A/N: Whoops, I slipped and a fic fell out. I wrote this in a completely different way than I've ever written anything before, and I'm sure it's painfully obvious which bits I wrote at 2am and which bits I wrote ten minutes ago, but I hope you like it.
Rome, 45AD
He needed a drink.
Humans had invented alcohol relatively quickly; Crowley had considered taking credit for it at first, before he'd seen how messy the results could be. It had gone downhill lately, though, he thought morosely, staring into the cup of house brown the bartender had given him. He missed wine, but certain events in the last decade had made the whole thing a little… icky.
Christianity, as they were calling it now, had been an unfortunate hit in Rome. He wondered sometimes whether the carpenter he had travelled with would have approved of the way it had turned out. But it wasn't his job to wonder things like that. It was his own fault for getting attached.
"Crawley? C-Crowley?"
He blinked at the familiar voice and looked up to see the Angel of the Eastern Gate smiling - smiling - at him, like he was pleased to see him. It must have been an exceedingly lonely eight years for him, too. "Well," the angel said happily. "Fancy seeing you here."
Crowley really wasn't in the mood. The angel, however, was not to be deterred; he hovered awkwardly at Crowley's elbow, wringing his hands. "Still a demon, then?"
He snapped. "What sort of a question is that, still a demon?" he threw at him. "What else am I going to be, an aardvark?" It wasn't as though he hadn't tried to be something else. The Fall had been both the most spur-of-the-moment and the most permanent decision he had ever made.
Still the angel smiled, chuckling nervously as though Crowley had made a joke. He lifted his own glass of house brown. "Well, salutaria," he greeted cheerfully. Crowley heaved a great internal sigh, and tapped their cups together resignedly. Clearly the angel had no intention of leaving him alone; "In Rome long?" he asked instead, perching himself on the barstool beside him.
"Just nipped in for a quick temptation," Crowley said noncommittally. And that hadn't exactly gone his way either, he thought darkly. "You?"
"I thought I might try Petronius' new restaurant," the angel said, sounding indecently excited at the prospect. "I hear he does remarkable things with oysters."
Crowley raised an intrigued eyebrow. He didn't think angels were supposed to sully their bodies with earthly sustenance, or whatever the decree had been. But then, Aziraphale had always been a different sort of angel. It was the only reason he'd tolerated him so far. "I've never eaten an oyster," he said idly, taking a sip from his cup and grimacing at the taste.
"Oh," the Angel of the Eastern Gate said in apparent delight. "Oh, well, let me tempt you to…"
Crowley looked up at that, his other eyebrow arching up to join the first. Let me tempt you. He would have put decent sestertius on all of eternity passing without him hearing those words from an angel's lips. "No," the blond corrected himself, brushing the front of his toga self-consciously. "That's your job, isn't it?"
He chuckled a little at his own mistake. Crowley smiled a serpentine smile, feeling his eight-year bad mood start to lift a little. "Temptation accomplished, angel," he said lowly, not even trying to keep the faint hiss out of his voice. Aziraphale knew what he was, after all.
Oysters, it turned out, were not particularly to Crowley's taste, but there was also wine, and somehow in the company of the angel tipping the morsels down his pale throat with some positively sinful noises Crowley drank it without the Blood of Christ entering his mind.
"…it is interesting, how it's evolved, and obviously as long as it's used as punishment there's no real objection from upstairs, but I can't watch it myself." Crowley dragged his eyes away from the angel's throat to listen to his discussion of the Circus Maximus, his hands waving oyster shells animatedly as he spoke. "Especially when they started to involve the animals."
Crowley took another deep swallow of his wine and hummed agreeably. It had been partially his idea to introduce lions to the Circus, but he wasn't about to admit that now. Humans didn't need his help to find new and entertaining ways of killing each other, but it kept him occupied.
"I quite enjoy the Circus," he argued easily. "And I've found that once your side has condemned someone, they don't tend to pay too much attention to what happens to them next."
The Principality frowned too deeply, like he had understood explicitly that Crowley hadn't been talking about the Circus. The stare made him uncomfortable, so he picked up another oyster and busied himself trying to pry it open.
