Good Omens fic: Before Eden pt I

[rainjoyswriting]

Before Eden part I of III, a Good Omens fic, sequel to But Thou Readst Black Where I Read White.

Disclaimer: They’re not mine. I would have written that thing *very* differently.

Rating: Honestly, I don’t think it tips above R, but that is for violence and past-violence of a deeply disturbing sort, so bear that in mind.

Warnings and spoilers: You will need to watch the first season for this to make sense but it’s safely AU before S2 comes along to ruin everything. And remember some horrible grim things happened in But Thou Readst Black, so we live in the aftermath of that.

Summary: A couple of blips perhaps, generally we’ve been alright.



Note: New word processor everything looks different to me. Unlikely to be replying to comments, badly need to sleeeeep. Hope everyone is doing well <3






Sea breeze and the scream of gulls arguing on the wing, and Aziraphale approaches knowing that Crowley is watching his back, which always helps. Crowley still can’t bear to actually walk up to him himself, Aziraphale asked him not to kill him once and Crowley is still biding by that request despite all his personal inclinations, so Crowley is leaning against the Bentley where he parked it in a spot far too tight for it to possibly have squeezed into, arms folded and face like stone. As for Aziraphale, he walks up to the railings and manages the best of a smile he can, and says, “Hello, Gabriel.” He offers the bag. “Doughnut?”

Gabriel glares at the sea, face worse than Crowley’s. He's holding the salt-cold railings over the beach, eyes not on the happy humans and prancing dogs in the waves but on the distance to the horizon, where the sun is a scythe on the water. Aziraphale looks across at it, dusts a little sugar from his hands, doesn’t quite know what to do with the bag until, patting at his pockets, he finds a second bag to put it into so he won’t get oil on his coat as he stashes it in an inner pocket.

Gabriel glares at the sea. Aziraphale sighs, and rests his own nervous hands on the railings, and listens to the waves for a moment. It always helps. The sea makes him feel so much safer.

He says, “Zophiel and Ramiel say you still haven’t really settled in.”

“This is a temporary realm of gross matter which will be incinerated come the next great war.” Gabriel says to the horizon. “Why get attached?”

“Because it’s our realm, Gabriel. It’s not like either of us can give our allegiance to Heaven or Hell if there is another war, not after what we’ve done, can we?”

Gabriel’s jaw works slow and angry, and Aziraphale looks away from it because the sense of Gabriel’s anger is only making him feel more anxious. There are some children kicking a ball on the beach chased by a small energetic dog desperate to catch up with a ball as big as its own body, and that twitches a smile for a moment, just a moment to forget that they really are stuck on the same side, Aziraphale and the angel who ripped the wings clean out of him. Not that ‘clean’ felt like remotely the right word at the time. Regardless, Heaven will have neither of them back, and while Aziraphale knows that he has no interest in helping either Heaven or Hell himself, even with blackened wings Gabriel can’t, surely? He truly believed in all that ‘enemies’ stuff, from the very beginning he did, he can hardly turn double now, can he?

He can’t anyway. Aziraphale can well imagine what Hell would make of the former, Fallen Archangel Gabriel coming to them, and it wouldn’t end well for Gabriel.

He glances back at Gabriel. Gabriel is glaring at the sea.

“Brighton’s nice,” Aziraphale says, awkward with small talk, trying to keep his tone light. “It must be lovely being so near the sea.”

Flatly, “Must it.”

“. . . have you . . . talked to any of the other angels and demons in the guest house?”

Glaring at the sea, corner of his lip curling, “I don't like talking.”

“Ah, um, no.” Aziraphale does understand the point of what Gabriel just said, Aziraphale is the one trying to make him talk now. He looks out at the water, and he knows he’s safe, he feels the way Gabriel’s power is cut off by the clipped ends of his wings beside him, but all the muscles of his back don’t seem to think they’re safe and they want to ripple, his wings want to beat, that utter horror of wanting to flap themselves into existence again. He tries to hold the fear in his breath, folds his wings from their nervous flexing and squeezes the cold railings in his hands. He tries to hear the sea. “Well. Can be tricky, can’t it. Making friends. It took Crowley and I long enough.”

Gabriel finally turns his head from the sea and looks at him and oh, Aziraphale wishes he hadn’t. Gabriel’s still wearing stubble he doesn’t need but the hollows under his eyes, he’s not choosing those, and that’s much more worrying. “I will never be like you.” Gabriel says, the hard, imperious tone of an Archangel. “You are everything that is broken in this world.”

That – word –

That is the (breath huffed against the back of his head) wrong choice of word, the worst (chisel forced between muscle and bone and levered) word, to hear from the one (the stretched tendon in two short drags of the saw hacked through) who (the weight of his wings shockingly gone and the blood leaving him fast and faint) broke him.

At first the shock, then the anger, similar in appearance because they both simply leave him hot in the face and speechless. Then – pain and fear are so entirely entwined that he can’t tell them apart, the way they suck the blood from his skin; and from there comes the lower, longer, deeper twist, he doesn’t know the word for it, sadness, still the horror, some sort of straining regret –

He wants, he so wants, to forgive Gabriel, for the two of them to get this thing behind themselves so they can just get on with things and forget about it, but everything Gabriel has done and won’t even acknowledge, it’s like a stone stuck in his throat, he can’t. He can’t and he won’t, he’s not that good. And what he feels, he thinks, is stuck forgiveness, like a jammed door, something he can’t get around or through, he feels unbalanced on it, permanently jarred by it. He is a being made for love and when it comes to Gabriel he can’t and he feels the inadequacy of it like a permanent blush. And he looks at Gabriel and flexes the muscles in his back, feels his wings – doesn’t move them, just feels their presence, the weight and the strength of them – and closes his hands at his sides, holds Gabriel’s eye. And he says to him, his voice hardly shakes, “Nothing has to be perfect to be good enough. You’re on Earth now. This is how we live.”

Gabriel’s lip curls. “This will never be how I live.”

“It already is. Do you – really want to talk about broken? I might well be the angel who walked away, have you still not –“ He waves a helpless hand at him, the nonsense of Gabriel’s pretence of innocence. “– have you still not faced the things you’ve done?”

“I did it for justice.”

“You did it for ego, Gabriel.” Aziraphale glares back, he’s not afraid, he’s not going to let himself feel afraid, he’s not going to act afraid at least – “Blood all over the floor of Heaven and you want to talk about ‘justice’, honestly –”

Gabriel turns to him and his invisible wings flare, Aziraphale feels it and he feels their ugly stunted ends and feels faint, and he feels Crowley snapping to upright by the car. “If I had my wings,” Gabriel says, low, the quietness of it bleaches the skin of Aziraphale’s face, he understands the threat exactly, he knows exactly what Gabriel means by it.

Crowley is already there, fearless in his fury, between Gabriel and Aziraphale and his invisible wings are straining, the muscles taut with keeping them sharply back and not flaring them out for everyone to see. “Say it again so I can hear it,” Crowley says through his teeth, the hiss whispering underneath the words. “Say it again, come on–“

“Crowley –“

Gabriel is looking Crowley right in the eye with no fear on his face and Aziraphale doesn’t think that that’s wise at all. “Don’t you think it’s strange that She’s never changed yours back?”

Crowley growls, “Not everyone thinks Heaven’s better than Hell.” and Aziraphale looks around at the staring humans who were enjoying their day at the beach and now are enjoying this little show and mumbles, “Oh dear, oh dear –”

Gabriel just shrugs in an exaggerated way, it’s never a natural motion for him, always a gesture learned and repeated. “I think it just shows that not letting him die might not have been the right decis–”

“Don’t think that holy water is the worst that can happen to you, don’t think I’m nice just because he is –”

“Crowley –”

“Don’t think I’m afraid of you, you used to be a worm.”

“Crowley, dear, everyone’s –”

“A worm with teeth.” Crowley spits.

Aziraphale tugs his arm urgently, voice a rushed rattle, “Crowley will you – everyone is watching –”

Crowley’s eyes, livid yellow over his sunglasses, don’t leave Gabriel’s face but he lashes his free arm out and Aziraphale –

– blinks, in the pure white desert outside of time where his wings sigh back, white and free, and for one second the breath shivers out of him relieved at the relaxation of them. But then he has to shiver himself to attention again because the two demons (one with great wide warm black wings like a friendly night and the other with shockingly cut-off feathers stark dark against the light) are still glaring at each other, there’s the shimmer of heat between their gazes, Crowley has actually brought them outside of time so that the two of them can continue fighting.

“Alright,” Aziraphale says, trying to be firm, “that is really quite enough.”

Gabriel says with a lip-curled sneer, “If you were going to kill me you would have already done it. For a snake you’re too spineless to follow through.”

“If I’m the spineless one then why are you all words, oh great and mighty Archangel Gabriel?”

“Cro–”

“I didn’t see you picking a fight with me when I had my wings.”

“Will you both –”

“Oh you think that’s the problem? You think the only fair fight’s an Archangel up against a principality?”

“Will y–”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, demon.”

They are nose to nose and a fraction of a second from the fire becoming literal. “You’re a demon, prat.”

Aziraphale has had quite enough of this.

It’s faster than a fingersnap, like a bulb flaring, the light he bursts with and clamps down again immediately. The light is a glimpse of the truth of his form, something he has never liked showing, feeling something like the shame of the humans when they first discovered their nakedness in it, his true form is just too much for him to feel comfortable in. That makes revealing it, in every sense of the word, flashing, and he never ordinarily would but he’s frankly quite cross. Both demons yelp, staggering back from the nose-apart width of snarling they’d narrowed to, hands clapped over their eyes. Crowley rips his sunglasses off to rub at his eyes and blinks repeatedly, turning to Aziraphale and saying, shocked and aggrieved, “Ow.”

“Sorry. Well. Sorry.” He jerks his coat neater, feeling very ruffled. “Just finding it a bit difficult getting a word in edgeways. Honestly, the two of you, is any of this necessary? How old are you? Don’t answer that,” As Gabriel opens his mouth, “that was a rhetorical question because we are all exactly the same age which is too old for this nonsense.”

