I’ve loved most. I just never knew how to show it. I was a coward. And I am so sorry. And you don’t ever have to forgive me, not for the rest of our lives. You never have to forgive me. But I will spend all of my days finding ways to make it up to you. I—I promise, Crowley.”
Crowley shook his head, slowly at first, then more deliberate. He was crying now. The mask was gone for good. “I don’t… I don’t believe you, Aziraphale. Look at you. Even now, you pull away from me as if I’ve burned you. You expect me to hurt you. What are you even doing here, Aziraphale? What do you want from me?”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured, shrinking in defeat. He stared down at his hands. His hands, which ached terribly to hold Crowley, but had never been brave enough. His tears ran down from his cheeks and dripped onto his shirt and his palms, tears that he had never let Crowley see before. He realized that he had never seen them in Crowley before, either, and yet here they were—crying to each other, for the first time, because they didn’t know where to go from here.
Aziraphale had made so many mistakes that had led them this moment, and may God personally damn him if he made just one more.
He reached for Crowley once more, and this time, he clasped Crowley’s hand firmly in his own. He pulled himself closer to Crowley, then dropped to his knees, still holding Crowley’s hand. Crowley didn’t look at him. In fact, he tilted his head away from Aziraphale and looked towards the ceiling, though that hadn’t prevented Aziraphale from seeing the way his lips were quivering. Still, Crowley didn’t pull away. In fact he was gripping Aziraphale’s hand right back.
“I want you, Crowley. I love you. When I left, it wasn’t because I didn’t want you. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you, or because I didn’t think you were good enough, or anything like that at all. I never wanted you to change. I wanted to change it all for you. For us. I wanted to keep you safe,” Aziraphale said, his voice cracking at the end. “And I did—I did keep you safe. But I couldn’t fix Heaven, and now I’ve broken us even further and I have to fix this. I don’t know how yet. But I’ll never stop trying.”
He stood up, keeping Crowley’s hand in his, and moving in even closer. He put his other hand hesitantly to Crowley’s face and cradled it, brushing a stray tear from Crowley’s skin with his thumb. Crowley shut his eyes tightly, but he didn’t move away.
“And I know you won’t, either,” Aziraphale murmured, “because you wouldn’t be in this bookshop otherwise.”
Aziraphale didn’t move, and neither did Crowley. Aziraphale waited for Crowley to say something to him. He waited for what felt like six thousand more years, scarcely daring to breathe, tears running down his face like rivers.
Then, so, so softly, “Say it again, Aziraphale.”
“That… you wouldn’t be in this bookshop otherwise…?” Aziraphale asked uncertainly, tilting his head slightly in confusion.
Crowley shook his head, not opening his eyes and not moving from Aziraphale’s touch. “No. No. What you said at the beginning. You can’t make me tell it to you. If you really do, you’ll just say it. So say it. I need you to say it.”
Aziraphale faltered at first, his confidence quickly fading until he realized what Crowley was asking of him. “Oh. Oh…” he sighed, pulling Crowley’s hand towards his chest and holding it over his heart. “I want you, Crowley. I love you.”
“Again,” Crowley said, his expression unchanged.
“I love you,” Aziraphale repeated dutifully.
“Again, Aziraphale.”
“I love you.”
“Again?”
“ I love you, Crowley, ” Aziraphale said with conviction. “More than Heaven. More than Earth. More than this bookshop and every single book in it. I love you, Crowley. I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you.”
Crowley broke. He pulled his hand from Aziraphale’s and buried his face in his palms. He sobbed openly, heartwrenchingly. Aziraphale’s face fell. He quickly pulled Crowley close to him and hugged him tightly. Crowley went stiff in his arms, then little by little, he relaxed, slouching against Aziraphale and slowly wrapping his arms around him. He buried his face into Aziraphale’s shoulder and kept crying. Aziraphale moved a hand to the back of Crowley’s head and held it gently, running his fingers through Crowley’s long, beautiful hair.
“I love you, Crowley,” he said without being asked.
Crowley clung to him, burying his fingers into the fabric of Aziraphale’s coat.
“That doesn’t make it hurt any less,” he spat bitterly.
Aziraphale closed his eyes, his lips trembling. “I know.”
“But I—” Crowley began, his breath hitching in his throat, “—I love you too.” He said it so quietly it was barely audible. He said it like it was something he was afraid of. “Don’t make me regret saying that out loud, Angel. Please don’t make me regret it.”
Aziraphale pushed Crowley away from him just slightly, then took Crowley’s face into his hands and looked into his eyes. His bright, beautiful yellow eyes. Then, he kissed Crowley.
It was as gentle, soft, pure, and despite the circumstances, romantic. It was loving. Adoring. In years, decades, centuries past, when a stray dream entered Aziraphale’s mind and he imagined kissing Crowley, this is what he thought it would be like. What he hoped it would be like. And he hoped it would be like this again, and again, and again, for the eternity that he wanted to spend with Crowley.
And Crowley kissed him back.
And the hurt was not gone, and it would not be for a very long time, but Aziraphale would keep Crowley’s request like a secret he would take to his grave.
For as long as he lived, he would never make Crowley regret him—not ever again.