Chapter Text
Aziraphale, of course, remembers everything.
Well, sort of.
He remembers Heaven perfectly well— there’s no reason why he shouldn’t, not with centennial reviews and discorporations and paperwork all conspiring to drag him away from his books and back up at each opportunity. Perhaps more pertinently, Aziraphale remembers Heaven from Before, and he would say, as any angel would, that it is vastly unchanged.
This is both true and untrue: Upstairs are a rigid, intransigent lot, and their methods and ways of thinking remain largely identical, even after the Fall, even six long millenia later. And yet Aziraphale knows too, somewhere, that this is wishful thinking, although on whose part, he could not say: on his, most likely, trying to stave off those awful, lingering doubts. To latch onto whatever it was from back then that prevented him from Falling. But all the same, there is something in the stretched-out smiles of his superiors that tells him otherwise; a metaphysical layer of dust, an intangible tarnish. The way the stark whiteness of the place has stopped feeling pure and started feeling empty.
And he is hopelessly unable to speak for the other angels, but Aziraphale, at any rate, has spent the last six thousand years being quietly afraid.
He remembers Heaven, in the beginning. He remembers everything that has happened there, even the things which he would rather forget. And so he remembers, of course, that there used to be… someone else. Someone he was, ahem, rather intimate with.
Someone he loved— loves?— and whom he misses most terribly.
The problem, then, is that Aziraphale cannot remember that person in the slightest.
Ineffability, in the end, is about balance. And so it simply wouldn’t do to strip all of Hell’s agents of their memories, leaving Heaven with perfect maps of their vulnerabilities, likes and dislikes and desires. He has the events, knows what they did together, and he has his own tangled web of emotions, and from all of this he can piece together a not insignificant portion of their relationship.
But he does not have him. This other angel— well, surely no longer an angel now. It is a terribly disconcerting thing, to remember with perfect clarity one’s first kiss, the bashful self-consciousness and the giddiness of it all, the inexplicable warmth and safety of being in the arms of another, and yet for that other to be little more than a vaguely humanoid spectre in his memory, a fuzzed shadow where a face, lips should be.
He remembers being happy . He doesn’t quite know why.
But Aziraphale doesn’t like to think about it, because it hurts, that loss, the forgetting. Because it’s a shameful thing, to be associated with an angel who Fell, especially if it was that kind of association. Because if he digs too deeply into the veil of hurt that he has drawn around himself, the fact that this other angel betrayed him, left him, he’s terribly afraid that he’ll find just the opposite to be true. That he was the one doing the betraying, by remaining.
There is something, Aziraphale thinks, that is inherently selfish— unangelic, even— about grief.
But then of course, the same could be said about love.
It is best not to dwell. And whatever his other faults may be, Aziraphale has always had an innate gift for lying to himself.
And so he— doesn’t forget, not really, he just stops thinking about it, pushes the whole matter, the whole of Before to the back of his mind.
And life goes on.
And then there is Crowley. Aziraphale will freely admit that he has, over the millennia, grown... fonder of the demon than he perhaps ought to be. He certainly never intended for it to happen, but, well, he has been created to love all of God’s creation, even snake-eyed demons, and so he’s long since slotted his lack of hatred for Crowley quite neatly into his tidy little view of the world, and moved on.
The problem is, he’s supposed to love in a great, vague, all encompassing way, really, not in a wondering-what-those-clever-fingers-would-feel-like-in-his-curls sort of way, in marvelling at the sharply ironic curve of Crowley’s lips.
And this, as hard as Aziraphale tries, is a little more difficult to explain away. It’s— well, it’s partly circumstance, certainly, but there’s more to it than that. He thinks.
How does one explain one’s reasons for falling in love? Crowley is… oddly enticing, a mess of contradictions, graceful and awkward, petrified of Hell and yet bolder in his infractions than Aziraphale would ever dare to be. Beautiful, with his slit-gold eyes, kind and stubborn and sharp and sarcastic. Impossibly, intricately human.
But it’s a dangerous path to go down, falling in love. Especially with a demon who cannot hope to love you back.
Because he can’t . Aziraphale knows he can’t. Demons don’t love, it’s a cardinal rule. And if he observes little… idiosyncrasies in Crowley’s behaviour that seem to suggest otherwise, surely that’s just his own wishful thinking, his desperately lonely mind playing tricks.
