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You know, love doesn’t mean
‘I never want you to change’.
But I don’t think it means
‘I don’t care if you change’ either.
So I suppose it might mean,
‘I believe that you’ll always be the person I adore’.
A declaration of faith, perhaps.
Sayaka Saeki
How could you how could you how could you
The words beat in him with the heartbeat he no longer needs to keep.
He feels frozen, feels lost, feels—scratch that, he is numb.
He doesn’t feel anything at all.
He winces and chides himself.
He might have once lied to God Herself, but if he starts lying to himself now, then, he thinks, what’s left after that?
The one person who seemed to be there to keep him in check every now and then isn’t there anymore, a gaping throbbing wound left where his presence used to be.
Aziraphale closes his eyes, briefly, fleetingly, a one tenth of a split moment.
That’s how much time he allows himself to grieve. It’s simultaneously just a spot more than a zeptosecond* yet encapsulates a lifetime. He is grieving, and in his grief, he keeps reaching back for someone who is not there.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you mean it,” he burns with righteous anger, comes so close, he basically sticks his nose right against the demon’s face.
And not just any demon—
His hair is the same fiery red, his figure – the same slender frame, his heart–
“I long to destroy blameless children of blameless Job,” the demon challenges him.
The snake that tempted Eve into disregarding God’s rules, the fiend, the wicked, the Fallen.
He challenges Aziraphale. Everything about him screams, look how twisted I am, how rotten, how dark, the worst of the worst. You stood in the light and in your shadow I sprouted, starved and neglected, well, witness me.
The light hits his eyes just right to make them seem burning, aflame, demanding to be seen.
He was a demon, he lied.
“I see you,” Aziraphale whispers, and his treacherous heart immediately fills with pure, blinding, overwhelming longing. “I always saw you. Didn’t I always see you?”
His lips tremble, and he has to pull himself together quickly. He straightens out his posture, he holds his head straight, he puts on a polite smile.
He dusts the image of the brilliant soul in his mind and tucks it carefully away, because despite the pain, despite feeling rejected, unwanted (no, not wanted enough?), heartbroken, despite all that, his love shines brightly and keeps him warm.
Under the brilliant lights of newly rolled out stars, gaze bright and full of wonder, full of hope, hair flowing around like an offset to his halo, arms outstretched to the whole wide universe as though ready to embrace it, hug it, love it.
Aziraphale knew in that moment, immediately imagined it and got smitten, how wonderous it would be to be on the receiving end of that gaze.
He always thought himself as a being of light, a part of the Host, always knew that to be good is to follow Her word, to obey, to believe in The Plan.
And yet, in that moment, in that second of mistaking the angel’s “gorgeous” for something it wasn’t meant to be, Aziraphale thought…
Maybe, to be loved like that was also to be good.
“You, angel,” Crowley drawls out, slowly, drunkenly, “you are an innocent child’s hand.”
He leans heavily onto the table between them and wags his finger at Aziraphale who, equally drunk, follows the gesture diligently.
“And me,” Crowley takes another generous gulp of the excellent wine they’ve been sharing all night, “I’m nettles… a nettle? Nettlssss— The stinging nettle,” he concludes with authority. “Tall, and tough, and old.”
Aziraphale doesn’t hesitate, not even drunk as he is, no, he grasps Crowley’s idle hand and holds it tightly, firmly, unapologetically.
“My dearest,” and the pause there is deliberate, hidden behind the drunkenness and a soft sigh, “Crowley, if you be the nettle, may I be a man of mettle**.”
And Crowley’s face is red, and there seems to be a tremor in his hand, and he mutters “oh, sod off, angel” and “you’re terrible”.
Yet, he doesn’t pull his hand away, and his gaze– Aziraphale basks in it, a less rare these days occurrence, welcomes it, prides himself if even a smidge for being on the receiving end of it.
And then comes fear.
Aziraphale thinks about Crowley’s face, and how this must be one the circles of Hell humans loved to come up with. The fear incapacitates him better than the pain.
He freezes in the middle of vast white nothing.
He is prepared to shelter his love forever, but what if they will never be in the same place again? What if he never again sees him, senses him, glimpses him? What if he never again will be able to full himself into hoping that the longing was… mutual?
Aziraphale witnessed him, always actively paid attention to every broken angle, every little hiss, every bitter musing. He knew better than comment on most of his observations, but he saw him nonetheless, what else was he to do? Gauge his eyes out?
Could he pretend to not want every little bit of love he sensed pouring out of Crowley as though his own hunger for love has not been terribly obvious for eons?
He eats the meat and he is terrified.
It’s smeared all over his face, he can feel it, the sudden hunger he was previously not aware of twists his insides, strangles his throat. It flows well with the relief he feels at Crowley’s reluctant confession, of the truth of him that Aziraphale already knew for himself. The soul he has known before is the same, just shrouded into more layers. He is gratified, and then he is instantly hungrier to know more. The mixture is dangerous.
He remembers the angel with fiery red hair, remembers the sharp, desperate want to feel his love, and—
It’s like hunger and fear and shame and defiance—
The ability to satisfy something that he didn’t know was there, pleasure for the sake of pleasure, Aziraphale isn’t ready for how strongly it grips him.