Aziraphale reached out after a moment and took his hand; Crowley stiffened suddenly, feeling the contact like static electricity against his skin. "Let me," the angel said softly, guiding his hands to open the shell.
Crowley stared at him, perfectly focused on the shellfish in their hands as though none of this was odd, as though angels and demons shared lunch all the time. The oyster popped open in their hands and Aziraphale cleared his throat gently. "Are you all right, Crowley?" he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
He blinked, trying to clear his head. "Fine," he dismissed, tipping the oyster into his mouth and swallowing without tasting it.
For a moment he thought the angel would press the issue, but he reached for the wine jug instead. "Were you here for the imperial wedding, then?" he asked. "I hear it was magnificent."
They stumbled out of the restaurant when the sun started to set, both starting to feel the effects of the wine. Crowley's head was spinning quite pleasantly and the angel was starting to lose the ability to form sentences. "Well," Aziraphale said primly, swinging his arms in the doorway. "That was most dis- diff- diverting."
Crowley smiled lazily. "If past experience is anything to go by, then I suppose we'll see each other again soon, angel," he drawled.
The Angel of the Eastern Gate smiled at him. "I look forward to it," he said earnestly.
And as he walked away, something fluttered in his stomach; a sort of twisting, sinking feeling that almost felt like he was starting to Fall all over again.
Soho, 1967
"You go too fast for me, Crowley."
He must have meant the car. He didn't dare look up; he could feel the tension filling the car like smoke, suffocating him. Crowley gripped the steering wheel so hard he could feel his knuckles crack, the little picnic flask clasped carefully in his other hand. Then, when he felt he could trust his own face, he looked over at Aziraphale and he knew he hadn't been talking about the Bentley.
He'd never seen a look like that on anyone before, not directed at him. The angel looked so vulnerable, so deeply laid bare that it took his breath away quite suddenly, replaced it with a scratch like steel wool shooting from his throat to the pit of his stomach. "Angel," he tried to say, but the word got stuck in his throat and Aziraphale was already gone, shuffling off into the Soho drizzle, unfurling a great tartan umbrella to hide his face from the car. Crowley would have given anything to see its expression.
He banged his head down onto the wheel in front of him, earning an alarmed peep from the horn that unsurprisingly didn't make the blond look back. He had long since given up trying to fight the way the Angel of the Eastern Gate made him feel.
Crowley had never been a good angel, and he was possibly a worse demon. He had sauntered vaguely down from a dull life in search of entertainment, and found instead nothing but pain and drudgery and the unbearable itch where the love of the Almighty had used to be. When he was stood on the walls of Eden, watching the first humans walk into the wilderness, wondering if he would be applauded or punished, it was suddenly and startlingly obvious that there was no guidebook for devilry.
And Aziraphale had been there, just as lost and insecure, and for the first time in all time Crowley had felt just a little bit less alone. One meal together in Ancient Rome and he had practically fallen over himself to see him again, and again and again until the twisting, sinking vertigo in his stomach threatened to consume him with each flash of the shy smile. The Principality never seemed to make an effort to hide his emotions, and each new one throughout the centuries only made things worse.
You go too fast for me, Crowley. The words echoed through the empty car for just long enough for the initial frustration to fade and their true implication to sink in. When the demon lifted his head, the key turning in the Bentley's ignition of its own accord, the tiniest of smiles was evident on his face.
They meant that it wasn't the journey or even the destination that the angel objected to, merely the speed they were travelling.
That was something he could understand. Something that came with knowing someone for six millennia was having a pretty good idea of where their limits were, and he'd always been careful not to push the angel more than he could handle. He knew this was harder on him: it was an acceptable thing for a demon to feel, really. If Crowley saw something he felt he wanted, he did something about it. Angels, on the other hand, were famously stiff-lipped about that sort of thing. It was natural that it would take his... friend a little longer to get to a point where they could talk about this. While Crowley hadn't thought it was possible to go any slower than he had been, he was willing to try. He had all eternity, after all, and he had a sneaky suspicion Aziraphale was worth it.
Except, quite suddenly, eternity became distressingly finite. Quite suddenly, before he'd even seen the angel again, he was being handed a Thing in a basket and Armageddon was, quite suddenly, marching resolutely forwards.
Tadfield, 2019
However he had pictured his last day on Earth, it was never like this.
