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Crowley wakes up slowly, and the first thing he knows is that he is cold and alone. This leads to the fact that when he had gone to sleep he had not been alone. With a sickening lurch, he remembers that he’d gotten too drunk to sober up and fallen asleep on Aziraphale’s couch the night before. Worse, he had fallen asleep on Aziraphale, his head on the angel’s warm lap, with Aziraphale’s soft fingers carding through Crowley’s hair and soothing him into the most restful sleep he’d had in centuries.
And now he’s awake, and Aziraphale isn’t there.
He sits up, removing his hangover and straightening out his clothes with a casual miracle. There is dread pooling in his stomach, and looking untouched and unconcerned is the best armor he knows how to use. He wanders vaguely towards the stairs up to the flat, walking loudly so Aziraphale, wherever he is, can hear him coming. There's a clatter from the kitchen, so he heads there.
Aziraphale is bent over a teapot, fussing with it and the kettle. “Ah, Crowley,” he says without turning around. “Divested yourself of your hangover?”
“Yeah,” Crowley says, watching the tension in Aziraphale’s shoulders, the way he doesn't turn to face the door. He doesn't even want to look at Crowley now, it seems. After what Crowley had done, what Aziraphale had done. The most physical contact they’d had in centuries, if not millennia. His chest aches with the confirmation of what the dread in his stomach had known all along. It had been a mistake, for Aziraphale, and he was going to pretend it hadn’t happened.
Yeah, well, Crowley can pretend things didn’t happen too. “Got some engagements today,” he says, with every pretense of casualness he can muster. “I’m sure your tea’s great, but I’ve got to run.”
The little bit of tension that bleeds out of Aziraphale’s shoulders at this declaration hurts, if possible, more than its initial presence had. “Drive safely,” he says vaguely, like that’s a normal thing to tell a demon that drives a hundred miles an hour through central London.
Crowley doesn’t comment on it. He doesn’t comment on anything. “Ciao,” he drawls, and leaves the flat and the bookstore entirely at the most decorous speed he can confine himself to. By the time he gets to the front door he’s going fast enough that after he absently miracles the door open in front of him, he slams straight into a patron that had been waiting outside. Normally, he might have apologized—he’s a demon, but this is Aziraphale’s territory, and he always ends up sliding into behaviors that might make Aziraphale happy when he’s near him—but he’s in far too vicious a mood today, and he isn’t a good person, he shouldn’t pretend, so he just slams and locks the doors closed again behind him with another careless miracle and stalks to his car without a word to the middle-aged coveter of books he’d knocked to the pavement.
Peeling out in the Bentley and speeding home relieves his feelings a little, because it’s fleeing in a hurry but without doing anything out of character enough for Aziraphale to notice that he’s upset.
He does, actually, have things he was going to do today, but he does none of them. He drives home to his flat, parks outside, and goes straight up to privacy. Once the door is closed behind him, he stands stock still, shoulders trembling, for a long moment before he screams and grabs a previously-nonexistent vase off of a previously-nonexistent hall table next to him and chucks it at the wall as hard as he can. It explodes into hundreds of shards with a satisfying crash, and he produces another immediately so he can do that again.
A timeless interval[1]of blind rage and despair later, the floor of the hallway is covered in more broken glass and ceramic than a mosaic-filled Roman villa, and Crowley is breathing hard on what he refuses to admit is the verge of sobbing.
Right. This is fine. This is… fine. It’s not like he’s ever expected anything of Aziraphale before. He can live with Aziraphale pretending this didn’t happen.
He can’t live with Aziraphale pretending this didn’t happen. If Aziraphale had just been going on like they had before, unchanged—maybe. But he’s not. Aziraphale is careful to stay on the other side of rooms from Crowley now, finds excuses to move rapidly away if they’re within a yard of each other, is full of endless excuses why he can’t go to lunch… and he won’t look Crowley in the face. Aziraphale will barely look in Crowley’s direction at all.
Visiting Aziraphale is actually lonelier than staying at home.
So Crowley gives up. He stops trying to spend time with Aziraphale and sits in his apartment alone watching telly. He buys an electric blanket, so he doesn’t have to think about how cold he is. He’s fine. He’s gone centuries without talking to Aziraphale before. This is fine.