Crowley is looking sullen. Gabriel mutters, “You started it.”

Aziraphale’s mouth drops open. “I – I – ?”

Gabriel’s eyes are raw with hatred. “All you had to do was leave me alone.”

The rush of anger makes Aziraphale feel giddy, then ill. “Odd position to take,” he says, and it shakes, “when all you had to do to stay in Heaven was offer the same to me. Now if you two are quite done sniping at each other, Crowley, my dear, might we go back?”

Crowley glances at him, then away again still with an edge of a sulk on it. “Yeah,” he mutters, slotting his sunglasses back on and there they are on the sun-soaked promenade, gulls loud on the wing, children shrieking, waves giggling over the stones of the beach. Aziraphale draws his breath in, takes Crowley’s arm, says briskly to Gabriel, “You have eternity. It really does seem pointless to make yourself miserable just to spite me, Gabriel.”

“Leave,” Gabriel says like it’s an order, turning back to the sea. Aziraphale can only sigh, and look at Crowley, and squeeze his arm; Crowley is still looking at Gabriel.

“Crowley . . .”

Crowley says, eyes on Gabriel, “You got less than you deserved. One of these days you’ll get the rest.”

He feels it in his cheeks, prickling and unpleasant. “Crowley –”

“Come on, angel.” Crowley mutters, hands sliding into his pockets as he turns away. Aziraphale holds his arm, holds him there for one moment more, looking at Gabriel, trying to find some words, some words, something to help heal the complicated, painful way the two of them are sewn together like the quires in some bitter book –

But everything he could say that might help would be a lie; he doesn’t forgive him, doesn’t like him, all he’s got is the tangle of his pity and guilt and anger and his idiot need for resolution, as if this world offers anything like resolution. He says, “Goodbye, Gabriel. Until next time.”

Gabriel glares at the sea, and ignores him. Aziraphale closes his eyes for a moment, finds the sound of the waves, then opens his eyes and smiles at Crowley and walks with him to the car. Crowley’s face is still stiff, his mouth too flat. Aziraphale feels in a bad enough mood himself to think fine, let him sulk, I don't care.

He cares.

In the safe space of the Bentley, which Crowley eases from its impossible parking space and jars forward far too fast, Aziraphale grabs for the ceiling for some sort of purchase and swallows and Gabriel is already out of sight through the rear window. And he knows that part of this speed is Crowley’s anger, Aziraphale is struggling with himself as well, he wants to reach for him and can’t make himself, wants to find some connection to hold to, he feels – not good. He never does feel good, after another attempt to reach Gabriel. So stupid how vulnerability makes him feel so spiky, why is he angry with Crowley? He is angry with Crowley, for – for what, for resenting how Gabriel still talks to Aziraphale, the things Gabriel won’t apologise for, all the things that Aziraphale is angry with Gabriel for himself but he’s angry with Crowley for feeling the same – he is ridiculous. And wrong. That’s not an easy thing to manage, when all he wants in the world after facing Gabriel is a hug. Vulnerability makes him fearful, and fear makes him spiky, and the spikes push him further and further from the only person on any realm would could actually make him feel safe.

He looks at his own hands on his lap so he’s not looking at the scenery flashing by far too fast, and says quietly, “It didn’t hurt, did it? The light.”

Crowley keeps his eyes on the road, twitches his taut mouth. “No,” he says. “Not really. Just – startled me.”

Aziraphale looks at his hands. He says, “I’m sorry.”

Crowley says, “Yeah. Well. If you think I’m apologising for hating that prick –”

“No,” he says quietly. “I don’t expect that. I hate him too, if I’m honest.”

“I don’t think you do or else why the Heaven do we keep having to do this?”

“. . . I don’t know. I really don’t.” Hatred is such a big feeling, so all-consuming, Aziraphale doesn’t know that it’s the right word now he’s pushed to it. “Can you feel hatred for someone and feel something else as well?”

Crowley jerks the steering wheel and Aziraphale grabs for the door to not fly sideways. “What else? What do you feel about him?”

Is it hatred? He feels increasingly confused about that now, suspects that he's not especially au fait with his own emotions, especially since Crowley told him when Aziraphale fell in love with him and it’s a significantly earlier date than the moment Aziraphale thought it was. He rights himself in his seat, looks at Crowley, looks down at his hands again. “Pity, mostly.” he says. “I wouldn’t have his life for the world. I’d rather be me, even with what he did to me, more than him – Lord, more than anything. I wouldn’t be him for anything. Maybe it’s not hatred but I can’t like him.”

“What’s to like?” Crowley mutters, and looks at him, and Aziraphale risks a flicked glance to his eyes and then back to his own hands, says, “Darling, do watch the road.”

He thinks, though he doesn’t know why, that it’s the ‘darling’ that does it; maybe just that in the middle of anything Aziraphale doesn’t forget that Crowley is, always will be, the most precious thing he has. And Crowley’s voice softens too, falls lower as he says, “Alright, angel,” taking a hand from the steering wheel to put it over Aziraphale’s, squeezing. “We're alright.”

Relief like dropping underwater, his eyes close; they’re alright. What else does he need?

Crowley drives. Aziraphale looks out of the window, and thinks about resolution. Things resolve in Heaven, everything ends tied up in a neat bow, souls saved for an eternity of celestial harps and radiance, the promise of a war that will solve everything. He chose Earth. He chose the messiness and entropy and incomplete, incompleteable nature of this realm, and he can hardly sulk now that he’s getting exactly what he knew he would. What would resolution with Gabriel look like? I'm sorry, it was wrong of me, I no longer understand how I could have done that – oh, how old is he, far too old to think . . . but he always thinks like that. One would think that knowing oneself naïve would make one less naïve but it never seems to have helped Aziraphale. He always thinks that things should be made right, and then he always bumps his head off the world, which disagrees.

Does it disagree, or just not care?

It’s less than an hour from Brighton to the cottage they chose, overlooking the sea, high on a cliff with the woods rolling down below the hill at the back, between them and a pretty village housing a delightful pub with very polite staff. Crowley pulls up on the gravel of the driveway and stands there even before he’s closed the car door looking the gardens over, it’s sweet the effort he puts into them, when he talks to plants he leans very close and whispers like what he’s saying is a secret, the dear man. He gave Aziraphale a corner of the garden for his own, where while Crowley works Aziraphale sits in a deck chair with a book and the flowers grow luxuriant around him. It’s an angel thing, one he’s sometimes a bit embarrassed by, given the effort he knows Crowley puts into it. It’s why he didn't mind either outcome, when they tossed a coin over who would take which job back when minding Warlock; it was hardly work, pottering about the gardens and watching everything grow so burgeoning green all around him, feeding the sparrows, watching Nanny teach the boy to ride a tricycle.

Aziraphale climbs out of the car and finds that he’s been sitting on the doughnuts. He goes to shake the sad contents of the bag out onto the bird table which for some reason only attracts crows, looks at the doughnuts’ mashed greasy forms and thinks, It’s a metaphor for something, though I’m not sure exactly what.

Crowley’s arms snake around him from behind and he purrs into the side of Aziraphale’s neck, “Now I have you all to myself.”

Aziraphale squirms his shoulders, wriggling in the sheer pleasure of being so wanted. It is true that London is increasingly hard work and they are less and less left to themselves, they’ve had to get more professional about all the angels and demons defecting to them, had be more rational about where they siphon everyone to, how they acclimatise them to the world, and it’s good work but it’s always lovely to get a break from it. The bookshop now is being minded by Penemuel and Haniel, who get along well though Penemuel prefers to live alone surrounded by stacks of paperback books – there is a bed in her flat somewhere underneath them all though Aziraphale doesn’t think she ever sleeps, it would eat into her reading time. Haniel stays in the bookshop, though he’s often busy with his volunteer work, which seems to mostly involve leaflets. But he can keep an eye on the new arrivals, and he’s a dominion, highest ranking angel who’s left Heaven so far, meaning he can defend the bookshop if he has to. Which is a relief to Aziraphale, having lost it once, even if he did regain it with some fine first editions of classic children’s literature thrown in.

Highest ranking angel to leave Heaven by choice, he remembers. By choice. And he closes his eyes, and leans his cheek to Crowley’s determining to forget all about him, tucking his own arms around the long arms wrapping his waist. He smiles, says, “Holidays are nice, aren’t they?”

“Yup,” Crowley says, and with an easy tucking motion gets an arm underneath Aziraphale’s knees and hikes him up – Aziraphale tends not to panic when Crowley does unexpected things, just waits to see what he means by it, and he catches his arms around his neck for balance as Crowley walks grinning to the cottage’s front door with an angel in his arms. Aziraphale rolls his eyes but he's smiling as Crowley boots the door open, says only, “Mind the door, Crowley –” before Crowley deposits him against the hallway wall, arms sliding around his body, pinning him back into the wall in a squeezed, fervent sort of way.

Aziraphale is surprised, then isn’t, smiling as he tucks Crowley in close by his blade-slim waist, laying his nose to the side of Crowley's throat with a sigh. Possessiveness, he thinks, that’s what he means by it, it often happens after another encounter with Gabriel. It’s not that Crowley is jealous of Gabriel – that being entirely senseless on every level, not something to enter the mind – but that near Gabriel he feels the nearness of the loss of Aziraphale, and needs to remember in a visceral way Aziraphale’s continued existence, Aziraphale’s hisness. Aziraphale doesn’t really question his belonging to Crowley; he ceased belonging to Heaven, so who else could own his allegiance now but him? And that makes it simple, at least. All he has to do is press against Crowley as much as he can, clutch back all the desperation of his gratitude at still being here to have Crowley too. It’s not hard to smile into the hug. It really is nice to feel wanted.

