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The fire was everything that Aziraphale could see. It burned hotter than the physical plane could account for, melting air and light and sound and smell and taste until it was nothing but heat, nothing but the snap and roar and teeth of flame.
Hellfire, blessed by the archangels. It was like napalm.
The bookshop folded around him like paper, ceasing to exist, and the fire inched ever closer. It was all ending, he realized. Everything was over.
The hand clenched around his tightened, and then let go. Aziraphale turned to follow it, only to find himself gathered up and held fast, thin arms like steel bands around his back, clawed fingers digging into the material of his coat.
He turned his face into the crook of Crowley’s neck, breathing in the smell of his skin. He was shaking, and he was terrified, and he was not alone.
“I love you,” Aziraphale said, his heart breaking with not having said it before.
“Save it,” Crowley replied, short and sharp. “Tell me later.”
He was—humming. When Aziraphale pulled away to look at him, his face was tight with concentration. He didn’t appear given up in the least. The fire was ten feet away on all sides, and Crowley had a look on his face reminiscent of the demon who delayed the eruption of Vesuvius for an impossible half hour, who held back the ash and smoke with his bare hands and an objective sense of what he was and was not capable of, for the sake of a few hundred lives spared that otherwise would not have been spared.
The fire was still moving. The humming was louder. Crowley’s eyes were all yellow, the pupil a thin, stark slit through the middle. He was holding Aziraphale with the desperation of someone who didn’t want to let go but knew they must.
His wings opened suddenly, a brilliant snap of midnight black against the fire. The primaries caught almost immediately and Aziraphale let out a wounded noise, reaching out uselessly to pull them in again.
Crowley caught his hands and stilled them.
“I mean it,” he said, anguished, burning, rebellious, beautiful. “Tell me later.”
And then, with a wrench, those yellow eyes and ruined wings and familiar hands were gone.
Everything was gone.
There was nothing, and then there was the garden wall.
The Eastern guardian is an alright sort, Crawly thinks, with wary optimism. Not like that knob over on the Western wall.
They met the morning after the very first Sunday, when the world was factory new. The principality had his feathers all ruffled, wild-eyed and breathless as if he’d given his corporation a good workout. Eve liked to run through the greenery with the big cats in the morning, her powerful limbs pumping, chest expanding, dark hair flying like a flag behind her. The angel’s discomposure seemed of a different sort.
He approached Crawly with a quick step, and Crawly—well, never let it be said he’s slow on the uptake. And he’s learned over the past twenty-some hours on Earth that angels very much strike first and apologize never.
So he backpedaled, keeping a healthy distance (and a large ficus) between himself and the guardian, and didn’t mind if it made him look like a coward.
Only—the angel certainly looked stricken by that maneuver. He froze mid-step and wrung his hands, eyes wide and lamplike and strangely human.
So maybe the ficus was a bit much.
Crawly stepped out from behind it, but didn’t come any closer. He wasn’t stupid no matter what Hastur and Beelzebub and Dagon all said.
“Hullo,” he said carefully, well-aware that even that much was dangerous. The Western guardian had nearly smote him just for slithering too close. “Don’t think we’ve met. I’m called Crawly.”
Later on, when the earth was much older and this garden was nothing but a footnote in a book that people took much too seriously, a very willful and compassionate human who devoted most of her life to helping and healing would invent the model of the five stages of grief. It was a framework for coping with or understanding a great loss.
And the first thing it would make Crawly think of is this very moment, and the look on the angel’s face when Crawly said hello.
The angel’s expression crumpled and his wings curled in around his shoulders and—bright and shining as he was, as perfect a creation as anything could be walking in Her light and love—he made himself very small.
He was like a black hole of misery. It made Crawly feel small, too.
It could have been minutes or hours—time was still a new concept, and took some getting used to—but finally the angel seemed to settle. He folded his wings neatly, loosed the painful-looking clench of his hands on his elbows, and let his arms fall from where he’d hugged them to his middle.
If he was still upset, Crawly couldn’t tell. They’d only just met, after all. Still, he found himself searching the angel’s face for a trace of that sadness, disquieted by it.
The angel smiled, and it was beautiful. It was warm and wry and not at all Heaven-perfect and it was beautiful.
“Hello, my dear,” the angel said. “My Name is Aziraphael.”
The Holy resonance of it burned—not enough to send Crawly sprinting for the nearest hidey-hole, but enough to make him wince. It’s not as though Aziraphael—ow—could help it. They just were naturally incompatible conversation partners, that was all, Crawly realized with a sinking spirit. Probably shouldn’t make a habit of it.
“But between you and I,” the principality continued smoothly, “I made a slight mishap when signing for this body of mine.”
Angels don’t have between-you-and-Is with demons. They don’t have mishaps. And his tone was almost playful, as if he was inviting Crawly in on a secret.
It was the best thing Crawly had ever heard. He wouldn’t have moved from that spot for anything, not even if Michael himself came by and offered Crawly his old job back.
“I must have been nervous about the promotion,” the angel admitted sheepishly. “Somehow I misspelled my own name! Can you believe that? I wrote down Aziraphale.”