Well. That’s the nice, poetic explanation, the one that paints Aziraphale in a noble, tragic light. Because if that’s not the case, then the comfortable black and white lenses through which Aziraphale views the world will shatter. Then he might actually have to face up to what he’s done— or more to the point, what he hasn’t.
Either way, he knows it’s best to keep some distance between himself and Crowley, because it’s so difficult to properly gauge the depths of his own feelings, because try as he might to suppress them, it’s whenever he thinks of Crowley that his lost love really begins to haunt him. He worries, sometimes, that all he’s trying to do is replace one fallen angel with another, to use Crowley as a substitute for what he lost. It feels— unfair, unfaithful, almost, although to whom he could not say. Because he has no way to know, really, whether his hopeless infatuation for Crowley is love or just loneliness. Who all of these feelings are for .
Better for them both in the long run, Aziraphale thinks, if he leaves well enough alone.
He has human lovers, of course, but that’s different: there’s a certainty to the transience of it which is both beautiful and bittersweet. It is meant to be fleeting, and all the more precious for it. There and then gone.
But he and Crowley and the blurred spectre of his angel, they are eternal. The Greeks were right, when they spoke of different sorts of love. Because the love that he wanted from his angel— that he desperately wants from Crowley, but will not let himself have— is immortal.
He has lost that immortal love once, and he is certain that if he and Crowley were to become… involved, that he would lose it again. That Heaven and Hell would never allow it. And Aziraphale does not know if he could survive that loss a second time.
He doesn’t want anything to happen to Crowley because of his own foolish selfishness. He doesn’t want to think about this, because it hurts , and so he pushes it down, and he doesn’t.
Until...
The problems don’t begin with the end of the world, or the surprising lack of it. The problems begin about three hours later, as Aziraphale, exhausted and alone in his miraculously restored bookshop, takes his first nap in what must be a good three hundred years.
The problems start when he dreams.
Aziraphale does not, as a rule, sleep: he has never been able to take quite the same decadent pleasure from it that Crowley does, and then the demon’s hundred-year nap rather put him off altogether. But the past eleven years have been hopelessly exhausting, and Aziraphale is so surprised by his continued existence that he doesn’t quite know what he ought to do with it.
And so he sleeps. And so he dreams.
It’s a simple dream, really, him and his angel, wings out. The glint of a smile, the curve of a feather. Long, clever fingers carding over his primaries in a quiet sort of intimacy. Turning around, quite suddenly, a joke, laugh lines around—
Aziraphale wakes up, heart in his throat, and with the sudden, burning memory of a pair of bright amber eyes.
Eyes that bear a staggering resemblance to a certain slit-eyed pair he’s grown rather fond of, over the millennia.
But surely not…
They don’t look that similar, Aziraphale tells himself. The eyes from his dream are— well, he’s loathe to use the word human , given the circumstances, but they are certainly more of the shape one would expect, with whites and round, perfectly ordinary pupils. They are warmer, too, more of a burnished orange than the sharp yellow-gold he’s become so used to.
And who’s to say that it’s a real memory, anyway, and not merely his subconscious twisting at things? It’s… well, it’s fantastically improbable.
Or ineffable , Aziraphale thinks, but pushes it down, because really, what are the odds?
It’s a coincidence, or a dream, or both, and so he moves on.
But it unsettles him, just the same, gnaws at his nerve endings, this half-remembered romance, perpetually on the tip of his tongue. The details of his dream are, in true dream fashion, wispy and intangible, but the feeling of it has lodged on his chest, heavy and solid and painful. The feeling of being whole, at peace. In love. It pulls at him, that feeling, and Aziraphale’s never been one for resisting temptation.
Besides, he wants to see what other details he can remember. What he can find.
Well, he has to know, now, because the thought is there, each time he looks at Crowley. Because if it is him, then it puts whatever it is that they have in an entirely different light.
He puts it off, for a few days, because his book is terribly interesting, because he won’t quite let himself go down this route. And then he sleeps again. And again, the following night. The night after that. Gets into the routine, almost as a human might. Or as Crowley does.
And he begins to remember.
It’s little things, flashes, and at first Aziraphale is doubtful but the details are so minute and inane that he cannot see quite how his subconscious might conjure them up— the arc of a smile, a self-conscious laugh, Heaven’s uncanny light playing off dark hair.
