[A/N] I'm not sure how I feel about this fic. I kind of like it, and I kind of hate it, and it is unbetaed and I never really planned to put it up anywhere but you know how it is. I have the first two chapters done and there will be more, I promise. This fic runs with my personal canon, so this chapter (and following ones, too, in all probability) contains references to other fics.

Anyway, I feel like this could be better but I can't think how to do it, and I always think my fics could be better, so here you go. This one is slashy. And T for profanity.

Aziraphale and Crowley are not mine; they belong to Pratchett and Gaiman.

The Meaning of Life is -

A large part of Aziraphale's job was to teach love, and he was good at it. He loved everyone, everything, with a calmly burning intensity that had given more than one human pause over the millennia.

This is not to say that he was perfect. He was wrathful at times, and irritable, and could be unthinking and cruel. But he never stopped loving.

Earth was different from Heaven. Heaven was beautiful, clean and cool and unchanging, a place of contentment and calmness. But Earth was seething and alive, something that Heaven was not, and Earth was full of beauty of a different sort – moonlight reflecting off of dancing water, sunlight refracting down through atmosphere and oceans in lazy golden shafts, birdsong and streams and wind in the trees blowing warm through his hair. Snow and ice on the high mountains, shining white and scarlet. And there was rain, which Aziraphale was very fond of. Heaven had never seen rain.

Earth was full of pain, as well. The living creatures struggled mindlessly for survival against odds that sometimes seemed insurmountable. There was starvation, and war, and hatred. There were tornados and hurricanes, and ships that never returned to port. There was fear. There was mental illness.

Aziraphale loved everything, in spite of these faults. Sometimes he felt that the world was ending, that there was just too much hurt and nothing he did made any difference—but then he would turn around and see a small kindness, a touch, a smile, and he would ache all over with love.

Small wonder, then, that one of the things he loved was a demon.

Crowley was the Enemy, of course, but he was also a kindred spirit, and the only fixed constant that Aziraphale could find in an ever-changing world. He was the speed of light in a vacuum, part of a vast, dimensionally consistent equation that Aziraphale did not understand.

Aziraphale had seen more of Crowley during the first eleven years of the Antichrist's childhood than he cared to admit – more than he ever had before, certainly. He had considered Crowley to be something like a friend for several hundred years, but had never really thought about him too much before.

But after the pseudo-apocalypse, long after the time that he and the demon should have gone their separate ways, Aziraphale found that Crowley was never very far from his thoughts. He would see things – mundane things – and think, Crowley would like that, he would laugh, even as he hurried to avert whatever danger had caught his eye; or, I wonder if Crowley's hand is in this, somewhere. It isn't his style, but I'll ask next time I see him.

The third time he caught himself thinking this, he was alarmed to realize that he had inadvertently grown close enough to Crowley to know his style. And then he began to notice other things.

He found that he enjoyed having the demon around. Obnoxious and evil as he was, Crowley was fun. And, ironically enough, Aziraphale found himself behaving more angelically around Crowley than he ordinarily would have, as if to prove some sort of point. And after a bit of confused self-searching, he realized that he had been behaving this way since… Well, for several thousand years. Before the Arrangement, even.

Being around Crowley brought a kind of excitement, an oh-what-will-happen-next feeling, a happy little buzz that had nothing to do with the quantity of alcohol they sometimes imbibed. And eventually Aziraphale realized, with a slow, creeping horror, that he had (quite without meaning to), somehow come to love the demon in a way that was different from how he loved everything else. He loved Crowley like he loved the world – a helpless, crushing, all-encompassing love for everything good and bad and in between that made him gasp with the enormity of it. Aziraphale would fight for Crowley if he had to. He would kill for him, if it came to that.

They went out shortly after Aziraphale had come to this realization, and he watched Crowley's face move as he spoke, and he wondered what it would be like to touch, and then was alarmed that he had even thought such a thing. Crowley would find this absolutely hilarious, he knew, and probably wouldn't even mind (it was Lust, after all, wasn't it) – but the thought of what Aziraphale's superiors might do was nothing short of terrifying.

"What's eating you?" Crowley asked suddenly, during a pause in the conversation, and Aziraphale jumped.

"What? What do you mean?"

Crowley's expression was a blend of amusement and curiosity and something that Aziraphale wished he could call concern, but Crowley didn't do concern. "You've been looking at me funny all evening. And you're staring into space more than usual. What's up?"

Aziraphale had flailed wildly and spouted off some excuse or other, and had excused himself as early as possible. He did not return to the shop. He was leaving London. This had to stop, somehow, and Aziraphale in his desperation could only think of one way to do it.

He fled to northern Africa. He was needed there anyway, he told himself, the people needed his help. The unrest in the Sudan had turned to something resembling open war, and Aziraphale told himself that he had been absent for far too long.

He fell into the familiar routine with a kind of bizarre relief – heal, pray, teach, love. He helped what humans he could without directly interfering, he held children and sang to them as they died, and when they were gone he was the only one who wept for them. He forgave the fighters, the insurgents, the soldiers, the murderers, the rapists. He forgave the protesters their ignorance.

The desperation and pain were almost comforting, a welcome change from the confusion of emotions. He did not sleep, he did not eat, he paid little heed to his human body. He worked tirelessly, without stopping, without thinking, until he barely felt the passing of time.

He poured himself into them, body and soul, loved them with every fiber of his being. He loved until he felt he could not possibly love anything else, until the world went white around him and his human form gave over to exhaustion. He loved until he thought he would die of it.