The Outline of Our Hands

by feigned

When Aziraphale leaves with the Metatron, Crowley immediately begins to spiral downward. He wants nothing to do with Heaven or Hell.

Blackberry bushes crept and crawled and hunched—lurched, Crowley rather thought—their way over a neglected, leaning fence line. The wooden posts and rails were grooved and pockmarked, their surfaces littered with peeling red paint. A larger piece tore off in the breeze, rust and red like an autumn leaf, and landed on Crowley's coat. He scowled at it, and the flake of paint incinerated into embers from the inside out.

"What are we doing here?" Crowley asked with a frown, giving his coat a last close examination. The ash was gone, but he brushed his coat with long fingers anyway.

Aziraphale didn't answer, but he looked far too delighted. As the angel stepped gleefully toward the vines and reached into the bushes, Crowley pulled his head back in the way only someone who'd ever spent any real time as a serpent could.

"Oh, nothing much," Aziraphale finally said. Crowley curled his lip, his nose wrinkling with lines of mistrust. Not entirely for the angel, of course, but for the blackberries Aziraphale was now carefully plucking from the vines.

Once or twice, the angel yanked a hand back and shook it, the vines taking small bites from his fingers with their thorns. Each time he did he would give the demon a sideward glance. Crowley watched Aziraphale stick the tip of a finger in his mouth after what must have been a particularly sharp bite, and he pulled his sunglasses down a little, watching. The angel had a good handful before he stopped to examine them.

The berries were dark, black and purple, some with beads of not-quite ripe red. The small, plump spheres still had some pearls of dew that caught the sun and made them look like little jewels.

Not the sun, really, Crowley thought. He stared.

Aziraphale picked out two and slowly put them in his mouth. Crowley watched the angel lick his fingers and then watched his mouth as the angel bit down on the fruit. A joyful little noise escaped Aziraphale, an almost entirely alien sound to Crowley, who made a sour face and tried not to snort. Then the angel shot out his hand, still cupping the fruit.

"Try one?" Aziraphale asked, his eyes coming through bright and hopeful and so blue, though it sounded more like a command. Crowley's face melted into an unamused but soft expression. He pushed Aziraphale's hand away.

"No thank you, angel. You know how I feel about food." Aziraphale did not look phased in the least, holding out his hand again. Crowley added, "And besides, you know nothing good ever started for me when fruit was involved."

Aziraphale exhaled and tilted his head. "C'mon. Just one. They're fresh, and perfectly ripe. Nearly, anyway." The angel looked briefly disappointed, and Crowley hoped he would give up. But Aziraphale squared his shoulders and held his hand out again. "And anyway, if anyone here would be getting into any kind of trouble, it would be me." There was a beat of silence. "Most likely," he added.

Crowley looked with shifted, narrowed eyes at the angel. Then he pushed his sunglasses back up and looked around the field that stretched flatly to the west of the fence, and the berry vines that continued to creep over it.

"I mean wouldn't it be stealing?" Crowley asked. His voice pitched up and became that sort of mumbly the way it did when he didn't really believe his own words and was somewhat asking himself as well. "We don't know who owns this place. Could be chased down by some farmers with pitchforks and torches and patched overalls and... bad teeth." He grimaced.

Aziraphale gave him that look. The one that meant the angel didn't buy a word he was saying.

"Or a… tractor?" Crowley added hopelessly. The berries were still in front of his face, Aziraphale's perfect fingers wrapped beneath them.

"How on earth would any of that be a problem for us?" asked Aziraphale.

The demon scowled. Of course the angel saw through him, after this long. Crowley looked at the blackberries in Aziraphale's outstretched palm. Admittedly, he looked at the angel's fingers more than the berries themselves. The grace with which Aziraphale was able to simply hold a pile of berries defied his human form. Crowley curled his lip a bit, but the look on the angel's face made him sigh. Always that look, that look, and he found himself willing to do nearly whatever Aziraphale asked.

"All right. But just one." Crowley relented. His hand hovered just above the angel's, fingers brushing like the spark of flint. He looked Aziraphale in the eye. "If anything catastrophic happens because of this, then it's entirely on your head."

The angel's face lit up.

"And you're not the one that's supposed to be doing the tempting," Crowley argued.

"Oh, no temptation involved here," Aziraphale said, countering by dipping his head and looking up toward Crowley, one eyebrow cocked. "I've only asked if you'd like to have some."

Wily, the demon thought.

Crowley stared at him, possibly for a few seconds too long, he thought. He reached for a blackberry. He held it between his thumb and forefinger gently and looked at it with trepidation. But that look was still on the angel's face. With an expression of mild dismay, he put it in his mouth and bit down. There was nothing about this he understood, not the taste, not the texture, and certainly not the joy Aziraphale seemed to derive from it. It was particularly juicy, the berry he'd chosen.

As the flavour painted his tongue, an odd sweet then vaguely sour taste, some juice slipped out the corner of his mouth and began to trickle down his chin. He was concentrating too hard on the taste to notice. It wasn't…. bad, he supposed. His nose wrinkled. He had the vague thought it might make a much better wine, or even beer. Something alcoholic.

"This would definitely taste much better as some kind of alcohol. Wine, or mead perhaps," Crowley remarked. Aziraphale ignored him and instead reached out his empty hand. He gently ran his thumb down Crowley's chin, the touch starting at the corner of his lips. It felt like fire.

Fuck, thought Crowley.

"Just some, ahh, juice… you had." The angel traced a slow line from his own lip down his chin, finger lingering. "Just there." Crowley narrowed his eyes behind his lenses at Aziraphale. The sun was falling toward the western horizon. Aziraphale looked at the small pile that remained in his palm. "Another?"

Crowley's mouth twisted theatrically, complete with a dramatic roll of his head. He sniffed and lifted his chin. He scratched absently at one collar bone, then he put his hands loosely on his hips and looked at the ground, which had suddenly become very interesting. He shifted his weight. Cleared his throat.

His voice cracked slightly. "Only if you do that…" He shifted his weight the other way and made a vague gesture to where the blackberry juice had dripped down his chin. He cleared his throat again. "That thing… again." He was rather mumbling as the grass at this point, but Aziraphale lifted up on his toes just the smallest amount, barely perceptible, and beamed. He really did seem to glow. Probably the sunset.

Probably not, Crowley thought.

Crowley took a careful look at the blackberries left in the angel's hand. Finally, he picked up another berry, the one that looked like it might be the juiciest. He put it in his mouth and used his tongue to slide it to one side, where he bit down as close to his lips as he could. Juice slithered from the side of his mouth and down his chin, more than before. For a moment he thought Aziraphale was going to break their half-spoken agreement.

But Aziraphale cupped Crowley's jaw this time, with those terribly soft fingers of his and the indescribable warmth of his palm. He brushed with a graceful motion the meandering line of deep purple away slowly with his thumb. It took a few strokes, and Crowley tried not to lean into the touch. It reminded the demon of his own grace, before the Sauntering that is. He didn't know if Aziraphale could see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he stared at the angel, then swallowed. His throat couldn't quite complete the movement.

"We should… ehm," Crowley almost hiccoughed out. He pointed in no particular direction, so long as it was not back at the blackberry vines. "Armageddon and all that…" He trailed off.

"Oh!" Aziraphale said, finishing the last few berries and rubbing his hands together. "Absolutely, of course," he said.

The angel turned to go, and Crowley groaned very quietly to himself, his knees bending slightly as he leaned back. Aziraphale made him feel just a little more alive. A little less lonely. Less lost. He caught himself up to the angel's side and wondered if Aziraphale had any idea.

They strolled away, side by side, Crowley with his slightly serpentine walk, to fulfil their neither Heavenly nor Hellish duties. Crowley chanced a sideways glance at Aziraphale. Despite the side screens on his sunglasses, he was able to see the smile on the angel's face. Aziraphale's head was ducked down and faced away, but he saw it. Crowley cursed to himself, but there was a small light that grew somewhere just outside his vision. Perhaps Aziraphale did know after all.

He thought he felt one of those flashes, the same sort Aziraphale commented on occasionally when the angel felt flashes of strong—no. Impossible. He decided it was just a feeling leftover from the angel's hand on his face. The corner of Crowley's mouth Aziraphale had touched lifted just slightly.

"Stop for tea?" Crowley said suddenly.

Aziraphale looked faintly startled. "What, you? Tea?"

Crowley watched the muted colours building as the sun just touched the western horizon. "Well, I would have said dinner, but I figured... You know... ehhh.. by the time we arrive." He paused and shrugged as casually as he could. "And I mean, single malt scotch counts if you drink enough. Copious amounts. Which I plan to do. Copiously." Something lightened in his chest when the angel laughed. "C'mon, no point diving into this mess without something in your stomach."

Aziraphale straightened his lapels and suddenly looked very serious in the fading, sepia light. "No. No, that wouldn't do at all." He smiled at Crowley. "Tea it is."

And this became a Thing. Their Thing. Well, an addition to a list of their Things, anyway. An unquestionable ritual that absolutely must be performed before any work, important or otherwise, demonic or angelic, could begin. Barring, of course, any truly immediate threat. And really, if you tried to weigh this particular moment on scales, it would tip in the favour of their Thing. Just a little. Armageddon just seemed like it wasn't quite heavy enough that it couldn't wait.

Aziraphale fell for nearly every temptation offered by the demon, though it generally involved an inebriated Crowley leaning on the table to watch with a determined curiosity as the angel ate and enjoyed actual human food. At least so far as it appeared to outsiders. Crowley was not watching Aziraphale eat. He was watching Aziraphale.

This Thing always took priority. And though the fiery fists of Armageddon pounded at, or through, their door, it didn't really seem to be quite that much of an emergency just at this particular moment.

/

"Angel!" Crowley said with a small amount of desperation he cloaked thickly in irritation. "This is the Supreme Archangel of all Heaven, your former boss, who tried very hard to cast you into hellfire and destroy you." Anger flared to the surface, but it looked as though Aziraphale didn't know precisely what stoked that anger. The man, rather the angel, Aziraphale was so keen on saving had wanted him to die.

Crowley suddenly remembered when the connection he had with the angel had been suddenly ripped apart without warning. He couldn't sense him anywhere on the earth. He remembered the burning bookshop, his unanswered cries for Aziraphale. Timber had cracked, wood and paper had popped and hissed and exploded around him. If he could no longer sense the angel, not in the bookshop, not anywhere on earth... The feeling of emptiness was indescribable. He would have torn himself apart if he could have consumed the bastards responsible in that same hellfire Gabriel tried to use to erase Aziraphale from existence.

Aziraphale looked as though he were trying to be patient. He glanced toward Gabriel, rather, 'Jim'. "I don't think he really has any friends."

"Exactly," said Crowley, looking at the rather bedraggled, amnesiac Supreme Archangel "Jim".

"Yes, exactly."

Crowley was about to shout something, but he stopped. He pursed his lips and looked askance at the angel. "What does your 'exactly' mean, exactly? I feel like your 'exactly' and my 'exactly' are different exactlys."

When Aziraphale answered, Crowley felt almost as if he were being chided. "Well, he doesn't have any friends, so he needs us." It infuriated him the angel looked so sincere. Aziraphale had forgiven Gabriel.

Aziraphale had gone 'round the bend. "What I need, is for him," he threw out an arm in Gabriel's direction, "to be nowhere near me, and the precious, peaceful, fragile existence that I have carved out for myself here."

Aziraphale looked hurt, but Crowley mostly saw utter madness. Until the angel said, "I thought we carved it out for ourselves."

Crowley's mind flashed to the special place reserved in the bookshop for his sunglasses. The comfort he felt here, the time he spent here. The contact between the both of them. Their journeys in the Bentley and their quiet times together on their bench in Saint James's Park. Meals in fancy, and not so fancy, restaurants and pubs. It didn't help lessen the anger. It almost made it worse. "So did I!" he growled out.

I shouldn't have said that, Crowley thought, resisting the urge to rub his face in his hands. I should not have said that that way.

Aziraphale turned away, and Crowley felt something unfamiliar worming around his stomach. Fear like he'd never before experienced. The thought of losing this. He could say Aziraphale had broken down his defences, but in truth he had never been outside of them.

You're doing a superb job of pushing him outside of them now, though, aren't you? Said a voice in the back of his head.

"Very well," the angel said curtly, no longer looking at him. Crowley tried to will him to turn back, but it was no use. "If you refuse to help me, then of course…" The demon watched the angel's throat when he swallowed. Crowley felt like a rock fell straight through his stomach. "...you're at liberty to go."

Crowley hid his panic, shoved it down deep, as he did most emotions. It was always easier to blanket these things with anger or indifference. "To go?" There was still surprise in Crowley's voice. Aziraphale still would not look at him. "Oh, right, this is how you wanna do it?"

Do what? Crowley thought briefly He wasn't even sure what he'd meant. Part? Split? Wait, was this some sort of breakup?

The angel finally turned back to him. "No, I would love you to help me! I'm asking you to help me take care of him." He was doing that thing again. That face. This time Crowley could not bring himself to give in. He stared at Aziraphale.

The angel turned away again. "But if you won't, you won't." Aziraphale sat down heavily in his chair, lending a certain, strange finality to the conversation. Crowley was at a loss. But the anger was still there, and this confusion that fuelled the flames, and he felt his body temperature rising out of control.

"Yeah, I won't," Crowley said, his voice rough through his constricting throat. He paced with swift, heavy steps to the door. With his hand on the knob, he turned back. His eyes were wide with disbelief, his entire body felt aflame. "You're on your own with this one."