On occasion he'd pictured going out in a blaze of glory, giving all of London winning lottery numbers or sunny weekends, sweeping Aziraphale off his feet for one mind-blowing kiss before they dragged him back to Hell. Other times he had considered blowing up the whole bloody place with two fingers in the air, grabbing the angel's hand and running so far and so fast that they'd never find either of them.
He'd never pictured sitting in a bar around the corner from a burning bookshop, throwing the dregs of a second whiskey bottle into his aching throat. He'd certainly never pictured being alone.
His clothes still smelled of smoke and ash, filling his nose and scorching his lungs with every ragged breath. It wasn't the first time he'd run through fire for Aziraphale. It hurt just as much as he'd feared it would, having been too late.
The worst part was, he couldn't shake the feeling that this was all his fault. Not even for the last words he had said - I won't even think about you - but for their whole existence together, for pulling the angel into temptation time and time again, for making him doubt his own side, for tempting Eve to eat the apple and leave the Garden and start the wheels of the Great Plan turning. For Falling in the first place. Maybe if he had withstood the infinite boredom just one more afternoon, avoided Lucifer for one more day, he would have met the angel on the same side and they could have spent eternity together. Angels did that, sometimes. He assumed. It certainly seemed a lot more likely than an angel and a demon... being together.
Maybe he should have refused to meet Hastur, that night in the graveyard, should have hunkered down in the bookshop and made his excuses. He'd known something was up.
He had been expecting a lecture, not the Antichrist.
And all right, on reflection, he probably should have realised that the portly Englishman with the moustache smoking a pipe outside the hospital would not have known intimate details of the plan to introduce the Adversary to humanity, but in Crowley's defence, he had been having a very bad day.
It had been a very bad eleven years, he reflected, shouting at the bartender for another bottle. Except that it hadn't: all those meetings with the angel in museum cafes, swapping notes and teacakes and knowing glances. Their hands had touched so many times and neither of them had spoken about any of them. He had been so aware of the ticking clock, the great nuclear countdown, that he'd been too flustered to confront the things they'd been sitting on since 1967. The frustration had built up inside him until he'd let it all slip at the bandstand.
He should never have suggested going off together, shouldn't have admitted that if it came down to a choice between the whole world and Aziraphale it wouldn't take a heartbeat, should have known he would only push him yet further away, but he was desperate and it was probably better that that had been what he said instead of what he was really thinking.
It's the end of the world, angel, can't you please just go a little bit faster?
There was a thunderstorm outside, he could hear the terrible crashing sounds of it. The angel's face swam in his double vision, frightened and alone, the way Crowley had left him.
Was that just in his mind? He could have sworn the hallucination was looking at him. "Aziraphale?" he whispered, almost afraid of the answer. He took his sunglasses off to get a better look, and the vision did not disappear. "Are you... here?"
The angel's image wobbled vaguely. "Good question," he said with a tiny smile. "Not certain. Never done this before."
Crowley almost laughed, putting down the bottle of whiskey with the vague thought that he'd had enough. "Can you hear me?" Aziraphale asked, raising his voice completely unnecessarily.
"Course I can hear you," he said.
The principality met his eyes then, a sad smile he'd seen far too much of lately making its way back onto his face. "Afraid I've rather made a mess of things," he excused. "Did you go to Alpha Centauri?"
Lots of planets out there, he had said desperately. No-one would even notice us. And Aziraphale had forgiven him, the smug tosser, and let him storm off in a huff that he hadn't really meant. He'd thought, knocked to the floor of the burning bookshop, wet and on fire at the same time, that those had been the last words they would ever say to each other. He'd never really intended to run away without him.
"Nah," he said lamely. "Changed my mind. Stuff happened." He wished he could reach out and touch the angel, but something told him it would not be wise. "I lost my best friend."
A shadow flickered across the angel's incorporate face. "So sorry to hear it," he said quietly. "Listen, back in the bookshop, there's a book I need you to get," he said briskly.
Crowley's heart plummeted through the bottom of his stomach. "Oh," he said as softly as he could manage. "Look... your bookshop isn't there anymore."
Aziraphale blinked. "Oh?"
