Good Omens fic: Before Eden pt III

[rainjoyswriting]

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

Disclaimer: I really don't own anything, I'm just trying to understand a few things.

Rating: R but this part, mildly.

Warnings and spoilers: Watch S1, read the first parts first.

Summary: There's surviving, and then there's the reasons to survive.



Note: I’m going to try to get some rest and then I’m going to try to find the energy to respond to some comments, I *am* <3










Air particles have a different odour blowing in off the sea. The scent is intoxicating, it has an aliveness that makes no sense, a cleanness to it though there is nothing clean about scent, which competes in Gabriel’s mind with grotesque taste and repulsive touch for the title of the dirtiest sense; in Heaven, nothing smells.

Yet the oxygen particles driven by air currents to Gabriel’s nose from the sea have become welcome to him, have become desirable, in a way that troubles him less each day. Part of him knows that he ought to be troubled by it, this sort of attraction to gross matter (how could anything be more gross than scent, it once roiled his stomach, that Gabriel can avoid tasting anything but scent just enters his body unbidden) is what corrupted Aziraphale, but it doesn’t feel corrupting. It feels enlivening, refreshing. Gabriel has to reach for metaphor, there is no understanding of such things in Heaven, but the scent of the sea has become to him what a long drink of water is to a dehydrated human, restorative, satisfying a need that Gabriel should not have. Angels should not have needs.

He’s not an angel anymore.

Standing as he ever stands, hands on the railing overlooking the sea, he has the space to acknowledge and allow these thoughts, with his gaze on the unending horizon of water he feels like he actually has the room for these thoughts which are otherwise too much for him in this overcrowded, chaotic, jangling world. In Heaven there is space for thoughts the size of eternity. Down here, only where the horizon opens out filled with water and flourishes of light can he find enough space to contain the things he has to think.

The hardest thought of all to think, the largest and most difficult thought to find enough space in the universe to contain it, is that he is the one with black wings and no power, and maybe Aziraphale isn’t the one who got corrupted.

It feels like it has taken him a thousand years to be able to face that thought, and yet he has been on Earth for only a couple of years, no time at all. The sheer scale of having to think – but time is so different here, in Heaven a hundred years is nothing, down here every single day gets heralded by sunrises and sunsets so gorgeous that they repelled him, at first, the sky like blaring trumpets announcing all the Heavenly host rejoicing and just for what, for what, twelve more hours of day or night, nothing. But it doesn’t feel like nothing anymore. In Heaven nothing changes for millennia and a day really is nothing but down here millennia seem beside the point, and twelve hours can hold a thousand revelations. So it has taken him no time – no time, not even a significant portion of a human life, to come to a thought that he might never have reached in all of eternity as the Archangel Gabriel in Heaven on high, empowered by the position the Almighty honoured him alone with. He would never, in Heaven, have considered Aziraphale’s point of view. There is so much space up there, the scale is so vast, that something as small as a mere principality vanishes into insignificance.

Down here on Earth Aziraphale has a different scale to Gabriel, not exactly larger, just somehow more substantial. Down here, Gabriel is not so large that Aziraphale is nothing. Down here, that frail little principality actually matters. Other things seem to matter more as well.

Like never speaking a word to the demons and corrupted angels they house him with, never deigning to speak a word to a mere human especially with his throat thick and hard with the ugly black mutilated wings he’s wearing on his back giving him no more power than the mortal wields. Like never speaking a word to a soul except for the angel he dug the wings out of who just keeps coming back, hateful in his presence except Gabriel finds himself checking in his mind the length of time since the last visit, the probable length of time for the next, his mind reaching through the days not yet passed for the next opportunity he will have to – what? To talk to Aziraphale? And yet that is what it feels like, not just anticipation, almost a longing. This shouldn’t matter to an Archangel. He should hold his faith in his righteousness and need nothing from this world. But he feels further and further from being an Archangel, alone on this mortal world, he finds that faith harder and harder.

(Is this how Aziraphale corrupted . . . ?)

Like the way the other – the demons and corrupted angels in the guest house don’t look directly at him, when at first they did try, spoke to him kindly in a way that made him rage on the inside, pity directed at him – but then very quickly it must have been known through all of Heaven what he did to Aziraphale and then the deserters coming down knew to tell the others what he had done, and now they try not to look Gabriel in the eye, try to pass him in the corridor leaving as much space between them as possible like he is the mutilated one, like he is the corrupted one. That shouldn’t matter to him. The almighty righteousness of the Archangel’s rightness should make their petty fear nothing to him, less than nothing, utterly beneath his notice, an object of obliviousness to one such as him.

It hurts. It is lonely and it hurts. He finally understands the meaning of the word ‘shame’. And at first it drew him to more rage and more and that stupid little principality coming back to pick at him as if there could be anything more between the two of them than Gabriel’s righteousness and Aziraphale’s betrayal –

But time passes differently on Earth. He can’t find the rage so easily anymore, can’t make himself stony and indifferent to those beneath him, they are literally no longer beneath him. Here he has to meet them in the eye, and they won’t meet him in the eye, because he is the angel – the former angel – who got blood all over the floor of Heaven for the first time since the Great War, he is the only angel whose wings turned black since the Great War, he is the angel, he is the angel –

He is no longer an angel.

He finds himself thinking of Job, he hasn’t spared a thought to that mortal in centuries. He’s held to that thought for so long, that he must endure these moments, mere moments, because if he holds his faith in his rightness because he must be right because She made him right, if he holds his faith then it will all be made right: Aziraphale will be punished and he will be made glorious once more and then he can start the smiting properly this time and –

And all that faith falters on Earth, as another dawn drags the light out long over the sky outside his bedroom window where he sits on the edge of the bed, alone, waiting for just enough light to go watch the waves for another long, long, long mortal day alone.

He was never alone in Heaven, not because he was never alone but because the concept of ‘alone’ had no meaning. Here there are nights when it seems like the only concept that matters in the world.

(Aziraphale is never alone, wears his white wings and is never alone, and that demon looks at him like he might as well be Her, the awe of it.)

He breathes in the sea air, the scent of it, lets the air go, and isn’t breathing a strange miracle in itself.

It’s time, he thinks. It’s the passage of time that corrupts. In Heaven time hardly mattered, a century was just a moment, and She made him right and so he was right. But here on Earth time ticks and trickles away as fast as sand through a glass, as fast as water, and perhaps She made him right but that feels now like a very, very long time ago, a long time in which a lot of things have happened, and he’s no longer certain that being made perfect means that perfection persists. She made Aziraphale and his demon perfect in the beginning and look how that ended up. And She made Gabriel, and Gabriel, over the course of time, did some things, chose to do some things, they were right if he was right but if he was not –

Awe of little things feels like it awakens him. He thought of it as corruption for a long time but it feels closer and closer to the feeling of the nebulae first painting across the nothing the more of it he experiences, the feeling of beauty unfurling out of emptiness; yesterday as he passed the breakfast room it was full of excited chatter and coos because Ramiel had upended a box of cereal over her bowl and the surrounding table and out had come with the chocolate-covered deluge a little plastic toy, a little plastic toy! Just there in the box! Joy just put in the box to fall out with your food, all the demons and angels passing it around mesmerised, glowing with awe, that the humans just put little bits of joy in the box for people to pour out like a miracle.

And Gabriel came back to himself in the doorway and hurried on his way, out of the front door, heart beating hard and fast and not knowing why, that access to joy as easy as a snap of the fingers felt like it unsettled what he had thought was the very truth of his soul –

He no longer knows what is true. He stares at the sea and it’s the most terrifying thing he has ever faced, demonic armies and the betrayal of angels are nothing, he no longer knows what is true. He knew he was righteous and right. He knew it. And now he no longer knows it, and what that means – what that means –

What does it mean, if he is not righteous and right, and he gouged out Aziraphale’s wings?

The hush of the horror, internal and silent, the first time he ever let himself face the thought head-on. His hand tightens on the railing, it becomes no easier to face, not even with the sound of the waves cocooning all thought, the dance of the light like a promise that the world is beautiful, that doesn’t help in this. Because if he is righteous and right and he gouged out Aziraphale’s wings, Aziraphale deserved it. But if he is – not –

It is so hard to name. It is so hard, he’s unmoored by his own weakness in this, finds it baffling, nonsensical, how can just the thought be so hard?

If the black of his wings is not merely a test but a judgement, then Gabriel was not righteous, not right. He was not an instrument of the Lord enduring Aziraphale’s blood all over his suit and the effort, the work it took to get the bones out of him because it had to be done. Somehow on Earth the change of scale changes the perspective, and Gabriel was not the righteous one in that room enduring something unpleasant in the name of the Lord. Change the scale, change the perspective, and there was a corrupted angel in that room, but it wasn’t the one being butchered of his wings. Change the scale and what Gabriel thought becomes irrelevant, and what he did becomes everything.

Gabriel breathes, and breathes, and stares at the sea. And the scale here holds him, sustains him, there is enough space here for the thoughts. Not the endless space of Heaven where it is easy to sleep inside the same thoughts you’ve had for six thousand years without ever even contemplating the possibility of annotating them. Here, gazing at the lines of the sea moving in and in and ever ever in there is enough space, generous, giving space, here there is exactly enough space for Gabriel to place and be brave and to contemplate the thought that he has done something wrong, more than wrong, monstrous, unthinkable, undoable, undoable, there the thought sits on the horizon like the burning of the sun, that he has done something unforgiveable –

And the thought as tiny in his heart as the heart of an atom, that if he asked for it, Aziraphale would forgive him.

These are dangerous thoughts, they feel the way human intoxication must feel, and he sways on them, holding the railings for steadiness, staring at the sea and trying to imagine – trying to utilise imagination, that most human, most ridiculous thing – what he will say, how he will act, the next time that bumbling little principality comes to him to talk about nothing, not about what Gabriel did, he never wants to talk about that, to talk about nothing as if somewhere in all those meaningless words they could understand each other . . .

Screaming down a distant street he can hear an engine he knows. The curiosity of it is that it doesn’t usually approach at that speed, even if it tends to leave that way, and he turns, one hand coming from the railing, to watch the Bentley screech the corner, skid half the street, come to a halt diagonally-on facing Gabriel and the cars it barely avoided on the road squeal their tyres and blare their horns and on the second jarring attempt Aziraphale opens the door so fast that he nearly falls face-first onto the road from it, the demon Crowley grabbing the back of his coat to hold him in, Aziraphale choking, “Gabriel, quickly, get in the car, get in the car, Asmodeus –”

“‘Get in the car’?” Gabriel says, because it’s such a new thing for Aziraphale to say that it makes no sense to him.

Aziraphale’s eyes on him are wild with fear, but not the normal sort of fear he aims at Gabriel, or not only so, and his voice comes shaking. “The demon Asmodeus has come from Hell and it knows you’re here and it knows your wings are clipped and it’s coming to destroy you Gabriel and it’s so fast will you please just get in the car, there isn’t time –”

He feels no fear, only curiosity. “Why get in the car?”

“So we can get you out of here you fool! There isn’t the time for – just get in, will you just – oh Lord.” The hand Aziraphale is holding the door open with has a handkerchief in it which he raises now to cover his mouth, eyes closed as if he feels nauseous the way the humans do. It’s a feeling Gabriel recognises, now, though he never did before. Aziraphale swallows and lowers the handkerchief. “Quickly, Gabriel, please –”

“You need to make it snappy, oh great Archangel Gabriel,” Crowley says, eyes unreadable behind those dark glasses over Aziraphale’s shoulder; he still has one hand on the wheel, and one on Aziraphale’s back. “We only just passed that thing on the road, alright you lot quit your honking,” yelled at the cars unable to pass the Bentley in either direction the way it’s cut across the street like this. “Heaven if they think this is a bad day, they are not prepared for what happens next.”

“Gabriel please,” Aziraphale says, too fast, near panic. “Will you please just get in the car we can explain then but will you please – you don’t have your wings, it will kill you.”

