Aziraphale could hear the silence around them, the bounds of time having vacated the world. He gently uncurled his fingers from Crowley's grasp and said, "Hello, Gabriel. You've been well?"
Gabriel smiled. He looked like a runny egg. "I knew it was you under there."
A snort from Aziraphale's right. "You'd have to be a mollusk to miss that divinity," said Crowley, before firing up a grin and adding, "which is to say, I'm surprised. Well done, you."
"Crowley," Aziraphale hissed.
Ezra would have laughed. It would have been Aziraphale's voice, but thin and with the hint of a whistle. Of course he would have laughed. He wouldn't have understood the danger. It saddened the angel, knowing that he wasn't Ezra when he was himself.
"All good things must come to an end," Gabriel chided.
His words, uninspiring and cliché at the best of times, settled deeply into the pit of Aziraphale's stomach like a set of human feelings. Crowley didn't appear to be taking it any better, but he took a shuddery breath and said, "I don't care about the bloody Plan."
"S'not yours to care about," mocked Hastur, "you signed it over."
"To Upstairs! I don't know what you're so happy about."
"We have the same goals," Ligur cut in, "the destruction of this planet."
Aziraphale wasn't exactly in favor of the prospect, but he knew that he had signed away any say in the matter when Crowley had drawn up that contract for him. Crowley! Had Aziraphale still been cursed—or was it blessed—with neural pathways, they would have lit up like a trail of bonfires. As it was, he settled on performing an instantaneous scan of his astral memory, which, of course, encompassed all of know history and more, besides. It was an activity he generally found calming, in the same way that some people count slowly to ten and others take deep breaths and still others develop a passion for eating their own hair. In this instance, however, his thoughts found a snag.
It was the cheekbones. It had to be. And there were so many things Aziraphale could have said at that moment, but being Aziraphale he settled on "I am not well-pleased with you, Crowley."
"Right," said Hastur, "turn 'em back. He's worse now."
Crowley's expression tripped somewhere in the territory of 'amused' and stumbled into 'vaguely horrified'. "Fell," he said, "this is what you're really like."
There was a silence that would ordinarily be referred to as 'stunned' had every concept of time not been thrown out the proverbial window, and then the reborn angel shouted, "Well, at least I don't take my tea with a shot of whiskey!"
"Other way 'round, angel," Crowley corrected automatically, with a twirl of his right hand.
"How could you, Crowley?"
"Well, sometimes I find that the whiskey has a bit too much…well, whisk, and so—"
"You know very well that's not what I meant!"
"And what did you mean?"
"Everything!"
Another one of those silences, though this one was charged with the beginnings of divine wrath as Aziraphale spread his arms from his body to make his point, arching his back, looking for infinity. On anyone else, the gesture would have been comic. On Aziraphale, it was heartbreaking. But there was something else.
"I don't believe we have anything further to discuss," said Gabriel, though without the coldness one might have expected—he didn't go in for the icy villain cliché, though this was mainly because he didn't see himself as a villain.
"Wait," said Crowley, and he was actually smiling.
Gabriel raised an ill-groomed and strangely transient eyebrow. "Yes, serpent?"
"This…this is what he's really like."
Aziraphale turned towards him and made a face like a disappointed cabbage. "Don't help me."
Crowley nearly jumped. He pointed at Aziraphale. "See? He's sarcastic! He's never been sarcastic! I thought it was a Divine impossibility, like sun in London or a classy ice-cream cake, but there you go."
"What's your point?"
Ignoring Gabriel's imperious tone, Crowley allowed himself a full leap into the air. "I'm going to be able to eat sushi when it arrives in London two hundred years from now!"
"Crowley," warned Aziraphale, "I think it would be best if you stopped…well, existing at the moment, but I'll settle for no more talking."
"You idiot," wheezed Crowley, for he was now laughing, "it's never left!"
"What are you on about?"
"The Plan!"
Gabriel looked a bit out of his depth, Ligur a tad more out of his, and Hastur was floating out there somewhere in the waves behind them.
Crowley shook his head. "You are all completely stupid. The Plan has never left Aziraphale's control. Don't you understand? Apocalypse, never!"
"That," Gabriel said, "is impossible. It is HIS plan, and as Aziraphale is HIS property, anything he owns belongs to HIM."
"Ah," said Crowley, "but he never left."
"Who never left, Crowley?"
Crowley spun around and grabbed a spluttering Aziraphale by the hand, alternating between vigorously shaking it and kissing it. "Ezra! You, you bloody little genius!"
"What?"
"Oh for Go—Sa—somebody's sake. You incarnated onto this planet in human form as one Ezra Fell, yes?"
"That's correct."
"And you had none of your angelic memories, correct?"
"Yes. I mean, no—I'm not sure what yes and no signify in this context—I didn't remember a thing."
"Even when you signed the contract?"
"Especially when I signed the contract."
Crowley grinned, finally deigning to release the angel's hand from his. "You see? Rights to the Ineffable Plan belong strictly to Ezra Fell, not Aziraphale. Tighter than a mechanical octopus, remember?"
"Yes, but Crowley—"
Gabriel cut Aziraphale off with a grunt so vague in its intention it could have meant anything, but all present nevertheless took it to signify his dissatisfaction. "We've been over this, demon. Once he returned to his full angelic state, property transfer would automatically take place, rendering "Ezra's"—here he used air quotes—claim void."
"Ah," said Crowley, "but Ezra never left!"
"You keep saying that," muttered Aziraphale, "I don't think it means what you think it means."
"But it does! Look at you! You can't honestly say that everything you do from now on won't be affected by your incarnation as Fell."
"That's ridiculous," scoffed Aziraphale, though as he said it he was trying very hard to keep his mind from replaying a certain series of events that had happened not long before on his living room floor.
"Like it or not, you're never going to return to your full angelic state. Not completely. And certainly not when you think you've been somebody else."
Aziraphale looked carefully at Crowley's face and thought he saw a shadow of pleading. But if he thought Aziraphale and Ezra were bound together, that one could never exist without the other, then that would mean—Crowley actually wanted to—
"Free will," said Aziraphale, letting the words march softly from his tongue.
Crowley smiled, and Ezra had never left. "The human part of me—the part that signed the contract—is still here."
"Rendering the Plan non-transferrable and unequivocally, irreversibly, indubitably yours."
"You really are a lawyer."
"Hey, I invented paperwork."
Aziraphale laughed for the first time since the change, and it was new and the same and Crowley was letting the feelings back in. Gabriel's voice broke the mood. "Well," he said, "HE won't be very happy about this."
Oh, God. Oh! God. Aziraphale smiled apologetically, leaving Crowley to take up the expected scowl. Hastur and Ligur leered from their customary lurking positions. Gabriel looked steadily at each of them before shrugging. "There is that new café I've been meaning to try."
He takes several steps backwards and waves his hand.
It's windy again.
A branch hits Aziraphale in the face.
"That café," says Crowley, "closed twenty-three years ago."
Gabriel just flashes his best middle-manager smile and he and the other two are gone.
An angel and a demon are kissing in the shadow of an eight-legged carriage.
Author's Note: The shift to present tense in the last few sentences of this chapter is intentional. I wanted to show the divide between the lack of time and the rush of it, as well as convey the immediacy of their new beginning.
I'm so sorry that it took me so long to write this chapter, but I've been cheating on you with another fandom! I know, I have no dignity. Also, upon finishing the chapter before this one I thought, 'well, that's interesting. How the hell does it end?'
Epilogue—shmoopy and fluffy—will be up by this time tomorrow! Thank you so much for your patience, dedication, and kind words!