"I'm really sorry," Crowley said, and for the second time in human history he truly meant it. "It burned down."
The angel fell silent; even in this ghostly form, the heartbreak was clear on his face. "All of it?" he asked in a very small voice.
Crowley stammered a little. Decades of memories swam between them, drinking and teasing and building that little shop into a safe haven for both of them. "Yeah," he managed eventually. The book he had saved from the wreckage seemed to nudge his side a little and he looked down at it. "What - what was the book?"
"The one the young lady with the bicycle left behind," Aziraphale said. "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of -"
"...Agnes Nutter, yes, it's here, I took it!" he exclaimed, grabbing it and waving it in front of the angel's face. "A sort of souvenir," he admitted while the angel explained, sobering as he remembered why he had so desperately felt he needed one. "Look, wherever you are I'll come to you, where are you?"
The principality hesitated. "I'm... not really anywhere, yet," he said slowly. "I've been discorporated."
Crowley winced. "Oh."
"You need to get to Tadfield Airbase," the blond said urgently.
"Why?" he asked, unfolding a great annotated map of the village with the airbase circled ominously.
Aziraphale smiled sadly. "World ending," he said. "That's where it's all going to happen. Quite soon now. I'll head there too... I just need to find a receptive body. It's harder than you'd think."
Drunk and distraught as he was, the phrase receptive body caused some sort of electrical short in Crowley's tired brain. "I'm... I'm not going to go there," he muttered, packing the maps and notes back into the book and trying to change the subject.
"I do need a body." The angel looked at him meaningfully. "It's a pity I can't inhabit yours," he said with the tiniest of laughs.
Crowley nearly knocked over an empty bottle, images of all the different ways the angel could be inside his body drifting up from where he barely kept them down at the best of times. He made an embarrassing sort of noncommittal grunt, trying and entirely failing to look unenthused. "Angel, demon," Aziraphale continued awkwardly. "Probably explode."
"Blegh," said Crowley, unable to think of any words.
And then as soon and as eerily as he had been there, he was gone, leaving only the ever-present twisting in Crowley's belly and another call to the end of the world. And after a moment of frenzied blinking, he sobered up, stood up, and answered the call, because a world that somehow still contained Aziraphale was a world worth saving.
He had to get to Tadfield Airbase.
After, they sat on a park bench by the side of the road and passed a hastily-miracled bottle of merlot between them, waiting for the night bus like ordinary humans. The wine wasn't anything like the real thing would have been, but sometimes you had to make do with what you could pull out of thin air.
The world, largely speaking, was more or less the same as it had been that morning; which of course meant that everything was different. Crowley shut his eyes for a moment, leant his head back on the bench just to take it all in: the smell of the grass and the thunder, the sound of the humans in the cottage behind them getting on with their lives, the rustling of the trees, the hairs on his arms rising gently as the breeze rolled by. It should have all been a memory, but it had persevered.
Aziraphale's arm brushed against his as the angel lifted the bottle to his lips once more. Crowley opened his eyes to look up at him, his blond hair seeming to shine in the streetlight. This morning, he hadn't existed. If they couldn't think of a plan tonight, he might not have him back for long. He closed his fingers around Agnes Nutter's last remaining prophecy still folded in his pocket.
Catching him staring, the blond's eyes widened slightly; he wiped the mouth of the bottle rather pointlessly with his sleeve before offering it to him. Something he had long ago stopped trying to define or ignore twisted deep in the pit of Crowley's belly as he took it. This could well be their last night together, he realised properly.
Or it could be the first. The bus arrived, and the pair boarded it, and let their shoulders touch in silence for the long drive back to London.
"So this is where you live," Aziraphale said in a vaguely amused sort of voice once they had wobbled up the stairs to the demon's flat, staring around the bare kitchen and the inordinately tidy study.
Crowley shrugged. "I'm not sure I'd say I live here," he defended. "I just come here to sleep and water the plants."
The angel seemed to perk up a little at that. "Plants?" he asked. Crowley opened the door to the plant room with a little roll of his eyes. The noise of amazement that followed was worth every second he had ever spent on the things. "Oh, Crowley," his friend said. "They're beautiful."