Crowley sniffs at the top of his head, runs his nose through Aziraphale’s hair to skim the shape of his ear, which puts an odd alerted thrill through him. “We haven’t even unpacked,” Aziraphale says with only a little shiver to it, when Crowley is just breathing with his nose pressed behind Aziraphale’s ear, slowing, calming inhales and exhales against the side of his jaw. Crowley’s head lowers, tucks under his jaw, and Aziraphale runs his hands up Crowley’s back, calming him, he knows how Gabriel upsets him. “We ought to get that white wine in the fridge.”

Neither of them even begin to move. Aziraphale lets Crowley calm himself against the certainty of Aziraphale’s body, and Aziraphale feels himself grounded, soothed, enclosed as he is between Crowley and the wall. He slides his fingers up into Crowley’s hair, which he’s wearing longer, now. For a time Crowley started wearing it longer on top with the aggressively short back and sides that young people seem fond of again – a hundred years exactly since Aziraphale last saw it so often – and Aziraphale was polite and puzzled and curious. He doesn’t understand how often Crowley changes, how much he seems to enjoy trying new things, it’s always such an event for Aziraphale to try something new while Crowley grows his hair everywhichway just for fun. Aziraphale wouldn’t have chosen that style but it didn’t look bad on him, he always looks charming, and the short hair around the base of his skull was very nice for scratching. But now he’s grown it longer again, worn in messy waves to below the bottom of his neck and he usually wears it stuffed back in a little bun but always loose at night and Aziraphale can’t pretend that he doesn’t enjoy playing with it the way that he does. It is lovely to run the fingers through, so rich and thick and glorious red, fox-red, deep as wine and lovely.

(If anyone asked, Crowley would allow them to believe that it’s for Aziraphale’s pleasure that he grew his hair longer again. He would allow them to believe that as opposed to the truth, which is that it’s for Crowley’s pleasure that Aziraphale now has more hair to stroke and comb and fondle and caress.)

Aziraphale can’t look down with Crowley’s nose acting as a prop against the underside of his jaw but he is aware of the paper underfoot, the post that has accumulated since they were last here – four months ago? Five? He loses track of time they’re so busy. He doubts it’s worth even mentioning it while Crowley's priority seems to be running his thumb over Aziraphale’s Adam’s apple, fingers curled around his neck, kissing the edge of his jaw, pressing his teeth in the flesh as if threatening a nip but his lip feels so giving, then, softer than the corners of even the most beloved book, for another kiss.

Aziraphale closes his eyes, can’t find much purchase on Crowley’s skinny back for his hands and gives up, grabs him by the belt (too shy to go for the back pockets of those absurdly tight trousers of his) and breathes at the ceiling, and he’s glad that this seems to be what Crowley really needs right now because he’s not capable of managing much more than giving himself to Crowley’s hands were he called to do so. Miles between him and Gabriel and still he can’t shake it, he is rattled, and the nervous energy is in him like a hamster on a wheel, he doesn’t know how to get it out.

The thing is, ordinarily he would talk to Crowley – he and Crowley always talk, an endless conversation, there’s no-one anywhere he can talk to like Crowley when one of them can say, “Just like Ithaca.” and the other can say, “Mm.” and they both know exactly what they mean. More than that, they want to know what the other means, they live leaning constantly forwards, towards each other, trying to reach each other. But they can’t talk about Gabriel. Gabriel has set up in the middle of their relationship like a rock in the middle of the living room they’re constantly having to step around and over without ever acknowledging, and it honestly is exhausting. The worst part is that Aziraphale suspects deep down that the problem might be his fault, and he’s not willing to consider that yet, and certainly not ready to concede it to Crowley.

Because they’ve already had the fight and it went nowhere, Aziraphale does know himself stubborn, he’s just always in the midst of his stubbornness so certain of his rightness that Crowley not recognising that is really very trying. And that was what he could see was in Crowley’s eyes in the middle of the argument even if not voiced, that Aziraphale is only being stubborn, that there is no point in going back to Gabriel over and over until – what? Until he becomes a better person? Until he changes? Until he apologises? What does Aziraphale even want from going back to him, him of all people, what does he think it will achieve?

He doesn’t know but he can’t stop himself. He can’t give up, he feels the hopelessness of it but can’t let go all the same. Zophiel and Ramiel write that Gabriel still never acknowledges the presence of anyone else in the guest house, he stares at the sea or he holes up in his room and he never says a word to any of them, his unhappiness is like a stain coming through the ceiling. And Crowley mutters, “Good.” and Aziraphale thinks . . .

What does he think?

He thinks that Gabriel is safer for everyone else if he’s less incredibly unhappy. He thinks that it couldn’t be possible for someone who has done what Gabriel has done to be truly happy without acknowledging it. He thinks, he thinks – is it only greed, pride, ego on his own part? He wants an apology. He wants Gabriel to repent what he did. He does manage sometimes to mean the better part of it, that he does see that Gabriel can no more move past it than he can and he has to acknowledge it eventually, but mostly –

(If I had my wings –)

Mostly he just wants until he could weep with sheer fury for Gabriel to acknowledge that what he did to Aziraphale matters, that he matters, that whatever the Hell he’s done in his life and oh he knows he’s done a lot, he has still never deserved that. And it is so stupid and stubborn and ridiculous, Crowley is right to be so repressed-angry about it because – because honestly, what if Gabriel never does any of that? Is Aziraphale really going to keep worrying at this forever, for all of eternity, is he really intending to waste all of eternity on his helpless knotted fury that Gabriel won't say sorry?

Greed, pride, ego, sheer stupid bloody-minded stubbornness. Of course he can’t let himself into the depths of the thoughts yet. Even the shallows make him hate himself too much and it becomes too hard to let Crowley love him when he hates himself too much.

Now Crowley’s palms press his hips and he says, lifting his head with his eyes still very close and eerie gold behind the sunglasses, “Let’s just stay here tonight. Drink ourselves silly –“ His hand lifts, the backs of his knuckles skim over Aziraphale’s hair, his eyes watching their path – “and unpack in the morning. Does that sound alright?”

Aziraphale folds his arms around his waist and smiles for him. “It sounds perfect, darling.”

He does mean it. The pattern is already settled, by now; they visit Gabriel at the start of the trip so that Aziraphale has a couple of days to get the stress out of his system and enjoy the rest of the holiday, so that it isn’t a horrible necessity at the end of the trip casting its shadow across the whole of it. So they’ll stay in tonight, stay close for a few days, until Aziraphale can concentrate on a book again, until Crowley’s teeth can unclench themselves, and then they’ll just be happy. It’s not like Gabriel is always there. Gabriel is a minor part of their lives; their lives are really each other.

Except he does still dream of it. And it does still sometimes return so hard that his vision goes dark (once a customer loomed at his shoulder too fast and Aziraphale startled and hit him with a book, and then there wasn’t enough apologising in the world and Crowley had to throw the poor man out of the shop like he’d done the wrong thing while Aziraphale was trying not to cry with sheer shame and honestly the only spark of relief in it is that it’s hardly the worst thing that’s ever happened to a customer in Aziraphale’s bookshop). Except that it is – there, it’s just there, scratching at the seams of his life, pressing at the cracks. He can’t make it not have happened. He doesn’t like to believe that he’s broken, that it broke him. What Gabriel did to him is far from the largest part of him, and he has eternity to be alright in, it’s alright to take a few years to get to alright. But it is there, and he’s sure an angel ought to know what to do, he doesn't know how to fix himself and here he was put on this Earth to make things better.

Crowley scratches at the back of Aziraphale’s neck, says like it's an I love you, “I’m glad we brought plenty of wine. You’re gorgeous when you’re plastered.” and the laughter bursts free of him, the sheer startled bafflement staring into his eyes, and Crowley grins.

*

It’s an innocuous dream at first, he doesn’t know that there’s anything to dread. Crowley likes dreams much of the time, relates them sometimes to the angel who sleeps much less and still finds dreams a novelty, sitting beside him in the bed with his book lowered to his lap, looking at Crowley over the tops of his spectacles (Aziraphale does call them spectacles) with the smile soft in the lines of his mouth and his eyes all warmly curious. It’s an innocuous dream, just stupid occurrence after stupid occurrence, he’s quite enjoying it. Then Crowley opens the passenger door of his Bentley (Why? Penemuel is going to drive – why would Penemuel be about to drive his car – ?) and the blood runs over the flooded seat and onto the ground, a horrible little waterfall, there’s a puddle of gore forming on the floor in front of his feet and Crowley knows –

He wakes gasping so hard he chokes on his own spit – God human bodies are so badly designed, fuck’s sake – comes up coughing and hears from the overstuffed armchair in the corner of the room the familiar clatter of cup and saucer, and Aziraphale yelping, “Crowley –”

Crowley’s hunched over himself wheezing when Aziraphale climbs onto the bed at his side, rubbing his back, saying, “Alright, Crowley, are you alright – ?” and Crowley snatches his arms around him and clamps his legs around him and sits hugging him in in as close to a python’s full-body wrap as he can manage in this form, the hiss leaving him slow and long. Aziraphale is clearly confused but worried more than that, squirming an arm free to snap his fingers for the bedside lamp to come on, getting both hands to the sides of Crowley’s face and tilting it up to meet his eye, combing the hair back behind his ears. The angel is blinking a lot, nervous; Crowley is not blinking.

“Are you alright?” Aziraphale says, his thumb brushing and brushing at the hair above Crowley’s temple and it would be more soothing if Crowley couldn’t still see that miniature flood of his blood running out of the car door for his feet. So he swallows and doesn’t say anything yet, doesn’t trust himself to, and Aziraphale, not really knowing what’s happening, tucks Crowley’s head closer and kisses him there on the crown of it, lays his cheek to his hair and hums, gentle as dawn.

Crowley knows why he dreamed that, the night after again the angel wanted a good hard pick at the scab of his gouged-out wings. Why they keep having to go back to that bastard, he’s made his position fucking clear, Gabriel doesn’t care, Gabriel would do it again if he only could, Gabriel fully deserves to go to Hell. What appalls Crowley – what he fucking doesn’t understand and refuses to understand – is that he thinks that Aziraphale’s trying to forgive Gabriel, he thinks Aziraphale’s beating himself up because he can’t, and he thinks it’s absolutely fucking insane. What Gabriel did shouldn’t be forgiven. What the fuck is the angel even trying to do?