(The first time around, it had taken Aziraphale a shamefully long time to realize that his Name caused Crowley outright pain. The demon couldn’t even speak it without cutting his tongue on his eyeteeth. After that belated discovery, it would take several more years still for Aziraphale to muster the courage to—accidentally flub one of his signatures. He’d held his breath, wondering if it would work, and amazingly, ineffably, it had.
This second time around, he hadn’t flubbed a signature yet. He didn’t even feel guilty for the lie. Tenses could be tricky when Time itself was such a new thing, after all, as Aziraphale would explain remorselessly over scotch some thousands of years later. Crowley would slam his glass down in vindication and declare that tenses—and all the other illogical snares and contradictory pitfalls of the English language—were some of his best work.)
“Aziraphale,” Crawly parroted without thinking, and when it didn’t hurt, he lit up. Trying not to sound too eager about it, because that was the best way to get things snatched out of your hands, he added, “That rolls right off the tongue. Might stick to calling you that, if you don’t mind.”
“Please do,” Aziraphale said, as if he was happy to hear it.
And so—Crawly thinks this angel is alright. More than, if he’s being honest, which he tries not to do. It tends to give the other Fallen hives.
The angel treads carefully sometimes, as though he’s trying to find his footing in the dark, as though there are things he can and cannot say. But he never shuts Crawly down outright, never leaves him in a sudden fit of righteous anger the way Crawly is always braced for him to.
In fact, he hardly leaves Crawly’s side at all.
They talk as though they were made to spend hours just talking to each other. Crawly is starving for conversation. He’s curious about everything and he has questions, and for the first time, here is someone willing to discuss them.
They share fruits from the trees and forage for mushrooms and shellfish. They wade through the clear pool by the waterfall to get a closer look at some impressive flowers growing on the opposite bank, even though it would have been more practical to fly, and then spend an entire afternoon airing their wings dry. The sun sets and rises and sets overhead and the angel stays.
“Don’t you, er,” Crawly says at one point, hesitant to remind the angel that he almost certainly has more important things to do than wander the garden with a demon, “have to—guard?”
After all, the other principalities haven’t left their posts to so much as stretch their legs. Aziraphale isn’t even carrying his sword.
Aziraphale politely finishes chewing his fig before speaking. “From what, exactly?”
“Er,” Crawly says again, and then gestures at himself, as if to say ‘me?’
The angel raises an eyebrow at him. And, okay, granted, Crawly isn’t being very adversarial at the moment. He’s got an affectionate onager in his lap, and its long velvety ears are so soft Crawly can’t help but pet them. But he could be adversarial if he wanted to. He’s very wily.
“I think I can thwart you just as well from down here,” Aziraphale says, and offers him a fig.
They even meet the humans. Aziraphale introduces himself, and then introduces the massive black serpent wound shyly around his shoulders as my friend, Crawly. Eve puts out her hands to hold him without a second of misgiving. It makes it easier to tempt her, in the end.
That’s what the book will say happened, anyway, but Crawly doesn’t think of it as tempting. He didn’t set out to hurt her. He wasn’t even snake-shaped at the time. They were only talking, and he wondered aloud all the same whys and what-fors that got him in big trouble Upstairs. And Eve got a look on her face that Crawly recognized, and that look never really went away, and the next thing anyone else knows, she’s biting into an apple.
“Oh, well done, Crawly,” Hastur says with mean glee, when the memo goes around. “Looks like you’re good for something after all.”
It didn’t feel very good. And Adam and Eve were very sad and hurt by the whole thing, which made him feel even worse.
At least Aziraphale is good-natured about it, when Crawly tentatively seeks him out. He makes a joke about ineffable plans even before Crawly could, as if he can tell at a glance that Crawly is afraid he may be angry.
“They sent you up here to make some mischief, and you certainly did that, at least,” the angel adds ruefully. “We can’t help what we are, my dear.”
They watch the human’s exodus together. Adam and Eve climb through the garden wall and step out into the vast sands with their heads held high, each carrying woven palm leaf bags filled with nuts and fruits, Adam with his arm around the neck of Crawly’s sweet onager, and Eve flocked by the big cats who love her more than they would love any paradise without her.
When it begins to rain, Aziraphale offers up a magnificent piebald wing without a second thought, so perfunctory about the whole thing that Crawly automatically looks over his shoulder for whoever that wing must actually be for.
With a little scoff, Aziraphale closes the distance himself. The curl of his wing draws Crawly into his side. Not close enough to touch, but—close enough. Here, on the edge of the wall, on the edge of—whatever is going to happen next—they’re standing together instead of apart.
He tries to feel normal about that.
Through the rain, he could just make out Adam drawing his wife closer in a similar fashion (not that Crawly was going to spend the next two hundred years thinking about those similarities, or anything) and in the opposite hand he raises what looks like….
“Now hang on,” Crawly says, squinting. “That sword looks familiar.”
“Good lord I’ll never live this down, will I?” the angel beside him mutters.