He closed the door behind him. He did not slam it, but he closed it as he would any other day. It left a fuzzy, final silence lingering.

Unforgivable, Crowley remembered saying a long time ago. That's what I am.

/

Crowley thought the entire idea of Aziraphale's Cotillion Ball, threats from the hell rising outside in the form of the undead or no, was complete bollocks. He'd refused to change. So had Aziraphale, but the angel already fit in. Crowley was handed off a food platter by Aziraphale while he was standing and trying to have a sulk, and then some of the most ridiculous music he'd ever heard began playing.

He tossed the plate of food carelessly on a chair and watched the zombies close in from a front window. This was the maddest thing he'd ever experienced. Zombies outside, and a ball out of one of Aziraphale's books inside, the attendees of the latter completely unaware.

He tried to grab Aziraphale again to tell him there was something very wrong. But the angel turned to him with a hopeful, wide-eyed look and a devious smile the demon had become very familiar with.

"Well," said Aziraphale, perhaps you could tell me… while we dance?" He grabbed Crowley to drag him out to the group already dancing a dance none of them could ever remember learning.

Pants, thought Crowley, but he followed.

Crowley had no idea what was happening, or how Aziraphale knew how to dance, or, even more importantly, how he suddenly did, but he had let the angel drag him onto the floor with very little protestation. How he did like holding Aziraphale's hand.

He tried to explain the hell-sent demons knocking at their windows, but the angel only rebuffed his worries. He growled in a not-so-low whisper that Hell had come for Gabriel, but every time their palms touched it was an electric distraction. No, not electric, magnetic. Like the final pull of some inevitable and inexplicable connection.

It was difficult to leave the angel when it came time to evacuate the humans. Crowley promised Aziraphale he would return. And he would. And he did. All to find out that Aziraphale had managed to start a war with Hell. Although he did absolutely love that the angel had blown up his halo. He couldn't help the grin that split his face.

It reminded him of the moment when he found out Aziraphale had given away his flaming sword as Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden. His fault, partly, but really, it was a stupid rule. And suddenly he was standing atop the high wall around Eden, beside the angel with whom he'd created the cosmos, finding out he also didn't care to follow all of Heaven's orders.

And that reminded him of the moment he looked into Aziraphale's blue eyes and all of this begun.

/

They disappeared. Beelzebub and Gabriel, hand in hand. She said something about being with him mattering more than choosing sides. And then he said something about Heaven being wherever she was. That was it. Those line-crossing feelings, the infuriating way he felt whenever he looked at Aziraphale. The infuriating way he felt when he wasn't near Aziraphale. That was precisely it.

If I could only find the words to tell Aziraphale how endlessly I think of him. That could be us, Crowley thought, watching the pair disappear to who knows where. He would do it, when they had some privacy. He would find the words somehow to tell Aziraphale. It will be us.

/

Crowley was sure it would break him in half to get that speech out, those words that caught in and clawed at and nearly bloodied him as they came up and out of his throat. To admit to himself at last that Aziraphale was his Heaven, and he was hoping to spend the rest of eternity with him. Rather, it would have broken him in half to get it out if Aziraphale hadn't come back in, almost bouncing off the floor with the idea of the two of them returning to the actual home office of Heaven.

When the angel had said it all with that face, with that voice, so desperate and confused, "If I'm in charge… I can make a difference." It did break Crowley, or at least the cracks began to form. He couldn't look at Aziraphale for a moment. And then, despite his whole self cracked and crumbling, he choked the speech out anyway. It came out nothing like he had planned. And Aziraphale's response was nothing like he had planned.

"Oh, Crowley," Aziraphale said. "Nothing lasts forever."

Crowley tilted his head back and gave a slow, sharp nod. "No," he said. His eyes looked everywhere but at the angel. He couldn't look him in the eye. "No, I don't suppose it does." He put his sunglasses on and shouldered past Aziraphale. "Good luck."

The angel tried again to recruit him, desperately telling Crowley, "I—I need you!" It failed. Crowley couldn't do it.

Light poured into the bookshop through the windows, bright and illuminating with the ever-present dust of old tomes dancing in the golden beams. A dimmer, softer light shone from the bookshop's fixtures. Crowley stood near the doors. He forced himself to turn and look at Aziraphale.

"Well," said Aziraphale, grimacing. "Then there's nothing more to say."

Crowley stared at him from behind his sunglasses. The tears would not fall, but they were there, brimming behind dark lenses, blurring his sight. Tears that were flooded with the love he couldn't hold in but had failed to put into words.

You should have just said it, Crowley silently berated himself. But he could not turn back the clock.

"Listen," he said, panic rising like bile in this throat. It was difficult to find his voice. Those words, that speech… It was supposed to end with them together, away, somewhere in Alpha Centauri, or wherever the angel preferred. Not this. Never this.

Crowley pointed upward in a vague gesture. "Do you hear that?"

"I don't hear anything," said Aziraphale, half lifting and dropping his arms at his sides in exasperation. The demon couldn't look away.

"That's the point. No nightingales."

In that moment, Aziraphale's face seemed to twist into a dozen emotions at once. Hurt, Crowley could see, clearly enough that he wished, oh how he wished he could take that back. Disappointment. Looks of reminiscence. Perhaps memories of their lunches at the Ritz; memories of Crowley slowing the Bentley down just a little bit after the angel said he went too fast for him; memories of creating the cosmos; memories of their times in Saint James's Park. Conflict. A little anger.

In there, somewhere, Crowley hoped—no, he saw (and he would swear to that until the moment he was erased from the Book of Life)—there was some semblance of care. Of want. Of love. Of a desire just as strong as his own to do what Gabriel and Beelzebub had had the courage to do. Tell the Metatron to piss off. Then leave. Go. Where didn't matter, only that they were together.

Crowley could watch the conflict play out over Aziraphale's face. It happened so fast, but he could see the small hesitations, the want to stay with Crowley, the desire not to return to Heaven. They were so close. If only he'd reach out. For the shortest of possible moments, Crowley thought the angel really had decided to stay. But the Metatron's offer, and Aziraphale's commitment to saving the world from his new position amongst the corruption eating its way through Heaven's sterile wards, won the battle.

Bloody hell, Crowley thought. This was just about the biggest cock up he'd ever managed, and he'd been turned into a snake. This had all gone pear-shaped. He suddenly flashed on Aziraphale telling him he liked pears.

"You idiot," he said finally, with some measure of disbelief and desperation, but determination also. "We could have been… us."

He knew Aziraphale was a romantic. With his fancy meals, and his dancing, and his small but intimate touches. Then there were Aziraphale's Jane Austen books, although he tried to ignore that Persuasion was the angel's self-proclaimed favourite.

The touches were Crowley's most cherished facet of Aziraphale's romanticism. He never quite knew how to feel when they happened, like earlier in the night. But he did know he never wanted them to stop. They left marks, every touch from the angel. Even the simplest of connections left behind in him brands that felt like pure light. When the touches passed, if Crowley couldn't see it on his skin, it was undeniably underneath. Six thousand years of brands, each building upon so many that came before. Invisible and scarring. He felt sometimes he was held together by only that web of scars.

In three strides he reached Aziraphale. He grabbed the angel's lapels as if his existence depended on it. If there was shock on Aziraphale's face, there was no time to register it. Crowley pulled him close, and in that moment his mind was completely silent. The whole world was silent. He pressed his lips to the angel's, crushed them together and felt something he hadn't known was missing begin to fall into place. The angel fought him at first, and Crowley nearly let go. But then he felt Aziraphale's hands on his back, pulling, not pushing. As long as Crowley had existed, the kiss seemed to go on longer. Not long enough. Never enough.

After the kiss, alien and awkward as it might have been—because he'd never in his six thousand plus years on earth kissed someone, anyone—he wondered if Aziraphale would know real, living, breathing romance if it slapped him in the face. Which he clearly did not, it could be argued, as Crowley just had. Perhaps if he'd offered more tenderness… but he had felt that would have been his entire ruin.

There had been some anger from Crowley in the kiss, naturally. How dare you do this to me now? How dare you do this to me at all? There had been need. A kind he'd never before known: precisely the opposite feeling he held for Heaven or for Hell. It was all consuming, as though he must drag Aziraphale into himself somehow. There had been love.

This had been thousands of years coming, building up like a snowball down a hill, only it kept going on and on until it compelled itself into a great ball of ice. And still it went on, growing and growing until finally the pressure turned it to stone, and it became this unearthly, inexplicable thing that Sisyphus himself would not have been able to move. It didn't matter to Crowley that that was the wrong mythology to use as a metaphor here, it worked. And his thoughts were incoherent at best. It made it no less true. There was love. More than Crowley could handle. But wasn't that the point?

Crowley had had a sick feeling in his stomach that he'd never experienced ever since he'd been about to walk out. The fear he'd felt before was dwarfed by the loss itself. He'd intended to leave the bookshop before even kissing Aziraphale, no matter how long he'd been thinking about doing it. Which had been...

Millenia. Crowley almost said that out loud.

Just before Crowley had been about to leave, there had in fact been a nightingale singing. Two, actually, on opposite corners of the street. One had been just outside the bookshop, on a small sidewalk-planted tree or a window ledge. But within that leaden, sunken, qualmish feeling he'd had, he had decided to miracle them away. He wasn't sure he could bear to hear them right now.

He admitted silently that it was a bit petty, as if to say, Well, I don't really love you that much. To remove some of their particular romance. Maybe a lot petty, and a little cruel. To remind Aziraphale of certain memories and then darken those pieces of them. Take them away. To hurt him just a little. To make it clear that no, he would not come with him. And if the angel left, so would he. But not with him.

Though, in all honesty at that moment Crowley could not recall precisely what a nightingale looked like. With his blood boiling cold inside him and washing away the last dregs of logic that remained in his angel-demon-human brain, Crowley had ended up miracling away all the birds in the area by accident.

Of course Aziraphale had heard nothing. There was nothing to hear.

When they had pulled apart, when Aziraphale's lips left his, that piece that had just begun to slide into place began to slip away again, with no means to grasp it and pull it back. And when Aziraphale stuttered, his mouth starting to form letters Crowley tried impossibly to decipher, Crowley was sure he could hear the sound of something breaking. But Aziraphale was wringing his hands, a losing conflict for Crowley once again. The angel showed no signs of hearing anything but the empty silence that hung in the air like tar.

In Aziraphale's hands, whatever wicked form demons had in place of a heart was glass.

There was another moment he thought Aziraphale might come round. Crowley couldn't read his eyes, but he wasn't looking at them. He was looking at the lips he'd just kissed, and after Aziraphale stuttered "I-", Crowley saw it. He saw the form of the angel's lips and his tongue, and the smallest of sounds escaped. "L—." But then Aziraphale stopped so quickly it was if it had never happened at all. He stepped back. He forgave him. As if Crowley were any stranger or acquaintance, or worse, one of his tenants. Someone he barely knew and not the other half of the longest, closest friendship he—and he was certain it was true for Aziraphale as well—had ever had. As if he were no more than that.

"I forgive you," said Aziraphale.

That perfect piece that had so nearly snaked into place for Crowley was ripped fully and finally away, leaving a glass ground flesh wound. As if Aziraphale turned over his hand and let go of that mutilated surrogate of a demon heart, and, as glass met wood, allowed it to shatter into a million pieces. Slivers that could never again be put right.

More than once he had toasted Aziraphale "to the world". This world they had fallen in love with. This world that gave them so many reasons to be, and reasons to be together. Had he fallen in love with the wrong world?

/

Crowley stayed. Of course he stayed, He was leaning motionless on the Bentley when the angel slowly looked back at him, posture stiff as he stood near the heavenly elevator. There was another moment. A flicker of doubt. Fear. About the two of them or about his new Heavenly position, Crowley didn't know. Maybe both. But Aziraphale did not return to him. Instead, the angel stepped inside along with the Metatron. Something stank about that… angel.

He watched Aziraphale's pallid face and wondered, if only for a moment, whether the angel felt as sick as he did. Whether his chest felt as though it was imploding and erupting all at once. The elevator doors closed. Crowley thought Aziraphale to be nearly hand in hand with the Metatron, whom he trusted less than any of those delusive, vile demons in Hell. Crowley had more faith in Jim—Gabriel, rather. He would rather trust Hastur than the Metatron.

He glanced one last time into the coffee shop at Nina, then the record store at Marie. He did not look back at the bookshop. It really couldn't last forever, he supposed. When he climbed into the Bentley, he paused only a moment before starting the engine.

Music had already been queued up for the two of them, Crowley so certain the angel would be sitting beside him in the passenger seat. An optimism as foreign to him as rule following. Things he had allowed himself to hope for, to expect, had gone so differently. He realised neither of them had said good-bye. At least, Crowley hadn't, not really. But it sounded as if Aziraphale almost had.

You bloody pillock, that voice said again.

When the song flooded the car, the words poured out like a chemical burn, like holy water: A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. Their song, in his mind. He shut it off. His sunglasses still hid what felt like tears threatening to stain his face.

The pavement was brimming with people. It and the tarmac were still damp from an earlier rain. When he pulled away from the kerb, he drove slowly through the narrow streets. He drove deliberately. And he stayed under the speed limit until he was far into the countryside. As if Aziraphale might be watching and somehow approve. Or at least remember something of their journeys together. Whether Crowley wanted those memories to make the angel happy, or to stir up regret that might give him cause to reconsider, he couldn't tell.