It’s not fine. He hasn’t been able to sleep since he woke up alone on Aziraphale’s couch, and his body may not actually need it, but he’s gotten very used to the habit—and more than that, not sleeping means he doesn’t have any time he can stop thinking. He hasn’t bothered going back into the bedroom since the first miserable night, preferring to stay on his uncomfortable expensive couch where the telly can provide some distraction from the inside of his head. He develops an obsessive investment in the characters on EastEnders and the contestants of Bake-Off and Love Island. He memorizes every detail of the schedule of every BBC channel, and which programmes he prioritizes.
It doesn’t help. He’s broken and had to replace three flatscreens in the last two weeks, when something reminded him in just the wrong way of why he’s alone in his apartment watching the telly and he started manifesting things to chuck at the screen before thinking about it. Some of those things may have, before being rendered into tiny pieces, looked like Aziraphale’s favorite angel-wings mug. Nearly the entire apartment’s floor is covered in broken glass and ceramic he hasn’t cared enough to clean up. Sometimes he kicks a path through it on the rare occasions that he leave the room. Sometimes he just walks on it, barefooted, and bleakly relishes the crunch and the pain. The path to the sink (to refill the plant mister) and the plants (to be misted) is speckled with red-brown edges on the shards.
He hasn’t even cared enough to threaten the plants. They don’t tremble at his approach anymore. He touches their leaves, sometimes, runs his fingers over them and reminds himself that he’s not the only thing alive inside the walls of his flat, in London, on this miserable ball of rock he had wanted so desperately to save.
After a month without seeing Aziraphale, a month without a moment of sleep to escape himself, he decides that desperate measures are called for. Maybe if someone touched him, he could feel less alone. Could pretend he wasn’t unwanted by every being above, below, and in between.
He fishes out his sleek, modern, entirely unused computer, and loads up the internet.
After a bit of research, he decides that craigslist is the best option. Dating sites are everywhere, but… no. He’s not dating. He doesn’t want to act like this means something.
After perusing a lot of posts, he decides that it looks like having your own place is important—too many people with roommates and no privacy—and goes out to acquire a flat. He doesn’t want to invite strange humans to this one. He tells himself it’s because he doesn’t want to clean the floor, or explain the statuary or the art.
He finds a cheap studio flat in Peckham—it being a ground floor he tells himself is only because it’s cheapest and does well for the image he’s decided to portray, and not because it has access to a small but lush back garden—and installs himself in it, buying and miracleing in an impractically large bed and not much else. As an afterthought, he stocks the kitchen with enough random bits of food—a few cans of baked beans, a packet of digestive biscuits, a couple of premade sandwiches from Tesco in the fridge—that it’ll look believably like a human actually lives there.
Mostly, though, he stocks it with cheap alcohol. He gets very drunk, changes his simulated expensive designer clothes into something more in line with his surroundings, and makes a post on craigslist.
Can’t sleep alone, he titles the post. It’s rambling and sad, admitting things he hasn’t been admitting to himself to the whole of the anonymous internet. I fell asleep on the couch of the man I’m in love with, on him, and he hasn’t looked at me since. I can’t sleep for thinking of him, remembering I’m alone and cold. I’m going mad. I’ll do anything you like if you’ll hold me while I sleep after. He takes pictures with the webcam the computer has manifested, in the style of the other posts he’s looked at, of his bare chest, of his arse in painted-on jeans. He hits post.
His anonymous new email account is filling up with replies in what seems like seconds, and he has enough choice to be selective. Many of them have sent pictures, or descriptions, and almost against his own will he is drawn to a plush man who describes himself as a bear, exchanging a few coy emails and then an address, inviting him to come that night. He doesn’t think about why he wants someone with a soft stomach to be the one who comes.
When the man turns up, he’s soft-spoken and kind, and it almost undoes Crowley. He thinks he could almost have dealt more easily with being used than with being taken care of. He doesn't press Crowley to talk about it—or to talk much at all—and Crowley is pathetically grateful.
He sucks the man’s cock, because he needs to feel like this is a transaction, like he has done something to pay for what he’s being given, and if his cheeks are damp when he falls asleep against the man's soft chest, neither of them mention it. In the morning the man ruffles his hair, lets Crowley suck him off again, gives him a sad smile, and leaves. It's only later, after Crowley has taken a shower and cried and gotten drunk again, that he opens the computer to find that the man had slipped a hundred pounds into it.
Apparently he pulls off pathetic and destitute well, Crowley thinks with black humor, because the alternative is crying again.