He eats the meat and this is how much he allows himself to show the evidence of his coveting.
Aziraphale nurses his love despite knowing this is what causes him pain, despite knowing it is chucking at him mercilessly, he feels slighted, feels abandoned, but he loves despite, despite, despite—
He takes a deep breath, and then another, and then one more.
He orders himself to be a version of himself that can live with this and immediately disobeys, because there is no way, no version, no comprehensible way to settle it.
He feels betrayed by the whole wide universe, when in reality it was but a one single soul.
And then he refuses to succumb to his pain, refuses to wield his heartbreak as a sword.
He might have started out anxious and vary and worried, but he has learned to defend it, he has, not single-handedly but still, carved it, precious peaceful fragile, out for—
“You don’t know me,” the demon hisses at him, but Aziraphale doesn’t cower.
He doesn’t budge, doesn’t give up. He is righteous and, yes, holier than thou, thank you very much, but he also isn’t blind, and he sees that every bitter angry gesture from the creature in front of him is poorly masked pain, pain, pain.
He was right, Aziraphale didn’t know him or any better, but he chose to believe Crowley again and again, and—
Aziraphale was right, also.
Time after time, the demon, the Adversary, proved him right to believe him.
No, in him.
“I just didn’t want to see you embarrassed,” Crowley says almost vehemently as he steps gingerly around, on the sacred grounds no less, hissing lightly in pain.
Crowley was never explicitly good, never the outright hero, never the nice one—
“But… the children?” the rain creeps up on them, the first heavy drop hitting the sand between them.
Crawly peers at the sky, not accusing, not demanding, but sad, no, perpetually heartbroken.
“I ought to be making people’s lives worse,” Crowley mutters, “I just—don’t have the heart for it.”
“No dying,” Crowley proclaims mockingly as if he didn’t just thwart a hurriedly planned suicide, “enough dying.”
– but he was always kind where Aziraphale simply didn’t know to be.
“Sometimes you just gotta blur the edges,” Crowley tells him with a shrug, as if they hadn’t just lived through several traumatic experiences stacked on top of one another.
Aziraphale’s affection is like a tide then, looming over him in its inevitability. Fuzzy and hot and exhilarating, it makes him giddy.
“Here,” it’s no more than a whisper of the wind and the splosh of colour is gone from Aziraphale’s jacket.
Aziraphale watches Crowley saunter away from him towards the church and feels it, the quiet serene yearning.
Aziraphale thought he read it all so right, he thought he finally understood what it meant to be, because the years on Earth have taught him, no, the Arrangement that so happened to be on Earth has taught him that there was more to being than simply existing.
He has learned that he actually was because for the longest time there was a presence next to him, not taking apart every little detail about him, not expecting him to be in one of the two boxes, never judging, never demanding, never—
Crowley was always loudly and angrily opposed to the very idea of himself and good in the same dimension. He was throwing it back in Heaven’s face, discarding the word, the sentiment.
If Heaven didn’t want him, Crowley didn’t want any of it either.
But he was kind when he thought he should, he was honest to himself, he was just.
Nothing was ever simple with Crowley, but over six thousand years Aziraphale came to realise that nothing has ever been simpler.
“You do a dance,” Crowley huffs angrily, testily, pushing it, never able to leave anything alone. “Do a dance and say sorry.”
Aziraphale feels his eyes widen in surprise.
“What dance?”
“Oh, I don’t know, the sorry dance,” Crowley hisses, all defensive and prickly and bitter, clearly indicating he doesn’t expect the angel to concede. His smirk is bitter, but he is banking so much on his bravado that he probably believes himself right before Aziraphale even has a chance to protest.
Aziraphale does protest.
He can do a dance.
“Of course, my dear.”
Crowley blinks at him, as though surprised, watches the dance, eyes hidden behind his glasses, and then accepts it with an extra layer of venom, avoiding meeting Aziraphale’s eyes all the way until they get to the coffee house***. And it’s delightful, and they drink coffee, and Aziraphale thinks this is as close to a mutual apology they can get and he loves every second of it.
Aziraphale refuses for his love to wilt and die, refuses to give up hope.
“A suggestion box,” the angel tells him, his eyes shining brighter than the newly hung stars around them. “How much trouble can I get into just for asking a few questions?”
Aziraphale wants to weep. Pulling the curtain back just a smidge is enough for it to flood him, to overcome him, to drown him.
Hair like fire, eyes like starlight, soul like nothing he’s seen before or ever since.
“We could have been us!” that same soul screams at him, cries at him, grasps at the lapels of his jacket and yanks at him.
The same soul that refuses him, that chooses spiting Heavens over him, that hangs onto him so tightly and yet pushes him away so mercilessly.
“I forgive you,” Aziraphale reaches out.
“Don’t bother.”
The soul he loves, he adores, he worships, that same soul cuts at him, and it burns and it hurts.
Was he wrong to trust him?
Was he wrong to fall in love?
Was it all a Test, is he supposed to somehow prove himself here, what is he to do?
He watches the projection of Earth spin slowly and, for the first time in six thousand years, doesn’t feel any particular way about it.