As far as he can theorise, whatever it was that had stripped away his memories had only been designed to last six thousand years— well, why should it have needed to be in place any longer? It wouldn’t have mattered, one way or another.
Aziraphale wonders, with a dread lurch, if Crowley can remember anything, now.
He holds tight to his little scraps of memory and sometimes he thinks it’s Crowley and sometimes he’s sure it isn’t, and in the meantime he pulls the demon closer anyway because in some strange way he’s never been more desperately lonely, because it’s been six thousand long years and everything is breaking down.
And then one night he has a name.
And then, of course, he has everything.
It’s Crowley. Of course it is. And if anything, Aziraphale feels relieved. A sort of numb acceptance. This is… well, he doesn’t have to choose, now. Leave anyone behind. And it means he can… apologise, maybe. Put things right.
It’s only now, in the sudden, oppressive emptiness of the bookshop, that Aziraphale realises he really hasn’t considered Crowley’s own feelings on the matter at all.
He stares at the door with a heavy, sick feeling, as though Crowley is going to come running back in at any moment, because Aziraphale thinks he would rather have more shouting, hot and sharp, rather than the silence that presses tight against him.
He sits, stands, paces a bit, sits again. He really has no idea of what he ought to do. What Aziraphale wants to do, sort of, is to get absolutely sloshed out of his mind, but drinking, for him, has become so inextricably associated with Crowley, over the millennia, that he can’t quite bring himself to do so.
This is bad, he knows. Whatever else, Crowley is his friend , and Aziraphale has hurt him, even if he can’t quite understand how. The look on Crowley’s face as he had walked out, grief and anger and something like betrayal, maybe, the way he’d flinched when Aziraphale had said— that name—- like it had actually, physically hurt him to hear it.
Maybe it had. Aziraphale hasn’t exactly stopped to consider anything along those lines, anything other than his own pathetic tangle of feelings.
Aziraphale stands up, decisively. He needs to find Crowley. To… sort this all out, somehow.
He hasn’t the foggiest idea what he is going to say. He’ll figure it out on the way.
Aziraphale decides to try Crowley’s flat first. He walks. It’s a nice enough evening, he registers distantly, and he needs the time to try and sort out— whatever it is that he’s feeling.
What had he honestly been expecting? That he would say the name, like some kind of magical key, that Crowley would remember everything and just sort of fall into his arms?
Well, sort of, he thinks uncomfortably. He had been expecting this revelation of his to smooth everything over, to give him both the love he lost so long ago and his love for Crowley, to absolve him of having to make any sort of choice.
And Crowley is a person . Not human, certainly no angel— he’s made that abundantly clear— but still, a person. Who can feel and hurt and— love. He might as well admit it.
If Aziraphale is terribly, brutally honest with himself, he knows that Crowley is in love with him. He’s always known. But knowing something and accepting— or admitting, maybe— that thing are quite different processes altogether.
He couldn’t admit that Crowley loved him, couldn’t allow himself to reciprocate those feelings, because that would require some admittance that Heaven’s rhetoric is flawed, would require some conscious action on his part. Would require him to… rebel, just a little, in a way that feels deeper than eating copious amounts of sushi or hoarding old books, in a way that he doesn’t know if he can justify to himself.
Aziraphale, for all his faults, is not stupid. What he is is ignorant , and willfully so. He has to buy wholeheartedly into the great plan, into Heaven, because if he doesn’t, it’ll all come crashing down. Six thousand years of doing things that while Right certainly didn’t feel particularly right, or good, at the time. Six thousand years of petty insults and assumptions and each and every time he has blamed the demon for something that he knows, deep down, is not his fault, because it’s convenient, having Crowley as a scapegoat. It stops Aziraphale from ever having to consider the consequences of his own actions because he knows, somewhere, that if he were to strip away the layers upon layers of self-righteousness and stubborn, ridiculous faith he has wrapped around himself like a shield, he wouldn’t like the person he found very much.
He owes Crowley an apology. Quite a few apologies, actually. Aziraphale quickens his pace.
The Bentley, to Aziraphale’s very great relief, is parked haphazardly on the pavement in front of Crowley’s flat, an almost certain indicator that Crowley is inside. Good, Aziraphale tells himself. This is good. No need to go chasing all over London. Now he just has to go up to Crowley’s flat and explain himself, and everything will turn out all right. Hopefully. Maybe.