As he drove, the side panels of the Bentley began to fade. The paint along the sides began to shift from their impeccable, glossy flat grey, replaced instead with the same yellow that Aziraphale had tried to colour the entire car that time he'd borrowed it.

And stolen a travel sweet, he thought.

Crowley would not notice this colour change until he after finally pulled over. He stopped the Bentley along a stone fence that edged a quiet pastoral view: fields of pale golden grass in the setting sun. At least, to him it seemed a bit golden. Golden and soft tan. It reminded him of so many of Aziraphale's ridiculous outfits. He exited the Bentley, still watching the sun: a flat, yellow-white disc to him. A sheep bleated in the distance, then a few others added their voices to a short chorus. He was about to lean against the car when he finally saw the paint.

"What the–" Crowley squatted down and ran his hands lovingly across the affected panels. "What is this?" he demanded. He glanced around in every direction, then stood up and did the same again. He strode around to the other side, and his hands pressed again either side of his face, his mouth open in disbelief. "Who—what—when?"

There were no answers that he would ever be able to uncover.

"Don't worry, girl," he said with gritted teeth. Why? Just why? "I'll fix this right up." But no matter what he did he could not seem to miracle that colour away.

"Who did this?" he mumbled, mostly to himself. Then he shouted. "WHO DID THIS?" He tangled his fists in his hair, squatting down until he sat on his heels. "BASTARDS!"

His emotions were already stewing to a boil over point, and this was just one more thing—he stopped himself and tried to take a few deep breaths. When he had calmed down, he remained sitting on his heels, his arms out before him, resting on his knees. He didn't look at the car. He didn't look at the sunset. He just stared down the road for a while until he recalled a line from a play he had heard rehearsed several centuries ago.

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss consume.

Crowley glanced at the yellow of the Bentley. His anger was finally burning itself out, and he dropped his head.

I just don't know how I ever thought the two of us could… Doubt spiralled through him. He left his head down and closed his eyes. They were still wet.

/

What Crowley would never discover is that the car had done it to itself. Not as a joke, not as a cruelty, of course not. But it had formed a connection with Aziraphale as well, even if it was not as strong. It felt it deserved something of a memory, too.

/

Crowley drove as far from civilisation as he could on this relatively small island. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly along the way that they began to leave imprints upon it. His emotions were like a metronome, swinging between rage and the deepest of misery with an almost predictable regularity. His anger flared again, a fire fed by hurt so deep, dark, and strong that the Bentley sometimes filled with the haze of the miasma the demon's uncontrollable emotions would elicit.

The emptiness he felt was so heavy it was as though it were physically crushing him, or pulling him down into some deep dark water with no bottom in sight. He tried to convince himself that perhaps it was better that it happened so soon. So soon after he'd finally realised what love was. That he was actually experiencing it. That it hadn't had time to grow and blossom and become an unbearable and suffocating thing he would have to suffer in unrequited silence.

But Crowley knew differently. He'd known love since first they were both angels. He'd carried that weight for six thousand years. And along with this new emptiness, he carried it still. It felt as though they had been telling lies to themselves, and in doing so found themselves tied inexorably by them.

After this, Crowley could be found two places: the Bentley or a local pub. He drank in both. He talked to himself in both, but it was more crazed and disconnected when he was alone in a corner with rocks glasses cluttering the table. Once, he lamented the absence of proper Glencairn glasses. But Aziraphale had had those, just for Crowley. And he didn't want to think about that, so he kept his pub picks on the lower end, just in case.

"Well, which is it, then?" Crowley appeared to be arguing with himself, but he was really in the middle of an argument with Her, in a very immature voice, like one might use for a puppet. For a puppet he certainly felt. "Existence precedes essence or essence precedes existence?"

He wasn't supposed to be making anyone bring him drinks, but he was lazy, and lonely, and at this point in little shape to do it himself. Slipping the bartender a hundred quid earned him some special privileges. Namely not having to fall on his face. More than once, at least. Crowley finished a glass and raised a hand to get attention for another.

"These pesky humans almost have You figured out, don't they? Bet you didn't count on that happening," he mused.

"Surely we're all the former. Angels, demons, humans. Well maybe not. Angels You made to serve you. You made humans with 'free will' and then killed most of them when they wouldn't listen to You. Send the rest to Hell. So really, you made them to serve You, too. And demons are just… just… humans You don't think got the job done well enough. Or fallen ang—" He sighed. He really had just hung around the wrong people.

Crowley finished the glass that had just been brought to him. "You know," he said before the bartender had turned to go, his voice lilting with alcohol. "It would be easier if you just brought the bottle." In a minute or so a fresh bottle was set in front of him.

"Yeeeaaahhh," he said, slipping a little in his chair. "Most of them are full of shit. But they've gotten You nearly figured out, haven't they?" He leaned his elbows on the table. One slipped off and he corrected it with a sloppy motion. He was completely pissed at this point, and if he'd had the faculties, he might be surprised that he hadn't yet been kicked out. "Loads of them reckon You don't even exist at all."

Crowley leaned back again to make drinking from the bottle easier. "Not at all. There are plenty of ways things could have come about. I mean, who made You?" He frowned. "But if You don't exist, then how can I exist? How can Azira—" He slid his fingers beneath his sunglasses carefully and rubbed his face with his palms.

He sat with the whisky in silence for a long time. Then he set the bottom of the bottle on his knee and made a wrinkled sort of face, lips and nose and brow somehow converging and angling one way all at once.

"Is that Your plan?" he asked quietly. "To destroy Yourself?"

It wasn't long after that, Crowley's raving became completely incoherent. And a bit loud. He was presently repeating the name 'Camus' over and over, each time placing more emphasis on the second half. Once he reached the point where he began to moo like a cow for the second syllable of the philosopher's name, the pub's good graces had run out.

As they escorted him out, he glanced behind the bar. He wished he was in a place highbrow enough to serve Talisker, but there was nothing there worth nicking on the way out. He found himself gently planted, wobbling like a child's toy, just outside the entrance. Crowley tried to straighten his jacket, then he returned to the Bentley to continue his bender.

Is it still a bender? He asked himself. Or is this just they way it is now?

/

Crowley spent most nights stargazing, if the weather was good. Drunk and stargazing. He looked up at the night sky, dark firmament meant never again, for him, to display the soft arc of the galaxy that spiralled around them, the stars that swirled within it, the nebulae that birthed new fire even as the old burned out. Once, Crowley stared upward and wondered if he'd done the Right Thing.

Not the "right thing," because Aziraphale had had the unique ability of pronouncing his capital letters, and this sounded like a Thing between them. It followed that of course it must then be capitalised. Those memories, those deepest, important ones that built themselves slowly into their Arrangement, and then to somewhere beyond. They were something he would not allow himself to give up, even if it felt as though he lived beneath Aziraphale's constant, outstretched shadow.

He watched the blank night sky for what felt like many nights, though it was truly just a few days that were clear enough. He could swipe the clouds from the sky with the easiest of efforts, but he let the weather be. Things didn't go well when he tried to change the weather. It only ever made things worse. He couldn't see the pitch black of night, anyway, just a pervasive, solid blue grey in place of it.

Though he could not see, Crowley could imagine. Imagine and remember. He would envision comets shooting across the sky in unfathomable arcs. When the nights were completely clear, he closed his eyes to see the Milky Way shimmer and swirl around the earth where the grass was damp from a quickly passed rainstorm.

There was no light pollution here, and it helped him fantasize he was able to see everything. Well, everything in view of the world with a human's naked eye. He knew the places of most of the stars, their speeds and trajectories. All the constellations slowly burning themselves out. He knew the planets and when you could see them and from where, almost like extra bright pinholes in the night sky.

Once, Crowley went to a planetarium, hoping, needing, to see. To really see. Even if it was just a vision. Even if it was just an illusion. And he wanted not just the small fraction visible to humans from earth, but all the things beyond. Supernovas and star-birthing nebulae, distant galaxies, planets he thought had too many moons. Even if he could not see the grace and beauty of the colours he and Aziraphale had created, he remembered them. He remembered as clearly as if he were doing it at that very moment.

But the images were thin and unfocused, projected from an aging machine onto an aging screen that should have been replaced decades ago. He had no place criticising the colours, but the motions were all wrong, so much of it made up from the best guesses of men who could study only a fraction of a fraction of the universe with artificial eyes that could only see so far.

A little more than a quarter hour in, things were pushing him so far to the edge that he couldn't take it anymore. Crowley was promptly removed from the premises by the minimal security team when he started shouting, "That's not right! That's not how it happened! I was there! It wasn't–" he waved his arms wildly at every area of the room, trying to point to everything at once. "It wasn't this! It wasn't this!" He may have been slightly, or extremely, inebriated at this point, but he wouldn't be able to recall afterward. He probably was, though, because one of the guards asked him how much he'd had to drink with a face that looked like he could smell it.

When they wrestled Crowley outside, still raving about the birth of the universe, the men in uniforms started to try to calm him down. They looked at him as if he were some half-crazed lunatic that needed to be locked in a padded cell, straight jacketed, and heavily medicated.

If only, he thought.

"Sir, are you all right?"

"Do you need help?"

"Is there anyone we can call?"

Aziraphale…

One of them asked if he was "on anything." Not the same who asked if he was drunk.

He wrested himself free, knocking the guards to the ground.

"No," he said hoarsely as he walked away.

/

Weeks passed with no word. Not a breath of a whisper. Months. Part of him wished Aziraphale's dreams were coming true, falling into place. The angel that wanted to save the world. Crowley no longer knew where he was, driving aimlessly and incredibly drunk, which the Bentley thankfully corrected. He had very little of his own money now that Hell would not cover his expenses.

For company he had his plants, which, he admitted, were very good listeners. Aziraphale had taught him that. He no longer yelled or cursed or growled at them. In fact, none of his furnace of anger was ever directed toward them. With those plants, within his small circle of friends he still had the Bentley (which needed no petrol), and one must not forget the alcohol. Waterfalls of it. Enough to swim in, if he'd had a pool to fill. And not a drop was ever returned to their respective bottles that he might sober up. Sobriety no longer interested him.

"I need so just to talk to you," Crowley said to the damp air one night, hanging one arm and his fifth empty bottle of scotch out the window of the Bentley. His voice was barely audible. "Even when there was nothing to talk about, there was always something to talk about. We always seemed to be able to stumble our way into a conversation."

There was a space he'd still saved like their secret song, gaping and deep. That became the pool he tried to fill inside himself. Sorrow dwelled everywhere, within and without. Everything he did had become a shadow of himself. A shade of Aziraphale.

Sobriety didn't interest him, but sleep did. And of the few (or many, depending on whom you asked, like himself) talents he possessed, one of them was sleeping. Crowley had slept through the entire 19th century. Well, if one didn't count that time he had to get up to use the loo in 1832. He certainly didn't.

At this point, all Crowley knew was that he was somewhere north of London, and probably quite a bit west. He didn't care. He still kept the Bentley under ninety the few times he had used a motorway. Still, he clung to the smallest glimmer of hope that the angel might happen to glance his way and see he was being better. Behaving better. Well, maybe aside from the alcohol.

Is that what I need to be for you, Angel? he thought. You said I was an angel once, is that what matters? Is that what you were so conflicted about? Am I, Fallen, not good enough, instead something you must return to his angelic status to be worthy enough?

He thought of their last argument. The tiniest of moments when he was sure the angel would deny the Metatron. But those moments had slipped away, fickle as an angel's feather in a stream, impossible, like trying to catch sand slipping through your fingers.

/

On one of his motorway journeys, he exited past signs too blurry to read in his state and found himself in the countryside again. Before long, and with some luck, he found what looked like a long-abandoned stone drive into the forest. Crowley pulled over and parked the Bentley in a copse of trees. Sunlight filtered through the high leaves and dappled the leaf covered ground, silver and white and gold. He glanced in the rearview mirror at his plants. He'd decided miracles were a no go for him right now, unless there were an emergency. The only attention he wanted they could not bring him. By this point only Hell would be nipping at his heels.

He very gently removed the plants, their planters still in cardboard boxes to keep them from jostling about too much. He set them down in a small grove of shrubs and foliage of around the same size.

"Now, you'll do all right out here, my lovelies," Crowley said to them, standing. "You'll get fresh air and rain and proper sun, and you won't have to listen to my utterly raving nonsensical depravity all the time." One of the plants seemed to wilt just a little.

Crowley climbed back into the driver seat of the Bentley and made himself as comfortable as possible. He left his sunglasses on, crossed his arms, wiggled his shoulder just right between the seat and the door, and let his head fall against the window. It had started raining a little, and droplets of water hit the glass and snaked downward in unpredictable paths. He watched the rain for a short while. He felt a certain amount of guilt for the plants. They would be all right, but it was more than likely they would never see him again.

God, he thought, unintentionally and with more than a little virulence toward the name. I hope it doesn't hurt to be eaten as a plant. He shot a disgusted look upward. "Clearly You have no problems with violence and pain in the animal kingdom, either. I mean what did those poor animals do to deserve a life of fight or flight, devouring or starvation? What, You think a duck has a moral code? Feed a duck that apple and suddenly it knows what good and evil are?"

And now he was having a one-sided argument with God. He sneered one last time and sighed heavily. The window glass fogged, and he drew random shapes into it with an index finger. His movements made soft, squeaking sounds. Was he really so desperate for attention from upstairs?