He followed him into the room. "They are, aren't they," he said proudly, though he followed it up with a glare at the things that quite plainly said, or else. Aziraphale raised a suspicious eyebrow as a lily in the corner started to shake.
"Drink?" Crowley distracted hastily, guiding the angel back into the kitchen. "Wine? Cocoa?" Aziraphale gave him a Look. "Wine," Crowley agreed, pulling a bottle - the real thing, this time - and two glasses out of the cupboard and pouring them.
He sprawled out onto his sofa with the glass and bottle, watching with a tiny frown as the angel followed him into the room, pacing slowly around its corners, reading the spines of the books and staring distractedly out of the window. After a moment of this, Crowley made an impatient noise. "Sit down, angel," he commanded. "You're making me nervous."
Aziraphale hummed. "I'm not sure that I can," he said, still facing the window instead of the sofa, clutching his glass to his chest protectively. "I'm a little nervous myself."
Crowley watched him for a while longer, bumbling about the room and inspecting everything from the laptop to the Mona Lisa cartoon. The twisting in his belly intensified until he could no longer bear it; without letting himself think about it too much, he crossed over to him and took the angel into his arms, folding him into a tight hug.
For a moment, his friend simply stood there, not moving or reacting. "What on Earth are you doing?" he asked.
"I don't know," Crowley admitted, suddenly feeling quite foolish. "Humans do it to make each other feel better."
"Oh," the angel said. He twisted slightly in Crowley's arms in order to wrap his arms around his back. "It works," he said after a moment, sounding surprised.
Crowley let his eyes slide closed and a deep rumble of acknowledgement escape his chest. He rested his chin in the blond fluff of his friend's hair, feeling his belly ever so slowly begin to unclench. They would get through this, together, just like they had gotten through all of human history. His eyes lit on the folio copy of Hamlet in his mahogany bookshelf and Agnes Nutter's words drifted back into his head.
Choose your faces wisely, for soon enough you will be playing with fire.
Playing with fire...
It's a pity I can't inhabit yours, the angel had said, bubbling vaguely in front of him like a fish behind glass. Crowley's mind had gone to familiar and indecent places then, but perhaps he hadn't been listening properly.
Gently, he released his grip on the other man. "Please sit down," he said quietly. "I think I've had an idea."
The sun was out in Berkley Square.
Crowley sat on the bench in Aziraphale's body and waited for him, nerves twisting his muscles into painful knots, the lasting tendrils of Hellfire making his skin itch. So many things could have gone wrong with their plan, so much resting on assumptions and chances, that he had to double-take a few times before he believed the sight of his own form sloping easily down the hill towards him.
It was an odd sight. He'd always known what he looked like, of course, he'd seen his reflection. But had he glowed like that, before? Was it the angel currently inside his body, the goodness escaping through his very skin?
Or was it that he was seeing himself with Aziraphale's eyes?
The sheep in wolf's clothing sat beside him on the park bench, ramrod straight with his hands folded in his lap. Crowley had never looked so proper in his life.
Once back in their own skins, they laughed together, giddy on their newfound freedom. When he said no-one was watching them, for the first time since Eden he could actually feel the truth of it. The angel's gleeful chuckle faded into contented silence and his hand fell just a little closer onto the slats of the bench.
Crowley looked over at him. Hellfire was still burning in his veins, making him bolder, making him feel alive, and suddenly it all became too much, this hot, twisted thing tying the very depths of his being into great cosmic knots and threatening to burn him alive. "I can't wait any longer," he said, hearing the words as though someone else had said them and waiting for them to bring the world down around his ears.
Aziraphale considered him for a moment, his eyebrows knit together, his lower lip trembling slightly. Then he sighed. "No, nor can I."
He sat up straight on the bench in surprise, his feet skidding on the damp grass below him in much the same way the words had stripped his mind of all balance. "Angel -"
"I'm sorry I kept you waiting so long," the smaller man interrupted, twisting his hands together in his lap. "I was a coward."
Crowley shook his head, not sure whether he was contradicting him or just trying to stop it from spinning. He pushed his sunglasses down his nose in order to see him better, not willing to risk misreading the situation. He couldn't mean it. But the unbearably intense look on the angel's face said otherwise. He hadn't seen that look since 1941, when he'd driven back to the bookshop and the two of them had sat in the car for almost half an hour, both trying to say something neither of them quite had the words for yet. "Are you... are you sure -"
And then the angel was kissing him; without warning, more suddenly than he could ever have imagined it, soft lips were pressed against his and a hand was in his hair and for all the time Before that Crowley had spent in Heaven, this was infinitely more glorious.