Aziraphale pulls open the door to the apartment building with perhaps just a touch more force than is strictly necessary, and up he goes. If he uses a very minor miracle to ensure that the lift arrives immediately, no one is there to remark on it.
He takes a deep breath, and slowly makes his way to the door of Crowley’s flat. Aziraphale does not come here often— Crowley moves and redecorates and generally just changes things so often that the bookshop has become a far more natural meeting point. A constant. Aziraphale has a tendency to latch onto things, books and snuffboxes and clothes, to try and cultivate some sense of familiarity in a really very rapidly changing world, but he knows that his only true constant, the only being around with any sort of consistency for these last six thousand years, has been Crowley.
He knocks on the door. Twice. The knocker is ridiculous, a gaudy silver snake thing, and Aziraphale can’t even bring himself to roll his eyes at it. There is no response.
“Crowley?” Aziraphale calls, tentatively. Then: “Please?”
“Piss off,” comes the reply, somewhat muffled by the still closed door, but just hearing Crowley’s voice, knowing he’s there, helps ease some of the tension from Aziraphale’s shoulders. Only some, but it’s a start.
“Look, I just— I just came to apologise,” he says, and tries to push down the small quiver in his voice.
“You can apologise from out there,” Crowley says, words doused in an almost clinical air of detachment. Aziraphale sighs. He was expecting this, sort of. He certainly deserves it. But he can hear the hurt in the demon’s voice, and Crowley doesn’t deserve that. And he still believes, somehow, that if Crowley would just let him in, let him explain, it might be all right.
“I’m sorry, Crowley, you know I am. I— oh, look, would you please just let me in? I just want to be sure that you’re all right.”
“Perfectly fine,” comes the acerbic response. “Happy now?”
“No,” says Aziraphale. It comes out in a much smaller voice than he had intended.
“Me neither,” Crowley replies, in a softer tone than before. “Now leave ,” he adds hurridley, and with renewed prickliness.
Aziraphale closes his eyes for a moment and leans against Crowley’s door, allowing himself to imagine the demon on the other side of it, so close and yet so terribly far away.
“You aren’t exactly making this easy,” he mutters, more to himself than Crowley. The demon, unfortunately, has always had remarkably astute hearing.
“I’m so terribly sorry,” Crowley says. “Am I in-con-fucking-veniencing you?” He hacks the word into its syllables with brutal efficiency.
“That’s not what I…” Aziraphale begins, and then stops. He is, quite suddenly, exhausted.
Aziraphale, even at the best of times, is not the most possessing of the qualities of, say, patience. Or tact, for that matter. And it has been an incredibly stressful night, and every single word spilling out of the angel’s mouth is wrong, wrong, wrong, and he is just about at the end of his tether.
“Anthony J. Crowley,” Aziraphale says tauntly, “would you please open this door and let me in, or— or I am going to make a scene .”
“Oh, no .” Crowley’s voice practically oozes sarcasm. “How very terrible for me.”
“It will be,” Aziraphale says, with a lofty sort of confidence he seems to have miracled up out of thin air. “It’ll completely ruin your image for all these humans, here. Not to mention your houseplants, if they caught wind of it.”
There is a moment’s silence, then a heavy, resigned sigh, and then Crowley is pulling the door open, all the while very deliberately avoiding eye contact with Aziraphale.
The sight of him startles the angel. His sunglasses are off, and there is something about the red lining to his eyes, the terribly human blotchiness of his face… demons are not supposed to cry. Angels certainly aren’t, and if anything, Aziraphale presumes that the other side would have even less use for it.
Crowley does. Effusively. He cries at films and plays, at the fall of empires and the deaths of friends, whenever he allows himself to have them. But this is the first time, Aziraphale thinks uncomfortably, that Crowley has cried because of him .
Well, no. Probably not, if Aziraphale thinks back to every cruel and baseless thing he has said and done to Crowley over the millennia, the centuries upon centuries of ignoring Crowley’s patently clear emotions simply because it wouldn’t suit Azirpahale’s worldview, because he might have to actually think about some things for himself. This probably is not the first time Crowley has cried over him.
It’s just that this is the first time that Crowley has let him see.
That uncomfortable feeling grows stronger, and Aziraphale follows Crowley into his flat feeling distinctly uneasy.
“Learned my name, then, have you?” Crowley says gruffly as he strides into his flat, pointedly still not looking at Aziraphale. “Only taken you about six thousand years, apparently.”