He squeezes Aziraphale in tight, and Aziraphale just hums like a lullaby, stroking the hair neat at the back of his head.

Crowley knows that Gabriel intended to kill Aziraphale, he’s intended to do it since the apocalypse got stalled, he just after the first fiery failed attempt intended to do it in a way brutally and bloodily tied to his fury of Aziraphale’s still-white wings, especially once his own turned black. The thing is, on the nights when Crowley can face it, on the nights he can actually look at that intention and its follow-through in the eye, on the nights he can bear to name it –

Crowley thinks that Gabriel succeeded. He felt Aziraphale fading in his arms as he carried him to Adam, felt the sigh of his body’s spending and losing its last strength. And Adam reset reality, that’s what Adam does, the world rewound and reworked without needing time to do it in and Crowley was then just holding a body more solid, more whole, as if all that airy weightlessness had just been the volume of blood he’d shed suddenly returned and beating strong back through his heart again. When he’s brave enough to be honest with himself, he thinks that Aziraphale was already gone by the time Adam stopped staring and could react, humans take so long to react, two seconds is more than enough time to die in. Crowley thinks that Gabriel is a murderer, that he’s already lost Aziraphale, that he knows the reality of what Gabriel did and the thought that Aziraphale wants to somehow make things right with him, like Aziraphale could owe Gabriel something, anything at all –

All that blood, all that fucking blood, it was all over Crowley’s hands on the steering wheel, it got tacky and uncomfortable as it dried through the drive, Crowley’s clothes were wet and then crusty with it, Aziraphale’s death soaking the passenger seat and smearing the dashboard and all over Crowley’s hands, sticking his clothes to his skin – what could forgiveness mean in the face of that? And what is he supposed to say to Aziraphale? ‘Your being violently, gruesomely murdered was personally really traumatic for me, please stop making me deal with it’?

He realises that what Aziraphale is humming for him, sweet as if in a nursery to the top of his head, is Fat Bottomed Girls, and finds that his eyes are pricking.

He knows who he fell in love with, he knows why he fell, first when Aziraphale confessed to giving away that stupid flaming sword out of nothing but compassion and then with a very final bump when in Rome an angel invited a demon for oysters, when Aziraphale tilted their interactions from their happening to bump into each other to their choosing to share time together, and Crowley, unused to kindness and care, used to being feared but utterly new to the concept of being liked, just – just fell, for the second and final time. Aziraphale might be easily enough distracted from compassion – Crowley’s purposefully done it himself enough times when the angel’s kindness was inconvenient for them, but the lure of a book or a really good meal or simple laziness will do it all on its own for the most part – but it is the angel’s first reaction, his reaction before thought kicks in, it is the truth of him, instinctive worry for someone else. Crowley fell in love with an angel who when they lost the Antichrist murmured unthinkingly I do hope nothing’s happened to him, an angel who said it was cold and there were animals and she was expecting and he knew, oh he knew what the consequences might be face to face with a demon but for Aziraphale consequences are the second thought, the one he doesn’t always manage to get to. Aziraphale is kind, at least partly because he doesn’t think far enough ahead not to be.

And then, on the other hand, there’s Gabriel.

Gabriel is only one of the reasons why Crowley knows that it’s not because Aziraphale is an angel that he’s kind, though Gabriel is a fucking clear example of it. All demons were angels first and Crowley’s survived Hell, Crowley knows that being made an angel doesn't mean you were made good, and even all the angels who kept their wings white displayed less love between them than that one angel who smiled for Crowley. Angels aren’t perfectly good, Aziraphale isn’t perfectly good, can match Crowley bitch for bitch and has passive aggression honed to a scalpel but in six thousand years Crowley’s never known anyone perfectly good, and certainly never known anyone who treated him better than his angel does, gentle and caring to a depth Crowley couldn’t have conceived of before he was given it. Aziraphale wasn’t made good because that's what angels are, Aziraphale is good because he’s him, because he wants to be and he made the choice not to fight his own conscience when he can fight Heaven instead, and the reward he gets for goodness is torturing himself a second time to try to reach Gabriel, the venomous prick who hurt him more than anyone’s ever hurt him and left Crowley’s dreams and the creases of his hands full of dark-dried blood.

There’s no reason why angels would have been made perfectly good, when God Herself clearly isn’t.

Crowley lifts his head, and finds the angel’s eyes, holds his cheek, clears his throat. “I’m alright,” he says, to the confusion and worry in Aziraphale’s gaze. He runs his thumb back over his cheek, finds an almost-smile raising at just how pretty he looks, even in this. “I’m alright. Just a shitty dream.”

Aziraphale watches his eyes, says nervously as if they both don’t already know what the answer will be, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Crowley just sniffs, looks at the armchair in the corner of the room – the cottage’s biscuit-box prettiness, all beams and leaded windows, leans so heavily Aziraphalean that in their attempts to compromise most of the furniture is aggressively Crowlish, modern and stark or else outrageously ostentatious but for that big squishy armchair with a doily over its back in the corner of the bedroom where Aziraphale sometimes sits to read. Crowley says, eyes narrowed on the armchair as if it’s the scene of a crime, “Why were you over there? What time is it?”

“Oh – ah – I don't know. Early.”

Crowley digs his phone out from underneath his pillow and its light is stark against the lamp’s golden glow, and Aziraphale pulls his head back a little with a pained sort of squint. “Just after four,” Crowley says. “What were you doing over there? In the dark?”

He can’t pretend he was reading, after all. Aziraphale’s face remains pained, as he kneels there with Crowley’s arms and legs still clamped around him, the weight of Crowley in his lap holding him in place, and he says, “I – was just, um, being – fidgety. I didn’t want to wake you. Is it worth getting up yet, do you think?”

Crowley’s about to pull a face – only CEOs and world leaders get up at this time, by which he means only the dangerously, narcissistically single-minded, but – Heaven, he’s not going to sleep again after that. “Fuck it,” he says. It's not like either of them need sleep anyway.

There’s a wrought iron bench against the back of the cottage, overlooking the garden rolling down towards the sea. There under the purpling sky – still dark but already promising that darkness is not a permanent state – they bring their coffee and what Aziraphale calls the ‘wireless’, tuned perpetually by the angel to Radio Four which means the World Service is murmuring comfortingly beside them as they sip coffee and listen to the distant waves. Still in his dressing gown Aziraphale leans warm to Crowley’s side, soft and comforting as a favourite pillow, and Crowley lays a casual arm around his shoulders, allows his temple to tilt to his. They’re quiet, for a time, as if what they really want right now is to listen to a radio programme about coffee farmers in South America and watch the sun rise.

What if he just says it? Crowley thinks. What’s the worst that could happen? He’s not looking for a fight, he just wants – he doesn’t understand, or if he does then Aziraphale doesn’t. If he can keep it calm, if it’s only an attempt to make Aziraphale safe. Neither of them like talking about it but – but what the fuck is Crowley for, now, if not keeping him safe? He wants to help. And that dream still tastes like rust at the back of his throat, he drinks coffee just to try to drown it out, swallows and draws his breath in long, feels how the two of them breathing presses them closer with each expansion of the chest and as long as they’re breathing they’ve got better things to do than drag themselves through the mud and blood for Gabriel’s sake, haven’t they?

“Fidgety,” he says to the angel’s forehead, and they both know what it means.

Aziraphale sighs as if he’s been waiting for this, pushing himself up to a more upright sit and cupping his coffee careful in his lap, though he makes no move to remove Crowley’s arm from his shoulders. “Yes, dear,” he says patiently, and Crowley’s already irritated, he hates it when Aziraphale gets patient with him. He grinds it in his teeth and bears it. Bluntness might help. You start blunt and then work your way to subtlety with Aziraphale, at least it gets his attention.

“You don’t have to go back to him.” he says, as Aziraphale watches him poised like a cat in his pale dressing gown, coffee cupped neat in both hands. “Whatever you think – whatever Heaven made you think over all those centuries, you don’t owe him anything and you’re not the bad person here, he is.”

“I know that,” Aziraphale says. “And they were more on the side of forgiveness in the abstract, anyway, much less inclined towards particular cases. I’m really not just some Heavenly sock puppet, Crowley, I have autonomy, I do have some thoughts of my own.”

“Good. So think for yourself. He’s never even going to listen to you, he doesn’t listen to anyone.”

“I know he doesn’t.” Aziraphale lifts his cup, hesitates for a moment as if thinking with it nearly at the lip and then takes a sip, lowers it again. “But he doesn’t seem able to ignore me either. So maybe I’m the only one who can get through to him, one of these days.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know, dear. That’s what autonomy means.”

The promise to himself that he would be calm in this discussion can honestly only ever be half-held when talking about this. “You can’t – want to forgive him, after what he did to you –”

Aziraphale sighs, and looks tired, and says over his coffee, “Can we talk about something else?”

Crowley glares ahead to the lightening sea, past the table at the far end of the patio where they’d spent the previous evening working their way through a number of bottles of wine, Crowley had most of it, Aziraphale slow and a little distracted in his drinking. Crowley’s eye falls back to the bottles still ranked beside the table for putting in the recycling; he remembers, when Aziraphale was pushing his chair back to go to bed, being very full of wine and holding his arms out to the angel who seemed far too sober, saying plaintively, “Carry me.”

“Sober up.” Aziraphale said. “We’re only going upstairs.”

“No, carry me. Go on, I’d do it for you.”

Aziraphale made a great huffy show of it and then pulled Crowley’s chair out, crouched in front of it with his back to him and hiked Crowley forward by the wrists over his shoulders, Crowley’s wine-sensitive head jarring into the piggyback. Crowley muttered, “This isn’t what I had in mind,” as Aziraphale jogged his thighs right in his grip and said, “Well it’ll have to do, I can’t carry you – horizontally, you’re too long, there are doorways to get through.”