Yes, Crowley thought, after a long time. But not from Her. He'd never wanted any attention, not that kind, anyway. Not until Aziraphale.

The angel's absence did something to him. Not when they were apart on earth, no, Crowley could always feel his presence. Admittedly both scenarios did something to Crowley he didn't like, but this was so much worse. The time Aziraphale had been unintentionally discorporated, and Crowley had arrived to the bookshop ablaze, he knew Aziraphale was gone.

He felt it, a tether violently snapped. An awful ache that spread even through his limbs, a crushing tightness in his chest, the overwhelming urge to curl up and disappear. On the outside, of course, he exuded a cavalier anger and took what vengeance he could out on the local public house. On the inside, he felt less alive, withering. Lonely. Lost. And like a broken record was a taunting voice in his head that sounded very much like his own reminding him that this would last eternity.

Now the angel was gone again. By choice. And knowing he was somewhere, even if he couldn't feel him, quieted those severed-connection symptoms just enough. Even if that somewhere was Heaven. He thumped his head against the window a few times. No, no it did not quiet the symptoms. It just added more.

Just keep lying to yourself, he thought. He shook away the thoughts and instead tried to sleep.

He was not supposed to dream. But he did.

He dreamt of every look Aziraphale had ever given him, even when the angel was cross. He even dreamt of those puppy eyed looks of his that more often than not got him what he wanted from Crowley, like removing a paint stain from his overcoat, when the angel was more than capable enough of doing it on his own.

He dreamt of every walk they had taken, especially around St James's Park, when they would find an unoccupied bench by the duck pond and sit close, side by side. Even in his dreams he could feel the static electricity between them.

He dreamt of every time they had sat down in the bookstore, after Crowley would hang his sunglasses on the statue of the rearing horse, reserved for just that, for him. Then he would bestow upon Aziraphale his unmistakable, "unintentional" misunderstanding of personal space and boundaries he had with the angel.

He dreamt of every touch, even the ones that for most go so often unnoticed: fingertips barely brushing when one of them handed something to the other, the brief warmth through their clothing when they passed by in close quarters, knuckles grazing when one handed the other his coat.

He dreamt of the blues of Aziraphale's eyes in heaven and the soft hazel brown of them in his human form on earth, though Crowley always saw the blue in them shrouding the brown.

He dreamt of his hands grasping the angel so tightly, the feel of the fabric of the coat he clenched in his fists and held on to for dear life. And of the feel of that kiss, thousands of years coming, that had sent everything wrong.

Crowley shot straight up in the seat with such force the Bentley rocked slightly beneath him. He wasn't sure how much time had passed. His watch said half one. The last time he remembered looking, it was just about midday. But that wouldn't tell him how many days had passed. He climbed out of the car and headed to the spot where he'd left his plants. He feared the worst, that some grubby animal had wandered its way through and eaten them all. But the plants were as he had left them, and the boxes had barely dampened and had not begun to disintegrate in the slightest. Anywhere from an hour and a half to no more than a few days.

An hour and a half, he thought. It must be, he was sure. Dreams were not allowed. Certainly not those. And certainly not so quickly, flashes like lightning, cloud to cloud, one beginning just as the other died out into darkness behind it. He couldn't bear the thought of so many dreams in such a short amount of time. The possibilities were almost infinite. And repeatable.

Sometimes Crowley wondered if dreams had souls, and that perhaps these types of dreams had the responsibility of hunting down and haunting the soulless.

He thought about that day Aziraphale had gotten splattered with a blue paintball on the back of his suit jacket. The wilting, blue puppy eyes. The perfect sulking lip. The way the angel presented his shoulder like he knew what was coming. Crowley had just been pouting at him in a mocking manner, but somehow the angel at once appeared so absolutely helpless. Crowley knew he hadn't had to blow it away so. He could have snapped his fingers where he stood. But, as always, he found himself grasping any chance to be closer. And Aziraphale looked so ridiculously happy afterward. Crowley had wondered if the angel would dwell on his breath over his neck now, instead of the stain that would absolutely not be there regardless of which of them had cleaned it up.

"Sorry, my dears," he said as he picked up the plants, half mumbling. "What a silly idea of me." He returned to the Bentley and carefully returned them to the back. He sat in the driver's seat for a moment, then looked up 'long term rentals' on his phone, for no reason he could pin down. An older couple was renting out a renovated space on their land far from the main house. That would do.

It was available, and though they did offer him to come down to the house for some meals, he politely declined. So far from the main house, they had no reason to question the strange hours he kept, or the amount he slept or didn't. Especially not the veritable truckloads of liquor with which he stocked the renovated barn. He'd driven to every off-licence in a twenty-five-mile radius and cleaned them out. More than one trip had been made, each time the boot was so full of whisky it barely closed, and even the Bentley's footwells had bottles jammed into them.

Crowley drank. It seemed such an understated word for what he was doing, because it had no end, no pause save to restock if he must. He drank until he was blind, which took extraordinary amounts of alcohol. Usually at least four crates of whisky so long as it was at least eighty proof. A night came when he drank to the point he nearly spilled a bottle all over the so nicely renovated floor of his hosts. That would not do. They were such lovely people. He decided he must be more careful. Whether he was or not was a matter of opinion.

He sank down to sit on the floor, back against the long side of the bed. He stared at the wall, a quarter of the window visible to him. The earth was well on its way to spinning them into another dawn, one he could barely see. With it would come the sounds of rousing farm animals in the distance. Crowley briefly considered making the particularly obnoxious cockerel disappear, but he thought better of it. For one, he was trying to stay at least mostly under Hell's radar. For another, he was only doing what he was meant to do.

What he was meant to do. Crowley stood.

He wanted to scream: the kind of earth-shattering sound that made one believe the ground beneath might in fact come apart and swallow everything above it whole. The kind of scream that would rip and tear and rend his throat to shreds, to ribbons. To tear apart the web of scars that held him so together with such fragility. He wanted to scream, but he did not.

Instead, he turned toward the bed and fell back to the ground, his kneecaps cracking on the wooden floor. He hardly noticed. He folded one arm on the mattress in front of him and let his head fall sloppily onto it. With the other, he slowly set the bottle of whisky down as steadily as he could, and then let that arm fall limply alongside his crumpled body. He breathed in, shuddering and uneven, with a short exhalation before another shuddering breath. The kind of breath of someone who'd been crying hard and long. Sobbing silently.

"I miss you," he choked out. "In some sort of way I can't even comprehend. Human, maybe. Desperately."

With great effort, Crowley lifted the arm at his side up to the bed and pulled his head back. He stared for a long time at his hands. Hands that would never again touch the angel he could not keep at bay in his dreams. He stared, vision blurred. A fear crept into him that if Aziraphale began to forget him he might begin to disappear.

Slowly, he pressed his palms together in front of him, his elbows on the bed. He entwined and then straightened his fingers.

How? How is this done?

He looked up, then squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead against the length of the thumbs of his trembling hands.

"I don't know how to pray," Crowley whispered, the burn of weeks of whisky heavy in his voice. "You see people pray to God, you see them pray to those they'd lost. Humans pray. Demons… the Fallen…" he trailed off.

He didn't know if you were to pray silently or aloud. In the end, he said softly, "Aziraphale. Angel. My angel. If you can… hear me, I am truly sorry. I know you've made your choice to join Heaven, to do what you can for the good." His voice strived to be louder. "I don't even know how this would ever work, you up there and me down here. You an angel and me…" He swallowed hard, feeling every word catch in his throat. "But please. Please. There must be some reason for you to visit earth again. I know you must be very busy, saving the world and all that…" He stopped long enough to notice it had begun to rain.

"But once or twice. Now and again. Cuppa at the bookshop. Lunch at the Ritz. Sitting beside one another on a bench in Saint James's Park by the duck pond. I even promise I'll stop shouting at all the humans throwing bread. The nightingales…" At that a tear did fall. It trailed its way down his cheek, into the corner of his mouth, then continued down his chin. He saw a flash of memory: Aziraphale swiping blackberry juice from his chin, staring at him the whole time.

He wondered if Aziraphale could hear his thoughts. Oh, if I could only put into words how I've missed you. Needed you. Was I too late? Was I too slow? If only I could make up for all the years I should have been kissing you. I thought… I started to believe, that if we were created for eternity, we were created to be together. And if not created so, I'd hoped–still hope–that it would be with you anyway. Since the moment you told me you gave away that flaming sword.

Crowley let the tear dry. I am somehow broken without you. Snapped to pieces inside. I'd do anything. Anything… He had to admit that he might even take him up on his offer, if he could reverse time. Surely Heaven could not be worse than this.

There is nothing without you. I beg of you. Please. Don't leave me here alone. I need you…

He slumped against the bed, his posture not dissimilar to a broken statue. Crowley started to catch his breath. As he did, his jaw clenched, tightened more and more, his teeth grinding, the skin at his temples pulsing. He ground down so much anger he thought his jaw might dislocate, or even break altogether.

"And to You," he snarled suddenly, his face almost on the floor where he had crumpled, though he was speaking clearly to Upstairs. He spoke with such vitriol flecks of spit sprayed the floor. "You and Your 'Ineffable Plan'. Does this have to be a part of it? Do either of us have to be a part of it? Is there even any Plan at all?

"Do you enjoy watching the hurt and loss and pain and pure agony in all these creatures You've created? All of us: human, angel, demon alike. Even the animals!" he brought up once more. "Have You ever even seen a nature documentary?! Starvation, being devoured from the inside out, still alive while flesh is being ripped from bone? It's barbaric! You're barbaric!"

His body heaved and his voice softened. "Just a few moments. Once in a while. Would that ruin everything? Aren't You capable of keeping it from ruining anything?" He started to remember the last time he'd asked Her too many questions. His anger was waning, being replaced with some indescribable sadness. He started to straighten himself to stand, but stopped halfway and wrapped his arms around his stomach. In went a deep breath.

"YOU TOOK HIM!" He screamed, just as he had when he thought Aziraphale had been taken from him in the fire. "You took my BEST FRIEND! You–You took the love of my, of my–" He clutched at his empty chest uselessly, clutched at his clothes, at the sheets on the bed. He fisted his hands in his hair. "I LOVED HIM! You took the love of my life, or, or, or whatever it is I have, whatever sick joke it was, making me, making us! You took the love of my ENTIRE EXISTENCE!"

His voice was failing him, but still he screamed. "I LOVED HIM!" He fell forward again, voice softening only barely. "I LOVE HIM!"

His arms and head fell onto the bed. He buried his face in the duvet, pulled it around his him until it was difficult to breathe. He uttered a final, "Please," in a broken whisper. It was a whisper that carried with it all the guilt and shame and sorrow and loneliness and pure pain gathered from the world entire. The prayers of the whole planet he took and melded, fused them into one word. A terrible and horrible amalgamation of pain. He hoped She could feel it.

Crowley drank and drank and drank until he finally passed out. When he came to, he was stone cold sober. No hangover. He reached for another bottle and started again. He did the same week after week for months with no answer. It was time to move on.

The elderly couple seemed sorry to see him go, as he had always been pleasant on the outside when in their company and left the place tidier than he found it. He also left them a larger sum of money than he owed. It was a good deal of what he had left.

/

He drove fast now. As fast as the Bentley would let him. If proper driving etiquette didn't get the angel's attention, perhaps this would. And if not, then at least he was driving the way he wanted. Crowley seemed to have lost control of the stereo. Not that he ever quite had it, but this was not an enjoyable oddity, like all his tapes eventually turning into Queen albums. This time the Bentley suddenly developed a knack for finding songs that utterly destroyed him.

You dreamed me up and left me here

How long was I dreaming for?

What was it you wanted me for?

Crowley groaned as his insides twisted. "Really? Tom Waits? This is just… cruel." But there was something inside him that still needed to come out. His mourning was far from complete. If it ever would be. If it ever could.

/

He used his phone to again find accommodations, but this time he looked for the worst rated motel he could find. He booked a room.

The man behind the counter was chain smoking and looked like he hadn't bathed in a month. Or changed his clothes. The key he was handed was worn and dull, the teeth ground down to curves. The plastic key fob was thick with grime from countless years of use in every scratch and inlay. He could barely read the room number. Never cleaned, he was sure.

Perfect.

Opening the door to his room took some jiggling of the key at just the right angle, but it opened. He shut it behind him with his foot. The last and final real miracle he would perform was to soundproof the room.

Crowley sat on the bed for a while. He was so lonely for Aziraphale he felt sick. He slowly dropped down until his back was on the mattress and looked around. The curtains looked a dark blue, he thought, and were pulled shut across a long window. There was a thinner, sheer white linen curtain behind the blue. He got up and pulled both open as far as they would go. This room did not overlook the car park, and instead he had a decent view of the sunset, which he still couldn't really see right.

He stood just at the glass, looking out over the empty road and past a field with a copse of birch trees. He couldn't see it properly, but he could imagine. The dance of the colours, the battle in which yellows and oranges and reds succumbed to purples and blues and indigos. Then the sky would turn black as ink.

Never for him, though, not anymore. Since the angel had left, he'd been trapped in this deep, grey eventide. Always just twilight after sunset and before sunrise. That night was cloudy, but not so much that there weren't plenty of breaks that let the night shine through. As always, he saw nothing. No moon, no stars. Lost to him were the velvety nights that seduced the senses, with no need to see anything beyond Aziraphale.