“ Crowley ,” Aziraphale tries, but the demon ignores him, just keeps on walking, snakeskin shoes tapping on the marble floor.
They reach what Aziraphale supposes passes for Crowley’s living room, although it’s as barren and blatantly unlived-in as the rest of the flat. Crowley gestures vaguely at a sleek white sofa that looks as though it has cost more money than Aziraphale’s entire bookshop.
“Sit, if you like,” he says dismissively. Aziraphale does. Crowley remains standing, across from him, and only now does he deign to look at the angel, arms folded securely across his chest. He doesn’t speak.
“I am sorry, you know,” Aziraphale offers, although the words feel weak and meaningless, somehow, when faced with this sudden, terrible emptiness between them.
Crowley nods.
“Right,” he says. “ Right. And what, exactly, is it that you think you’re apologising for?”
“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale says slowly, desperate to get the words out right, “because I know you love me.” He looks up at Crowley and gives the demon a humourless smile. “Crowley, I’ve known that you love me for hundreds of years.”
Crowley flinches, but says nothing. Aziraphale takes a deep breath, and continues.
“And I’m sorry,” he goes on, “for never acting on that, or— or letting you know, at the very least. For making you feel like I didn’t love you back. Because I do,” he adds, and it’s imperative that he makes Crowley understand this, “Of course I love you, my dear.”
Crowley looks down at the floor.
“Not enough to tell me, apparently.”
“Too much to tell you,” Aziraphale says fervently. “You have to understand, I was terrified. If Heaven found out—”
“You would Fall,” Crowley intones, voice flat and disconcertingly empty. “You would be like me.” He laughs, high and cold. “I can’t think of anything worse for you.”
“I can remember the Fall, now,” Aziraphale says softly, trying to stave off the sting of Crowley’s words, wishing he could just— smooth over Crowley’s pointed sharpness, soothe him, hold the demon in his arms and tell him how much he cares for him. He can’t, and it’s his own fault. But what he can do is talk, and so he does. “Remember it properly, I mean. I— I came very close, I reckon,” he says, stumbling over the words, because he has never admitted this, not properly, not even to himself. “I had all the same doubts, the same questions that you did. You were just a bit more… vocal about them. And then when it really counted, I stayed quiet.” And you didn’t. And you Fell , he thinks, but does not say.
Crowley sighs, picks at his fingernails.
“And therein lies the problem, you see. Not me. Not me at all .” He looks up and meets Aziraphale’s gaze, slit pupils narrowed into almost nothingness. “And so if that’s the person you love, then perhaps it’s for the best that you didn’t tell me.”
“I love you both,” Aziraphale says softly, and this time it is he who cannot quite meet Crowley’s piercing gaze. “I always have.” He gives a quiet laugh. “Only I’m terribly selfish. And I could never— I was terrified of losing one of you. Foolish of me, of course. I lost him six thousand years ago.” He looks up. “But please , Crowley, don’t let me lose you too.”
The silence that follows is deep and pervasive enough to make Aziraphale’s heart race. Should he— should he do something? Speak, stand, move, he doesn’t know, anything to wipe that horrible blank look off Crowley’s face.
It is Crowley who speaks first, in the end.
“‘S my first proper memory, the Fall,” he says, suddenly terribly fascinated by his own reflection in the gleaming floor. “That’s when I started being me, I reckon. Before that, it’s…” he shrugs miserably. “I can remember feelings, sort of, but they’re… they don’t feel like mine .”
Aziraphale winces, slightly. Oh, Crowley… it certainly doesn’t sound like the most pleasant way to come into existence. The Fall had looked really rather awful from above.
“I remember everything that happened,” he offers. “And my emotions, too, but y— he was just… a blur.”
“So what changed?” Crowley asks, voice still small and flat but with a touch of real, open curiosity to it which makes something flutter, deep within Aziraphale’s chest.
“I started to dream,” he says simply. “After the world didn’t end. And I started to piece things together, sort of.”
They went quiet again, for a moment, but it felt less strained, this time, and more… contemplative.
“I’m sorry for—” Aziraphale begins, then breaks off. “I understand, sort of, now. Better than I did, at any rate.” Crowley inclines his head in response, a few stray strands of dark hair falling in front of his face, and in that moment there is nothing that Aziraphale would like more than to be able to cross the space between them and push them back.