Part of Gabriel is calculating what loss it would be to be killed. Part of Gabriel can’t perform the calculation while trying to understand that look on Aziraphale’s face, why he is doing this, why he and the demon who hates Gabriel more, Gabriel believes, than he himself has ever hated Aziraphale, are here, now, doing this.

And something turns in his stomach like nausea, Aziraphale gives a small broken moan, Crowley hisses inwards, that sick lurching feeling of some approaching, overwhelming demonic power. “Get in the car, idiot, get in the car,” the demon snarls at him, and then the quaking of the ground rhythmically pounded, then the sound of the hammering of hooves as heavy as houses, then up the street and the screams of humans start as they see it, the beast like a building, its great flat head, the smoke pouring from its nostrils, its almost-hands thick as tree trunks as it gallops on all fours towards them.

Gabriel looks at Aziraphale’s face, the way he looks bleached, he’s dropped the handkerchief like his hand has no strength even for that, and Gabriel remembers him in Heaven when he couldn’t move and couldn’t wear any expression that Gabriel didn’t want him to and his eyes danced damp as they do now but the tears leaked loose, then, along with the blood, and all of that was Gabriel’s doing. Now Gabriel just looks at him that one last time, and turns his back, flexes his hands on the railing, and looks again at the sea, the lines of light on the water, the openness of the space made of water meeting the light.

Aziraphale says, voice hollowing, “– Gabriel – ?”

Asmodeus is almost on them, the Bentley’s engine revs but Aziraphale isn’t closing the door, says again, choking it, “Gabriel –”

Gabriel doesn’t have to turn his head, facing a creature the size of Asmodeus, its sheer scale is its own gravity, he feels it loom over him raising onto its hind legs and it opens its mouth and if he weren’t holding the railing, a broken demon as he now is and no Archangel, the force of its bellow might have flattened him from his feet. But he stands there, eyes on the sea, all that open moving light, and he says without looking at the monster, “Look.”

Asmodeus bellows again. Humans are running and screaming, car alarms are going off, all life on the beach is fleeing in mad mortal panic but the sea just sighs, and sighs, and sighs again and again, as if there is enough space and enough peace in this world for anything, for everything. Gabriel says again, when the bellow has lowered enough for the beast to hear it, “Look.”

He can hear the waves, and Aziraphale whimpering in the car, and the huge heavy way the demon Asmodeus breathes beside him. And it turns its head, so enormous it has to turn it left, right, trying with each eye to focus where Gabriel focuses. “No, no,” Gabriel says, staring at the horizon, holding the railing, and there is enough space given by the sea for everything, for everything. “Look.”

Asmodeus breathes, bitter black smoke rolling away in the air, confused. And finally it looks at the sea head-on, the horizon so huge that it doesn’t need to turn its head. It looks. Gabriel looks. The sea moves, and moves.

“Look,” Gabriel says, quietly, as the waves bring more and more and always more light to deposit on the stones of the beach, always more, always, always, always more. “Look. Do you see?”

And he stands in silence next to the monster, both of them staring at the waves, while the engine of the Bentley ticks and gives small warning shudders, and even the sound of Aziraphale’s shivery breathing begins to slow.

*

They don’t talk much on the drive to the cottage, they’re both too fucking exhausted, spent to the soul, to dredge up words in the car. The entire day – Beelzebub, and Asmodeus, and Gabriel, and the afterwards – the entire fucking day, Crowley thinks, could have happened over the course of a year and still he’d be fucking knackered, so yeah, after today, after today, they’re spent, they’re done, and the words need to wait. Who cares about ‘needing’ sleep, it’s the only fucking thing he wants.

If it hadn’t been for all the angels and demons in the guest house he doesn’t know how they’d have coped, he knows they would have thought of something, they always think of something but there were mad panicking screaming humans everywhere and Asmodeus had smashed a whole lot of cars in its unthinking sprint to Brighton and it took the work of all of them, miracles practically crashing into each other, so that by the time emergency services and news crews arrived what they found was what Aziraphale would term a splendid piece of street theatre, just the costume worth taking a selfie with, as Aziraphale who is braver than anyone Crowley has ever known crept up to Asmodeus’ back where he stood beside Gabriel staring out to sea and placed a hat there on the street behind his enormous unholy feet before scuttling back to Crowley’s side making urgent little noises of terror; humans walking past just dropped their change into the hat. Those they couldn’t catch to wipe the memory of they just allowed to be confused by the new narrative emerging. Who’s going to listen to those who wouldn’t be persuaded? What’s more realistic, monsters in Brighton or really absurd over-the-top street theatre in Brighton? Come onnnn.

But then the light was fading, then the sun was setting, the sea purpling and enriching, and still Gabriel and Asmodeus gazed at the water, silent. Aziraphale’s small uneasy hand found Crowley’s, and Crowley wrapped his long fingers around it as if it was no big deal, and Zophiel folded her arms in her dress luminous white in the dusk and said, “We will take care of this now.”

Aziraphale looked at her looking tired and small. Crowley’s immediate instinct was right, thanks, we’re off then but he still cleared his throat and said, “You sure? That thing is not your garden variety renegade demon.”

“No,” Zophiel said, Ramiel gnawing a fingernail beside her, watching Gabriel and Asmodeus watch the waves. “But Brighton is our place, as London is yours, and it cannot always be on you to take care of these things. We have to learn to stand on our feet at some point.”

Aziraphale gave one of those tired small meant smiles, said, “You’ve been doing a marvellous job, my dear. You really have.”

“Nobody is dead yet,” Zophiel said, and Ramiel tugged her sleeve. “Few are dead yet,” Zophiel emended. “Yes, it’s felt like quite a successful venture so far.”

And Aziraphale looked at Gabriel’s back as if to say something, but Gabriel was staring at the sea, and Crowley squeezed his hand suddenly hard, his own throat going tight. And the angel looked up at him and smiled, that smile, the core of Crowley’s whole heart; “Zophiel and Ramiel taking care of Brighton, Malachel and Elyon taking care of the shop,” Aziraphale said, and he smiled, and his eyes looked so tired. “Well, we’re hardly needed at all, my dear.”

Crowley can think of little better than no fucker needing anything from the two of them, so all they have to focus on is what they need.

They’d had no plans for an impromtpu holiday and the cottage is silent and dark when they arrive, tucked into the hills like a secret. And they really need to have some words, the two of them, because at one point in the journey Aziraphale took off his shoe and opened the car window and poured out a line of black sand onto the road behind them, and Crowley definitely wants to know what the fuck there, and everything else. But they’re so fucking tired, tired as lead; Aziraphale unlocks the door, looks down and scoops up the piles of post, taps the envelopes neat on the hallway table and Crowley has already caught his arm and turns him a full three hundred and sixty degrees for the staircase and upstairs, Aziraphale coming dazed after him, so stupefied with the day that he would follow Crowley’s lead down to Hell right now. The only place Crowley is leading him is the bedroom, where he rotates himself back to the bed and then falls backwards as if into water, crashed out on the mattress so he’s staring at the ceiling, to which he says, wide-eyed, “What the fuck.”

Aziraphale is silent, then lifts Crowley’s ankle and removes one shoe, and then the other, and Crowley listens to him setting them square to the bedroom wall before removing his own to join them. Eventually he does sit on the edge of the bed, still silent, and unfold himself neatly backwards to lie beside Crowley, hands tucked together on top of his stomach. Together, they stare at the ceiling, the old beams and new shadows of this evening, they haven’t turned a light on yet. Finally Aziraphale says, “Was that a sentiment or a question?”

“Both. Why’d you have sand in your shoe?”

“Oh. Asmodeus – does something a little like you do. But it’s a much darker desert, and I don’t believe it’s outside of time, Malachel and Elyon had already healed you by the time I was back.”

Crowley turns his head to the angel. “It took you to another place. Why?”

Aziraphale stares at the ceiling and looks so tired, but at least not afraid anymore, too exhausted to be afraid. “It thought that as you had left to be with me instead of conquering and ruling Hell, there must be something about me that is better than ruling Hell, so it came to take me off you.” His eyes track some thought across the shadows on the ceiling. “That’s all my doing, isn’t it? I’m the one who convinced them . . . and Asmodeus would have killed you to take me, and that was . . . all my fault.” He swallows, turns his head to look at him. “Crowley, my dear, I’m so sorry.”

“No, look, none of that’s – none of that’s your fault, don’t be daft. It – what did it think – ?”

“It thought I must do something that is better than Hell. Do you know, I was too distracted even to think of showing it a card trick or something.”

“No,” Crowley says, aghast on the inside, as Aziraphale lifts his hands for Crowley’s glasses and says, “May I?”

Crowley lifts his cheek to make it easier for the angel to slide them loose, and set them aside. They resettle more easily eye to eye; Crowley sees more in the dark, but Aziraphale doesn’t need to see so much; his hand is on Crowley’s cheek, thumb stroking gently, gently, mouth a little parted in the memory of the terror of that thing attacking Crowley and then taking him.

“I tried to explain to it that – that love doesn’t work like that. I know you didn’t only leave Hell for me, Crowley, but I know . . . I know you would have, years ago, if I’d ever asked. And I really felt it then.” Small smile, his stroking thumb. “It really made me feel how much you love me, even if I couldn’t find any explanation for Asmodeus as to why I would be worth it.”

“Worth everything,” Crowley whispers, voice too low and too rough. “Worth everything.”

“You sweet creature,” Aziraphale murmurs, stroking his cheek. He swallows. “Asmodeus couldn’t understand, so it – suddenly it was just reading my mind, it took an embarrassingly short amount of time to do it in. And what it found in there was where the former Archangel Gabriel was, completely helpless, and it just – we just ceased to matter to it, that was a much better prize. It dropped me in a second, you know all the rest. Malachel and Elyon did heal you, Crowley, they did do a good job, didn’t they?”

“Yes, yes,” Crowley says, because the whole thing happened so fast he didn’t even have the time to feel anything about it, shock more than pain, what mattered to him on finding himself whole under the hands of two angels was that neither of those angels were Aziraphale, and Aziraphale was nowhere to be seen or felt. “It wasn’t wrong,” he says, thinking it through. “You are better than Hell.”

“That isn’t exactly a compliment, my dear.”

“But then,” Crowley says, because this, this they need to talk about, “you insisted we go rescue Gabriel.”

Aziraphale’s hand pauses on Crowley’s face, then turns so the soft knuckles are stroking his cheek, tucking some hair back behind his ear. “Yes.” the angel says. “I did insist. But you still could have said no.”

Crowley is mostly surprised at that, he doesn’t know how he expected Aziraphale to reply but why throw this back at him? “What happened to no more Gabriel?”

“Well that’s different, we couldn’t leave him to be destroyed –”

“Oh we could, angel, believe me, with pleasure we could, nothing in the world could stop us doing it, except you. Why did you want to save him?”

“Why did you come with me?”

“Because you’d have got yourself killed on your own!”

“No,” Aziraphale says, and people don’t realise that Aziraphale’s softness is just another kind of firmness, because Crowley is trying to argue with a steel girder in lamb’s clothing right now, he already knows there’s no way to squirm around or through when Aziraphale is just not moving. “That’s not why you came with me and we both know it isn’t, my love.”

“Because – ohhh, because I like your sexy schoolmistress voice, is that what you want me to–”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, and his hand’s still gentle there in Crowley’s hair but underneath the softness of his voice Crowley has already hit the steel core, and his teeth clench.

“Fine,” Crowley snaps. “Because you want us to be better than him so we bloody have to, don’t we, whether we want to or not, we don’t get a choice anymore, got to be good to make Gabriel look bad –”

“You’re not saying what you mean, Crowley.” Aziraphale says, as gently as a cliff face. “You are avoiding the subject.”