Crowley pulled the curtains closed, turned, and grabbed a bottle of whisky from the case. He set it gently on the bedside table. Then he thought better of it and so put a twin at its side. He opened the first and took a long draw from it. It was an angry curiosity that made him open the small drawer by the bed. A bible sat at an angle, the only thing there other than a small notepad and pen. He picked it up. With his face contorting in anger, the book went up in flames. Yes, he thought, this is it. The road's end.

He would no longer contribute to the keeping of dead angels while living nothing but lies.

Crowley set his sunglasses down on the bedside table. He checked the curtains again to be sure no one would be able to see in. He took the pen from the bedside drawer and snapped it in half, then used the ink to smear the peephole dark. It was quiet, though he could hear the buzz of the neon signs faintly. Sound coming in, but none going out.

He turned and leaned his back against the door, ink smeared over most of his fingers and one palm. Orange carpet, probably from the seventies, beaten down with time and dirt. Small table in the corner with one chair. A short dresser with an old tube TV angled on one side. Next to it was a triangular cardboard sign that said, "free cable". A single bed. The bedside table next to it. And opposite him, the open door to the bathroom, plastered with olive coloured tile and a dying orange light above the sink mirror that flickered once in a while.

He pushed himself away from the door, and thus his ward of silence.

Then Crowley screamed. He tore at the outer layers of his clothes until they were shreds that shifted slowly down his body and slipped to the ground. He kicked the furniture until his shoes split from their soles, and then he kicked his shoes off. He grabbed the wooden chair and threw it against the table. Both broke into unrecognisable forms, into alien pieces, splinters almost a confetti, damned. He stepped into the bathroom and put his hands on either side of the yellowing sink. Then he screamed some more, this time at his own unrecognisable reflection.

One of his fists went through the mirror. A spray of glass. The shower curtain came down, snapping every ring on the way. He returned to the main room and threw the outdated television at the wall. Crowley's shoulders were heaving, his emotions beyond control. A haze began to fill the small room.

His wings unfurled in the small room, black and shining and every bit as angelic as Aziraphale's.

Just not white anymore, he thought bitterly.

Crowley sank to the floor facing the foot of the bed and grabbed the open bottle from the small bedside table. He took a long drink from it. Then another. His hands were bloody from the mirror and slippery against the glass. The bottle almost slipped from his grasp. He looked at his stained hands quietly, save for the hoarse sounds the desperate gasps for air his lungs made. Breathing out of habit. Out of whatever humanity came with these assigned bodies.

There was no turning back. He would belong to no one.

Crowley reached one shaking hand across his chest and back over the opposite shoulder. He could feel the softer feathers just at the base, along his scapula. Even darkness could be as soft as sweet, violent wings. A brief flash of thought passed through his mind, and he wondered if it felt anything like duck down. He wasn't sure he'd ever find out.

The thought came and went, and his hands moved along the wing, fingertips familiar with the gloss of each feather as he ran them along the vanes. Even in the dim light of the rundown motel room they shone. Not a glow, but instead it was like a fractured crystal, every ray of light caught, split, augmented. The softest of reflected sparks of light painted the dirty taupe walls in every colour imaginable. If only Crowley could see it.

He thought of his wings when they had been white. Before the Fall. Somehow, they never seemed to have shone quite as much as this, even then. When he met Aziraphale, though, even from the first moment that shooting, wavering blue light had transformed into an angel, he saw wings that gleamed like no other.

His hand shook. His jaw locked. His eyes closed. Another breath and he grasped the wing as close to his skin as possible, where it was thickest, near the top. With every ounce of strength he had and more, Crowley began to rip through feather and skin, muscle and bone and blood, which was coming fast and dark and slippery. He pulled until he felt the joint dislocate and the tearing of the tendons and ligaments, which snapped like the sound of gunfire. He moved his blood slick hand under his arm, which was raised so he could reach the bottom half of his wing. It was easier, though not by much. He severed the last of the wing. Through all of this his mouth was wide, teeth shining and face distorted in pain, but he uttered no sound.

When he was done, one great black wing lay perfectly folded on the motel floor. Crowley did not know how long it had taken. Time no longer had any meaning to him. He and time collided somewhere, could not grasp one another and so clashed in ways that made no sense. Time did not get confused, it did not worry or spend countless hours considering how it affects anything around it. Crowley did all of these things. Time, as he understood it, was merely a thief.

His back was soaked, as were the remnants of his clothes. With another hit of whisky, he did the same to the other wing. It was more difficult this time; his strength was waning. He felt like a man drowning, every other gasp of air rattling in his chest, constricting in pain. This time Crowley did scream, because it was all he had left.

Once a second black wing lay beside the other, Crowley kept screaming until his voice hid from him. As if it were itself begging him to stop. He panted heavily a few times, then fell unconscious to the floor. His last image was of a bottle falling to its side and beginning to roll away.

All around him the world swayed. Dim and cold and dank with the faint smell of mildew and… something else he couldn't place. He could hear the sounds of insects somewhere. Where? Where was he? His head pounded. Crowley rubbed his eyes, scrubbed his face with his palms. Everything was so wet. He determined he was on his knees on the ground. His trousers were damp. It had been raining. Warm rain on a cold night. He must have had one bottle too, cajoling or maybe forcing the bartender to keep serving him. Or perhaps helping himself to a few bottles from behind the bar. Easy enough to slink by without being noticed, he was very good at that. Another night, another familiar drunken stumble out back of the pub to a deserted alley. Another heavy crash of his shoulders against a stone wall. Another slow slide to the ground with the bottle still in hand. All familiar, even if he did not remember this time.

He reached blindly for the bottle of whisky he hoped had not rolled too far out of reach when he'd fallen. Unbroken, he also hoped. His hands were met with nothing but rain soaked ground, the texture unpleasant against his fingertips.

His head kept pounding, but he was more alert. Starting to come 'round. When he went to lift a hand to his temple, this time he saw the blood. The world suddenly came far more into focus. The ground that was not ground. There was no pavement beneath him, no tarmac. The spinning began to slow. He spared a second to hate the way this body processed alcohol so quickly. His hands tentatively assessed the area around him, and his eyes began to really see again, even if there were two or three of everything.

Furniture. A low, round table with one wooden chair that had been broken and now lay twisted and snapped on its side, blood spattered. A dresser with the drawers removed violently and strewn split apart across the room, also covered with blood streaks, spray, and handprints. A bed with the blankets and sheets twisted and rolled up and sodden with blood that looked black as it crept slowly up the fabric. The twin mattress had been pulled half off the frame, a corner soaking up deep red from the floor. A TV, screen shattered, and one knob popped off onto the floor. The bedside table and curtains seemed to be the only thing intact. The view in was still closed to the world. The curtains had begun to soak up a darkness from the floor beneath.

A metallic smell. Old iron. Rust. He looked around again from where he was on his knees, sitting on his feet. Blood spread like ink over oil all around him, dark and black in its thick aggregate, thinning to a caliginous copper where it slithered out and away. It feathered across the carpet like some frightful, monochrome watercolour. The walls were patterned with red, some dark and drying, some wet and bright. Crowley could not remember seeing so much blood, not even since The Beginning.

He was awash in it where he had collapsed on the floor. He stood, reaching out for something to steady himself but finding nothing. Of course, he'd destroyed it all. Feet braced apart, back hunched forward, he held his hands inches from his face, as if he were going to cover it with his palms. Looking up, he saw another door before him, open.

The bathroom was solemn and dark and brutal in the dim flickering and buzzing of the orange-white light behind frosted glass. Dead insects were piled in the corners of the light fixture, disassembling pieces in their decay. He could see a single fly crawling upside down inside its prison. The sink had pieces of glass in the basin. There were pieces of glass on the awful green tiled floor. All were painted in some way with trails of blood.

Above the sink was the shattered mirror. He looked at the back of his hands. On his right, clustered around his knuckles, were several cuts. They were still oozing. A memory like fog came to him, his anger and rage, his fist connecting with the mirror glass.

There was enough glass left to glimpse an angular, disfigured reflection of himself, more unrecognisable even than every night before. He held his hands before him, palms together, like a penitent. They were awash in red, thick and trickling, skin seeping with it as though he had plunged his arms into a vat of blood past his elbows. Over even the black of his shirt, the tailored seams frayed and torn to expose the skin of his shoulders and back painted crimson with trenches of torn flesh. The blood dripped slowly down his face, smeared across his forehead and splattered on his ears, his neck, his chin.

Habit made him reach for his sunglasses, but he was already staring at his face, and there was nothing covering his eyes. He always hated when he had to look at his eyes. But he stepped closer to the mirror and could see his hair slick with the same thick, oily blood that soaked the fabric of his shirt, of his trousers, blood that felt as though it would seep back into his skin were it possible.

He blinked, trying to recognise the face that glared back, so lost. He blinked again. What stared back into his eyes were not his own. They were not yellow. There were no vertical, slitted pupils, a misery granted to him just before his Fall. Intended to blot out the night sky so he would never again see the immense magnificence he'd created with God's blueprint and Aziraphale by his side. For a moment he forgot all the blood, all the damage and destruction.

His head was suddenly swarmed with the colour of memory. The nascent, uncontrollable energy blasting, blinding, swarming and swirling and shooting past him. Them. Him and Aziraphale.

"Look at you, you're gorgeous."

And it was. The stars roaring furnaces, the swirls and curves of forming galaxies, the nebulae explosively birthing more fire to hurl into the near infinite unknown. He remembered Alpha Centauri exploding from a fireball to come to rest nearly right next to them. Yes, the colours, the amorphous, aborning shapes, the radiance and coruscation of the already formed stars that scattered in every direction. All of that was gorgeous. But he was not, he knew, only talking about the creation he was watching bloom before his eyes.

When he was cast out, after first spending his time fomenting temptation in the Garden as a snake, he was left with this cruel, residual gift. His eyes did not change with his body, instead remaining those of a snake. It had left him almost colourblind and unable to see the stars, or even the moon. Despite this punishment, all of those things he had not been able to see when he looked up in the dark had never mattered. When all that was taken from him it had never mattered, because he had Aziraphale. He had his star. And now the angel was gone. And Crowley was left with not a single piece of him to hold on to.

But now, looking in that shard of mirror at what must be his own eyes, there was no slit, no yellow-gold iris. Only soft brown contracting around circular, dark pupils stared back at him. Human. Or at least normal.

All that remained was his tattoo, static and unalive now just in front of his ear at his jaw. It was a faded black and red and gold, blurred at the edges as real tattoos eventually do. A reminder, as though the way his shoulders would scar over would not be enough. A last laugh in a trail of Heavenly laughs thousands of years long that was clearly not long enough.

Crowley was silent a long time. For a moment he wondered if he'd remembered to hang the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the doorknob. The thought passed quickly. When he began to laugh, the dim, humming light above him shone brighter and buzzed louder. Brighter and louder until the bulbs burst within their cage, cracking the frosted glass. The only living fly took wing to its freedom, and the room fell into shadow.

The quiet buzzing of the fly made him think of Beelzebub. And then of Gabriel. And then of Aziraphale. And then the hurt he'd caused the angel and the fool he'd made of himself. And then the kiss. And then, finally, the look on Aziraphale's pale face as the Heavenly elevator door closed and took his other half where he could not, or would not, go.

The tiled floor felt wet and slick under his bare feet. Crowley turned the shower faucet. Nothing happened. He pulled at the plug and twisted and tried again, but there was no water running to the shower.

"Piss fucking bollocks."

He picked the largest pieces of glass out of the sink, then turned on the faucet. At least the sink worked. He did the best he could to wash the blood from him. When he was done, the dingy white washcloths, hand towels, and bath towels were completely soaked red and pink. He threw them on the floor. He wasn't sure what to do about his clothes. Those he couldn't wash in the sink easily enough. He glared at the shower head as if it might cower from him.

Crowley walked out of the bathroom, trying to avoid the glass. He stood in the middle of the room, which at this moment might as well have been a battlefield. His hands were at his sides. If he couldn't wash his clothes he might as well try one last miracle to clean them, repair the room. Disappear his broken wings. Hell be damned. With a simple, terse motion, he lifted his forearms and snapped, as if beckoning something from below. His usual way of executing simple demonic miracles.

Nothing happened. He tried again, with a grander gesture, ignoring the pain in his back. The blood remained where it was. The furniture still broken, save for the bedside table. He almost smiled when he saw the second bottle of scotch full and unharmed, his sunglasses folded neatly at his side. It seemed he had, in fact, severed himself from whatever otherworldly powers drove his side. That side, not his own side. Crowley sighed a small laugh.

He found his nearly destroyed shoes in the corner. As he leaned to retrieve them, a glint of metal on the floor caught his eye. He picked up the motel key and slipped his bloodied feet into his useless shoes.

Cor, the thought. I'm going to need an entire new wardrobe. He was being terribly over dramatic, because this was only one outfit, though the only one he presently had on earth. Besides, he would not be able to afford that, of course, much less store one. No more hellish convenience of an endless, demonic wardrobe.

He didn't much care what he left behind, whether when it was found people would gasp in disbelief and call 999, or if they would cross themselves and speak to God, or if they would just scream and never be the same again. He didn't much care what the rest of the universe would think either. Nor Heaven nor Hell. He did not need either of them. He belonged with neither of them. To neither of them. He never had.

The doorknob of the motel room required quite a pull to get it to shut. He'd left the key. He hadn't thought to rinse it and he wasn't going to turn it in looking like that. To his luck, just outside a room two doors down was an unattended housekeeper cart. He craned his head around the open door and saw someone busy cleaning the bathroom. With an almost cartoon-like yank, Crowley grabbed half the stack of clean bath towels from the cart. There was no way he was going to sit in the Bentley without protecting the seats.