“Do you hate him?” Aziraphale blurts out, quite suddenly, and it’s a strange sort of question to ask, he is dimly aware, but all the same he really does need to know.
Crowley blinks, an unusual enough occurrence on its own, and thinks this over.
“I don’t regret it, you know,” he says slowly. “Falling. I mean, it wasn’t fun , obviously, but… I mean, how often do we get to make a choice, do anything significant, anything that’s not just following the great bloody plan?” Crowley stops for a moment, takes a deep breath. “So no, I don’t hate him. Don’t know him well enough for any of that, I reckon.”
Aziraphale nods, slowly. Quite suddenly, an awful thought occurs to him.
“And… do you hate me?”
Crowley looks up, sharply.
“ What? ”
Aziraphale can’t meet his gaze again, so focuses on the sofa instead, running an idle hand over the leather. It really is dreadfully fancy.
“I wouldn’t blame you, if you did,” he says, and it’s true, he deserves it, and he’s trying so very hard not to cry, even though he probably deserves that as well. “I’ve been so terribly cruel to you, my dear.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous ,” Crowley snaps. “Of course I don’t— angel, do you have any idea just how much more straightforward my life would be if only I were able to hate you?”
“Ah,” says Aziraphale, unsure if this is a good thing or not.
Crowley snorts, turns smartly on one heel, and strides out of the room. Aziraphale dithers for a moment, debating whether he ought to follow or not, but Crowley comes back almost instantly, a bottle of wine and two glasses balanced precariously in his slender arms.
“Budge over,” he tells Aziraphale, who obliges and can’t suppress the warmth that spikes through him at the sudden, wonderful nearness of Crowley.
The demon passes him a glass.
“Drink?”
Aziraphale smiles, despite everything.
“Thought you’d never ask.”
And so they sit. And so they drink. And it’s nice, of course it is, and considering the state Crowley had been in when he left the bookshop, it’s a minor miracle of its own. It’s only… something Crowley said keeps sticking in Aziraphale’s head— the talk of choice, and significance.
Because really, what has Aziraphale ever done? He is over six millennia old, and has done very little of any real, sticking value in all that time. Averting the apocalypse, he supposes. Or trying to, at any rate— he is willing to concede that others may have made more significant contributions on that front.
Holding Crowley’s hand at the airbase, he thinks, is certainly up there— in fact, more or less every single action he has ever taken that he would class as significant , that mattered in some way or another, has involved Crowley in some way.
And that, maybe, is precisely the point.
Aziraphale sighs, and supposes he owes Crowley one final apology.
“I was happy,” he starts haltingly, “When I realised that you… used to be him. But for all the wrong reasons,” he adds hurriedly, catching sight of the look on Crowley’s face. “Because it simplified things for me, I suppose, because it meant that I could… rationalise it all away, loving you. Because it meant that I didn’t have to think, or question, that I could go on happily following a system that I know, deep down, isn’t right .”
“Oh,” says Crowley, a touch shakily. He takes a deep swig of wine, as does Aziraphale.
“What I’m trying to say is,” Aziraphale tries, “is. Is that you make me… question. And change. And that yes, things would probably be significantly easier if I just hated you, but they’d be duller, too.” He pauses for breath, and is surprised— and a little concerned— by the wet shine to Crowley’s eyes, but the demon is smiling, too, wide and achingly genuine, and so Aziraphale smiles back, tentatively, and continues. “I haven’t done all that much that I’m proud of, I suppose,” he says wryly, “or that’s not just what the Plan— or Gabriel, more to the point— expected of me. But if I were to kiss you now…” he pauses, mouth dry. “Well. Well, I would class that as fairly significant, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d say so, yes,” says Crowley, somewhat faintly. For a heartbeat, neither of them moves, and then all at once, they are both surging forward, mouth on mouth, and Aziraphale’s hands are in Crowley’s hair and it’s clumsy and awkward and giddy and wonderful , and it is a good long while before they break apart.
“What happens now?” Aziraphale asks, finally. Crowley shrugs.
“You’re the one with all the memories,” he says, with just a twinge of bitterness.
“Well, yes,” says Aziraphale, “but… that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? And we were different people, then.” He gently weaves Crowley’s fingers through his own. “Both of us,” he says decisively.
The look on Crowley’s face, Aziraphale thinks, is very nearly wonderful enough to make up for hundreds upon hundreds of years of wasted time.
As it is, they have plenty of catching up to do.