“Romance is dead,” Crowley had said, and together they discovered with a bump that Crowley is also, on Aziraphale’s back, too long to fit through these old low doorways vertically. But then he got to rest his nose in Aziraphale’s hair and close his eyes and that wasn’t something to complain about, really. He doesn’t remember much about getting into bed, presumably due to wine more than concussion, Aziraphale must have helped. He looks back at Aziraphale’s face – he still looks tired, it always takes him a couple of days after an interaction with Gabriel to right himself again, it fractures in Crowley’s throat that he doesn’t want any of the pain and exhaustion of it for him, all he wants –

He says, voice just a little rough, “I want you to be safe.”

Aziraphale looks across at him, expression full of curiosity, wonder, breaking behind his eyes into tenderness; then he lifts a hand and tucks Crowley’s tangled hair back behind his ear, says softly, “I know you do. You always look after me, Crowley.”

– he forgets, sometimes, that before him, the angel never had anyone to be gentle and caring for him either. They astonish each other with casual offers of care. What the Heaven it must be like to be human, to come into the world helpless and needy and to have other people to take care of you from the very first moment you breathe . . .

He says, “Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale blinks at him, his curiosity coming alert; Crowley doesn’t often use his name, he does know it, ‘angel’ just trips so immediately off the tongue for him. Crowley wrinkles his forehead up with the effort of the emotional reach, neither of them find this easy, and says, “If, in the middle of the night, you get ‘fidgety’ . . .” Aziraphale’s soft sad eyes, the frown of uncertainty at his brow, and it only takes the smallest flex of the arm across his shoulders to feel him more safely tucked close. “Wake me up,” Crowley says. “I’d rather be awake for it. I want to be awake for it. Promise me you’ll wake me up.”

“There’s really no need for me to be such a bother.”

“Angel, I had fucking millennia of not being bothered and I didn’t like it much, please bother me. Wake me up. Promise me.”

Aziraphale gives him the pained look of knowing himself trapped, then takes a breath and says, “If, when you wake up from a horrible dream and I’m not awake for you, you promise that you’ll do exactly the same.”

Fucking Heaven. Crowley rolls his head back on his neck, glares at the sky. But if Aziraphale were asleep he wouldn’t know if Crowley didn’t follow through anyway, an old habit of thinking he allows himself; so, fine, whatever. “Fine,” he says, and Aziraphale’s shoulders give a small happy wriggle in his arm.

“Then I promise, dear. If I need you then I’ll wake you.” He looks down at his hands, the smile small but true. “Sometimes a bit of a cuddle would be nice.”

Crowley swallows a mouthful of coffee to knock loose the ball of complex choking agony that raises in his throat, the weird way it hurts when he knows himself needed by Aziraphale when that’s the only thing he could ever conceivably want, what fucking idiot thought to make love feel like this?

The sun rises, the sky’s shot-open richness fading to pastels by the time the shipping forecast comes on. The gulls get louder. Aziraphale says, “They’re in for a blow to the west,” because he does things like commenting on the weather, he actually does that, and Crowley just grunts, attention mostly on the strange poetry of the radio, what is a German bite?

“What do you want to do today?” Aziraphale says, stretching on the bench, tugging down is pyjama shirt where it rides up the soft white skin of his stomach which is a faint disappointment to Crowley, who doesn’t often get to see his skin and usually has to tempt him into the bath for it. Aziraphale is all curves, not a sharp angle on him. Crowley loves holding him by the waist, the temptation of the apple-roundness of his body between his palms. “If it counts as today yet.”

“There’s that town with the bookshop you like.”

“Oh yes. But don’t you want to take the garden in hand, since we’ve been away so long?”

“It’s behaving itself, mostly,” Crowley says, looking back at the honeysuckle cowering against the wall behind them; the garden largely doesn’t dare not to behave, and only the boldest and stupidest weed would enter.

“It’s always so beautiful.” Aziraphale looks over the flowers as the long light of the rising sun makes translucent the edges of the petals, a smaller, gentler Eden. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“It’s all in the fertiliser,” Crowley says. The fertiliser and the threats, anyway.

Aziraphale looks at him for a moment, eyes – not quite nervous, Crowley doesn’t know how to name the expression in them, before he says, “I know I don’t always – make things easy, for you. I know I’m a lot of bother sometimes. I know you say you like it, I still know – I really am – I’m a lot of work. A lot more than I thought I would be or I want to be, honestly.”

“Angel – that’s really not . . .”

“I do appreciate it. I do, Crowley, dear, how patient you are and . . . I know you don’t always like it. Thank you for . . . thank you.”

And he kisses Crowley’s cheek, petal-gentle, picks himself up and offers Crowley a hand for getting him to his feet too. “Somewhere might be open for breakfast by the time we leave,” he says. “We could take a walk on the beach first, anyway.”

Crowley stares up at him, Aziraphale pale in the dawn light and smiling hopeful and loving with that grain of uneasiness, his invisible wings flexing nerves behind him. He’s beautiful, literally breath-out-of-the-throat beautiful to Crowley. And he’s alive. And offering Crowley his hand, and the things they’ve got through together, he knows they can get through this.

He takes his hand, allows himself to be lifted from the bench. Aziraphale smiles more settled then, and says, “Please don’t wear that t-shirt though, dear.”

“I like that t-shirt.” Crowley says. “It’s a great album.” Never Mind the Bollocks is a classic, Crowley doesn’t know what Aziraphale’s problem is.

“It’s vulgar and garish. One or the other is really quite enough.”

“If I don’t wear the t-shirt then you’re not making us go in any tediously specific local museums, I swear to – I swear the next mangle I have to look at, I’m kicking it in.”

Aziraphale rolls his eyes. “Fine. Breakfast and bookshop. Garden centre on the way back?”

“Walk on the beach first.” A little longer with just Aziraphale before they go out into the world, Crowley loves pretending they’re the only beings in existence sometimes, people are just a pain in the arse making things more complicated and the two of them can seriously make things complicated enough all on their own.

“Splendid,” the angel says, and looks so genuinely delighted, Crowley doesn't know how to look away.

*

On the beach Aziraphale slips on some seaweed and ends up arse-down in the water, covered in sand; grace as an attribute of angels has always eluded him. Crowley miracles him clean again, Crowley himself looking respectable but puzzling in a black leather jacket over a t-shirt reading ‘Andy Warhol ate my banana’ and some fiddly little necklace he’s taken to wearing, Crowley liking to change with human change. He tucks the t-shirt in at the front but not at the back and won’t let Aziraphale neaten it for him; “It’s how they do it now,” he says, flapping Aziraphale’s hands away, and honestly, what would Aziraphale know about it, he doesn’t intend to wear such a thing as a t-shirt for as long as humans still make such things as shirts.

It’s a nice beach in front of the cottage, an arc of sand before the stones, and humans do come but only locals, really, and certainly not at six in the morning. So they have it to themselves, cool sea air and the waves where they hit shore and sunlight all at once sparking like struck metal. Aziraphale takes Crowley’s arm to keep himself from further accident and lets the good salt wind scour every feather on his back clean, and he does feel a lot better on this side of the night. It’s always tricky, seeing Gabriel again, it brings a lot back. But he always knows he’ll come back to Crowley on the other side of it, and that’s all he needs, really.

Apart from something from Gabriel, something from Gabriel, he wishes Crowley wouldn’t ask him about it, he hardly knows the meaning of it himself . . .

It’s easy to slide back into the old patterns in the cottage, and very quickly the memory of a chisel stabbed between the bones in his back to pry his wings loose is at the bottom of the stack of his concerns, and Aziraphale is just enjoying a couple of weeks away from London with Crowley again. Crowley gardens and Aziraphale does the newspaper crossword in the deckchair with his sunhat on, they take walks on the beach and into the village for lovely dinners at the pub where they are perpetually terrible at the quiz (always top marks in music and literature, and then always failing catastrophically at history because they remember things quite differently to how humans wrote them down, or they just forget entirely in Aziraphale’s case, who remembers little about the industrial revolution apart from a really top notch pork pie he bought from a station during an early train ride. Their score on celebrity and sport is best not lingered on.). On an evening they talk, and dance very badly, and chip away at the jigsaw Aziraphale brought with him, and listen to music or Aziraphale reads poetry to Crowley when he’s feeling brave and very full of love, and some nights they just sit together on the living room sofa, maybe there’s music, maybe there’s just the sound of birds nervously submitting to the darkness returning, and Crowley has his arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders and Aziraphale has his arm around Crowley’s waist and somehow their heads will be tilted together onto shoulder or brow or cheek to cheek and they can be silent together, and that’s just lovely. It really does just feel . . . eternity won’t be long enough, Aziraphale thinks sometimes, and he knows he’s greedy but who wouldn’t be, for more of Crowley?

He reads through the stack of books he brought with him, the particular pleasure of rereading Mrs Dalloway outside of London, the purity of his sense of the city in it, the clarity and sweetness of his longing; he really never has thought of Heaven as his home. He gets through Marilynne Robinson while Crowley is gardening, coming over to offer a shoulder and pat his head and say with a sigh, “There there, angel,” while Aziraphale has a little weep. He can’t quite face Proust again in the mood he’s in, retreats into Sappho (his Greek is abysmal after so long, and he’s grateful to Professor Carson who makes the language as alive as a speck of salt on the tip of the tongue). Penemuel told him he’d like Alberto Manguel and he does. She also said she didn’t know what he’d make of Tanizaki and he doesn’t either, though he can’t put it down all the same.

Well, he can, when Crowley’s hands press the book down to his lap and he says with a subtle hiss, “Might I have five minutes of your time, angel,” slinging a leg over his and pressing his mouth up by the jaw into a kiss.