He turned away from the hotel and nearly tripped over himself. The world had changed. Or he had. An entire spectrum of colours he thought he would only ever see in his memories now revealed themselves.

The colours he could see now drove him to distraction. The colours. All the colours he hadn't been able to see since the moment he'd been made a serpent in the Garden were returned to him. They flooded his senses like synaesthesia. Crowley quietly marvelled at it all.

"Shite," he mumbled to himself suddenly. "I need to get out of here." He strode quickly to the Bentley and tried to arrange the towels so the blood wouldn't seep through. "Sorry, girl, this was certainly not my intent." His back and shoulders hurt, his human adrenaline, if that's what it was, wearing off. The pain was near blinding. He climbed into the Bentley, towels lining the seats and his body. He started the engine and drove out of the car park.

What he did not see, as he had pulled the motel room door closed, were the black, perfect feathers of his self-severed wings begin slowly to turn, tip to bloodied quill, from black to a blinding white.

/

From there, once he had clothes that were not shredded and blood soaked, it was more meandering the countryside. He didn't sleep for days. There seemed to be some residual effect fading from him slowly enough that allowed him to heal quite quickly. Still, the pain was there, and the scars that remained must appear gruesome. He couldn't bring himself to look at them yet.

Once he was mostly healed, Crowley tried sleeping in the Bentley again, but dreams uncurled from the shadows like bats taking wing, so much worse than before. It was no longer only memories that tormented him, but worlds that did not, could not exist. Somehow, he missed more the things that would never be than the things that had been. Aziraphale returning and embracing him. A life together never having been angels in the first place. The pair of them disappearing together forever, like Gabriel and Beelzebub. Every time he woke, he was gripped with the choking, flesh-tearing feeling of losing him. Over and over. Again, and again. He could barely function.

Sleep in hotels or B&Bs was better. Less violent to his heart, or at least the place where one should have been. It seemed he remained much an ethereal being in composition. Still in an assigned body built to hold his demonic form. A not quite human vessel.

/

It was already dark, not a hint of cloud, no hint of sunlight on the western horizon. It was only the stars and the moon to walk with him now. Sometimes he'd watch them to the point he would trip over something or walk into someone. He'd gone down the local off-licence to grab another unreasonable supply of liquor. Admittedly, since the celestial night had been returned to him, he had been drinking a tad bit less.

Crowley stepped out onto the pavement, his hands full with cases of whisky, and a bag holding a few bottles of wine. The Bentley, parked on the double yellow line near the door, popped its boot without a word, and he started to load the liquor in a way the bottles were least likely to break. He closed the boot.

The only light other than the moon came from a sodium-vapour streetlamp on the corner and from the windows of the pub. Raucous voices from inside. There was an older couple several doors down the street that seemed to be saying their goodbyes for the night.

Crowley rocked back onto the heels of his once immaculate shoes and smiled awkwardly in their direction. They just glanced at him and shook their heads. Probably the illegal parking. Or the fact that he was still double fisting 750ml bottles of scotch that wouldn't fit in the boot. To his credit only one was open. And it was still mostly full. If only they knew what he had in the boot.

His human constitution was at once terribly disappointing and a surprising respite. The latter especially, as his plans now were to get and to stay as drunk as possible for as long as possible. It only took a bottle or two now before he was out. Eventually his constitution dropped even further and much less than just one bottle would do the trick. It was saving him quite a bit.

The other downside of severing his demonic connection was his pockets. He no longer had access to Hell's financial department, though he had been trying to avoid using it anyway. Everything he had left as of now was everything he had saved. He thought back some years and really wished he'd fired that financial advisor. Or listened to Aziraphale.

What wasn't a downside was that he and his Bentley still shared most of their previous bond. The car still needed no petrol, and it would correct any mistakes he made behind the wheel. At least for now. He really hoped that wouldn't change.

Crowley took a long swig from the open bottle. In the darkness, the damp ground was speckled only by the shattering of those dim lights and soft moon. The pavement and the cracked, old tarmac seemed to mirror the shine of the stars above. It reminded him of that vast and infinite space just before he'd blossomed the universe into existence, he and Aziraphale. A bit more orangey, he admitted. With the streetlamp it more resembled the colour of Alpha Centauri B as it had passed them by.

He stepped to open the driver's side door and tried to sneer at the yellow paint. Attempt after attempt to miracle it away, before ripping his wings off, had forced him to look up several "professional" painters. But every time, the yellow just bled back through. Or absorbed the grey. As though it were eating its way through. Though he didn't think Aziraphale would ever be so crass. Sometimes he thought it was more like the yellow pulling it in. He couldn't bring himself to make any sort of face about this anymore and sighed instead.

Crowley looked up with his hand on the door handle, and as he did, he saw a falling star, or shooting star, or whatever humans called them. Meteors. It was beautiful and luminous as it moved through the earth's atmosphere, burning. He watched as it grew bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, until it was nearly too bright to look at.

It wasn't long before it became apparent that its course was set straight for this area. He found that mildly concerning, but there was so much light that Crowley couldn't see which way to move to get to safety. And besides, these things were meant to break up and dim to darkness anyway, and if they hit the earth at all, do little or no damage. Well, except that last one. He wasn't responsible for it, but he did had suggested it. He thought it a great contribution to the joke God had been playing on the palaeontologists.

As he watched it close in, lighting the world around him to the brightest day he'd ever seen, he suddenly didn't care. There were worse ways to go. He glanced at the bottle in his hand, glowing white in the light of the meteor. Like liver disease, he was sure. So he stood there, patted his car on the roof, and said, "Good luck, ol' girl. It's been something, hasn't it?", closed his eyes, and waited for his inevitable destruction. Something deep within him, where all those Aziraphale-light created scars were still slowly unravelling, was at peace with the idea. Wanted it, in fact. But that was not to be.

Abruptly, the meteor shattered, raining out and down like welding sparks, splitting in so many directions. Brighter, and just that white yellow that reminded Crowley of that first star shower from which he'd shielded Aziraphale beneath his wing without a second thought. In the distance they began to rain down and sputter out, like small dying stars. But the fewer there were, the closer they got, until suddenly Crowley watched as they almost adjusted their path directly toward him.

"Oh, what the fuck?"

He wasn't entirely afraid; they'd harmed nothing else. Not even the old couple that had remained outside their door. Which, he thought, had been a bit silly, not knowing what would actually happen. They seemed more interested in each other than the fiery rocks of death raining from the sky.

He really was not prepared like he thought he was, thinking they would be as harmless to him as they had to everything else. There was a searing pain in his eyes, a light so bright it could only be described as darkness, his vision torn away like film melting in a projector, the edges like paper fire burning viscously away to white. He shut them tight and screamed in pain. He'd never screamed like this before, not even when he'd ripped his wings from his own body.

There was something different about this pain, deep and dishonest, and it needled its way through his entire being. What came from the very core of him was a keening wail, a cry that echoed, that ripped across counties, through fields and barns and pubs and homes, and the ears of all along the way.

When he came to his senses, he realised he was crouched beside the Bentley, holding the front tyre and wing mirror as if afloat in the dark at sea. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The pain, the colours, the light. His eyes were squeezed shut and he was afraid to touch them. He imagined blood, dark and crimson pouring out of his eyes. He imagined his eyes were no more now than great, burnt, cavernous holes in his face, a face that must be burnt beyond recognition. Every part of him quivered with fear, and he had no sense of anything past the pain. But the pain quickly vanished and became as if it had never been. Crowley regained some of his courage. Enough to release his death grip on the Bentley.

Crowley let go of the car, and, with shaking hands, touched his face. First his cheeks to check for blood. Nothing. Then slowly up to where his eyes should be. He winced until he felt his eyelids, the wrinkles of them deep as they were squeezed shut. He pressed gently, and his lids did not cave in. He felt only the light resistance of his eyes. He opened them and breathed in what must have been the first time in minutes.

In the perfect glossy paint of the Bentley, his reflection stared back at him. He dared to move up to look in the wing mirror. His face was just as it had been when he left the pub, though perhaps a little more sober and a lot more frightened.

He noticed the couple down the road clutching at each other as they stared at him. Patrons of the pub watched him through the windows, some looking as if they might set down their pints and offer aid. But he needed none.

He waved awkwardly. "It's all right, all fine here" he said, trying to add his least terrifying smile. "I'm just… I've never seen that before and…" He gestured wildly toward the direction of the sky from which the phenomenon had originated. "I mean it came right at me. I thought…"

Everyone looked at him in silence.

"Does this happen often 'round here?" he asked with a nervous laugh. The man a few doors down guided the woman back into the house and closed the door, likely not wanting her to have to walk home on her own. A bit hard, Crowley thought, but he couldn't blame them. The pub had returned to its normal noise level. He was alone once more.

He stood and looked up and down the street. No barking dogs, no startled livestock in the distance. No comments he could hear about the incident at all. He dusted off his clothes. What a strange thing to have happened. In fact, it seemed like no one else had seen it at all. People came outside for that sort of thing. Or at least right after. And for this one they probably would have taken shelter, he assumed. He opened the door to the Bentley and looked up at the night sky.

He froze with one foot in and one on the pavement.

The constellations were gone. The stars were gone. The nearly full moon, so bright and huge and heavy in the sky was gone. The Milky Way was gone, that sweep of stardust that spun around them, through which they spun. Like candle flames blown out in a single breath. He ducked back down to look in the mirror. His eyes were still brown, pupils still round. Still human. He looked up again. Not a cloud in the sky. There was no night, either. Just that interminable grey-blue twilight that had taken it over when Aziraphale had left him.

Crowley covered his eyes, pressed the heels of them into them until silver sparks began to dance behind the lids and he started to feel dizzy. He let go. He took a breath. He opened his eyes again and looked up. Nothing. Just the cold, grey universe staring back at him: a pallid, dull gloom that wrapped him up in a blanket of loss.

He remembered the sparks that had showered down around him. He remembered again his wing stretched over Aziraphale. There was no danger, no harm that could possibly come to them, but he'd done it anyway. Perhaps, now that he had walked away from his angel origins, he was susceptible. But aside from his vision, he was completely unharmed. That had been focused.

Intentional. Personal.

One week he'd had his eyes back, his true sight. Or almost. One week he'd been able to see the black of the night sky and the cosmic bodies that populated it after it had been kept from him for so many thousands of years. For one week he could see their creation, the only time it mattered, since Aziraphale was gone. He'd ripped himself somehow from Heaven and Hell, and he'd seen that dark, beautiful, living canvas above. All the things they created in that moment six thousand years ago. In every possible colour. But now there may as well have been no sky, so few colours and so little sight that had been left to him.

Am I supposed to be grateful for those few days? He thought. What a cruelty it had been.

That week, the week he could see, he had more than once sought out any telescopes he could find. Crowley had found more than one someone or somewhere with a telescope and gazed upon the miraculous nebulae, furnaces of every colour and soft shape birthing star after star. Comets of ice and fire. Storms raging on planets that could swallow their small, meaningless world whole. He remembered again the blue spark of Aziraphale darting through the empty web of the dark before and responding to his call for aid.

Of course, Aziraphale had merely held the scroll, but secretly he credited them both equally with the creation. Would the stars and the galaxies and the comets, the planets and the moons, and most of all the beautiful bursts of the nebulae have been so beautiful without Aziraphale there? Would they be there at all?

No, the thought. If anything in this increasingly disappointing universe had any meaning, they were meant to be together at that moment. If there was a Plan, then he was convinced they were meant to create it together. And if that wasn't part of it, then fuck the "Ineffable", insufferable Plan. It was meant to be anyway.

But it was all insignificant, wasn't it. Insignificant to the "Almighty". So insignificant he doubted She even knew what love was. Love received, perhaps, but not love given. And the only love She knew, She pulled from Her creatures under false pretences. But now, now he was certain She'd never felt it. Not that kind of love. Not the love felt in an outpouring greater than any waterfall or rockslide or eruption. Greater than any explosion since before the universe began. And here he was again, doubting. She couldn't possibly understand the love he felt for Aziraphale. And, he hoped helplessly, the love that was returned.

He sank down and leaned against the Bentley's front tyre. And now She had meted out this… punishment? For what? Was it not enough that a few questions had resulted in mite-infested reptilian consequences where She was concerned? And that being not quite enough of a punishment for Her, banishing him with those serpentine eyes as a reminder. Possibly for the apple. And the fall of the Garden. Crowley frowned and nodded to himself, distracted for a moment. Most probably definitely for that.

He got into the car, closed the door, and began to drive.

This. What had been his crime this time? Disobeying Hell? Because Hell had no power to control the cosmos like that. Tempting an angel? He'd done that plenty of times for thousands of years. Though he supposed good food and drink did not weigh out the same on the scales as doubt and disobedience and dereliction of duty.

Crowley's fingertips touched his lips. He so wished that he had not been so awkward. Or angry. That he hadn't been so afraid that he'd let the tenderness fall to the wayside. Six thousand years and that was all he was able to offer.

Aziraphale's reaction had given him whiplash. Because just behind that "L" sound that barely escaped Aziraphale's mouth was a "K". Or possibly hard "C". He "cared" about him? Or he "couldn't"? Couldn't ever, or couldn't right then? Crowley had been too slow for Aziraphale this time. And then for the angel to forgive him. Perhaps… was it possible? Had there never been an "L" in there at all?

