Chapter Text
Crowley and Aziraphale get drunk, and the question comes up: Ever been in love?
“I know all about love,” Aziraphale protests. “I’m made of it! It’s all I am!”
“No, no,” says Crowley. “‘Course you are, I know that, that doesn’t count. Ever been in love?”
Neither of them really suspects it of the other, but both their hearts are thrumming hollowly, aching in their respective bodies. Crowley gives it away more so by having asked the question. By the way he cradles his wine glass. Aziraphale notices this, because Crowley has always been his personal puzzle, but isn’t quite quick enough to put it together in his current state.
“Have you?” asks Aziraphale.
“No fair. I asked first.” He leaves it at that, eyes hidden as ever, along with any emotion they might let slip.
Aziraphale sighs in thought.
“Come on,” Crowley presses. “Any angel you ever found yourself looking twice at? A human even? A… A d—”
Aziraphale shoots up in his chair. “Now that you mention it! My dear, I had almost completely forgotten about—well, it wasn’t love, it could hardly have been, we only ever met the one time.”
“Oh,” Crowley reacts, muted. He doesn’t know what he expected. He’s getting his answer and now he has to sit with it.
“Yes, there was… well, it was so long ago. It was even before the garden. It had almost slipped my memory, but there was someone I found… frightfully fascinating. But I daresay this particular angel never really saw me when I was in the room.”
Isn't that the way it goes, thinks Crowley. It's always the ones right in front of you.
But he listens anyway, because it's something new about Aziraphale, another reason to love him, another part of him to know and cherish the way no one else does.
“Who was it?” Crowley asks a little glumly, flipping back to the rolodex of names he still vaguely recalls from his time upstairs.
“Well, actually, they… never told me,” Aziraphale admits, deepening a blush that was already there from the liquor. “That’s how much of strangers we were. But we had a conversation once, while they were in between assignments. They were always much busier than I was in those days. I think I had just learned that I was to be sent off to earth, actually, and we—well, we ran into each other, and had some conversation about how strange it might feel to look up from below. And I said, hopefully not too far down below.”
He stops to giggle, and Crowley’s glasses remain opaque, but his hand has tightened on his drink.
“And then they said something along the lines of, No, not quite. I hear the stars were made to be viewed from the center. I always thought that was quite lovely. But then… well, the rest is history. I was sent to the gate, and I never saw… haven’t seen them since.”
There is a long silence. From the set of his eyebrows, it looks like Crowley’s eyes have closed. Aziraphale turns waspish. “Have you fallen asleep?”
Crowley jolts up. “No,” he says immediately, almost a whisper. “No, no. Not asleep.”
“You asked me. Shows what manner of respect you demons have.”
“Aziraphale.”
“What?”
There’s a long silence, but they’ve been alive a long while, so for them, it’s not so bad.
“Nothing,” says Crowley.
I hate myself, he thinks. If I hadn’t fallen, we could have had all that. No barriers. No hereditary enemies. No starting all over.
“Are you feeling alright, my dear? Perhaps we should sober up.”
If he had just held onto those questions, everything between them might have worked out, starting from the day the Archangel Raphael said to the Principality Aziraphale: “I hear the stars were made to look just right when you’re standing in the middle.”
And now they never can.