By the time they’re packing to go home, closing up the cottage until they can next get away, Aziraphale doesn’t think that Crowley’s had another dreadful dream, at least he hasn’t had any under Aziraphale’s watchful eye when he’s sat up with a book. He doesn’t know what that dream was about, Crowley never will talk about them, and it depresses him in so many ways when it happens. He hates to think of Crowley suffering. He hates to think that not only is he helpless in the face of it but Crowley knows that, and knows that there’s no point in telling Aziraphale any of it because Aziraphale can’t do anything about it anyway. He hates to think that the Fall still hurts Crowley so much, what else could he be dreaming of? And the thought of Crowley still pierced by thousands, thousands of years of pain –

(- the thought that he might have thousands of years of it ahead of himself as well -)

His poor sweet Crowley, he puts a hand on Crowley’s arm once the doors bang and they’re back in the Bentley, before Crowley can screech off like a madman, and he smiles, and means it, and says, “That was a lovely holiday, Crowley, dear.”

Crowley looks at him that open blank way he does sometimes, as if he hasn’t worked out how to respond to whatever Aziraphale’s just done even when it was really something very commonplace, lips just parted, eyes wide gold. Then he reads Aziraphale’s face with a flicker of closer attention and the smile tilts the corner of his mouth softer, and he says, “Yeah. It was.”

It starts to rain as they drive back to London, which seems natural, really. Back to reality; back to Crowley’s flat where Aziraphale has always been welcome, back to his wide dark bed where that first night back they both sleep, Crowley hugging Aziraphale around the stomach with his nose pressed to his chest, Aziraphale with an arm around Crowley’s back and his hand lost in Crowley’s hair and feeling very right, perfectly safe and perfectly as he ought to be, and coming home really is just as nice as going away.

Back to the bookshop, currently full of angels.

Penemuel has been nominally in charge while they’ve been away, the only demon present at the time. She’s sharp and fast-thinking and does not take well to what Aziraphale thinks of as ‘nonsense’, the squabbles that sometimes break out in the bookshop's basement. After a little time on Earth she’s stopped leaking ink except onto the clothes of particularly objectionable customers, and she’s taken to wearing very well-fitting black pencil skirts over black stockings, pinstriped waistcoats, white shirts buttoned open at her throat to where the waistcoat cuts them off at her ample chest, dark hair loosely bundled up into a bun with a pencil stuck through it, little round rimless spectacles on her nose. Aziraphale thinks nothing of this, though Crowley gave her a noticeably demonic, eyebrows-raised smile when he first saw her new look. Some human customers do get a bit flustered in front of her but honestly, that could just be the eyes-narrowed way she looks at them for interrupting her reading time.

She leans over the desk, the upper part of her waistcoat pillowed on top of her folded arms. “Malachel and Elyon have been at each other’s throats. I hope you enjoyed the seaside.”

“It was splendid, thank you, but oh – goodness, I mean honestly, they’re both angels, what have they got to argue about?”

She twirls some loose hair around a finger, says, “I think it goes back to some war X-thousand years ago when due to an administrative error they ended up blessing opposite sides and they’ve never really got over it.”

“Well really,” Aziraphale says, then, “We got you some rock, my dear, I do hope you enjoy it. Where’s Haniel?”

“What interestingly-shaped confectionery,” she says. “Thank you. Haniel’s at one of his political things, putting leaflets through people’s doors about sad polar bears or something. He left you one on your desk. I’ll just go sit down with a book and –” She looks down at the stick of rock. “– appropriately consume this.”

Crowley looks at her with raised eyebrows and a smirk Aziraphale is suspicious of as she slinks off for a sofa. Aziraphale says, “We’d better go have a word with Malachel and Elyon, I suppose.”

“Nope,” Crowley says, stretching his arms tall and heading for his own sofa, the one he’s perpetually draped across either asleep or on his phone. “This is an angel thing, not my problem.”

“Oh – Crowley, don’t make me go on my own -”

Crowley crashes with a sigh onto the sofa, puddling his body back, getting his spine squirmed right on the cushions. “If it was demons fighting I’d happily go down there but this is really more of your area, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale's hands grip at each other, and he says, “Please, Crowley –”

Crowley catches the tone and looks at him sharply through the sunglasses, suddenly hawkish-alert on him. Aziraphale is trying not to let too much of it on his face while showing enough that Crowley will understand – he knows he understands –

Crowley can break up fights between demons merely by turning up because demons are collectively terrified of Crowley and will do nothing to displease him in his presence (out of his presence demons are demons, so they’ll do whatever they think they can get away with). Aziraphale knows that his own presence will stop Malachel and Elyon fighting but not because they’re afraid of him in anything like the same way, the way angels view Aziraphale now . . .

At first no-one needed to know, on Earth; all that the defectors from Heaven and Hell knew was that Gabriel had come back, Fallen, had been dealt with and was no longer a danger to anyone. But word of what he’d actually done, what he’d done to Aziraphale, was widely whispered in Heaven, and of course the first defector after it had happened told every angel and demon they met on Earth, and it spread, and now they all know, and yes angels look at Aziraphale with a certain level of fear but that’s not because they consider him powerful and threatening. It’s because he got his wings ripped out and didn’t die and now they’re back and Aziraphale – good Lord he knows it, he feels it himself sometimes, he is freakish, eerie, he is something spine-tighteningly wrong like the first warning signs in a Poe story, he understands the dread they feel and finds it too hard not to respond with something that he wishes were as simple as shame, the ugly shocking fear he feels. And he needs Crowley with him, facing two angels who know. He doesn’t want to do it on his own. All these months and he’s still not strong enough.

Crowley draws his breath in and huffs it out, hiking his body back to standing, tugging his little bun of hair taut again. “Fine, fine,” he mutters, walking up to him again and Aziraphale feels his entire body turn on like a lamp with the sheer relief of it. He takes Crowley’s arm and smiles and says, “You are good, Crowley,” and Crowley scowls to the side and mutters, “Yeah, yeah, don’t go spreading it around.”

They can hear the sniping voices from the stairs down (“– only cowards ambush –” “– only competent armies plan for it –”) hesitating and staying hesitated once Crowley and Aziraphale come into view, Aziraphale smiling amiably, sure that this can all be sorted out amicably just as he was sure of it the last time, and the one before that. “Hello again,” he says, “Penemuel tells us there’s been a bit of bother, what seems to be the problem, hm?”

The two angels sitting on the bottom bunks of beds pushed to opposite sides of the room are still, and stare at him. It is very hard to not be incredibly aware of his own wings, which they’re very careful not to look directly at. It’s not that angels and demons can see each others’ wings on Earth, they’re simply aware of them through a sense that humans lack, or most humans do, Aziraphale has determined through long years of interaction. Some humans do have a sense close to it – something like how Anathema talks of auras sometimes. But everyone in this room can feel wings, and Malachel and Elyon are both pretending that the backs of their necks aren’t prickling with proximity to Aziraphale’s uncanny, unsettling wings, and Aziraphale is pretending that he’s not aware of it and certainly not bothered by it while he can feel his face turning pink, and Crowley leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets. There the demon says, “It’s easy enough to solve this if you two want to be on opposite sides, I don’t know why you came here if you wanted to fight each other.”

Malachel looks uneasily at Aziraphale as if for some kind of guidance, though Aziraphale himself is in the dark about what Crowley is talking about. Elyon gives Crowley a distrustful look and says, “What do you mean?”

Crowley fishes in a pocket, draws out a coin, gives it an experimental flick upwards and catches it on the back of his hand. “Pick heads or tails for Heaven or Hell,” he says. “Then one of you goes up and the other one goes down and we’re finally done with all this . . . noise.”

“– wait, I don’t want to go – back –”

“– certainly not going down –”

Aziraphale understands, and looks at Crowley with an approving smile, he is clever. “Then you’ve no need to fight, hm?” he says. “On Earth we don’t have sides, so you can’t be on opposite sides and there’s nothing to fall out over. I mean, do think about it, it was thousands of years ago, all those humans would have been dead by now anyway. It was only an administrative error, shame for everyone involved really.”

“The humans least of all, apparently,” Crowley mutters, pocketing his coin, probably into oblivion; Aziraphale creates coins when he needs them as well, mostly for making them ‘appear’ out of Crowley’s ear which the demon remains unimpressed by.

“Just think of it as a fresh start, you can leave all of that silliness behind in –“ Aziraphale glances up, curious, at the clattering rush of Penemuel’s heels coming downstairs fast. “– Heaven – ?”

Penemuel, panting, stabs a finger up the stairs, hair falling loose from its bun, staring wild-eyed at Crowley. “Up there – up there – far above my pay grade, you go deal with –”

“What the Heaven are you talking about?”

“Penemuel, my dear, whatever is wrong?”

Penemuel just makes a snarling sound as if they’re being somehow inept and she hasn’t got the time for it, striding for a bunk bed and hauling herself up to the top bunk where she huddles her body small, arms wrapped tight around her legs, and hisses, “You go deal with it!”

Crowley flits his gaze to Aziraphale through his sunglasses, and shrugs one bony shoulder. Aziraphale wriggles his shoulders back – well, if they must – and follows him up the stairs again, Aziraphale will admit to being a bit worried about what’s going on upstairs, after that fire he’s just very aware of how fragile all of his books really are . . .

They’re only just through the doorway into the bookshop itself, Aziraphale’s only just closing the door, when he stiffens with awareness of Crowley’s wings flaring out, invisible from the customers but wide warm black feathers snap out between Aziraphale and the bookshop itself, as if he’s –

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, more surprised than afraid, seeing their visitor over Crowley’s shoulders.

. . . Crowley’s wings snap out as if he’s shielding Aziraphale from something; and Lord Beelzebub looks up and across at them, and puts down the book she was examining, gaze narrowing dark on Crowley and then almost assessing on Aziraphale behind his shoulder, as if trying to work something about him out.

“I am here in peacze,” she says, though the muscles on Crowley’s body are hard as ropes, and Aziraphale says softly, “Crowley,” touching his back to try to make them relax; they don’t. “I come with a meszage for the traitor.”