Silence in the dark, both of them breathing. Crowley’s jaw strains tighter and loosens again. He hates being honest. He hates being honest. So much of the time he tells himself that it’s a demon thing, but right now he knows that all it is is not wanting to face the truth, and Aziraphale knows that too.

“Fine.” Crowley says, voice lower this time, and lets his breath hiss loose. “Because we are better than Gabriel, we are good, and I need a shower now I’ve said that thank you very much.”

“You angel,” Aziraphale says, fingers scratching his scalp, humour and wickedness in his eyes, and Crowley gives an agonised groan, rubbing his face into his own bent arm on the bed.

“But it still . . .” He watches Aziraphale’s face and Aziraphale can’t see him in this light, so his gaze is soft on Crowley’s right eyebrow or thereabouts, looking at nothing really and stroking his hair. “It still shouldn’t have been your problem to fix,” Crowley says, and that comes quieter, low with pain for this. “You having to risk your life to save Gabriel, that . . . there’s nothing fair about that.”

Aziraphale says nothing for a moment, stares at nothing, strokes Crowley’s hair. Then he rolls onto his back and folds his hands on his stomach and says to the ceiling. “No. Quite. It does feel sometimes rather like She’s toying with us, doesn’t it?”

“We make plans and She calls them punchlines,” Crowley says, watching his face. “Are you alright?”

“Think so. I’ve been worse. I’m very tired.”

“It didn’t – change your mind. About giving up on Gabriel.” Crowley watches his face with the hunger of a snake. “It didn’t, did it?”

Aziraphale’s eyes are on the ceiling but he’s not looking at anything. “I really am very tired,” he says.

“You, angel,” Crowley says, “are avoiding the subject.”

“Yes, dear, I am.” Aziraphale says. “I’m very tired. And I don’t know if I am that good really, especially not when I’m this tired.”

“You just saved Gabriel’s life, you just won the right to get away with doing at least ten evil things –”

“Oh that’s just instinct, isn’t it, in the moment,” Aziraphale says, voice drowsy now, eyes blinking heavier. “True goodness isn’t just those moments, is it? It’s every single damn day, when we have to . . . oh I feel tired just thinking about it all.” He lifts his hands to rub his eyes, and Crowley doesn’t even want him to think about it. He wants him to sleep, safe beside Crowley, feeling his safeness beside Crowley, he wants Aziraphale to feel like there is nothing wrong in all of the world and everything, everything is soft. He knows how innocence works, he knows there’s no way back for the angel or for anybody, he wants to create all the safety and softness that Aziraphale now knows forever that the world is empty of. He nudges his nose into the angel’s cheek, drapes an arm over his chest, slides a thigh over his and Aziraphale mumbles, fighting a yawn, “Should – should – pyjamas.”

“In the morning,” Crowley murmurs, closing his eyes, tucking his angel closer.

“Makes no sense,” Aziraphale says, and yawns again.

“’n the morning,” Crowley slurs, and kisses his temple, and closes his eyes with his nose to Aziraphale’s cheek. Aziraphale starts something that might be a sentence, might be a word, but it stumbles out into the slow of his breath, and then there’s quiet, just the softness of the dark and the angel and demon, asleep.

*

He wakes with Crowley limpeted to his side, an arm and leg squeezed snake-tight around him, Aziraphale’s arm loosely holding his demon in place. He blinks and blinks at the ceiling, the early light blushing over the beams, the sound of the seagull on the roof of the cottage announcing the dawn with all the subtlety of a battering ram. And he remembers yesterday, and runs it through in his head sifting out the worst of it but Crowley is holding him and breathing very slow against his collarbone, so the worst hardly seems worth lingering on in this moment.

Except that he remembers Gabriel’s face and it lurches in his stomach, not knowing what it meant, the expression there, it is very important to Aziraphale that Gabriel is not unpredictable to him. That look on his face –

He shifts a shoulder back into the mattress, bother, slept in their clothes, slept in his coat even, he’ll be one big crease. He wonders how long Crowley will take to wake, runs a hand down his back, knows it’s early, the quality of the light. He finds that he’s wondering if Gabriel and Asmodeus are still standing like statues and staring at the waves. He does wish Gabriel would get a hobby, he’d feel better knowing he was occupied with something, unnerving Aziraphale really shouldn’t count as a hobby . . .

He sighs over Crowley’s hair, turns his head and –

“Crowley,” he says, sitting up and bringing Crowley with him, Crowley who snorts and mumbles and squirms upright in his arms, saying, “What, what what what what angel why’d you wake me–”

Aziraphale catches his cheek and turns his head so that Crowley too is looking at what Aziraphale is looking at, and Crowley stops talking.

Eventually Crowley says, “Did you do that?”

Aziraphale says, “My hope was that it was you, dear.”

“Why would I put a door there?”

“Well,” Aziraphale says, “quite.”

To their side is the door to the stairs, the perfectly innocent door they came through last night, as meek as a lamb that door. And there, opposite the foot of the bed, not quite against the wall, is a new door, larger than the other, more elaborate, filigree on the golden handle, fretwork on the hinges, with a large golden key sitting in its lock. That would be enough. But in the crack around where the door sits in its frame misty light beams through, thin and pale as dawn, and Aziraphale has the oddest sensation in his stomach, like his stomach is a bowl of water and just the fact of that light is causing the water to gently ripple, ripple . . .

Crowley says, “The definition of a trap door.”

“But who would put it there? And they gave us the key. Don’t you find it odd that we’ve been given the key?”

“Could be a dummy. Could be booby trapped.”

Aziraphale marvels at him. “What must it be like to live in your mind?”

“Could be bait. Could in fact be the mouth of a shapeshifting demon waiting for us to walk inside.”

“Could be rampant paranoia,” Aziraphale says, still holding Crowley and looking at the door. “You know, there’s only one way we’re going to find out what’s behind it.”

“Do we need to know what’s behind it?”

“You’re not telling me that you don’t want to know. A magic glowing door appeared in our bedroom overnight. We can’t just ignore it.”

Crowley gives the door a baleful look, and finally the truth of the matter comes out; “It looks holy, to me.”

“Honestly my dear, would you feel any better about it if it looked infernal?”

“Welll, yeah, I guess you have a point. Because no, I really, really wouldn’t.” Crowley stares at the door, and sighs from the depths of his lungs, and says, “This is why I hate mornings.”

They pick themselves up from the bed, Aziraphale dusts himself off and flicks the creases out of his clothes, righting his bow tie while Crowley runs a hand through his hair and tightens the bun, and flicks at Aziraphale’s hands as he tries to de-crease Crowley too. “I dream of taking an iron to your wardrobe,” Aziraphale says grimly, and Crowley says, “Really? I dreamed Beelzebub was a giant seagull. What mundane dreams you have.”

Aziraphale eyes the door. “I’d better go first, if it does look holy,” he says, beginning to feel uneasy now. “We don’t want you walking through and . . .”

“No,” Crowley says. “Because if it’s a trap, they want you to walk through first.”

“Oh good Lord Crowley don’t be absurd, it–”

Crowley holds a finger up in front of Aziraphale’s face, cutting him off. “Bookshop fire.” A second finger unfurls from the fist. “Golem.” A third. “Gabriel.” A fourth, and Aziraphale rolls his eyes in sheer frustration. “Fucking Asmodeus. So yeah, angel, you are not walking first and alone through the magic door that appeared in our bedroom overnight. We are going through it together. Because the next time I have to deal with you maybe being dead, pfff,” he slots his sunglasses up his nose, and gives Aziraphale a hard yellow stare over them. “I’d rather not, even if it does mean it’s both of us.” He holds his hand out. “It’s both of us or it’s neither of us. Choose.”

Aziraphale stands there primly, feeling nettled always puts his back very straight. “First of all,” he says, “both that golem and Asmodeus – and Gabriel, now that you mention it, were times when I nearly lost you too, and don’t you dare tell me that I am not to have feelings about that as well, I very, very much do, my dear, and I am no happier about facing it again than you are. And secondly oh Crowley you are unreasonable, what if it leads straight up to Heaven, you hardly want t–”

Crowley says, almost lightly, almost musingly, almost as if his eyes don’t look like that, “Remind me what happened, angel, the last time you went to Heaven?”

Aziraphale’s mouth opens and closes, he stares, he stops. His shoulder blades tense and flex slightly, his wings trying not to stretch too wide. He says, aiming for merely irritable, “Fine. Both of us.” and takes Crowley’s hand. “But sometimes I do still really wish I had that flaming sword . . .”

“It never was very you, angel.” Crowley says, and his hand squeezes Aziraphale’s, the skin of his cheeks tightens, his teeth clench for one last second. “Let’s do this then,” he says as if merely resigned, as if being dragged into Aziraphale’s tailor’s shop for something nice for once. “Both of us.”

Hand in hand, they approach the door. Aziraphale touches the key – Crowley hisses sharply in but it does nothing, it doesn’t burn or strike or blow up or whatever the demon imagines might happen next in his untrusting way. The door is already unlocked, though, so Aziraphale turns the handle instead, Crowley taking the key as he pulls the door open, “I’m having that, no bastard’s locking us in behind–”

Crowley stops. So has Aziraphale’s breath.

What strikes first, more than anything – more, Aziraphale feels it deep in his chest, more than anything, more than anything what takes him is the smell, leaves so verdant the scent glows, flowers hueing the air a dense full rainbow, crisp, juicy, sweet ripe fruits, the clean of the earth, the richness and the fullness of it, scent like a song of glory, scent like rejoicing, a hallelujah of scent. His eyes feel sharp with tears, scent takes him back – more than taste, more than memory, a scent unknown for thousands of years and he is immediately back and blinking and submerged in it all and Crowley’s hand is slack in his as Aziraphale whispers deep and thick, “Oh, Crowley.”

The scent takes him back because they are back. They stare through the doorway, together, at Eden.

There is no longer argument about walking through the door. The grass underfoot is as plush as a pillow, releasing that fresh clean smell with every step as they walk dreamily, hand in hand, Aziraphale fascinated for the flowers of a magnolia tree white and sweet pink in their hearts, the tiny stars of wildflowers underfoot, the bank of wild strawberries, fruit and flower, smelling so of summer that in his mind he can hear the soft pock of bat on ball, taste cucumber, feel the cold water of waves underneath bare feet, the purity of the summer that they breathe. Crowley follows him silent, holding his hand and looking at everything Aziraphale points out – the avocado and mango trees, the high proud climbing beans, sweetcorn and squash, hibiscus and eucalyptus, here the trees lush with moss and spangled with orchids – “Oh Crowley dear orchids, you love orchids, look –” – past cacti and agave, the ground warm and dry and clean underfoot, ballooning, architectural baobab, the shocking scale of the great pines, here now oak and silver birch and horse chestnut in both flower and fruit, everything in flower and fruit, how could he have forgotten? He didn’t forget but just didn’t think of it, the beauty of it, not nearly as much as he could, all those millennia he’s spent not thinking of Eden as much as he could have when all of this could have been returned to his heart if he had just remembered the smell . . . a fox chatters curiously at them from the undergrowth, rabbits are grazing at the grass, picking out choice, juicy flowers underneath the elegant steps of a deer, and a nearby lion yawns in the sun, and watches them with a lazy flick of its tail.

Crowley says, slowly, “What the fuck is going on?”

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, whole heart softening and reaching for it as he sees it through the trees, “there’s our wall, Crowley, look, let’s go see it, let’s go back –”

“I don’t understand why the Heaven Eden just appeared in our bedroom,” Crowley says, jerking after Aziraphale still holding his hand and walking with delighted speed for the wall. “Angel, what the merry fuck is going on here?”

“Let’s deal with why later,” Aziraphale says, seeing and swerving for the steps. “We’ve had a beastly time of it, Crowley, let’s just enjoy a moment, shall we? Our wall? For old times’ sake?”