Upside, he was unconscious for eight hours in which he didn't think about Aziraphale at all. It was worth it. More effective than just being drunk.
Being drunk is much worse, actually, because when he's drunk his fingers creep towards his phone and he gets tempted to call Aziraphale, or drop by the shop, or—
Advantages of the Peckham flat also include its lack of landline and ansaphone. He couldn't bear to unplug his back in Mayfair, or turn it off, in case Aziraphale—but, well, it means that when Aziraphale makes awkward phone calls (that Crowley studiously ignored even when he was still in Mayfair) asking falsely casual questions about what Crowley was up to, he doesn't have to listen. He can lay on his huge bed, wrapped in his electric blanket, and stare at the telly he miracled into the ceiling, while he waits for evening, when another man will come.
A few times he picks skinny ones, or harsh ones, trying to remind himself of Aziraphale less, but it doesn't really help. He’s just as aware of what he’s doing, and why, and how pathetic it is, how debasing. It’s just also more unpleasant.
So mostly he chokes down his self-loathing and invites soft men, with quiet words and round stomachs. After a while he has enough that like him and contacted him about returning that he rarely needs to post a new ad anymore. Some of his regulars stroke his hair, and he can almost pretend. Most of them leave money, which he really doesn't need. He keeps it in a tea tin under the sink, and brings it back to Mayfair to throw in the safe and ignore on his weekly trips to check on the plants.
He doesn't bring any plants to Peckham. That would be like admitting that he lives there now, that he has made this his life. If sometimes, during warm afternoons, a black snake curls up under the sun in the grass of the back garden of the studio flat, that’s no one’s business but its own.
It’s Thursday, and a soft-spoken man with tweed jackets and curly hair is due to come over that night. Crowley would not say that he is looking forward to it, inside or outside of his own head, but his skin is crawling and he’s having a worse time than usual focusing on anything but memories.
His computer pings with an email notification from the man—he technically knows all their names, but refuses to so much as think them, as if articulating them will make what he’s doing real—and he clicks on it hurriedly. His stomach drops. An unexpected emergency, so sorry, won't be able to make it.
Crowley manifests a mug and hurls it at the wall, then miracles away the shards and the dent in the plaster. He has to keep up appearances here. He goes to craigslist to put up another ad. He doesn't have much time to be choosy to find someone else for tonight, and hell if he's going to just skip it and spend the whole time thinking, or getting drunk and almost calling Aziraphale.
Earlier that same Thursday, Aziraphale is fretting. He’s been growing slowly concerned for a while now. Crowley has stopped visiting, which isn't entirely unusual, but he hasn't answered his phone or called Aziraphale back since, and ordinarily he always calls Aziraphale back. Ordinarily he rarely even lets Aziraphale go all the way to the ansaphone.
Crowley is entitled to his privacy, of course, and to… choose his own associates… but Aziraphale is getting increasingly afraid that something has happened to him.
Telling himself that this is entirely for Crowley's sake and not at all for his own, Aziraphale hails a taxi and heads to Crowley’s flat. It feels thoroughly peculiar to be going there in some strange car, as every previous time he had visited, it had been with Crowley, in the Bentley. The drive feels like it takes years, and he almost misses Crowley’s absurd speeding.
When he gets to the building, he goes up to the right floor, then pauses outside the door. He's not entirely sure what he actually plans to do now.
He'll figure it out. Once more into the breach. He takes a deep breath and knocks on the door.
Nothing happens.
He knocks again, harder. Still no response. “Crowley?” He calls hesitantly. There is silence from inside the flat.
He bites his lip and dithers for a few minutes before steeling himself and miracleing the door open. He'll apologize later, he just has to know Crowley is all right.
He steps into the dim hallway, mind filled with justifications, and something hard crunches under his shoe. He stops still, and has to center himself and calm his nerves for a moment before be can bring himself to snap his fingers to call light and look down.
It takes him several seconds of staring at the floor to make sense of what he's seeing. Broken pottery. Hundreds—thousands?—of shards of it, covering the floor so thickly you can't see the concrete underneath. All of them are blank white and sharp-looking.
He doesn't want to walk on them, but he also doesn't feel he should remove things from Crowley’s flat—even broken things—so he hesitantly kicks through them, so the soles of his shoes are touching mostly floor, rather than wobbling on the fragile, uneven carpet of broken ceramic. The shards are scratching the leather, but he’s choosing to ignore that. He has higher priorities right now than the state of his loafers.