Crowley’s hands flex taut, not fists. “‘Traitor’ implies that I was on your side to begin with,” Crowley says in a low drawl, too casual to be casual. “Bold assumption.”

Beelzebub gives him a look that could boil tar, and then looks at Aziraphale who does understand Crowley’s need to be between Aziraphale and Beelzebub, Aziraphale’s immediate instinct is always to put himself between Crowley and any hostile angel – for goodness’ sake Gabriel once threw a bottle of holy water at him in this very bookshop – but he’s anxious about it, all the same. Beelzebub says, glaring at Aziraphale, “Will you pleasze tell the traitor that I hope he’sz happy, because thanksz to his nonsensze I am now dealing with factionsz, as if Hell was an eazy thing to manage at the beszt of timesz.”

“– ah?” Aziraphale says. “I mean, he can hear you, he’s right h–”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley growls, “would you please ask the Lord of the Flies why I should give a rat’s distended testicle about what’s happening in Hell anymore?”

“Crowley, Lord Beelzebub is directly in front of you, this is getting very silly.”

“Tell the traitor,” Beelzebub grinds out in her harsh, shrill voice, and Aziraphale rolls his eyes skywards, Lord he is really tried by all of this sometimes, “that if my ordersz to ignore him get ignored by those following hisz own example, he should look to himszelf for blame becausze no-one would have thought to rebel if he hadn’t got it into hisz treacherousz head –”

“Please tell the Lord of the Flies that if I’m getting blamed for rebellion then she might want to look in a mirror now and then –”

“I'm going to go sit down,” Aziraphale says, walking to his preferred armchair. “I don’t think I’m necessary for this conversation at all if I’m entirely honest.”

Beelzebub shrieks, “Tell that traitor that if demonsz come and pull off your fluffy white head then he isz not to look to Hell for retribution becausze we want nothing to do with either of you! If factionsz follow hisz lead, he needsz to defend himszelf!”

Blinking at Beelzebub, genuinely startled, Aziraphale – understands, sudden and jarred, why she came up here to talk to them. If there has been further fragmenting of Hell, if some rebel demons aren’t coming to Earth to join the two of them but are forming their own vicious, brutal little enclaves – Crowley, and by extension Aziraphale and any other stateless angel or demon, really might be in danger. And if a demon were to attack Aziraphale, Crowley would blame Hell and probably would be foolhardy enough to go down and try to have it out with them, and Hell, Hell is still frightened of Crowley, the last thing they want is an angry Crowley coming down full of fury and vengeance . . .

She’s guarding her back, Aziraphale thinks, still standing with one hand on the armchair, staring at her. She’s threatening us as a way of warning us as a way of keeping herself safe; this is a very demonic version of a truce, isn’t it?

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, and his voice is soft in a way that unnerves Aziraphale entirely, “please tell Lord Beelzebub that if any demon, any demon, so much as touches you, then I don’t care where they came from or why. If any demon lays one finger on you, that demon will come to think with wistfulness of its Fall.”

Aziraphale, pale, says nothing. Neither of them require it. Beelzebub has already turned and stalked her way out of the shop, after one final lip-curled snarl of a sneer at Crowley; Crowley snaps his fingers and waves a hand at the three staring customers at the other side of the room, says, “She was angry about the customer service. Angel, are you alright?”

“. . . we probably shouldn’t do that so much, not to the regular customers. Human brains are very fragile, I’m sure it can’t be doing them any good,” Aziraphale mumbles, and sits with a thump, quite done in by the stress of their return to London. Crowley prowls around his armchair twice like an angry cat before picking an arm and sitting on it, one leg sliding down so they’re thigh-to-thigh; Crowley hasn’t much sense of personal space when it comes to Aziraphale, who is very attached to the notion of personal space when it comes to everyone but Crowley. “I’m fine. Are you alright?”

He looks up at him, Crowley’s wide golden eyes behind the dark glass, he can tell that he’s rattled. Crowley mutters, “Why wouldn’t I be fine.” and Aziraphale smiles weakly, and takes his hand.

“It was nice of her to come warn us, in a way.”

Crowley barks something close enough to laughter at the ceiling out of sheer shock. “Nice! She only did it to cover her own back. And you, where were you?” Snapped back at Penemuel, creeping up from the staircase to the basement. “Thanks for leaving the Lord of Hell herself to the two of us –”

“You two have form when it comes to confronting her,” Penemuel says. “And anyway, if we really don’t subscribe to ‘sides’ up here, I’m not obliged to get turned into a puddle of post-demon goo on your behalf.”

Aziraphale allows, “She has a point.” Crowley just gives one of those exaggerated, face-scrunching smiles to Penemuel, who smooths her waistcoat and strides as fast as a very tight skirt will allow back to the shelves as if unconcerned. Aziraphale sighs, softly, and presses Crowley’s hand in his. “We’ll be alright,” he offers. “If any demons did come, I’m sure we’d . . . we’ve been alright so far.”

Crowley’s jaw tightens, flexes, and he says nothing. Aziraphale says, “Well, yes, apart from me getting my wings pulled out, apart from that we’ve been alright. A couple of blips perhaps, generally we’ve been alright. We will be alright, Crowley, dear.”

Crowley mutters, “Couple of blips. Why the Heaven would you believe that?”

Aziraphale isn’t sure himself some days, though he knows he does believe it. All he can say is, “I’m used to trusting things I don’t understand.”

Crowley groans, and slides off the arm of the chair into Aziraphale’s lap, where Aziraphale contentedly folds his arms around him to help with his balance. Crowley is a rather bony thing to have on the lap, but in a nice way; She gave him ever such lovely bones, She really took care with Crowley’s body, it’s always been perfect. Crowley allows his head to dangle dramatically backwards off the arm of the chair, Adam’s apple pressed prominent in his throat by the position. “Don’t understand,” he mutters to himself, as if thinking the words through.

Aziraphale rubs at his side with a crooked knuckle, says smiling, “I very rarely understand you.”

“Psh. That doesn’t mean anything.”

“But I trust you, Crowley.”

Crowley opens one eye, then the other, and lifts his head a little to squint at Aziraphale. “You never used to.”

None of the customers look over at their little scene. The regulars have seen it all before – the regulars Aziraphale has reached his peace with, those who understand that his shop is basically a very exclusive reference library where committed readers are welcome to look at and yet never take the books, so long as they look carefully and with clean hands – and those who aren’t regulars know that they’re in Soho.

Aziraphale smiles at him, strokes his arm a little. “Crowley, darling, I trusted you more than anyone. The only problem was that I didn’t trust myself.”

Crowley sits up enough to be repositioned from a pose of extravagant suffering into resting his side against Aziraphale's chest, so Aziraphale can get an arm more comfortably around his waist, looking quite far up at his face with Crowley sitting on his own thighs. Crowley says, “We might be alright. I mean, we need to stay close –”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, because after what happened to him in Heaven, he’s not letting anyone take Crowley back to Hell, he can’t.

“– and maybe we'll be okay.” Crowley’s fingers flicker along Aziraphale’s arm, and his smile is wicked. “I’m not afraid of them. Not now I have my own personal holy water dispenser.”

Aziraphale tuts, and frowns past Crowley at the window. Yes, holy water would be safest for everyone concerned, so long as Crowley stands behind him. But . . .

Crowley murmurs, “You’ve never killed anyone.”

“. . . I think I would, for you, that’s the thing. I don’t think I would even think about it. It would be – like a reflex. Protecting you.”

“My knight in shining armour,” Crowley says, the smile creasing his eyes that lovely way, then turning more stonily serious. “Aziraphale.”

“Hm?”

“Make it a reflex to protect yourself.” Crowley goes silent, still, and Aziraphale automatically mimics him. He’s listening, he realises. Checking the distance of the customers, and Penemuel’s position in the shelves. And he says, low through his teeth, “I need you.”

“Of course, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, unsettled. “Of course.”

After what happened before – why wouldn’t he protect himself? He can’t – the thought of going through it again –

“Of course, my darling,” he murmurs, tucking some of Crowley’s loose-fallen hair back behind his ear. “Of course.”

He’s already shocked himself with some of the things he's capable of for Crowley. Minding his own back can hardly be the harder prospect, not when he knows what he’s minding it from.

*

Dusk is gathering, and Gabriel still doesn’t like the way demons can see in the dark – unsettlingly monochrome and simply unsettling, to one so recently an angel – and so he walks back along the seafront, glaring at the ground in front of himself, mind still full of the way the waves break white on the stone. He has to remember that he’s a demon sometimes, and doesn’t know how much longer that will continue for, it’s only been a few years; humans might notice the time passing but however far he’s Fallen, he’s very far from being merely human yet, and his time Fallen has been a blink even if it has felt like a small eternity. Humans and their petty measurement of time do not, in the grand scheme of things, matter. The universe will be bookended by the wars of Heaven and Hell and the souls of humans are merely the prizes, like all of the soft fake animals in their flashing, clanging arcades.

But that leads his mind to the angel and demon who seem to want to make themselves as human as they can as if dissatisfied with immortality, as if Gabriel’s mind ever strays very far from them, now. The streetlights flutter on overhead with a sodium stutter as he tries not to think about him but Aziraphale just keeps coming back. Every few months he’s back, as if – it’s as if he’s still in his own warped way doing the work he was supposed to be doing all along and he’s trying to save Gabriel’s soul, as if Gabriel is some weak faltering human who needs nudging back on the path to righteousness, or as if (the former more enraging, the latter more absurd) he’s trying to make friends with him. Gabriel prised the wings out of him and it wasn’t easy, levering the bones out took effort, the muscle and sinew clung and had to be sawn apart and even an angel as dim as Aziraphale must be able to tell that Gabriel knew what he was doing. He isn’t some pathetic human doing what humans do. Gabriel knew, and any possible motive for Aziraphale’s returns is ridiculous in the face of that knowledge, and demeans the both of them.