“I didn’t like the old times, angel, I didn’t have you in the old times –”

“Then think how much more you’ll enjoy the wall this time around, now that you do have me,” Aziraphale says, holding his hand and hurrying up the steps, up and up and up the height of these walls, he remembers the view –

“Oh I remember this view,” he whispers, when they’re there, gazing across the unbroken, unblemished vastness of Eden, and this is what holy means, this is what holy means, it has nothing to do with churches and priests, this place, this is sacred . . .

He holds Crowley’s hand, heart awed quiet inside. “You had tempted Eve,” he says, hushed, staring at Eden and holding Crowley’s hand. “And I had given them my sword, and we didn’t know then if either of us had done the right thing.”

“I think both of us did exactly the right thing,” Crowley says, taking his sunglasses off with a free hand and pocketing them. He sniffs, gazes around, says in a voice that isn’t offhand enough, “It rained, didn’t it, you sheltered me with a . . .”

Sometimes he remembers and he stops, as if drawing any attention at all to the existence of wings, given what Aziraphale’s wings have cost him, is the wrong thing to do. Aziraphale just looks at him, and smiles, and still holding his hand he stretches his wings back wide and white, and lifts one coyly over Crowley’s head. “The first rain,” he says, remembering that scent, good God, She really outdid Herself with scent here. “It felt holy, I didn’t want it getting on you in case it might –”

“Melt me?”

“Or, you know, sting a bit. And as I remember it you came shuffling up to me as if asking for an umbrella anyway.” He lowers the wing again, looks over Eden, there aren’t the words, literature failed, always, to bring him back here. There is so little that words can do for scent, for the reality of what it is to be present in Eden. Crowley watches his face then gently rolls his long back and his own wings sit soft-dark in their presence, flexing just a little, Aziraphale knows how this air feels on them, fresh and silken as if new. On Earth it always feels a bit much to have their wings out, humans shaped Earth so it doesn’t have the space for them but here is made to the scale of wings, whatever colour they happen to be.

“I know I should wonder why,” Aziraphale murmurs, staring at the Garden. “I know I should. I think I’m just a bit too overwhelmed with the that right now to get to the why.”

Crowley, gazing over Eden, turning and looking across the wall, stills, hand hesitant in Aziraphale’s for a moment; Aziraphale may be unable to worry about why yet, still too overcome with scent and sight and memory, but he forgets that Crowley moves so, so much faster than him, Crowley is always speeding ahead, and trying not to leave Aziraphale behind.

“Angel,” Crowley says.

“I don’t know if I’d thought She’d destroyed it, how could you destroy something like this? It was just unreachable, and I didn’t think of it anymore –”

“Angel,” Crowley says, more urgently, “the last time I was on this wall, I don’t remember a desk being up here, do you?”

“A desk?” Aziraphale looks up at him, follows his gaze to the wide, grand-looking office desk standing further along the wall, and his wings give an uneasy flex. “Ah, now that you mention it, no, no, don’t remember any . . .” It sounds so much more ominous than it should, in the most ridiculous way. “. . . desks.”

Crowley eyes it sourly. “I knew this was a trap.”

“We don’t know that it’s a trap.”

Crowley says grimly, “Nothing good ever happens at a desk.”

They approach together, still holding hands, Aziraphale nervous of anything changing in Eden. As they get closer he realises that the desk is not merely made to the appropriate scale of Eden, the sheer size of it, the desk is as wide as it is because there are two chairs behind it, rather grand chairs, two large elaborate ledgers set on top of it, but he’s never known even the lowliest scrivener in Heaven to share a desk. Why . . .

“Whatever it’s for,” he offers, trying not to feel as uneasy as he really does, “it really would be the most magnificent office, the view, you must -”

The spotlight hits them like a cannonball. Aziraphale jumps so hard his wings flap in panic, Crowley flinches and his hand snaps tight as a claw around Aziraphale’s and he stares up, the hiss escaping low and threatening as Aziraphale stares up open-mouthed and defenceless and the light doesn’t feel like it lands on them, the light goes through, that golden-white light does more than illuminate, it saturates. And the voice says from higher than mere Heaven and singing through every bone in his body and wings, “Crowley, Nebula Architect, first class. Aziraphale, Angel of the Eastern Gate.”

Every one of Aziraphale’s muscles has gone slack; if Crowley weren’t holding his hand he’d be on his knees, it feels like the only thing he can do, under the direct gaze of God and knowing everything, everything that he has done it feels like all he wants to do. But Crowley is dark and rigid and upright in the purity of the hum of the light, holding Aziraphale’s hand viciously tight and staring up as if, through the beam of light, he might be able to glare at God Herself. And someone has to say something, and how has someone as utterly insignificant as Aziraphale found himself in a position where he has to say something to God Herself?

What do you say? What do you say when you walked out of Heaven and stopped the apocalypse and let a demon kiss you, wanted a demon to kiss you, when every day that demon touches you and you are whole in a way you never were when you did, officially, the Lord’s work? What do you say when – when he had finally snapped and sawn the last clinging muscle and tendon loose and dropped you to Earth to die and if She cared about right and wrong, what did that mean about you? What do you say, small as you are, to God, here in Eden, holding Crowley’s hand and still knowing that it would be letting go, not repentance, that would be the true betrayal of everything that is good and holy and sacred in this or any other world?

“. . . hello,” he says weakly, and Crowley’s breath growls out through his teeth.

“Thank you for submitting your feedback.” the voice of the Almighty says, serene as starlight. “Your feedback is very important. Thank you for your patience while your feedback was in the Queue.”

“What feedback?” Aziraphale looks at Crowley. “What feedback?”

Crowley’s face has gone still. “I did, uh,” he says, voice suddenly very small. “I . . . made a suggestion box, once.”

– now is not the time to discuss how foolish a thing to do that that was. “– but I never submitted anything! I – oh.” His face blanches, his wings sag. “Oh,” he says. “No.”

Aziraphale has had a lot of feedback for the Lord over the centuries, goodness, reams of it, some of it quite heated. And he never did submit it in a feedback box, good Lord Crowley Heaven didn’t want feedback they wanted shut up and do as you are told but how can he be aghast at Crowley’s naivety when every day of his life he has, silent in his soul, submitted his feedback and not always especially politely either and God doesn’t need a feedback box, God is omniscient, and every time –

Every time –

Oh God. She has heard him, every time.

His hand has gone slack, he does need to be on his knees. She really has heard all of it. And if he thought that he was powerless when Gabriel came for him, it’s like thinking that the drip of a tap is the depth of the ocean. If Crowley weren’t holding his hand he’d be on the floor and it wouldn’t be grovelling, it would just be acceptance; he cannot make himself small enough, under the gaze of the Lord.

But Crowley is holding his hand. Crowley is holding his hand, tight, and his face has that horrible slackness to it, Aziraphale knows exactly how his cheek would feel if he touched it now, Crowley finally brought to this precipice too, and it fills his throat, if this is the moment they find themselves in – if this is the last thing they will ever get –

He lifts a wing, white as a star under this strike of light, and again he raises it over Crowley’s head, as futile a gesture as love is, as he looks up at the light and Crowley suddenly looks at him. As if he could shield Crowley from this.

As if he could face this and not try to shield him.

“Your feedback has been taken on board,” the Lord says placidly. “Your suggestion that there should be somewhere between Heaven and Hell was most valuable. Eden has been designated for the souls of humans who do not warrant an eternity of either Heaven or Hell, to spend their afterlife here.”

Crowley stares directly upwards again, past Aziraphale’s wing. Aziraphale’s mouth is open but there are no words, he thinks that this is what humans mean by an out of body experience, he doesn’t feel like he’s here.

“The designation of souls for the Third Place will require an extensive review process and the relevant materials have been made available for you.” God says. “Thank you for your feedback. Your feedback was most valuable.”

And the light is gone, and Aziraphale feels the presence of God – like a magnet the size of the sun, and his soul a single iron filing trying to suck out through the top of his head to reach it – gone. The sound of birdsong returns to them like a thunderclap, the distant chirr of insects, the soughing of the leaves of the trees. He feels the sweet clean air of Eden run over his skin and his wings again, he swallows and can taste the purity of the air, all of it forgotten under the gaze of God and back again now that they both, impossibly, still exist.

Then he gives in to his knees and sits, heavily, there on the wall, lurching Crowley down a little with him and hunching his wings back, too stunned to speak. Crowley is still standing there holding his hand, dark and upright, lips parted and eyes wide and not blinking though he never really is one for blinking, while Aziraphale tries to relearn how to do it while his eyes are dry and still everything feels a little distant, like he can’t get through translucent paper to touch the world itself –

Crowley turns his head, stares at the desk, and very gently lets loose Aziraphale’s hand. Aziraphale says, even though he knows the answer to it, “Crowley, what just happened?” and Crowley turns for the desk, for the great elaborate ledgers laid on it. One is white and bound in gold, the other black, silver edging its pages. Crowley swallows, barely perceptible but Aziraphale knows him, and he opens the black one, and the first page – unfolds like an accordion, like a magic trick, unspooling as if infinite over the edge of the desk and down the wall, down down down, paper like a waterfall streaming to the floor of Eden while Crowley stares at the minute black writing set out in its neat columns and says, “Ohhhhhh . . . fuck.”

*

Crowley takes one of the desk chairs, one leg up on the desk and back bowed like a snake’s as he reads through the tiny text of the ledger, sick in his stomach as he privately searches out any name, any name, that he might have nudged too far and sent to Hell when left to their own devices that poor fucker would never have fallen. Aziraphale is still sitting on the wall, shoes hanging over the drop to the floor of Eden, a page from the white ledger running through his hands and its long long tail dancing a little in the breeze, almost playful, over the treetops. For a long, long time, they don’t say anything.

Then Aziraphale lifts his head and looks at Crowley and says as if really trying to understand it, “Are we being punished?”

“Don’t think She thinks like that,” Crowley says, black wings lazily unfolding and shifting behind himself. “Don’t think She thinks . . .”

“Please don’t say anything about ineffability, it’s been a trying few days.” The angel looks up from the page and looks across Eden, the hush of leaves and song of birds, the chuckle of dashing water somewhere, how clean it all smells, London will smell like a sewer to them when they return. If, Crowley thinks, looking at the fucking size of the ledger, they ever return. Aziraphale says, “There are as many souls in Heaven and Hell combined as to make no difference to the number being infinite or not, it is still the work of an eternity to work through them all because Crowley they just keep dying, you know they do, that’s what humans do –”

“I know, angel.”

“– and then they keep making new humans to die too, they’re always at it, this is – it’s like Achilles and that tortoise, we’ll just never reach the end of it.”

Crowley’s brow folds. “Achilles and the tortoise?”

“Or was it the arrow.” Aziraphale’s brow folds. “That was all a very long time ago.”

“He’s one of ours,” Crowley says, listlessly, too low in spirits to rouse himself to any sort of feeling right now. “Theirs. Hell’s. Achilles. I need a pencil, need to mark him for coming here, he’s been down there –” He puffs his breath out, stares at the list of names and names and names. “A very long time, yes, angel.”

“At least we’ll be together,” Aziraphale says, though he still just sounds like he’s in shock. “And here, it is lovely here, isn’t it?”

“Mm,” Crowley says, staring at the names and names and names, his wings lazily flexing as he thinks.

What he’s thinking, staring through the list of names and names and names, wings moving as he breathes, is that Aziraphale sits there dove-white and as close to innocent as anyone could be after six thousand years and everything he’s seen and been and done and had done to him, designated by God Herself now to mind and manage Eden, Eden, the Third Place, the place they ached for all that time. And yet God was clearly speaking to both of them, as far as God is concerned they are a unit, both to mind and manage this place of all places, this place.

And here Crowley sits, black-winged and wearing an ironic t-shirt in Eden, leg slung over the desk he’s been charged by the Lord Herself to sit at forevermore. Here he sits, exactly himself, wings like soot and still very much a demon, not an angel, definitely not an angel, and the Lord didn’t even mention the fact.