He tows the light along with him, and it's a good thing he does, because there are no lights on in the flat at all, and nothing coming in the windows. All of the floors are covered in the same layer of broken pottery, until he gets to the living room. It's thicker here, with what looks like almost drifts of it along the walls next to the television, piled up to a foot higher in some places than the layer on the rest of the floor. There's black broken glass mixed into those piles, which distracts Aziraphale enough it takes him a minute to notice that there's another difference in the floor of this room. A path towards the kitchen and one leading towards the room where Crowley’s houseplants live are clearly visible, the shards in them a little lower and more neatly compressed than the rest of the room, and something dark is smeared on many of the pieces, especially the edges. It isn't until Aziraphale leans close to look and is hit with the smell of copper and sulphur that he realizes it's Crowley’s blood.
He hasn't spoken since he stepped into the flat, and he's almost afraid to now. He can feel the hollowness of it, anyway. He doesn't need to shout Crowley’s name or look in every corner to know that the demon isn't here. It doesn't even feel like somewhere Crowley lives, anymore, a sense of a place that Aziraphale hadn't realized he possessed until he was confronted with the lack of it.
His shop feels a little like that lately, like something important that belongs there has been taken away and left a hole behind it, but he's not thinking about that.
This time, when he gets in a taxi, he bends traffic around it and blurs the driver’s mind enough to halve the time it takes to get back to Soho. He is thoroughly unsettled and definitely concerned, and he wants to be home. He wants to forget dark concrete halls filled with pale broken things smeared with blood, though he rather expects the image will never leave him.
Has something happened to Crowley?
He nearly forgets to pay the cabbie when he gets home, then overcompensates and gives the man several hundred pounds out of redirected guilt. He hurries inside, snaps up a sign in the window that declares CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, and heads into the back room to drink and pace and fret and try and figure out something to do.
After an hour or two, he's drunk enough and worked up enough that he's talking to himself, muttering aloud what he does and doesn't know. “Just because there was blood doesn't necessarily mean something happened to him, but why was there blood? Why is he gone? If he left himself, why didn't he say something? Oh, I just wish I knew where he was!”
Next to him on the desk, his computer beeps and the monitor flickers to life displaying a webpage[2]. He frowns in confusion at why it's come on without his direction, and is reaching to shut it back down, when his eyes catch on the picture on the screen. It's a scrawny chest, ribs visible, with no shirt on, but at the bottom of the image he can see a belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake that is horribly familiar.
He clicks through the other images with a pit of horrible certainty growing in his stomach. These aren't Crowley’s usual clothes, and the room behind him isn't the (empty, silent, bloody) Mayfair flat, and he doesn't usually see the demon from these angles or in these states of undress, but—
He tries to pretend he's not positive he's right, but he can feel the empty falseness of the lie.
There are words next to the pictures. He is terrified to look at them.
He does anyway.
Can't sleep alone, says the title. He feels slightly ill, dread building alongside certainty, and the body of the post only makes it worse.
Bears of London, you know the drill. I'm still pining for a man I can never have, he still doesn't love me, you're still soft and willing to hold me so I can get some sleep after I do anything you like. My Thursday regular cancelled today, so this is a limited time opportunity—you need to be free tonight, within three hours. As ever, I have my own place. Email me, I'll pick someone and give them my address, if you're the lucky winner you come over and this is all yours till morning. Picture required, doesn't need to have your face, does need to have your torso. The quicker you can make it to my flat, the more likely to are to be selected.
You're all so good to me. I'll see one of you soon.
He doesn't want to believe that Crowley posted this.
He can't convince himself that there's no way Crowley posted this.
Before he can talk himself out of it, he hits the reply button, and his email program opens. He stops and stares at the blinking cursor for a few minutes. Does he really want to do this? Does he want to make it real?
He thinks about human men treating Crowley as all theirs and something twists in his chest. If it's not Crowley, he has to know. If it is—
If it is, there are a lot of things that follow that he cannot possibly let himself think about. Not right now.
Having decided to compose the email doesn't give him a better idea of how to do it. He picks at and deletes sentences for several minutes before giving up and going with Hello. I have been told I'm very soft, perhaps too soft. I'm free right now.