Complete solitude doesn’t become him, Aziraphale finds, once the realization settles in.
No more bookshop – he never thought it the most important place.
No more human food – he never thought it the most important thing.
No more watching ducks in the park, no more getting rescued, no more earnest glances, quick touches, unintentionally brilliant quips, warmth that bursts open in his chest and bleeds into every crevice of his soul, no more—
No more fraternizing.
The pain is debilitating, it arrests his movements, interferes with his attention span, it makes everything unbearably heavy. He can’t walk it off, he can’t cough it out, he can’t miracle it away.
Where his love lives all across the vast fields of his soul, pain is now a permanent fixture.
Aziraphale goes through the motions.
Maybe, this is The Plan.
He can change them, he knows. He can do good.
But at what cost?
“Didn’t you have a flaming sword?” the demon narrows his eyes and immediately ignores his weak protests, “You did, didn’t you? It flamed like anything. Looked very impressive, I thought.”
And then, a bit later, the same demon steps a little closer, because Aziraphale admits he gave the sword to the humans, and for some reason the demon seems to appreciate it.
He can’t do this, Aziraphale realises, watching Metatron move something akin to chess pieces across the board.
He can’t contain himself any longer, so he backs away from the table and legs it to the elevator.
He comes down to Earth with no particular target in mind, and there’s throbbing pain, pain, pain everywhere where his body is. The skies are dark, weeping with him, even though his earthly vessel doesn’t seem to have any tears left.
He falls to his knees, grass and soil marring the warm beige of his clothes. He never managed to give those up, even as he was nudged to the very top, the very spotlight.
Is it worth it, keeping his love, sheltering it, refusing to give it up?
After all, Crowley broke his heart so thoroughly.
Aziraphale squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head.
Maybe, Crowley’s spite towards Heavens was stronger than his affection, but Aziraphale’s love is something he’s nursed for a millennium.
He can’t throw it away, he doesn’t want to, he won’t.
Aziraphale has thought that being loved in return would mean to be good, believed it so earnestly that when his love was rejected, it shattered everything, and in his pain he didn’t even pause to think that, maybe—
Maybe, that rejection has shattered Crowley too.
Maybe, love is not hunger and painful longing and sacrifice.
Maybe, love is hope, maybe, love is forgiveness, maybe, love – is being forgiven in return.
His heartbreak felt like a tide that overcame him, it pulsed and twitched and ached, refusing to leave it very well alone.
His heartbreak felt like Crowley muttering “Was it really so wrong?”.
His guilt felt like Crowley muttering “Don’t bother”.
Jim-definitely-not-short-for-Gabriel sighs wistfully.
“You know what it’s like when you don’t know anything at all, and yet you’re totally certain that everything would be better if you were just near one particular person?”
“Certainly not,” Aziraphale swallows so thickly he worries he might have swallowed his tongue.
Jim, amnesiac, lost, utterly confused Jim, looks as him with something akin to pity.
“Let me tempt you to some oysters,” he immediately fumbles over his words, feels his face redden.
Cra—Crowley smiles at him, and it’s somehow kind.
“We don’t dance,” Crowley mutters following him to the dance floor with little to no hesitation.
“A small demonic miracle of my own,” Crowley shrugs and hands Aziraphale the bag quickly as if not-caring.
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale breathes.
And Crowley pauses to cast a glance at him over his shoulder.
“Hm?”
Oh dear, Aziraphale thinks then, for a second unable to breath, heart galloping wildly.
Aziraphale kneels on the grass and looks up and lets out a long, tired sigh.
His love is his inability to abandon hope, and he knows then that he is good at that moment.
And, despite all else, he hopes, he hopes, he believes, more than anything in the world, that—
“Angel?”
His head whips up, words tumbling out of him faster than he can stuff them back in, his hands reaching out because he doesn’t care if he looks hungry, if he looks desperate, he doesn’t care if the evidence of his love is smeared all over him in wide stark strokes.
His love is more than anything The Plan has to offer, and he is not too prideful, and he doesn’t need to be right.
He doesn’t care if he is.
“I’m sorry. My dearest, Crowley, I—I’m sorry—”
And then Aziraphale is wrapped in his arms, obsidian wings folded around them with no care, no excuse.
“Don’t bother,” Crowley whispers. “I forgive you, too.”
And all the pain, all the doubt, goes quiet.
The sunlight breaks through.
*Zeptosecond – the smallest registered unit of time, one trillionth of a billionth of a second. This is the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule.
**In case you, like me, aren’t English, this is a reference to a bit from Aaron Hill’s “Verses Written on a Window in Scotland” that goes “Tender-handed stroke a nettle, and it stings you for your pains; Grasp it like a man of mettle, and it soft as silk remains.”
***The first coffee house in Europe opened in 1650 in Oxford, hence, it being The coffee house. And that’s the first year Aziraphale mentions doing the I was wrong dance. In my deranged head, after seeing the angel easily do a stupid dance for him over something that maybe isn’t as grand in the big scheme, Crowley feels obligated to reward the “sacrifice” by taking his angel to the first ever coffee shop because why the hell not.