A small voice in the back of his head. Does Aziraphale think I even deserve to be loved? Does he think he doesn't deserve it?

Crowley felt as if a ship were sinking in his chest. Then he felt that familiar, fiery anger. But it was not at Hell. Not at Aziraphale. Not even at himself. The only anger that burned within him was for the unholy forces of Heaven. At Her taking Aziraphale, sending the Metatron to cajole him with recognition and attention, like an abusive parent who knows their abused child will jump at the chance to receive that love withheld. And now for taking the only thing that let him gaze upward and see all the beauty they had created. All the beauty that had drifted at his side and made it with him.

She had completely taken Aziraphale from him in every way possible.

Crowley pulled over on an empty road. These emotions were beginning to wear him down, pull him apart. He felt tears build behind his sunglasses in the darkness. He cried out again, a howl of loneliness that cored the universe to its heart, if indeed it had a heart. He slumped over the steering wheel and turned on the headlamps but did not start the car.

"What have I done?" he asked in a small, rough whisper, as he'd been screaming for so long his voice had nothing left. That and the alcohol. Crowley glanced in the rear-view mirror at the plants looming green and gentle behind him in the back seat. They seemed to lean toward him. Not once since his angel left him had he screamed or thrown a tantrum or blamed them for being imperfect. Recent events proved that nothing was.

"I'm the one that tempted him," he rationalised, recalling all the human delights he'd been able to persuade Aziraphale to try over the millennia. Usually food and drink. How the angel had looked so dour and dubious and finicky when he'd first touched that ox meat. But he'd loved it. Stuffed himself full. Then there was the wine. Not long after the angel became quite the connoisseur. Until one day they began their lunch or dinner or tea dates at the Ritz. And there were also the less cultured nights at crowded pubs.

Crowley actually preferred the latter: stuffy and brimming with drunks. When Aziraphale took it as his personal responsibility to ensure no one got too close to the demon. The small nudges, the touches as glasses and bottles were passed from one to the other. The angel's hand on his chest, and not briefly. The constant check-ins with those blue eyes. Lingering eye contact.

But he had tempted the angel. And Aziraphale, who had looked upon these unnecessary human behaviours with not even a curious disdain, had found such delight in them. Crowley laid his head on the steering wheel, not gently.

If such simplicities as food and drink could cause such a response, such a change in the angel, what must that kiss have done?

"Ohhhhh… I've done it all wrong," he groaned, referring not only to the timing, the clumsiness, the lack of tenderness behind it, but that he had once again introduced the angel to something completely alien, completely human. With no time to process. He sat up and touched his lips with his fingertips. Ahead, the hedgerows lining the narrow village road were softly lit by the headlamps.

He was gutted. There was an empty pain in his stomach, a hole in his chest full of fluttering, lonely things when he thought of kissing Aziraphale, when he thought even of just seeing him. Crowley's fingers lingered. He wanted more; he knew now for certain he would never be able to get enough even if the angel were still here in front of him. The question was whether he deserved it now.

Crowley placed both hands on the steering wheel and stared blankly ahead. Everything inside the atmosphere was perfectly clear. He had a small, quick hope that Aziraphale felt the same when he thought of their kiss. Or, although it was because of what he believed to be the very small, selfless part of him, hoped perhaps the angel thought of it not at all.

The morning was beginning to make its fierce announcement. Clouds began to move in. And rain. All of that he could see, even if the rain and his inebriated state made it seem as though there might be more than one of everything. He let out a sharp breath and started the engine.

North. He would drive north as far as he could go. As far from London and the A.Z. Fell and Co bookshop as he could get without leaving behind his car. And if that wasn't far enough, he'd take a ship with the Bentley to the other side of the earth if he had to.

/

Crowley spent a number of months driving vaguely northward. When he started the journey, the scars on his shoulders were vicious and red, and if he stretched the wrong way they would bleed a little. That he always wore dark clothing helped. No one ever saw them. And he learned quickly that the easiest answer to questions about his tattoo was merely, "I lost a bet a very long time ago." It wasn't entirely false.

He was as human as he could be, he was fairly sure. There was still something that remained, but it was no link that he could feel. Though while he had no more access to the magic of miracles, he found he could still charm enough bartenders to give him free booze.

Occasionally he could also somehow magic up a bit of cash. It was always thirty four pound eighty. This very much confused him in a concerning sort of way, but only for the first dozen times or so. No one seemed to be coming after him. Most importantly, his connection with the Bentley had not faded, and it showed no sign of doing so.

After a couple of months, the scars stopped bleeding. Another couple and they had turned from angry red to an angry pinkish colour. It was hard to see them in the reflection, positioned as they were, but he was grateful for that. His snake tattoo, however, taunted him every time he looked in the mirror. Unfortunately for Crowley, he spent a lot of time now in front of mirrors. He just couldn't get his hair to… Well, it wasn't like before. It was exasperating. He thought of cutting it.

His dreams had become far more sinister. A burning bookshop with every wall and every shelf aflame around him. His helpless screams for an Aziraphale that would never come. There was just anger and fear, but mostly fear. For himself. When he woke screaming, sweat soaked and twisted in the sheets he held tightly in his white-knuckle fists, there was a name on his lips. The angel's. But it never came out. And it faded as fast as a penny dropped into the sea.

There were times he knew he was dreaming. Or thought he was. Instead of running from it he would scream at a void.

"What, shall I show him a diagram of this… this… heart—or whatever it is I have in my demonically possessed body? How each piece and movement is indelibly FOR HIM, in all its chaos, like a ship, listing, green water engulfing it, so, SO close to the shore?

"I HAVE SHOWN HIM THAT!"

He woke with his fists pressed hard against his chest. He could still remember the angel's scent, and he swore he smelled it now. It triggered so many memories that he clutched at his head, at his own demons.

Sometimes, in the smallest moments between sleeping and waking, he caught a vision of the stars bursting from Aziraphale's eyes. There was always this fluttering void within him. A shape, a piece, but the edges blurred, and it was not hard to imagine just what that hole in him was.

The piece that was ripped away, he thought.

Once in a while he was granted a night's respite. Or what would have been to most. Dreams of soaring through the most beautifully coloured behemoths of stardust clouds. Asteroids and comets with long tails of ice that looked like fire. A hand holding his, though he could never see who. It felt, though, very much like the other half of his soul. Did he have a soul? Did it matter? From these dreams he woke to wracking sobs and sought out more liquor, curling up back in bed, holding his knees to his chest.

/

At one small but tidy motel, in the cold, and the dark, Crowley heard what sounded like a heartbeat. Really, he felt it more than heard it, but the rhythm was unmistakable. He'd heard it millions of times in humans. Slow from ease, quick from fear or anticipation or exertion. He'd heard the slowing and stopping of those who passed on, whichever way they might be headed. He sat up slowly in the pale light that leaked through his small windows. He was alone here, who could it possibly be? He started to get out of bed to check outside.

"Did you know that God only ever gave a real, beating, flesh and blood heart to one angel?"

Crowley nearly jumped out of his skin. He twisted in the sheets, trying to untangle them from his limbs, to see a vague shadow in the corner chair, with even vaguer wings.

"What the great pissing fuck—?"

Whoever it was remained unphased. "We were supposed to be copies of Her, though with far less power of course. But for some reason She chose to give one angel an actual, beating heart."

Crowley was sure this was no agent of Hell, but he would almost have preferred that to one of Heaven's. No, he definitely would have.

"I'm sorry, I don't give an actual fuck who you are, or about any of this… bullshit it feels like you're about to waffle on about, so please, do one?" Crowley was extremely irritated at this point. He always woke up grumpy lately, and this was no exception. Now he had to be grumpy with a stranger in his room.

The figure was silent, but it made no move to leave. No movement at all.

"Did you not hear?" Crowley said. His voice was louder and slightly less raspy.

"I think you do want to hear this, what was it, 'bullshit I'm about to waffle on about'."

Crowley raised his arms from his sides and dropped them heavily. "Who even are you? Popping into blokes' rooms unannounced. For all you know, I could have been starkers!" He almost was.

"No one important." The shadow moved just slightly, and Crowley could tell it was not a trick of the light. Shadows did not cast shadows of their own. At least he didn't think they did. It made him feel slightly better, as he'd suddenly had the thought he might be talking to no one.

"What do you want? Why are you here?" he asked, finally disentangling himself from his bedsheets. He rubbed his eyes, but it made nothing clearer.

The figure ignored him and instead continued the story. "Then God set up his fall. She created a number of angels with a very specific arrangement in mind. You know Her and Her 'Plans'." Crowley scowled, and the stranger continued. "She put those angels in a position where their only choice was to carry out his Plan."

Crowley scoffed. "Another 'Plan'," he spat. "And what was it this time? Ruining the family barbecue?"

The figure still ignored him. It was very grating on his nerves. "This particular Plan was angelicide. They were forced to murder other angels."

Crowley was not sure what to say, so he waited, slowly pulling on his trousers. He stood on the same side of the bed as his guest in the near darkness.

"In imposing their sentences," a wing moved, and Crowley could see a white feather catch the smallest ray of early sun for just a moment, "She was… unfair. Call it a disproportionate response. After Her… disciplinary actions, that heart-blessed angel lost faith in Her, rebelled, and was cast out."

Nothing wrong with a little rebellion, Crowley thought. He crossed his arms. The skin was still tight across his back and shoulders, and he winced.

"I'm sure you've already figured out which angel," the voice said.

"Lucifer," mumbled Crowly.

There came a small noise of agreement. "When She cast him out, She tore out the heart She had so gracefully given him. All other angels have never been made with hearts, because they are all essentially, as I said, far less powerful clones of Her."

The only thing Crowley could think to say was, "Why?" That voice sounded so familiar, but he couldn't place it. An itch in the back of his head, throat, a name on the tip of his tongue.

The figure, the angel, laughed. "What is the use in asking Her why? The only answer anyone will ever get is 'The Plan'." The chair creaked faintly.

"So why are you here?" Crowley asked, taking two slow steps forward. "I've no more links to Heaven or Hell. At least nothing more than a car and a handful of change. I want nothing to do with either of them."

"True," said the angel. Crowley was gritting his teeth trying to place that voice. "I'm here because you're finally hearing it," it added.

"Hearing what? A distant thunderstorm?" Crowley scowled and stepped forward again. "I'm alone here. I'm alone here for a reason."

The angel became no more visible the closer he got. There was a short silence. "You think you've Fallen further into darkness."

Crowley quickly looked away. It was not far from the truth, or it was the truth. He had Fallen. He had survived the pain and anguish that accompanied it. But Falling seemed a scraped knee to this life. If you could even call it that any longer.

"Crowley, just stop, close your eyes, and listen."

He didn't look convinced. It was probably a distantly passing oversized vehicle, or a storm, as he said. But he humoured the visitor and closed his eyes. He listened but heard nothing. He waited until exasperation overtook him. Just before he opened his eyes came the thrum-thrum, louder than before. He thought he could feel it under the floor. He opened one eye and squinted the other. "Are you trying to tell me there's something under the floorboards? Is this some kind of Tell-Tale Heart thing? Because the only guilt I feel doesn't involve killing anyone."

"There is no heart beneath the floor. But there is one in this room." The shadow paused as if trying to give him another chance to come 'round. "Crowley, the love you carry for Aziraphale is light itself, that webbing of what you feel are scars? You've created something stronger than any angel has created before. That is the sound you are hearing."

Crowley squinted into the darkness, for once wishing he still had his reptilian eyes. He was starting to feel silly, and a bit thick.

"Does God have a heart?" the angel asked. "As I said, she created us as Her clones. So, no heart there either, then? No meaty, labyrinthine, almost… serpentine motions that spew some divine lifeblood throughout the entirety of Her supposedly omnipresent existence? For one, how would that even work? And even if it could, if She'd had a heart to balance out that manic head of Hers we wouldn't be here, would we?"

"Well, we'd be somewhere," Crowley countered. "Or nowhere. Or some-thing in no 'where'. Or No one in some-thing–" He stopped himself. "So, you're saying we wouldn't be in a universe that has been on the record to be destroyed after six thousand years?" Crowley asked.

The shadow shrugged. "Entirely possible. It could be anything."

Anything. Maybe one where Aziraphale said yes to him. Or maybe…

"What, with Aziraphale and I never meeting, and—" He stopped short. "Never meeting," he repeated slowly. The thought made him nauseous. It didn't matter that never meeting meant never knowing they would never meet. This Crowley, here and now, could not get that far in his reasoning to keep his stomach from churning, and he suddenly felt very dizzy.

"Perhaps." The shadow shifted; more feathers were visible as the sun moved through the sky. "What is so bad about learning about good and evil?"

Finally, vindicated. "See? that's what I said!" Crowley interrupted, forgetting himself for a moment.

"And anyway, the tree was incomplete," she continued, because it was definitely a she, Crowley decided. "The apple was but a small portion of what God literally flailed between as good and as evil. Morality. Absolute or relative? Free will leading to ethics. Free will leading to chaos. Even God could not decide. Even our omnipotent God could not control it, it seems. People kill other people over it. And to this day no one has figured it out, not beyond their own pompous, self-righteous assertions that they were infallible. In the right. Did you know Kant had OCD?"

Crowley didn't think he knew who Kant was, but he was sure he was going to figure out who this was if he had just a few more minutes.