He surged forwards, both hands rising to pull Aziraphale closer, and the angel allowed him to take control, easing back until both of them were upright, clutching at each other, six thousand years of something crackling in the space between them.
It could have been minutes, could have been weeks, time had never meant much to Crowley. When his lips were bruised and his body aching, they pulled away from each other just enough for the world to restart around them.
Someone was clapping. He looked around with a snarl to see a group of teenagers resting their bicycles against a tree, wolf-whistling and cheering them on. Crowley rolled his eyes and raised a hand to cut the brakes on their bikes, but felt a warm hand close over his wrist. "Leave them," Aziraphale murmured. His breath blew softly across Crowley's cheek. "They're not a part of this."
Crowley kissed him again. He had to agree this seemed a much better use of his time; the familiar scent of the angel flooded his lungs and stoked the inferno in his chest until it was all he could do to stay grounded, the wings he kept hidden itching to wrap around them and hide them from the rest of the world.
"How long have you known?" he couldn't stop himself from asking, stroking a finger across the reddened swell of the other man's lips.
Aziraphale shrugged, catching the finger in his palm and kissing it gently. "I think it started with what you said - around 530 or so, I think," he admitted, looking shyly up at him as though ashamed of this information. Fifteen hundred years, Crowley thought to himself. "You said that we must cancel each other out -"
"I shouldn't have said that," he interrupted. He'd thought he'd seen a flicker of something, through that accursed helmet in the swamp, and he'd spent a good few decades thinking of how 'cancelled' had not been the right word. "I didn't mean it like that."
Aziraphale shook his head impatiently. "I'm glad you said it," he dismissed. "It got me thinking, you see. Because it made sense - you working to spread evil while I worked to spread good, we should have cancelled each other out. But I never felt cancelled out. I never felt... less of myself around you. Quite the opposite, in fact."
Crowley blinked. He wanted to say something, but the angel had the air of a man unburdening himself of a lifetime of holding something in, and it seemed quite wrong to interrupt him when he'd been waiting for the words for so long. "When I was with you, I felt more rounded," he continued. "More logical, more exhilarated, less worried about everything all the time. More the person I'd always wanted to be. Less angel, more... Aziraphale."
Something deep and primal rose in Crowley's chest as his friend's green eyes lifted to meet his own. "I felt the same," he admitted. "It started in Rome, 45AD - you came up to me like an old friend, like you were pleased to see me."
"The oysters," Aziraphale remembered, his face lighting up the way it always did when food was mentioned.
Crowley chuckled fondly. "Let me tempt you, you said," he reminded him. "Like you trusted me. Like the two of us having lunch wouldn't break every rule either of us had. Like I was worth breaking the rules for. Even in Heaven, I never had that."
The angel's eyebrows drew together again. "You were worth breaking the rules for," he insisted. "I ought to have known that. I should have acted on it in 530, and 1020, and then in the fourteenth century -"
"Don't," Crowley bit out, clenching his fists.
"Sorry," the angel backtracked. Both of them took a breath to recover before the angel picked up his thread. "But I definitely should have acted on it in 1941. I shouldn't have kept you waiting."
Crowley shook his head, letting the smile break through his lips. "I knew you'd be worth waiting for."
He placed another soft kiss on the angel's mouth, then looked up at the sky with a deep breath. "Can I tempt you to a spot of lunch?" he asked briskly, sliding his fingers down Aziraphale's arm to take his hand.
The Angel of the Eastern Gate sat up straighter, a familiar excitement beginning to shine in his eyes. "Temptation accomplished," he said, and the memory of the first time came flooding back; the lazy heat and the heavy wine, and the feeling of being comfortable with his companion the way he only had with one being since the beginning of time.
"Let's go, then, angel," he said, keeping hold of Aziraphale's hand as they walked away. A bird was singing, somewhere in the park, but Crowley paid it no mind.
He suddenly fancied oysters.