After muttering irritably at the computer for a bit, it grows a camera. Aziraphale, thinking of Crowley’s distinctive belt buckle, takes his clothes entirely off and miracles up a screen behind himself to conceal the bookshop before taking the picture. He then realizes his ring is visible, and takes it off before trying again, this time with his hands mostly out of shot. Crowley has looked at his hands a great deal over the years. He doesn't think they're particularly distinctive, but, well—
Well.
As he attaches the picture, he suddenly realizes that his email address is rather bloody distinctive and Crowley knows it. He kicks himself and goes to look up how to make a new one.
After a bit of dithering over too-obvious pseudonyms, he's trying again, with JohnMason at Hotmail dot com instead of AZFell at Yahoo dot com. He retypes his message, signs it “John” with a twinge of pain at the lie, attaches the (carefully scrutinized for identifying details) picture of his chest, and hits send.
He immediately secondguesses himself and goes to get the bottle of scotch he left on the side, absently miracleing his clothes back on and the screen out of existence as he does.
By the time he gets back to the computer with the alcohol, having taken a couple of healthy swigs directly from the bottle on the way, a reply has popped up in his inbox.
He clicks on it, his stomach lurching.
If you can be here within fifteen minutes, John, I'm yours for the night.
It's not signed, but it doesn't need to be. It's followed by an address. He's not sure he could actually get a taxi there in time, but he is entirely desperate enough about seeing this through to miracle himself across the city instead.
I'll be there, he replies.
Perfect, see you soon returns to him in moments, and he spares a moment to think about the typing speed that implies. He didn't think Crowley was any good at typing. Perhaps it's not Crowley.
Perhaps Crowley has gotten a lot of practice recently.
With that thought, he can't wait any longer to miracle himself straight to Peckham. He's not on exactly the right street, he doesn't know every detail of the borough, but he knows he's close and that he can walk there in time. And that if he appeared on the doorstep it would be rather suspiciously fast.
What does it matter if it's suspiciously fast, if it's Crowley, and he's about to have something to be a lot more than suspicious about, he asks himself as he hurries down the street, but he doesn't allow himself an answer.
He reaches the door both too quickly and far too slowly. He takes a deep breath and knocks. Too late to back out now.
There's a faint click and the distinct feeling of a miracle from the doorknob, and a too-familiar voice calls out “It's unlocked!”
He opens the door and walks in. He barely registers a nearly empty studio flat with a huge bed on the floor in the centre, because all he's looking at is Crowley. He looks years younger than Aziraphale has ever seen him wear a corporation before, and Aziraphale could count every rib in his shirtless chest. He's wearing some kind of shorts so abbreviated they barely qualify as an undergarment, let alone an outer one, and nothing else.
He's looking straight at Aziraphale with an expression of dawning horror that Aziraphale finds he does not at all enjoy being directed at him, and a moment later Crowley makes a hoarse horrible noise and collapses to the floor like his strings have been cut. His face is behind his knees, his arms in front of the top of his head, like he's so desperate to escape that he's trying to hide behind his own limbs from Aziraphale.
“You're John Mason, I suppose,” Crowley says in a flat voice with something trembling behind it.
“…Yes,” Aziraphale says, because he can't think of anything more useful to say.
“Congratulations,” Crowley says, and his voice shakes more with each word. “Found me. Lovely detective work. Buy you a bottle of Chablis later. Go away, Aziraphale.”
There is something beating at the inside of Aziraphale’s chest that feels like it's going to burst out and leave him hollow and bleeding behind. “I'd rather not,” he hears himself say, distantly, “if it's all the same to you.”
“It isn't, actually, I would prefer you fucking well leave!” Crowley's voice raises to a scream that cracks horribly on the last word, and it hits Aziraphale like a knife in the chest. “Why are you here, why are you fucking here, what did I do to fucking deserve this, Falling wasn't enough, suffering wasn't enough, I have to be fucking humiliated in my fucking weakness too. Why are you here, Principality Aziraphale.” Crowley snarls the last sentence, and Aziraphale has never heard that venom directed at himself before.
He doesn't think Crowley has ever addressed him by his title before.
“I was worried about you,” he says helplessly, knowing it's a ridiculous and inadequate reason to have come here under false pretenses. “You wouldn't answer my calls, I went to your flat and you weren't there—”
Crowley actually looks up from behind his arms at that last, and his face is drained of blood, ghost pale. “You went in my flat?”