He remembers, once, Aziraphale a little ruffled and pink with port in front of the fire, trying to explain one of his theories to Crowley, the angel thinks about things far too much, Aziraphale saying to Crowley that the black of his wings was something God must have intended all along and so had nothing to do with anything Crowley had actually done. Whether Crowley was good or bad was not relevant, God needed Crowley a demon and so a demon he was, and all the soul-searching and soul-lacerating and the guilt and questioning and loathing and bitterness he aimed at himself, there was no need for it. Crowley could be a demon and still be essentially innocent. And it was an entirely different kind of unfair to the unfair that Crowley had raged about it being all along without ever truly believing in that, but it had opened a space for him all the same, inside his mind, a space where maybe it wasn’t all his fault. A space where his fuck-ups were merely fuck-ups and not defining of the universe and himself. A space where he wasn’t permanently brazening through the ugliness of his own black wings. A space where he could actually deserve for Aziraphale to love him, and simply receive all the angel’s affection and admiration and all that heartbreaking fondness as if it were earned, or better than earned; as if it were simply grace, and safe to bathe himself in.

And what he’s thinking now, staring through the names and names and names, is that fucking Heaven, that’s how God thinks about it, isn’t it? Nebula Architect, first class, as if nothing had changed in thousands of years, as if the rebellion of something as small as an angel is meaningless to Her; to Her, both angels and demons are just employees, doing her bidding, Hell is as much part of Her plan as Heaven is and the black of Crowley’s wings is just – just a uniform. The Fall was nothing to Her the way it was to them, to him, it was just part of the Plan, the opening of a new corporate location. All those years Aziraphale fretted about doing what God wanted and Crowley thought himself free of all that, and never even fucking knew what clock he was still punching in at the start of every working day . . .

He stares through the list, black wings rising and gently falling with every slow breath of Eden-fresh air, and he thinks, Yeah. Totally different kind of unfairness.

Her Plan isn’t about fair, not in any way they understand. But their plan can be, and all these names, all these fucking names, they can put some of it right but it’s the rest of their lives. No more popping to the Ritz, no more holidays on the Downs, no more bookshop, no more nights in the bed in his flat, no more anything, just names and names and names, forever. No more boozy nights and peaceable breakfasts, no more really good albums, lovely little bookshops, Christmas trips to Tadfield, sushi, misting the plants -

. . . no more Gabriel, no more threat from demons, they’re untouchable here, no more threat from angels, but – no more anything, and it shocks Crowley that offered that trade-off, he doesn’t want it. Yesterday he’d have sworn and meant it that to make Aziraphale safe forever there was nothing, nothing he wouldn’t do. Here he’s been handed Aziraphale’s safety for all of eternity and what he’s thinking is, No more lying on the sofa watching him do jigsaws in his socked feet, no more holding my arm while we potter through a garden centre, no more holding his hand on a walk on the beach or through the park . . . ? This desk, here, forever, putting everyone else’s fuck-ups right, forever?

“We can save Anathema and Newton, I always worried about wherever they would end up after they got involved in the apocalypse like that,” Aziraphale says, putting the page he’s holding aside, squeezing his hands in his lap. “And Adam, Crowley, do you think Adam plans to get old, to die? I thought – if they took him back to Hell – I couldn’t bear the thought.”

“. . . dunno.” Crowley tries to rouse himself from his own thoughts, dragging his eyes from the names and names and names to the angel, who watches him nervously from the wall. “Yeah, he seems . . . he seems to really like being human, so – so dying was always on the cards. Yeah.” He swallows, and is surprised by how it hurts. “Yeah,” Adam’s godfather says, voice only a little rough. “He’s better off here.”

Aziraphale looks down at the page beside him, spooling off into a thin ribbon fluttering in the air of Eden. “You really wouldn’t think souls would need rescuing from Heaven, would you, and yet . . .”

“Oh I would,” Crowley says. “I very much would angel, subjecting someone to that much unrelenting white light and harp music would get you dragged in front of The Hague if you were human, all those poor bastards who did their best, what they get for a reward is legally, to humans, torture.”

Aziraphale sighs, and does not defend Heaven. “Yes,” he says, wings slumped. He looks out across Eden, a tired and sad-looking angel, hands holding the edge of the wall and eyes all distant and straining with uneasy feeling, an angel in the minor key. “Yes, there are quite a few we could rescue from it all. It’s good work. I know that it’s good work. It’s just . . .”

“. . . endless work,” Crowley offers, and Aziraphale’s wings sag in a great sigh.

They’re silent again for a time after that, Crowley finds he’s thinking about Denmark Street, Aziraphale has never understood Crowley’s love of Denmark Street, he’s thinking about a tiny dank little place with sticky floors and loud music and warm spirits and how it just exhilarated the soul, and how working through all these fucking lists will he ever have a spare moment in all of eternity to waste an afternoon in Denmark Street listening to Aziraphale complaining about everything and wiping the chair with his own handkerchief and that gloriously prim and bitchy look on his face –

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, and it’s the tone, Crowley looks up. Aziraphale’s back is straighter, the wings are up, Crowley’s angel has come into the major key and Crowley feels the great betrayer, hope, sit up in his own chest. Aziraphale thinks about things far too much, and now and then, in little pockets of serendipity, too much is exactly the right amount to save their lives.

“Yes?” he says, hand getting tighter on the list.

“You know – it is an eternity of work, for an angel and demon, to work through all these lists of names. It will take an eternity. And all those souls suffering in the wrong realm until then, just because it would take us so long to reach them on the list – well that’s just rotten luck, isn’t it? That’s too unfair on them. She couldn’t possibly have intended for that.”

“. . . no?” Crowley says, slowly, letting Aziraphale think it through.

“The thing about God,” Aziraphale says, hands gripping tighter at the wall of Eden, “is that She has always been a very great believer in delegation.”

And he turns, and looks at Crowley, and the brilliant, tricky little bastard is starting to smile.

“Crowley,” he says. “We have a rebel army of renegade angels and demons.”

Crowley – blinks. For what might be the first time in a very long time.

They never felt like much of an army, neither Crowley nor Aziraphale much inclined to drill them in any way, but Aziraphale does have all that paperwork, they took care of all of them for months until they could send them off somewhere new to learn to be themselves, so now they do have all those angels and demons who risked it all out of belief in a Third Place. And now they’ve actually been given a Third Place, and all those rebel angels and demons –

Holy fuck. They’ve been given staff.

For the first time, Crowley sees a crack of light at the end of the tunnel, a crack of light through which a snake’s body can squeeze and he can once again spend unending nights watching an angel complete unreasonably large jigsaw puzzles and then Crowley can fall asleep on top of him while he reads, and that will be better even than Eden itself.

“But it will still be . . . the paperwork, I mean,” Aziraphale gestures helplessly at the list pouring like white water beside him off the wall of Eden. “Drawing up shift rotas, and codes of practice, and dealing with staffing issues and conflicts and . . . we’ll still be up to our necks in it, Crowley, I’m afraid . . .”

He trails off, as if another thought has occurred, and now he’s following that one, eyes fading distant again. Crowley watches him greedily, yes, angel, think it through, think too much, we need all the thinking you’ve got right now . . .

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, eyes on the list rolling in the breeze over Eden’s treetops.

“Yes, angel?”

Aziraphale clears his throat. “Do you know who really is good at all of that kind of thing? I mean – management, and HR, and making sure rules get followed, and –”

“No.” Crowley says, because he knows exactly what Aziraphale means, and no.

“But we would be in charge, ultimately, he couldn’t do any harm, he’d just be –”

“No.” Crowley says again, firmly, because all the safety and beauty of this place, Gabriel would taint it just by thinking about it.

“But it would give him something to do, do you know how it –” His hands squeeze together in his lap. “Do you know how it unnerves me that he just stands there all day long staring at the sea and I don’t know what he’s thinking –”

“It doesn’t matter what he’s thinking, he’s never touching you again.”

“But of course he isn’t,” Aziraphale says. “He has no power. He could no more hurt me than I could hurt – God. But I –” He swallows, and he’s looking at Crowley, Crowley wishes he wouldn’t, does the angel have any fucking idea how hard it is to deny those big sweet heart-wrenching eyes a single fucking thing? “I know I still feel it. The fear. I know it’s stupid.”

“It is not, it is not, stupid. It’s the most sensible fucking fear in the world.”

“But it wouldn’t have to be,” Aziraphale says. “If he were busy at a desk making rotas and didn’t even have the time to think about me. Crowley, I’m not asking you to like him, I’m asking you to – to use our resources, so that we don’t spend quite all eternity staring at paperwork when we could be – reminding ourselves why lives are actually worth the living, at least some of the time. Don’t you think?”

Crowley stares at him, and what he thinks is No.

No is all that Crowley thinks, when it comes to Gabriel. He knows that Aziraphale thinks a lot more than that, Aziraphale always thinks too much, there are lots of ‘no’s in Aziraphale’s thoughts of Gabriel but they’re not alone in there, there’s so much else as well, so much that when Asmodeus dropped him out of elsewhere back to his bookshop and he could have just put his arms around Crowley and waited for Asmodeus to take care of the problem for them, he dragged Crowley to Brighton to try to save Gabriel’s life instead. To try to save a demon already condemned by The Hague in Crowley’s head, because you don’t come back from what Gabriel did to Aziraphale. There is no interpretation of doing God’s will that could ever act as a smokescreen for that. It was all Gabriel, all his ugliness and brutality and sadism, and there is no coming back from Aziraphale in Crowley’s arms that night, the Bentley full of blood, Adam’s shocked face in the dark. There is no returning to innocence from that.

And he looks out across Eden, and he looks at the list. All those souls in Hell, he thinks. And how many millennia of torture does he think they need, before they earn the right to come here?

Because that makes him feel ill when he focuses on it, the power they’ve been given, the ability to judge who deserves torture and who deserves to rest. And he realises with a jolt in that second why it turns that bad way in his stomach, that’s what Gabriel did. They’ve been asked to be Gabriel. And Crowley has an immediate lurching instinct to empty Hell, to leave it stripped bare, not a soul left in its corridors, to not be the one who decides who has to suffer and for how long –

Then he thinks, Well, not those fucking Nazis, not even been down there a century, they can fucking sweat it out. And the cigarette company executives, Jesus demons should look at them with awe, what they managed to do. And the heads of oil companies, alright, fuck them, and all those white-hooded shits from America and all their moron fascist buddies the world over, okay, actually, yes, there are a lot of fucking humans he doesn’t want clogging up Eden and that makes him feel like shit, he can’t get a handle on how complicated all the warring feelings are inside him. The desire to not be Gabriel, and the desire to enjoy Gabriel suffering.

This is the Third Place, he thinks, slowly. Maybe I can accept that I have both.

“We can make the proposal, at least,” Aziraphale says, looking up from the paper to the horizon, perfectly balanced there with his shoes hanging over the edge of the wall. “He may just say no and that’s the end of it anyway, isn’t it. But it would help, if we could just focus on – on the ground rules, of how to recognise which souls would be safest here, and leave all the admin to somebody else.”

Crowley watches Aziraphale watch the horizon now the sun is getting heavy and low, all day they’ve stared at these lists, the way the breeze runs soft with oncoming night through the feathers on his back. He says, soft as a snake, he doesn’t know what he feels in saying these words, what he’s hoping for, “Do you forgive him?”

Aziraphale looks at his own hands folded in his lap, and his forehead is oddly creased, the skin around his eyes looks tighter, his mouth flops half a smile on and loses it again. “Do you know, bit of a . . . sort of depends which day you ask me, or which moment, I . . . now and then, almost.” He looks up at the sky, the first sunset, it’s always the first here, thousand and thousands of years and every single day and night is still new. “Almost,” he says again. “Sometimes, almost. If . . .” He looks down at his hands again. “But there doesn’t seem much point in dwelling on ‘if’s.”