"Humans She gave hearts, and supposedly loved them above all, depending on who you ask. She tortures them like ants as children do, so I would lean toward no. Angels She gave something less of Herself, a sort of muted glow we found could be filled by things. Things, but only for a short time. Bodies, which we outlived and forgot as often as we remembered.

"Except. Look around you, Crowley."

Crowley felt compelled to obey. He noticed the room was much brighter. All around him was suddenly like the very first light of dawn, but without direction, and whiter and bluer than the sunlight. And coming from inside the room.

"Am I waking up now?" he asked.

"You behave as though you are dreaming."

"Of course I'm not. This is it. The bottom. Below any level of Hell I could conceive. At least, that's what I imagine happens. An already Fallen angel who rips off his own wings? Left human-but-not-quite? I've never even heard of such a thing." Crowley scowled. It was more of a pout, really, which was hiding the sadness he'd flooded himself with again.

"Then what is that light?" The light had not brightened, and it still came from what seemed to be every direction.

"I thought that was you," Crowley said.

"It is not coming from me," she said simply.

"Oh." He was still struggling with this apparently simple concept. "Well. I don't know," Crowley said mockingly, more comfortable with anger than sadness. "I imagine it's just someone playing with me then. You, maybe? I don't even know who you are or why you're here. Who knows?"

The angel's form was more visible now, but he could see no identifying features. She tapped the centre of her chest.

He steadied himself and looked down. Between the black buttons of his freshly pressed shirt, open down to just beneath his breastbone (he must be in Hell, he hadn't ironed since… well, the Incident). Emanating from there came a light. White and warm and blue and gold all at once. It reminded him of Aziraphale's eyes, and of his absurd wardrobe preferences. He almost choked.

"What is this?" he asked, awe softening his voice to nearly a whisper.

"The first angel with a heart. Self-made. It may not have pumped much blood before you tore your wings from your body, but light instead."

"And now?" he asked slowly.

"Mostly blood. But as you can see, only mostly."

"How does an angel give themself a heart…?" he asked, neck still bent, hands parting his shirt further as he watched the glow in his chest.

"How do you think?"

Crowley looked up at her. "I don't kn—Oh," he said quietly.

"That, and being at least a little bit of a good person," the angel said. Words Aziraphale had once said to him.

"But I'm… human… now." He placed his hand to his chest and felt the warmth of the light. He felt a beat, a quiet thumping that was pushing not only blood around his body but moved as well six thousand years of Aziraphale.

"Are you?"

Crowley took several, purposeful steps toward the shadow, finally, finally recognizing the voice.

"Muriel?" he asked. But she was already gone.

/

One morning he woke, slightly hungover as his human organs tried desperately to keep up with his alcoholism. Crowley wasn't sure if angels or demons could be alcoholics, but he very clearly was one now. He stumbled to the bathroom of the rented room he'd found for the night and leaned his hands on the sides of the sink. He reached to turn on the faucet but stopped. Frozen.

The tattoo was gone. He leaned in close to the mirror and scrubbed at his skin. He pulled and stretched the flesh around his ear and jaw. Eventually Crowley resorted to searching his entire body for it, it moved sometimes, but to no avail. The snake was gone and losing that part of him somehow hurt more than his Fall.

Would his newly discovered heart be next?

When he walked outside that night, he could see all the colours of the evening. That misty, grey purgatory was gone. He could watch the sun rise and set, see the colours it painted across the sky. But he could not see the moon or stars.

/

Eventually, Crowley reached Scotland, and the farther north he went the more he began to forget. He was not aware of the forgetting, which could be seen as some small solace if he'd known. Memories he couldn't quite drag up eventually stopped exasperating him and faded to the softest touch in the back of his mind.

The snake tattoo had been first. And who was to say whether that be a punishment or a mercy? The bookshop was next: every leather-bound book, every cramped crook and corner to hide away amongst the shelves, the light that filtered through each dust mote through the window above the desk. The rearing horse statue meant just for him to hang his sunglasses. His sunglasses. Until then, every bookshop he'd passed had had him gripping the steering wheel of the Bentley until he felt his bones might break.

Following that, and all at once, he forgot he'd ever been a servant of Heaven or Hell, much less a detractor, and he forgot everything and everyone that went with that. Aziraphale faded like he was blown away by the wind.

He forgot ripping off his wings. The scars became a mystery, like so much of his life seemed to have become. It was easy enough to keep them covered to avoid questions, and eventually he convinced himself he must have been in some kind of accident, which must have taken much of his memory, too.

He could no longer magic up money, but he'd forgotten he could ever have done that as well.

Oh, God, he thought one day, looking at his bank accounts. He could still remember many of the important things. Don't tell me I need to find a job.

Crowley considered bartending, but he was sure he'd drink more than he would serve. Various shops were looking for help, but only part time. And he needed a place to stay. He drove on aimlessly, farther north, took more ferries, found no more opportunities. And anyway, he had no idea who he even was. He'd tried to think of his name, but it was gone. Suddenly everything all seemed so impossible.

After a while, Crowley found a small village in the far north of the Shetland Islands where no one really cared to ask questions. They were not immediately rude to a stranger rolling in, but he did have to win a few of them over while he was there. He was sulking in a pub near last call when he overheard two men at a corner table.

"Aye" said the first man. "Said t'system failed and there's nowt in charge of 'er. Ship almost wrecked two nights ago when it went down. Craig refuses to rely on that ridiculous automation again. Right choice if you ask me." He took a sip from his pint.

The other leaned in. "So they need a light keeper again? Good luck finding someone. Our people moved down southerly ages ago. All that solitude." He shook his head.

The first man nodded. They both looked into their glasses with their arms crossed on the table.

Crowley stood up from the bar, the stool squeaking along the floor when he pushed it back. He approached them carefully.

"Sorry, so sorry to interrupt," said Crowley. "But I couldn't help but overhear there's a lighthouse keeper needed?"

The two stared at him like he was something from other than this earth. Then the first man spoke.

"Aye," he said slowly. "What, you interested in all that cold and salt and damp and isolation?"

"I might be."

The second man laughed and slapped the table with his palm. "Well if you're serious, you'll want to speak to Craig."

"Craig?"

The first man nodded. "He'll be up there running things for now. There'll be a couple ferries for you, unless the last bit is too wild. Might be you need to go out by rowboat." He sniffed. "Seamus," he added with a nod.

The second man said, "Robert." He held out his hand, and Crowley shook it. Panicking, he tried to work out what name to give in return. He must have had one at some point. Why couldn't he remember?

"James," he said, finally. Crowley made a vague gesture of thanks. "I appreciate the information, and if it works out, I'll buy you a couple pints if I see you again."

"Aren't many this far north," the second man said with a chuckle. "We'll be seeing you again fer sure soon enough, either for supplies, or on your way to movin' on." He smiled, a few teeth missing in the front, and went back to his pint.

Two days after that, Crowley was working as a lighthouse operator on an otherwise uninhabited island in one of the farthest reaches of the north.

/

Eighteen months later, Crowley was standing with his arms crossed on a gently curving steel bar that encircled the lighthouse. It badly needed paint, and it was peeling off onto his jumper. He slowly picked the red flakes from the wool. The sea roared against the rocks in an everlasting battle below. The salt spray was cold on his face. He looked out over the vast array of blues where the sea hurried away into the horizon. Sometimes it was difficult to tell where the water ended and the sky began.

The lighthouse was in the north of the Shetland Islands, about as far north as one could get on the farthest north island of the Shetlands. People had abandoned the island decades ago, he'd been told. It was just the sounds of the sea, the wind, and the gulls.

Crowley decided he would resume his fight with the sea salt and the paint of the railings tomorrow. He'd done enough for the day and wanted to watch the sunset. The way the blues began to brighten as the yellows and oranges spread across. Orange and yellow and pink and green and purple and every shade of blue. Even fiery red sometimes. They faded and blended, rolled and snaked through the distant waves.

The sight reminded him of something… something he couldn't quite put his finger on. For a while it had given him headaches trying to remember, but over the weeks they subsided, and now it was nothing more than a faint tickle at the edge of his mind.

He'd made some friends with the locals down where people still lived, down where he'd first met Robert and Seamus. Gruff men, but friendly and funny once they let him in. There was also a small grocer's where he did most of his shopping. Usually, when he did feel like company, he met some friends down the pub. And he still maintained an inhuman talent at cards, though he tried to lose enough that he felt it was fair.

But really, he preferred the solitude of and duties to the lighthouse. He had his plants, and a car that seemed to somehow be oddly attached to him. It also suspiciously never needed its tank filled with petrol. He thought that was something he shouldn't complain about.

Once, on one of his excursions into town for food and the necessities, he was in the grocer's inspecting an apple for bruises. When he looked up there was a man with white-blonde hair and crinkles around his eyes smiling at him. Friendly, or perhaps a bit more, he felt. He swallowed roughly, his mouth had gone completely dry. He managed a small smile in return while bile rose in his throat. He placed the apple carefully back on the stack and guiltily left his full basket close to the front of the store. Then he left.

Crowley sucked in a breath of cold air as though his life depended on it. He leaned over with his hands on his knees as soon as he reached the pavement and was clear of the door. For a few moments he felt like vomiting, but the feeling passed.

His heart was racing, pounding behind his ribs, so fast it felt as though it were trying to claw its way out. He felt it everywhere, like a long, low current electric shock. He gasped for breath, his lungs shrinking and shrinking as his chest tightened and felt about to cave. He leaned back against the stone wall and clutched his chest.

His head felt fuzzy and like there was something ricocheting off the inside of his skull, trying to blast its way out, a memory that desperately wanted to be remembered. But he couldn't catch it. And after some time, the memory turned to sand in his fingers and filtered away on the breeze. After a little more time, his heart calmed and his breathing slowed, and Crowley decided tomorrow might be a better day to get the shopping done.

A few months after he got there, he had tried to sell the Bentley to get something more practical. But every ad in the papers and any signs he'd posted seemed to vanish as if they'd never existed. And once he'd realised it really didn't ever need petrol, he'd decided to keep it.

Sometimes, and Crowley never knew where the idea came from, or what the moon really looked like up in the actual sky outside of photographs. He knew it affected weather talk, and tides. When the clouds were just right, he'd often watch the big, white beam of the lighthouse hit them and pretend it was the moon passing by. Maybe to check in, maybe en route to some very important business. It was comforting somehow. But inexplicably lonely.

The sunrises were just as breathtaking as the sunsets, pallets of colour that almost defied his belief. Still a small scratch at the back of his mind, but it was so brief and so gentle now that he didn't notice.

Once the sun was up, Crowley retreated to bed, to a restful and dreamless sleep.

/

Aziraphale was staring blankly out a window by the end of a long, white hall, lit with white lights and held up by pillars painted white. It looked out over even more sterile, white, unblemished floors and offices. His mind was wandering. Crowley had been right.

There was no gravlax with dill sauce in Heaven. No Sondheim. He had no gramophone and no records to play on it anyway. No wine or single malt scotch, and certainly no intoxicated conversations about kraken and dolphins and whales. No books, at least not the kind he'd treasured so deeply in his bookshop, and certainly no bookshops. And no St James's Park to sit shoulder to shoulder together while Crowley partook in his odd obsession with duck welfare.

Heaven was cold and sterile, and an emptiness hung heavy in the air like the remembrance of a lost loved one. This couldn't be the way it had been in the Beginning, could it? Aziraphale had spent most of his time down in the Garden guarding a particular eastern gate, but when work came to call and he was needed here, he could not remember it being so… vacuous. Heartless.

The Metatron appeared behind him. "On your way, now, we've important work to do!"

Aziraphale managed not to jump, being pulled so suddenly from his reverie. He turned from the window and forced just in time a smile that did not reach his eyes. "Of course!" he said brightly.

"Oh, and do let me know if you'd ever like to try another meteor shower," said the Metatron. "They can be so much fun!" He was far more jovial than Aziraphale was comfortable with.

"N-No," he managed. Then he lied. "I feel I rather screwed things up when I did it. I miscalculated speed and direction, and several people were hit with meteorites." Shame welled up in his chest.

"Oh dear," said the Metatron, feigning care. "Was anyone hurt?"

Aziraphale looked down at his feet and lied again. He shook his head. "Thankfully, no."

"Excellent, excellent. So, I've left some very important work on your desk; we must keep the ball rolling on the Second Coming."

"Yes, of course, sir."

They parted ways. When Aziraphale sat at his desk, he gave no notice to the folders and piles of papers and documents that needed to be signed off on and stamped, nor the requests he had to approve or deny.

He looked down and pulled back the cuff of his suit, and then unbuttoned the cuff of the perfectly ironed shirt sleeve beneath it. With one finger he touched the inside of his wrist, just where his pulse would have been. A tiny golden snake slithered and coiled around the tip of his finger. It always felt so warm. Before he became too lost in his thoughts, he pulled away, and the snake writhed and twisted into its usual form, back to its resting place on his wrist, contorted as only serpents can be. He left the cuff unbuttoned.

"I'm so sorry, love," he said quietly, almost nothing more than a murmur of lips. He wondered if Crowley had felt as sick and wilted as he had when he watched him by the Bentley from the elevator. There was a feeling of melancholy that overtook him. Like the last songs of crickets in the night at summer's end.

Aziraphale cleared his throat and turned his attention to his desk. There seemed to be an awful lot of red tape. That he did remember. But he got to work, with a side glance into his wrist. Right, then. There was quite a lot to do if he were going to stop the Second Coming.