“I thought you might be hurt!” Aziraphale defends himself, knowing it doesn't excuse it. “And there was blood everywhere—”
Crowley actually looks confused for a moment, then squeezes his eyes closed. “Right. From going barefoot to mist the plants. Thought it would be safe to leave my own home a mess, I have to keep this one neat to avoid questions, but I got it to begin with so I wouldn't have to explain my flat.” He opens his eyes again to sneer at Aziraphale, another expression Aziraphale isn't used to having aimed his way. “Don't have to come up with an excuse for you as to why I can afford it, at least. Just for everything else I've done in my miserable bloody existence.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Bullshit, Aziraphale.” Crowley sounds exhausted, and Aziraphale feels like a monster. “If you recognized me from the ad, you had options that were not this. You came because you wanted to corner me for answers. Here's your fucking answers. At least have the nerve to ask your questions, I can see them crowding behind your eyes.”
Aziraphale closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. It's already awful, he tells himself in a twisted mockery of reassurance. You can't make the situation much worse. He opens his eyes and looks straight into Crowley’s. “Are you in love with me?”
Crowley bursts into laughter, bitter hacking laughs that sound closer to sobs. “Yeah, angel, I am. Sorry about that. You've been so good at ignoring it all these centuries, I didn't mean to make you actually fucking admit it.”
“Centuries?” Aziraphale says before he can stop himself.
Crowley gives him a disgusted look. “No, I make a habit of tracking all kinds of humans and angels across the world and rescuing them out of any unpleasantness they get into and then getting drunk with them. People I don't care about at all! Why, I rescued an archangel from a duke of hell last week!” His voice goes high and sing-song, dripping with mocking sarcasm.
Puzzle pieces are slotting together in Aziraphale’s mind, and the picture they are revealing makes him want to throw up and then possibly set himself on fire out of sheer ashamed remorse. Oh, God, he has been so cruel to Crowley. And then, before he disappeared— “You fell asleep on my couch,” he says, without really meaning to.
“Yes, you are capable of remembering events, have a gold star,” Crowley snaps.
“And I wouldn't look at you in the morning, because—”
“You were so fucking disgusted by having touched me, angel, I know, I was there,” Crowley interrupts.
“No,” says Aziraphale. He has a feeling this may be the most important thing he ever says, and he hopes desperately he can get it right. “That wasn't it at all. I was terrified—” he holds up a hand to stop Crowley as he opens his mouth, “—I was terrified of how wonderful it had been, how much I loved having your weight against me, my fingers in your hair where they've itched to be since Eden, you close enough to touch, and I wanted to possess you and never let you go, and I was terrified of taking things you didn’t want to give, and of abusing your trust and good will, and I couldn't trust myself to touch you without clutching for more, and I thought I could just pretend and it would go back to normal and I'd still have you and you wouldn't be frightened away, and I should have told you, Crowley, I'm sorry, I should have sat and waited for you to wake up and asked what you wanted, I'm a coward and I fear what I want more than anything—”
Aziraphale runs out of words with half a sob, his eyes fixed pleadingly on Crowley, who has been watching him babble with a series of expressions that Aziraphale cannot interpret.
They're both silent for a long minute, and Aziraphale is afraid he's ruined everything irreparably, driven away the only thing that made his life worth living, and finally Crowley opens his mouth.
“You're a fucking bastard, Aziraphale,” he says, but his tone is almost conversational, like he's remarking on the weather. “Always your bloody pace. You go too fast for me, Crowley,” he imitates bitterly, and Aziraphale remembers red lights and a tartan thermos and cowardice and fresh reasons to hate himself. “Right. You want something of me? Come here and take it. I did promise I was all yours tonight, after all,” he adds sarcastically. Crowley drops his knees to the sides to sit cross-legged on the floor instead and spreads his arms. “One worthless crawling demon, here for the taking.” The matter-of-factness of the insult to himself twists in Aziraphale’s stomach along with everything else making him feel like he's going to dissolve from within with shame.