Crowley sighs, puts his page aside and pushes himself up from the desk, walks to his angel’s side and sits there, feet over the drop to Eden, looking at Aziraphale’s face. Aziraphale worries so much about everything. Someone has to do the worrying about Aziraphale for him.

“Here’s a ground rule,” Crowley says, taking Aziraphale’s hand and the angel immediately finds his eyes and smiles at him. “For souls who get their second chance here. Nobody comes here just because they’re tired of suffering.” Crowley looks Aziraphale in the eye, and Aziraphale looks back puzzled, at first. “They only get here when they get that they made other people suffer and that’s what matters, whether they got punished for it or not.”

It’s quieted Aziraphale’s face, Crowley bringing that reality home. “True repentance,” he says, and looks down at Crowley’s hand holding his.

“That goes for every soul in Eden. That goes for Gabriel too. If they don’t get it, we’ve got nothing for them here. But they’ve got plenty of time to work it out in. All the time in the world, to get their heads out their arses and finally get ticked off our little lists.”

“. . . yes. That does make sense. This place should be . . . this should be a place where we can acknowledge what we’ve done, and be more than just that. And where we don’t have to face bumping into our demons if they still can’t be trusted.” His smile twitches back. “I did always hold out a smidgen of hope for grace, you know, through all of it, that somehow, somehow, it would all be alright in the end, somehow.”

“We’re not at the end yet.”

“No.” Aziraphale puts his cheek to Crowley’s shoulder as the sun makes its sleepy way to the wall of Eden, and the scent of dusk is getting heavier in the air. “I think that this is what beginnings look like.”

Crowley rests his cheek against Aziraphale’s hair, and sighs again, slow and deep. Animals and birds are making night-time noises, welcoming the dark, the air is getting impossibly richer and purer as the light sinks. And sitting side by side like this, as the sun sets and the moon rises, their wings touch, feather brushing feather, white and black.

That’s how they spend their first night in Eden, underneath the first stars.

*

Crowley closes the car door to the sound of crying gulls, waves on the stones, the chatter of holidaymakers unaware of angels and demons and the things that they’ve done. And he looks across at Aziraphale on the pavement, the angel’s hands clasped and looking nervously ahead and he always looks nervous, Crowley knows that, Aziraphale has always had resting anxiety face, he knows him, he knows him. And that’s why Crowley walks to him and with a roll of his eyes like it doesn’t mean anything he scoops an arm through Aziraphale’s, so he can slouch his hands into his own pockets and Aziraphale instinctively tucks his arms through Crowley’s and instead of worrying his hands together like that his hands press Crowley’s arm, and he gives one of his small pleased smiles, head lowered, eyes warm. For that little sparkling moment when he’s got Crowley, he looks like he’s been made the happiest angel either inside or outside of Heaven.

Then they both look ahead, to the demon beside the sea.

They’ve already been to London, to pick up all of Aziraphale’s paperwork and let Penemuel and Haniel know about the Eden thing except Penemuel and Haniel already had some idea of the Eden thing, because there in the middle of Aziraphale’s bookshop and not connected to any sort of wall was a great grand door, glowing mist showing fine around its edges in the frame, a golden key set innocently in the lock. The bookshop’s outer wall had been repaired by the Heavenly and Hellish denizens of the shop, but nobody had made this thing, and nobody knew what to make of this thing either.

“Has anyone been inside?” Aziraphale had said, giving it quite a particular look, the door that God put in his bookshop as if the Almighty Herself might have at least had the courtesy of mentioning it to him first.

“It’s locked,” Penemuel said, sitting on the edge of the desk and casually flexing her high-heeled ankles. “I made Haniel try to open it.”

Crowley murmured, already knowing the answer, “Why Haniel?”

“It looks Heavenly, it’s clearly not my problem.”

Haniel, in his placid, expressionless way, like a tree’s branches flexing in slow wind, opened a hand out to them to see the imprint of the key’s handle scarred there on his palm. “I don’t believe it to be Heavenly.”

“Ah, no, rather,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley took the key before Aziraphale could – he’d already handled the key from the other door, and while he didn’t think it would burn all angels and so burn Aziraphale (he thinks the keys are meant only for the two of them, he just doesn’t want to test the theory on Aziraphale’s soft unmarked palm). “Funny story, same thing happened in our holiday cottage, ever such a surprise, woke up to a brand new door. The funny – funny, funny thing is – I’m sorry, what – what are the customers making of it? Big glowing door in the middle of the shop?”

Crowley prowled around the door’s rear and laughed to himself, low in his throat. “I know exactly what the humans make of it angel, they make content for the ’gram.”

“They keep taking photographs of it,” Penemuel said, as Aziraphale looked narrow-eyed at Crowley, trying to construct a sentence that made sense to him out of the melange of Crowley’s words. “They think it is ‘super Harry Potter’ and ‘awesome’. Sometimes they bring their friends and we have to start with the odours and menacing lighting until they leave. Also Haniel keeps trying to give them leaflets, that tends to hurry them out.”

Haniel solemnly handed a leaflet to Crowley and said, “The number of wild birds in Britain has declined by seventy-three million since 1970. Hold the capitalist agricultural industrial complex to account. Eat the rich.”

“What is the funny thing, then?” Penemuel said. “About the door?”

“Oh, that, yes, it leads to Eden.”

Penemuel blinked, possibly the first time Crowley had ever seen her look surprised. Even Haniel’s expressionless face took on a different sort of openness, awe behind the wide blank of his eyes. “Eden,” Haniel said.

“The funny thing,” Aziraphale said, “is that the Almighty has designated it as a Third Place for human souls, somewhere between Heaven and Hell, and left us to sort out who should go there from now on. Imagine our surprise! We will require your assistance,” added in a slightly hurried hopeful way, as if getting it out of the way quickly would guarantee agreement. “Need to get the word out to everyone else of course, going to be jolly busy for a while, think of all those souls stuck in the wrong place, really need to get a wiggle on –”

“Eden,” Penemuel said. “Eden is behind that door?” She looked at Crowley, her face blank, all her smirking self-possession gone. She looked at the door, looked at Crowley, took a tight breath through her nose, said, “I’ve never seen it.”

“I remember the plans,” Haniel said, looking lovingly, longingly at the door, and his voice took on a different tone, a yearning edge. “Paradise.”

It occurred to Crowley then that he was one of the very few beings and the only demon who ever had set foot in Eden, and not once but twice; certainly he was the only demon who had ever spent the night there, underneath the stars and the wing of an angel. And he looked at Aziraphale, who only looked surprised himself, so he cleared his throat and said, “Welll,” like it was no big deal, unlocking the door. “Yeah, She did a – a pretty good job on the place, yeah.”

The light poured into the bookshop as cleansing as the promise of water, and the soft old papery scent of the books blended like perfume with the dew-fresh glowing green of Eden.

Crowley always has been one for temptations.

That was two days ago, and they’ve been busy since then, contacting the renegade angels and demons they’ve scattered across the Earth, summoning them to work. Crowley had – it had niggled in his mind, that some might say no, that many might say no, that they might want nothing to do with the whole fucking business of the Almighty and Her ineffable plans now they were well out of that, but so far not any of them have. Surprise gave way to thought, and then that prickle of determination that Crowley feels as well, to fuck Heaven, fuck Hell, fuck all of that bullshit childish hypocritical binary, let’s have a Third Place, let’s make it complicated.

Let’s save those souls we might ourselves have got condemned. Let’s snatch them out from under the noses of the superiors we always hated. Let’s rescue them before they get there. Let’s for once in the history of this entire fucking reality make things fair.

And now here they are in Brighton, Crowley walking with Aziraphale’s arm through his, because nothing in this world is truly fair, and they’re just trying to make and mend and cope as best they can.

All those months of Aziraphale approaching his back as Gabriel stared at the sea and it’s the first time, the only time, that he’s done it holding Crowley’s arm, because Crowley could never bring himself to walk up to Gabriel without a weapon in his hand before. Now he saunters empty-handed towards Gabriel and the sea with Aziraphale’s arms tucked neat around his left arm, and he wonders – Heaven, he knows, he should have let Aziraphale have this sooner. He should never have let his own hatred of Gabriel put a wedge between the two of them. Neither of them have got what they wanted, when it came to Gabriel, Crowley could at least have let Aziraphale have some of what he wanted, a bit more of what he wanted, after . . .

Well. Nobody here got what they wanted, did they?

Gabriel is sitting, which is new, on a little stool, wearing – oh holy fuck – wearing a big blousy painter’s smock, with a floppy beret on, in front of an easel propped against the railings, because when angels decide to play at anything they really ham it up. Crowley doesn’t even need to be very close to see the content of the easel which is – execrable, the sea as executed by a three-year-old, a blobby mess of shitty clouds over nauseatingly crappy waves. Part of Crowley is grudgingly impressed; Gabriel really is demonic, much more than Crowley’s ever managed to be.

They stop, almost, almost close. “Hello, Gabriel,” Aziraphale says, and removes one of his arms from Crowley’s to pat at his pockets. “Got a humbug in here somewhere, would you like one?”

Aziraphale offers food the way that others might raise a white flag; Crowley has long known that the angel’s love language is food, it’s why Crowley knows that he can always get himself out of the doghouse with cake. Gabriel just looks hard and even at his own shit painting before saying, “It’s much more difficult than it looks, you know.” He lifts his paintbrush and indicates the horizon, the canvas, the horizon again. “Recreating the visual appearance of matter through the medium of paint. I’m ascertaining how the humans do it, they seem to have developed some trick to it.”

“Mm,” Aziraphale says, smiling politely, and what Crowley is thinking about is Aziraphale’s commonplace book – or books, really, he’s been keeping it since the Renaissance and has shelves and shelves of volumes in his office. When Aziraphale is being especially boring in the shop (usually accounts are involved) Crowley will slink into the office to browse them sometimes, having never been explicitly told not to which is the same as an invitation to a demon. Volumes and volumes of perfectly-neatly transcribed quotations and lists and N.B.s Aziraphale has written to himself, interspersed with exquisite little sketches of interesting fossils or flowers, or the changing street outside his bookshop in Soho, or the way the sun comes through the window and glances across the edges of books as if their paper is made of light -

And Crowley. In fact, a great deal of Crowley. Crowley may indeed be the single most-sketched object in all of Aziraphale’s notebooks, in fashions Crowley had forgotten ever wearing, wearing expressions he’d never even noticed himself wearing, Crowley’s face from every angle captured so perfectly in pencil that the images look like love, nothing else could explain how beautiful they are, Crowley has never thought of himself as looking like that. Which had shocked Crowley to the stomach the first time he’d seen them – it felt far too vulnerable, too exposed, to be seen by his angel, especially in the moments when he wasn’t aware of what he looked like himself – but he hadn’t even noticed himself assuming that it was just an angel thing, how perfect every drawing was. Crowley thought it was just a thing that angels do, the same way that if Aziraphale sits beside a rose bush for long enough then all the flowers will open their dreamy heads to gaze upon him. Not something Aziraphale planned for or worked at the way Crowley has to fucking work for everything, just something that happens for angels as easy as sunrise.

Now he looks at the former Archangel Gabriel’s painting that not even a parent could put on a fridge and looks at Aziraphale’s polite, slightly strained smile, and surreptitiously tucks his clever, perfect angel’s arm a little bit closer. Aziraphale opens his mouth again, hesitates, says, “Where – is Asmodeus, now?”

Gabriel splots some more blobs of white onto the waves on his canvas, narrowing his eyes and pulling his head back as if trying to see something else in the mess. “Underneath,” he says, and gestures at the sea with the brush. “They discovered that they prefer looking upwards at the waves, there are fewer interruptions. But I like the horizon.” He looks up, a long gaze at the long horizon, that stretch of light where air and water meet as cleanly as the pages of a book. “Yes. I like the horizon.”