“You—that’s yours!” Crawly jerks around to look at him, bewildered. “I’d recognize it anywhere. Guardian-grade, that is. Your counterpart to the West nearly skewered me with theirs.”
Aziraphale’s eyes flash. “They what?”
“Nevermind them. What’s Adam doing with your sword? He can’t have invented stealing already! We’ve literally only just started.”
Aziraphale is too busy glaring Westward to answer for a moment.
It’s the closest he’s come to Holy Wrath in Crawly’s presence. The snake shuffles a little, made anxious by the angel’s obvious anger. His reptile brain starts throwing up flags. His human brain, however—troublesome, marvelous thing that it is—refuses to entertain the idea that Aziraphale could ever be a danger to him.
Other angels, maybe, but not his.
Hm. That might come back to bite him. He writes it off as future problems for future Crawlys.
Aziraphale finally jerks his head forward again, a scowl on his perfect face. He curls his wing in, giving Crawly no choice but to press against his side.
“I swear, the standards are abysmal,” Aziraphale mutters with vitriol. “They’ll give just anybody a halo.”
“Not anybody,” Crawly thinks it fair to point out. He waves a hand above his own head where a shining, resplendent crown of light used to sit. It was a gaudy, heavy thing. Secretly, he’s happy for the excuse not to have to haul it around anymore.
The angel huffs, his mouth twisting into a reluctantly amused smile. No matter how many times Crawly reminds him that he’s a demon, he isn’t bothered.
“You’re worth a thousand of any one of them, my dear.”
Even if he doesn’t mean it, Crawly likes that he said it. It’s nice to be told he’s worth something for a change. Before he can get any more distracted, or start wriggling around like a happy lizard, Crawly says, “The sword, angel?”
“I gave it away,” Aziraphale says ruefully. “Adam and your clever Eve needed it more than I did.”
“Oh,” Crawly says aloud. It’s all he can say. His heart is racing, so he presses both hands to it before it can run off without him. The angel is gazing at him with something in his eyes that Crawly doesn’t recognize. Is Aziraphale waiting for him to speak again? Crawly swallows, and opens his mouth, but all that comes out is another, overwhelmed, “Oh.”
Aziraphale is watching, this time. All of his focus, all of his attention belongs to the being at his side.
This time he sees the way his wily, lovely demon’s face changes in lieu of this new piece of knowledge. His yellow eyes are wide and full, his lips parting. Wonder, Aziraphale recognizes. Fascination.
Infatuation.
The snake is a new creature and his human shape is newer still. Someday he will know how to perform with the best of them, will know how to hide all of his thoughts behind implacable yellow eyes as deftly as closing a door, but for now he wears them on his sleeve next to his heart. His mouth twitches into a smile and he lets it, because he doesn’t know better.
He looks up at Aziraphale with the curious beginnings of love on his face, surrounded by Aziraphale’s feathers and sheltered against his side from the storm. But for the first time, Aziraphale is leagues ahead of him.
Aziraphale adores him.
He adores the person Crawly is going to become—the frustrating, endlessly clever, self-conscious and compassionate love of Aziraphale’s entire stupid life—and he adores him now. This somewhat shy, always-curious creature with a million questions about every single thing in Creation that Falling and burning and damnation were not enough to snuff from his soul.
Aziraphale spent the entirety of his former existence feeling torn in two, always anxious, forever guilty, wanting and craving and denying himself, every new day a new exercise in self-flagellation. But there at the end, he had finally figured it out. Too late, of course, but he had.
Love is not a sin.
And his love had somehow given him this. At the end of everything, at the unraveling of their hard-won happy ending, his Crowley had given him this marvelous, impossible second chance.
Aziraphale is going to be worthy of it. Aziraphale is going to live every moment the way he should have done the first time around. He’s going to care for Crowley the way he deserves to be cared for. He’s going to fight tooth and nail for them for once in his goddamn life.
LANGUAGE, he hears in his head, a wry admonishment.
Aziraphale doesn’t startle badly enough to fall off the wall, but it’s close. Crawly clutches at him in alarm. He looks bewildered, but he doesn’t look as though he’s hearing the voice of the Host, because he certainly would have fallen off the wall. Small blessings.
Aziraphale clearly remembers the last time his Mother spoke to him directly, when She asked about his sword and he as good as lied to Her face about it. It wasn’t a particularly good lie, but he was nervous about it for years anyway. This time, he doesn’t feel any particular reason to tell Her anything but the truth.
I’m keeping him, he says stubbornly.
THAT’S THE IDEA, God replies, the definition of impossible to surprise. JUST TRY NOT TO UPSET THE ENTIRE APPLE-CART AS YOU GO.
Good Lord, Aziraphale thinks, I am so sick to death of apples.
He’s ready for something brand-new.
“When the rain stops,” he says, “let’s leave here together.”
“Uh-huh,” Crawly agrees automatically. He doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s still holding Aziraphale’s arm, until the angel covers his hand with one of his own. Then he blinks, and his face colors magnificently, and his brain catches up to his mouth. “Ghk—guh—where?”
“Haven’t got a clue,” Aziraphale says, and smiles at him. “We can figure it out as we go.”