He doesn't deserve to touch Crowley, but more important than that is that Crowley doesn't deserve to be this miserable, to believe that Aziraphale doesn't want him and that he has to sell himself to be touched, to believe that he doesn’t deserve to be cherished, so Aziraphale crosses the floor and drops to his knees in front of Crowley. He reaches out a trembling hand to touch his cheek, permitted, permitted, and like the bursting of a dam the gentle touch rapidly turns into pulling Crowley into his chest, wrapping his arms around as much of him as he can reach, one hand buried in Crowley’s hair and the other clutching at his hip, and he's shaking, taking heaving breaths that are almost sobs, and he can feel Crowley tense and wary and trembling in his arms, so afraid of this, afraid Aziraphale is going to ruin him again, and Aziraphale is weeping into Crowley's hair and whispering incoherent apologies that are half in languages that have been dead for centuries, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry it took me so long, I'm sorry, I hurt you I'm so sorry I hurt you I'm sorry, dear one I'm so sorry, you are the last thing I've ever wanted to hurt, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Aziraphale’s chest is damp, because Crowley is weeping too, and as Aziraphale babbles apologies and clutches him close, Crowley slowly unfreezes and wraps his arms around Aziraphale in return, melting into his chest and clenching handfuls of Aziraphale’s coat in his fists.
They stay like that, clutching desperately at each other like they're trying to become one being, murmuring apologetic nonsense, weeping and shaking, for a long time.
Eventually Crowley pulls back a little with a sniffle. His face is raw, but Aziraphale can see a little guard going up. Guard, and behind it, fragile and impossible to protect, desperate hope.
“Hold me while I sleep?” Crowley asks, whispers, looking down, like this is too great a shame or too great a risk to let Aziraphale look into his eyes while he asks it. “In the morning we can— we can talk about—” he voice cracks and he takes a deep breath and tries again, “about if— if you want me to come to the shop or—” his voice is more and more ragged as he goes on, “but please just. Please stay, please don't go, please don't leave me to wake up alone again, please.” His voice breaks entirely on the last word and it's another knife in Aziraphale’s chest. He put that terror, that uncertainty, that pleading insecurity there. This is his fault.
“Yes,” he says. “I promise.” It is the best he can give, his word, and he knows it means nothing, is worth nothing.
Crowley apparently decides to trust him, though he has never proven himself trustworthy in all the six millennia the Earth has turned, and starts to move to get up and walk to the bed. Aziraphale makes a split second decision that he doesn't want Crowley walking there, pulling Aziraphale after, he doesn't want to follow, doesn’t want Crowley to have to have faith that he’s there. He doesn't want want Crowley to be forced to be any more the supplicant than he has been already.
He stands and sweeps Crowley up in this arms, cradling him against his chest, and carries him the bare few strides to the bed. He sits down on it, lays back against the pillows, arranges Crowley against his chest, in his arms. After a moment’s thought, he miracles off his waistcoat and jacket to a pile on the floor nearby, leaving his soft much-laundered shirt as what Crowley is leaning against rather than tougher cloth and buttons.
Crowley inhales sharply with surprise when picked up, and makes a desperate little sound he apparently cannot suppress when Aziraphale’s jacket disappears. He presses his face into Aziraphale’s chest after they’re settled and draws in a deep breath. “Sorry you don't have a book or something,” he murmurs, defensive, nonchalant, self-deprecating, intensely Crowley.
“I have everything I need,” Aziraphale whispers, his heart breaking again, and Crowley’s shoulders tremble for a bit.
Slowly the tension bleeds out of Crowley's body, and his breathing evens, running on automatic when he's not paying attention to muck it up. He molds into every contour of Aziraphale’s chest, and Aziraphale wants to weep he feels so gratified by and undeserving of this trust, but he will not wake Crowley, so he lies in silence and watches the demon’s face slack and defenseless in the dark, and knows it will be no trouble at all to lie here until morning.
He would watch Crowley sleep for a century, if the alternative was Crowley away from him, Crowley waking up alone and thinking himself despised. He is a selfish bastard of an angel, he hurt his dearest demon so very much, but it doesn't matter if he doesn't deserve Crowley. Crowley deserves whatever he wants, and if Crowley wants Aziraphale, he's his.
He's not going to run away any more. Ever again.
[1] Around fifteen minutes, if measured on a clock somewhere else. [ return to text ]
[2] This model of computer, in anyone else's hands, is throughly incapable of rendering images, variable width fonts, or indeed any part of the modern World Wide Web. No one has ever told Aziraphale this, however, so he has soldiered on with the assumption that his computer could do anything he needed it to, and in the face of implacable angelic faith, it has complied. [ return to text ]