“Splendid,” Aziraphale says, and swallows, and swallows again, and swallows again, and Crowley lifts a hand and squeezes his arm. Aziraphale swallows, again, and says a little unevenly, “Look, Gabriel–”

“I’ve been thinking,” Gabriel says, brush smearing with far too much force across the paper a weird shape like an unfolded paperclip in the sky; gull, Crowley thinks, he remembers Warlock’s sloppy art offerings as a toddler, the kid was fucking Caravaggio in comparison. “About some of my – actions. Before I left Heaven.”

Aziraphale says nothing. Crowley keeps that hand on his arm, sees in Aziraphale’s face that he’s retreated inside himself like an anemone into its parapet, retracted himself in on the inside into something as small as the head of a pin, while Gabriel does something unpredictable and he isn’t safe. So it’s Crowley who says, soft as a growl, “Oh?” with one hand on Aziraphale’s arm and his eye on the demon Gabriel, prepared to do whatever makes Aziraphale safe, whatever it may be. Gabriel talking about his ‘actions’ before he left Heaven has never done anything but hurt Aziraphale more, and if he tries it this time, he’s done. He’s never even seeing the door into Eden, he’s certainly never taking refuge there. If Gabriel wounds Aziraphale even one more time, he can take his chances with Heaven and Hell, and all Crowley will do is greedily watch.

Gabriel looks at the sea, hard and hard-jawed, and Aziraphale grips Crowley’s arm and doesn’t say anything, as the wind shifts his coat, Gabriel’s smock. Gabriel’s jaw flexes, and he says, “It doesn’t seem plausible to me, given our current circumstances, that some of the decisions I made were – correct.”

Crowley watches Aziraphale, not Gabriel; the angel’s eyes are wary, very wary on Gabriel’s back, but they’re not . . . Crowley doesn’t even understand the expression he’s wearing, why does he look sad? “Our circumstances,” Aziraphale says, carefully, only a little faintly.

Gabriel stares at the sea, and something moves in his eyes like a dark low current, and he swallows hard. “That I am a demon with broken wings,” he says, “and you are –” He stops, and looks around at Aziraphale who doesn’t flinch, Crowley feels him not flinching. “You,” Gabriel says, it sounds like a shrug. “It no longer makes sense to me. All I can conclude is that the decisions that I made were not correct. They were not what She intended.” Gabriel’s jaw works silently, and Aziraphale’s hands are tighter than he’s probably aware of on Crowley’s arm, and Crowley is a single fragment of a second from snapping giant snake-teeth into Gabriel’s head if he does the wrong thing now. “I regret them,” Gabriel says. “My actions. I regret my actions.”

Aziraphale stares at him. Crowley is struggling to keep the hiss out of his voice; “Is this how the Archangel Gabriel says he’s sorry?”

Gabriel looks at Crowley, brow lowering. “Sorry,” he says, as if confused by the word, not as if he’s using it. He ponders it, skin folded between the eyebrows, then looks at Aziraphale again and says, “Is that how it works, the mortal mindset? Is it different to regret?”

What the fuck would they know about a mortal mindset, Crowley wants to snap, but in the same second looking at Aziraphale looking at Gabriel he knows with a lurch of the guts that Aziraphale knows everything about being mortal. All this time he’s spent trying to come to terms with it, not just the nearness of his own destruction but the form of it, to be made wounded and wretched and weak, to have to die the messy drawn-out way humans die and then have to live with not dying, with something like mortality in the back of his mind always – all those books Aziraphale has read, all those thousands of years pottering about amongst the humans, and only after Gabriel got his hands on him did he understand the horrible vulnerability of what mortality means.

Is it different to regret? Of course it’s fucking different to regret –

What makes Crowley feel hollow, empty and desolate on the inside, an arctic desert in his guts just in anticipation of it, is that this is when Aziraphale is going to forgive Gabriel, and Gabriel doesn’t even fucking deserve it.

Aziraphale blinks a bit, resettles his grip of Crowley’s arm, fingers no longer digging in like claws on the edge of a cliff. He lowers his head a little, raises it again, lowers it again. He almost looks like he’s going to speak. Finally he draws a breath in through his nose and gives a thin empty smile to Gabriel and says, “Yes. It is different to regret.”

The everything it would mean if Gabriel could actually be sorry for what he did to Aziraphale, instead of just regretting ‘what he did’. But Aziraphale presses on, smoothly and quickly before everyone can get stuck on the ‘sorry’ that isn’t coming, saying, “I take it there would be no – repeat, then. Even were your wings unclipped, you have no further desire to . . . to hurt the rest of us.”

Gabriel’s eyes come alert a different way. “Will my wings be unclipped?”

“No.” Crowley says, flatly, because they won’t.

“Not up to us, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale says, almost sounding almost-rueful.

Gabriel takes this in, and then nods. “No,” he says. “I don’t want to wage any more war on you, or the other renegades, or Heaven, or Hell. The outcome strongly suggests that it is not part of Her Plan.”

“Funny you should mention the Plan,” Aziraphale says, wearing a smile that doesn’t mean a smile, “just had ever such an interesting revelation about part of it, came here to talk to you about it actually –”

No, Crowley thinks.

No, he wants to howl and sulk and sob, no, because he’s not sorry, because it’s not enough, because what does it matter if he won’t do it again, he still did it. Why should we care if he’s ‘safe’ now, he doesn’t even understand what he did, why don’t we throw him into Hell for the fate he deserves, why don’t we leave him to suffocate on his aloneness while we get on with what really matters, why doesn’t he have to suffer after what he did to you and you don’t even forgive him, Crowley knows Aziraphale, he knows him, Aziraphale forgives as easily as a hiccup but he doesn’t forgive him so why the fuck –

He watches Gabriel’s face as he learns that God has given Eden to Crowley and Aziraphale as a Third Place, watches Gabriel’s face as he understands that God has confirmed what the two of them always knew, watches his face as finally and truly he sees in the way Gabriel’s eyes and face go slack that he knows he did the wrong fucking thing, the word of God is the ultimate confirmation for a mind like Gabriel’s, Gabriel now knows like he knows his feet on the pavement and the brush in his hand that he did the definitive wrong thing. If that is what they’re calling him dismembering Aziraphale and leaving him to die. Crowley looks at his face feeling greedy for the realisation he sees there but it’s still not enough, he knows it’s not enough. He knows, then, that nothing ever would be enough. Fuck, what would ‘sorry’ even mean in the face of what Gabriel did? If a thing is unforgiveable, what’s the fucking point of forgiving it? It can never be undone, you can step back into Eden but never into innocence. What would it matter if Aziraphale forgave Gabriel? Crowley never will.

“-–so we need a little hand with the paperwork, you see, and staffing issues of course, goodness there are an awful lot of angels and demons to get organised, we thought of a rota system, seemed the best method to balance rigour and kindness, a team of an angel and demon to review each soul, to balance each other out a bit –”

Because you need an angel and a demon, Crowley thinks, watching Aziraphale explain it to the Fallen Archangel Gabriel and knowing this; you need to balance whatever horrendous shit a human did in their life with a sense of sympathy that it’s so fucking easy to do horrendous shit when life is on top of you like a rock, you need the capacity for forgiveness and the clear-eyed recognition of what was actually done, you need someone, always, to speak for both sides, someone who can say they hurt other souls and their soul hurts, and weigh it out together.

And in the end someone has to make the ultimate decision and that’s going to be their work, Crowley and Aziraphale, forever now, and the two of them are trying to face it as if they’re not wary of getting into flaming rows on an hourly basis for the rest of eternity. They’re coming to a new Arrangement, now. They need the time to do this seriously, to write down rules, weeelll, to write down guidelines, to come to their compromises; they really don’t have the fucking time to organise the staff, to get the paperwork filed, to do the administrative drudgery that beings like Gabriel live for.

The rule they came up with that they never would have come up with if it weren’t for Gabriel, talking it out in Crowley’s flat as they came to this new understanding between themselves, the things you learn only through the loss of innocence: Nobody goes to Eden if the souls they hurt in damning themselves don’t want them there. Nobody should be relieved to find themselves in Eden and be innocently chilling surrounded by flowers and fruit and then suddenly come face-to-face with the human who abused them in life, Crowley doesn’t want any innocent mortal Aziraphale going about its business in Eden without warning faced with its Gabriel. And that’s what’s going to eat so much of their time. Interviewing souls who enter Eden about whether they’re okay with the ones who hurt them, maybe killed them, getting into Eden too, and ascertaining whether it’s grace or guilt saying yes for them, and whether it’s trauma or cruelty saying no, and weighing up what all of it means while souls still being tortured hang in the balance. And they are also having a fucking life on the side of it all, so yeah, staffing rotas they definitely do not have the fucking time for.

That’s all you’re good for, oh great and mighty Archangel Gabriel, Crowley thinks, glaring over his sunglasses at Gabriel looking weirdly small and isolated on his stool, listening to the angel he ripped the wings out of tell him how they’re going to do the work of God. You’re here for the spreadsheets. Welcome to the ranks of the lowly, welcome to not getting to decide and doing what you are told.

And then he hears himself and feels queasy, he really fucking does not like what Gabriel does to him. And Aziraphale. Of course he doesn’t want Gabriel doing a fucking thing to Aziraphale for as long as he lives, but what he turns Crowley into, does he think that Crowley wants to have all this hate in him . . . ?

Weird to see Gabriel humble, as Aziraphale makes their polite goodbyes and offers a humbug again and another polite goodbye and it always takes fucking forever for them to make their exits when weighed down by all of Aziraphale’s manners. Gabriel’s silence is humility born of sheer shock, Crowley knows, and he doesn’t know how Gabriel is going to feel when it’s actually sunk in and he has the chance to think about it. Crowley’s just glad to get Aziraphale back in the car – he only realises with his hands on the wheel that they’re shaking, how did he not notice himself shaking? He was so focused on Aziraphale, on his sense of the threat to Aziraphale so close to Gabriel, he didn’t even notice –

Aziraphale does, leaning across to put a small gentle hand over Crowley’s on the wheel, watching his face nervous and then offering a smile, a little squeeze of the hand. “Thank you,” he says, watching Crowley’s eyes, the glasses never hide them enough when Aziraphale is this close. “I know you hate dealing with him. Thank you, Crowley.”

And Crowley knows him but he’ll never understand him, says, “You don’t even forgive him.”

Silence, and then Aziraphale takes his hand back. “No,” he says, clasping his hands together in his lap. “Not today, at least.”

“Then why – why –”

Aziraphale thinks about that for a long time, staring at the dashboard; staring at the glove compartment, Crowley realises, and his stomach does a grim loop-de-loop. Eventually the angel says, “It’s rather more complicated than . . .” and trails off, and stares at the glove compartment. He worries his hands together a bit. Then he looks at Crowley, and smiles very tired, and says, “‘Forgiveness’ makes it sound so very clean. I don’t think, the Third Place, I don’t think we can pretend that kind of nice neat binary there, we’re not Heaven and Hell, it’s not that easy. And I don’t need to forgive him to want to be more than just hating him. It isn’t really about him, my dear, you know . . . you know that.”

“I want –” Crowley snarls, and stops, and grinds his too-blunt teeth on what he wants. He tries not to let himself want anything, when it comes to Gabriel, but what is best for Aziraphale. He knows how fucking selfish he is, he’s a demon, what Crowley wants dictates what Crowley does but not here, not in this, not for him. But he wants – what the fuck does he even want –

Aziraphale watches his face, and waits. And Crowley’s teeth are not sharp enough, contain none of the venom they should, he should be a spine made for striking and fangs full of death in front of Gabriel, he should – he should – everything should –

His hands flex tight on the wheel, and he growls out low and so painful with all the hatred in it, “I know this isn’t – I know what I’m saying, I’m a demon, you knew that, I’m a demon. Nothing about this –” His voice is like bits of broken glass, his throat feels flayed. “I had to carry you bleeding like a butchered animal because that thing – and I never get to kill him for it, I never get – I never get –”

Aziraphale takes his arms in a way that startles Crowley into stillness, and with a strength nobody would expect in looking at him, pulls Crowley’s upper body across the seats to himself, and tucks his cheek to his own chest, and strokes Crowley’s hair, as tender as if he’s cupping the head of a newborn lamb and not a demon so seething on his own hatred that he could choke on it like bile. “I know,” he says, so gentle, and he does, Crowley knows, he knows Aziraphale knows him. “I know, Crowley, my love. It’s alright, darling. It’s alright.”