Still Aziraphale comes back, though being demeaned by it has never seemed to stop that angel from much. But Gabriel doesn’t understand it and has nothing but time to try to understand it in, without a Heavenly empire to run. He watches the waves and finds that for all the power he’s held in his life he has no control over his own mind, which wanders back to Aziraphale’s visits, the pained, struggling look of his smile, the way his voice at least starts out – lightly, hopefully. Gabriel is learning to read body language, is learning that this isn’t Heaven and it’s not just that outside of Heaven even angels can lie, it’s that there are truths somewhere beyond the easy matter of truth or lie, like the truth of how Aziraphale tries to smile for him but won’t stand quite as close to Gabriel as a natural conversation would require. Whatever the Hell Aziraphale is trying to do, still his body near to Gabriel’s tenses, still Gabriel can see the tight way he’s breathing. He’s still afraid, even though Gabriel’s wings are clipped. And yet he keeps coming back. He keeping coming back.

Gabriel finds it difficult to think on Earth, finds his mind falls into its own paths, is no longer under his command. There are too many distractions to control his thoughts, even now when the flashing arcades are behind him at the busier end of the seafront, even now every house he passes has a curious uniqueness to it, a noisy scream for attention in the form of paint and curtains and small gardens and jauntily sickening names (he particularly loathes ‘Beachy Keen’) and nonsense material objects placed on windowsills for no purpose other than being occasionally looked at. Gabriel wants to keep his mind a flat white plane and instead he’s tumbled about on this chaotic Earthly realm unable to quiet his own thoughts. There’s no space on Earth to think properly, no wonder Aziraphale became deranged over the centuries, away from the open white expanse of Heaven where the mind can sigh out into certainty. The only place on Earth that offers enough room for rational thought, for the emptying of the mind, is the sea. The waves roll, and roll, and roll again, like pleats picking up in silk, forever. There is rationality to the motion of waves, predictability, a full understanding of physics offers a full explanation of the phenomenon; there is no ‘full understanding’ when it comes to human nonsense. Gazing at the waves Gabriel’s shoulders can unpick. His mind can enter the water. He can empty his sight and mind of everything else. He can be still.

Walking back to the lodging house now the twilight is inking the sky a richer blue his mind is once again on – it drives him mad to be made to think so much about Aziraphale, he sees now that this was his downfall, this was why he Fell, too much thinking. Even in Heaven the last few years he’s been fixating too much on that damned principality. But someone had to. Someone had to. Wearing white wings as if he hadn’t done everything he had done – part of the reason to cut them loose was just to see if it was some sort of an illusion, how, how, even after his own had – how? Because She can’t – it can't be that She’s made her decision, and – and Gabriel had to Fall, and Aziraphale –

His hands squeeze their fists as he walks, his breathing is coming harder. I am being tested, he tells himself. I keep my faith. None of the facts of his actions have changed. It had to be done. It had to be done. If I had to Fall to punish him then it was simply necessary. I will be rewarded for my faith, my certainty in righteousness.

Unless the testing came earlier, and Gabriel has already failed.

He doesn’t like to think about the wing incident – does Aziraphale think he enjoyed it, the sound of tearing gristle and snapping bone? – and finds it easier to recite, low as a lullaby, everything Aziraphale did to deserve it. He finds there are gaps on the list, though. Even scouring through Heaven’s paperwork he couldn't find evidence of when and how Aziraphale began drifting away from Heaven, he always seemed diligent; the first even slight fudge of the paperwork Gabriel could find was only eight hundred years ago, when Aziraphale seemed to make a journey from London to Cornwall rather more quickly than expected, but even if Gabriel had noticed at the time he would merely have thought that miracles were after all the business they were in. And then nothing, for long periods, he found only pockets in the paperwork where he suspected that Aziraphale was covering something up, for the most part he seemed to be exactly where he said he was: in London, tending to the day-to-day, blessings and minor miracles. So when did Crowley emerge? When did they – which one of them sought the other out? How did the corruption start?

An unease in his guts – angels should not feel things in their baser organs, he thinks; no, Hell, demons shouldn’t either – makes him look at Aziraphale next to Crowley, the first and arch tempter, and think that he knows exactly what happened, that Aziraphale’s sin is that he is rather dim and easily persuaded and easily led, not really autonomous enough to warrant the punishment Gabriel chose for him. Weakness, not evil, though for an angel weakness is evil. But it’s strange; Aziraphale is weak and never very certain, not the way Gabriel knows certainty, Aziraphale is naïve and stupid and easily cowed – but the demon Crowley clearly doesn’t want him coming back to try to talk to Gabriel again, and yet he does. It’s like Aziraphale’s certainty is water inside him, splashed about and scattered and flung and helpless in the face of any superior force until enough power of it has built and then it is the sea, and nothing can stop the waves. For millennia Aziraphale must have done what he was told by whoever told him if they just sounded certain enough in the telling and he doubted only on the inside, and now in this last decade for the very first time he’s put his feet solid to the ground and stood immoveable. Unable to choose a side for centuries, now that he has not even that snake can change it back for him. Of course he can’t. Gabriel can’t, and Gabriel tore the wings out of him.

He can hear voices out on the street, in the dim of the gathering dusk, can now see two figures outside that one guest house with a perpetual ‘No Vacancies’ sign in its window. Two female-presenting figures clutching each other, one shrieking with bouts of peaking horror, the other shrieking with semi-muffled laughter.

Zophiel, the first angel who followed Aziraphale out, is wearing a helmet and padding on her knees and elbows over her immaculate flowing white dress, standing on the wheeled board Ramiel, the demon, sometimes rolls down the street on in her own shapeless baggy clothing, blowing and popping gum bubbles as she goes. There’s none of Ramiel's casual grace in Zophiel at this moment as she holds Ramiel by both elbows as the stationary board gives a wobble and screams, “Don’t let go! Don’t let go!” and Ramiel says, “Alright angel, I got you amn’t I, even if I let go you’ve onny two inches to fall –”

And then they feel Gabriel’s presence the way that he feels theirs, and they look over, stilling, quieting, though Zophiel doesn’t let go of Ramiel and Ramiel continues holding Zophiel’s arms back just as tight. Zophiel’s back is for one second as even, as straight as it ever is, and she says to him with her old cool, “Gabriel.”

Then the board gives some subtle jarring and she shrieks, grabbing for Ramiel who bursts into her laughter again, and Gabriel stands, and stares at them, and –

What could he say? What could he want to say to them, another traitor angel and demon? They’re no better than Aziraphale and Crowley, worse, at least Crowley and Aziraphale had the spine to leave on their own, they didn’t need to follow anybody out –

Worse, Gabriel who has never said a word to either of them looks at Zophiel hanging from her grip on Ramiel weak with her laughter and Zophiel howling, “Don’t let go! Don’t let go!” as if she’s hanging from the slippery edge of Heaven itself, and he wants to say, That looks fun.

He walks past them into the guest house and doesn’t say a word.

Inside there's a light on in what they call the breakfast room but is really an everything room, and around the table two demons and an angel are facing another angel sitting behind some kind of short screen – Cassiel, Gabriel thinks, they never interacted much, he can hardly be blamed for not being able to name every ragtag angel who’s betrayed Heaven by now. One of the demons rolls a die and the other angel and demon theatrically moan, and the demon throws his arms up. “One! It’s a stupid one alright! What the fuck’s it matter, he’s a rogue, of course he can pick the lock!”

“There are rules,” Cassiel says serenely. “Your character is too distracted and hurried, loses her grip on her tools and the pick bounces and skitters away in the dark of the cave. And the gnolls are ever closer.”

“Fuck your rules!”

“Please roll initiative.”

The other demon says, “Don’t use that dice again.”

“It – what – what the fuck difference would using a different dice make?”

“Clearly it’s cursed.”

“Heaven would you know about curses –”

Cassiel says, “In the singular they are referred to as ‘die’.”

“Oh,” the demon says, knuckles whitening around the die in his hand, “fitting.”

Gabriel walks past the doorway and upstairs, and doesn’t say, What are you doing? That looks fun.

When he closes the door on his own small room, his only space in all of this world, he feels his stunted wings stretch back and closes his eyes, alone. It makes no sense that on this crowded noisy jarring plane he feels aloneness in a way he never has, in a way that – here on this congested, distracting, raucous world, in a way he never understood in all of Heaven’s clean white open endless space, here, he feels lonely.

The only angel he’s exchanged so much as a word with in two years is Aziraphale. Without Aziraphale he is silent, and how is this allowed to be the way the world is?

I am being tested. I am being tested.

But when he is alone, in the silence of this room, feeling how much he matters (nothing) to any angel or demon in this building, to any soul on this whole Earth (nothing; except to him), he can feel the formulation of the words he can never allow himself to articulate. Here in the dark feeling the black on his back, bereft of Heaven and power, alone, lonely, silent, he cannot allow himself to think what if what I did was

It’s too much even to approach it. He doesn’t put the light on. He lays on top of the bed, on his back, ruler-straight and staring at the ceiling. Aziraphale will be with his demon, happy, as he always assures Gabriel he is, and encourages – bafflingly, making as damnably little sense as anything to do with Aziraphale ever makes – Gabriel to be as well. I can guarantee you that I intend to be happy, so you really might as well try for the same even if it is only out of spite.

(What if I did the wro)

He stares at the ceiling, through the grey of a demon’s darksight. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t need to, and is aware of, and fears, the dreams. He fears what sleep might dredge up in his mind. He didn’t like the way the blood made the work so slick he needed the pliers, sticky as it made his hands as well. None of it was about what he wanted, it was just necessary. And now here he lies alone, to wait another night through, until he can walk out with the dawn to watch the sea again, and he has lived for all of eternity and the length of these nights near breaks him.

(What if it – that is easier, a bit more more distant; what if it was)

Downstairs he hears muffled cheering from some sort of group triumph in the breakfast room. He wonders what it’s about, if it’s the sort of thing he could ever feel, though he doesn’t want to feel it, he doesn’t want to join them. Better to be righteous and silent than to join them.

(. . . what if it was wrong . . . ?)

He stares at the ceiling. He waits for the dawn.



Part II