Crowley grips his arms mostly in confusion and when the pain comes – it shocks him how sudden and hard it comes, held in Aziraphale’s arms, the tears feel like they slit his eyeballs, his throat is a lead pipe –

“I know, my darling Crowley, my sweet darling Crowley,” Aziraphale says, hands cupping his head close so Crowley can feel Aziraphale’s heart beating against his own cheekbone. “I know. I know it’s not fair. I know.”

He doesn’t cry. It hurts worse to hold it in but the pain grounds him in all the hate, all that rage had him unmoored. “I want to kill him,” Crowley snarls into his waistcoat and he wishes it sounded harder, sounded less like a sob.

“I know, my poor Crowley, I know,” the angel hums, his voice a deep resonant buzz to Crowley’s skull. “My poor Crowley. We don’t always get what we want. Nobody gets everything that they want.” Aziraphale’s hands stroke his hair, he lifts one of Crowley’s rage-rigid hands and kisses it gently. “It’s probably for the best, isn’t it, my dear, hm? Where would we really be if we got everything we wanted?”

Crowley breathes, and breathes, crammed to the hard steady-breathing pillow of Aziraphale’s chest.

“We’re going to be alright,” Aziraphale says, stroking his hair and breathing, easy and regular, against Crowley’s ear. “We’re going to be alright, my love.” Crowley wraps an arm around Aziraphale’s midriff, doesn’t care how awkwardly leaned across the Bentley he is like this, he never wants to leave. “We’re going to be alright, Crowley, we’ll be just fine, my dear, won’t we?”

Crowley stares at the Bentley’s window over Aziraphale’s chest and his heart beats, beats, crammed tight to his cheek, his light in the dark, his only pole star. Neither of them got what they wanted. Nobody gets everything they wanted. Want is too simple. The world is too complicated. How simple the world would be if Crowley got everything he immediately wanted; how brutal the world would be, if Crowley got everything he wanted.

“I want to kill him,” he says, arm of his sunglasses digging into his cheek against Aziraphale’s chest, eyes unseeing on the window. “I’ll always want to kill him.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, hand stroking over his hair, a gentle affirmation of Crowley’s feelings, not his lie. He does want to kill him. He doesn’t, in his better moods; but he does, both, always, all the time. “Yes, my dear. It’s alright. We’re alright. We’re alright, Crowley.”

His heart is still beating, so steady and steadfast. “Go on,” he says through his teeth, fingers wrapping close around Aziraphale’s wrist.

“Of course we’re alright,” the angel murmurs, the backs of his fingers playing soft over Crowley’s hair. “Of course we’re alright, my darling. We’re alright. You’re alright, Crowley. You’re alright, my love.”

They’re very busy people, now. But when you have eternity, you have the time for this; for Aziraphale’s heartbeat, and his gentle promise, repeated like his breath, that what they have is enough, that what they are is enough, that this, the way they hold each other now, this is enough, this is enough, this is worth everything, this is enough.

They have all of eternity, and love will be enough.

*

It is a frost-sharp winter evening outside the cottage where Crowley has got Aziraphale deliciously tightly-wrapped in all four limbs in the bed, breath beginning that slowing into sibilance of his slide towards sleep. The angel turns the page, quite content underneath the quilt with a demon’s arms and legs like wire around him but a good two-thirds of the book and half a cup of cocoa on the bedside table left, and so no reason to wish to be anywhere else anyway. Nowhere is better than here. And he says that with the door to Eden at the foot of the bed, but he knows it’s true; Eden is the nicest afterwards that anybody could wish for, but here is the before, this life on this world and Aziraphale gets to spend it with Crowley rubbing his cheek to a comfortable spot on his chest, and nothing could ever be better than this. Here he is perfectly happy.

Crowley makes a slow satisfied humming noise, and Aziraphale absently puts his fingers into his hair, scratches a little at his scalp, eyes on the page. Crowley gives a long stretching squirm of pleasure and nuzzles closer again, and Aziraphale does wonder sometimes what anybody outside of this bedroom would make of it – Hell so collectively terrified of Crowley that its bowels turn to water at the sound of his name, humans fearing even the idea of a demon and then Crowley, clingy as an old dog, rubbing his nose against Aziraphale’s shoulder as he settles himself more comfortable there.

“You are a soppy old thing,” Aziraphale murmurs warm with fondness, eyes still on the page. Crowley just makes another low satisfied why-should-I-care noise, smug almost, cheek pressing settled to his shoulder now, sighing the relaxation through every single muscle in preparation of the release into sleep.

There is a knock at the door. Not the bedroom door; the soft nighttime starlight around the door into Eden stutters softly, as some figure shifts uneasily behind it.

Aziraphale immediately looks up and Crowley’s arms get tight on him again, the demon groans, “Oh no no no angel leave them to it they can manage one miserable night on their own, one night –”

Aziraphale is already folding his spectacles for the bedside table and slipping the bookmark into the book. “I’d just better go see if it’s urgent,” he says. “Crowley, do let go for just a moment, there’s a dear –”

“No they have to learn and I just got comfortable –”

“Crowley you are being really very difficult, let me –”

A squirming wriggling fight to get out of Crowley’s grip and jerk his pyjama shirt right again with a glare down at the demon, who moans and writhes on the pillow, screwing his eyes more tightly closed and pulling the covers over his head. “You always choose them over me,” he says from underneath the quilt and Aziraphale ties the belt of his dressing gown with his eyes on the ceiling, Lord give me strength, and Crowley snaps from under the covers, “Don’t roll your eyes at me.”

“I wasn’t rolling my eyes,” Aziraphale says, which is about fifty percent true which is enough. “You just wait there for just a moment, there’s a good chap, won’t take a minute –”

“Wouldn’t take them a minute to just use their initiative for once this eternity,” Crowley snarls, and Aziraphale ignores him, and unlocks the door, and dusk sighs out of Eden and into the room like the soft sweet breath of the moon.

It’s Elyon, an angel, looking flustered to be interrupting them. “Oh hello, good evening,” Aziraphale says, and smiles. “What seems to be the trouble?”

Elyon’s head bobs apologetically, he looks at the papers he’s got in his hand, looks at Aziraphale again, looks at the papers. “Thank you, sorry, I just – I’m working on this case with Iuvart and – how much genocide is too much genocide?”

Aziraphale continues staring at him with the smile unmoving on his face and says, “What?”

“Genocide,” Elyon says. “How much is too much? Because Iuvart says if it’s only a little bit of genocide –”

“Oh no,” Aziraphale says, and can tell that Crowley is snickering underneath the quilt and can feel his own face getting warm, “oh no, I’m afraid that really any genocide at all is entirely too, too much, um, there can’t be any genocide, really there can’t, goodness no.”

“Oh. Not even if it’s just a little bit, because Iuvart said–”

“I believe Iurvart may have been – having a bit of jape, just a little bit, um.”

“Oh.” Elyon looks down at his papers again, and his wings shuffle uneasily, and he nods to Aziraphale with a flicker of his glance at the bed behind him, where Crowley is giggling into his own arm and the covers keep jogging. “Thank you. I’ll go tell – thank you.”

He keeps doing that strange nodding like he wants to bow, as Aziraphale closes and locks the door; they are all of them still working out how to behave with this new Arrangement, even if the demons seem to have largely decided to behave as they ever have. Aziraphale ignores Crowley laughing underneath the covers as he removes and rehangs his dressing gown, but can’t really ignore him when he lifts the quilt to climb underneath and Crowley rolls onto his back, cackling at the ceiling, “Just a little, just a teensy bit of genocide, angel –”

“Oh stop it, you’re as bad as each other,” Aziraphale says, flumping the duvet down on top of Crowley’s head again and picking up his book. “Honestly, the way the demons needle the angels, honestly –”

Crowley comes climbing up the covers so his head emerges, his smirking head, Aziraphale affects not to notice. “Well if they really can’t learn that a little bit of genocide isn’t enough –”

Aziraphale draws his breath in slow through his nose for patience and then lets it sigh out, and feels really exhausted, then. “Can you imagine,” he says, just holding his book, not opening it yet. “Can you imagine all the interviews we’d have to do to let someone like that into Eden – every single soul who would have to forgive them –”

“Yeahh, they’re low on the to-do list.” Crowley kisses Aziraphale’s shoulder as if he’s not really thinking about it, already snaking his arms and legs around the angel again. “Best start with the low-hanging fruit. You know, the ones who didn’t commit genocide.”

Aziraphale stares into space holding his book, then does look down at Crowley, and says, “You are awful.”

“You love me.” Crowley says dismissively. “Are you even reading that? Don’t have to read that.” He yawns in a dramatic way, puts his cheek to Aziraphale’s shoulder and looks up like a puppy with golden, slit-pupilled eyes. “Just for one night,” he says, as if it doesn’t really matter, and Aziraphale looks at him and it matters more than anything in the world.

“Maybe not tonight,” he says, as if it doesn’t matter, putting the book back on the bedside table, shuffling himself down the mattress to lay down. “But you’re getting up if they knock in the night.”

“Is that really what you want, angel?” Crowley says, snapping his fingers so the lamps go out and all the light there is is a softer sort of darkness coming from behind the curtains, and that silvery low glow around the doorway into Eden.

Aziraphale contemplates a grumpily-woken Crowley answering the door to an angel almost persuaded that there’s nothing really wrong with serial killing if they give to charity as well, and sighs through his nose, he knows he’s the one getting up in the night. “Go to sleep,” he mutters, “you slithery old snake.”

He does slither, slithers his arms in underneath Aziraphale’s and around his chest, his legs around his, very effectively pinning his prey to the mattress and then seeking with his cheek the very perfect place he wishes to lay it on Aziraphale’s breastbone. “Mmmm,” Crowley hums, very pleased with the world right now. “Nighty night, angel.”

Aziraphale tuts his tongue, just gentle with disapproval of knowing himself very slithered around indeed tonight, and settles an arm around Crowley’s back, a hand in Crowley’s hair, blinks up at the ceiling in the dark. He doesn’t sleep so much, not unless tempted into it really, and there have been nights where it would be easy in the dark without a book to distract for his mind to sink – some nights it’s like being knee-deep in quicksand, the struggle not to sink – there really are some depths, some suffocating, crushing places he could sink –

But it’s only could; he doesn’t have to. His fingers sink in Crowley’s soft hair, his cheek tips down into the scent of it, his eyes are blinking closed. There is always ‘could’. But if it’s always there then there’s no pressing need for it; he leaves the horror in the box, shuffles to turn his shoulder in the mattress a little more into Crowley’s side, settling his nose down safe in his hair, closing his eyes. Humans think of Heaven as bliss always and Aziraphale thinks vaguely, Oh you silly things, as if Heaven could be as good as this, breathing slow into Crowley’s hair. Even Eden isn’t this. We had to lose Eden to get to this, and goodness, wasn’t that bargain worth it.

When you have eternity, you really do have enough time for all of it, and this, here, holding his demon now in the dark, this is why you do any of the rest of it. If this didn’t matter then nothing would. But they have this, this and everything else, even the horror of it all sometimes, they have all of eternity, all of everything to get through. There is no need for horror tonight.

In the dark of the room they sleep so close that there is no space for dark between them.

Comments

glorious

[alumiere]

i really enjoy your tale here, i had a huge grin especially when the third place is eden you two figure it out happens. thank you for writing this and all your fics!

p.s. it took me ages to figure out my account here again, now to make dw send me messages when you update