Chapter Text
Aziraphale was very, very good at keeping secrets. Crowley only found out if he got under what Aziraphale was thinking and hinted at it, getting closer and closer until Aziraphale would divulge the secret, like a sweet. Giggling all the way, too.
But this secret, this secret he’d been sitting on since Eden. Since he’d held his wing out like an umbrella for Crowley in the first rain, watching it spread across the horizon. It was like a broken bone- he held it close, got defensive when Crowley got near it, hurt and snarling like a mad dog when he poked too close.
He was completely smitten with Crowley.
Aziraphale didn’t know when it’d started, but when Crowley had asked about the flaming sword in the Garden, and when he’d assured him that he’d made the right choice, maybe that was it. Maybe that was the day- the dawn of time.
Or maybe it was standing with him in the desert, a black shawl thrown almost carelessly around Crowley’s shoulders and flame-red hair. Maybe that was then, seeing the fabric contrast against the curls, a flame in a bed of coals.
Crowley still had the shawl- still wore it sometimes. Aziraphale’s heart still skipped a beat whenever he wore it, remembering the hot sun, the sand in his shoes, the way Crowley had looked…
Or maybe it was when they were trying to teach the not-antichrist-Warlock. Nanny Ashtoreth. Aziraphale sighed, inhaling very very deeply and exhaling the same. Goddess of war and sexual love. He remembered.
That was all Crowley.
Now, sitting here in his armchair, facing the window into the garden where it was raining, with a glass of red wine balanced on the arm, he contemplated the centuries of pining, and the turn for the interesting things had seemed to have taken recently.
Oh, Aziraphale was drunk. The several empty bottles of priceless wine clustered around the base of the armchair and the half-empty one at his feet told the whole story if anyone cared to know.
He was drunk drunk drunk drunk. And thinking of nothing but Crowley, who was God knows where doing God knows what with God knows who, for God knows what reason.
Did God know, though? Not that he was doubting God- but still…
He sighed again and looked at his garden, the garden he’d styled after Eden, trying to go home to a place that didn’t exist anymore.
He missed Eden. He missed Crowley.
“Angel!” someone yelled from the front door of the bookshop. “Angel, it’s wet out here and the bloody door is locked!”
Oh. It was Crowley.
Aziraphale’s mouth flattened into a grim line as he sat, unmoving. The lock to the front door clicked. Crowley walked in, shaking out a black umbrella.
Aziraphale was too drunk to care what he looked like, sitting in the dark in days-old clothes with a forest of bottles strewn about him.
“Angel?” he called. Aziraphale could hear him creaking his way through the main proper of the bookshop. “You there?”
“Mrgh,” he managed, which was a very emphatic ‘go away, foul fiend’ for about twenty bottles in.
“Did I wake you up?” Crowley asked, striding into the darkened bedroom. Then, “Oh G- S- fuck, angel, how long have you been drinking?”
Aziraphale didn’t bother mentally running the numbers. The clock glared at him, its hands like a moustache.
“Mrgh,” he said.
“Bet it was since I left last. What’s gotten you so depressed, eh?”
He nodded a bit, found his head lolling on his chest, and chortled a faint little laugh at the cotton emotion this provoked.
“Sober up, damn it!” Crowley threw his hands up. “Angel, please tell me what’s going on!”
“M’won’t sober up!” Aziraphale pointed in the general direction of Eden on Earth. “‘s raining, m’dear boy.”
He could feel himself losing his grasp on his corporation, wings and eyes and feathers spilling out of the cracks and edges of Aziraphale the Human. He must have looked a real fright, a vaguely human form with an eldritch angelic being superimposed atop and around.
“Aziraphale, angel, calm down!” Crowley shouted, waving his hands in front of his face like it would save him from witnessing the drunk angelic onslaught.
It occurred to Aziraphale that Crowley had never seen his angelic form. Just the wings. Not the corporation threaded with the eyes, the wings, the whole of the universe speckled throughout the being.
The universe to protect- since he was charged with protecting it.
Crowley was now standing in front of the window. An elaborate piece, in the style of stained glass, at the perfect angle, was framed…
“The wall,” Crowley gasped.
“The wall,” Aziraphale echoed.
“It’s raining,” Crowley said faintly. A broken, flaming crown flickered above his head. Aziraphale drained some alcohol out of him, evaporating it into nothing. Crowley’s tears dropped onto the floor as he stared.
“Eden,” he said. “I missed it so much.”
And then they were both standing at the window, Azirapahale no longer drunk, clothed in white with a halo, wings, and eyes.
Exactly as he had been created.
Crowley, in his flaming red hair, the broken crown of fire, black robes, wings, and snakeskin scales.
Standing at their Eden and wishing for times that had been and might be soon.
“I remember like it was yesterday,” Aziraphale said quietly. “The first rain.”
“I didn’t know if it was holy. I’d fallen but not gone down yet, so why wouldn’t everything up there burn me? If it was so much God’s domain.”
“And I thought of you.” Aziraphale touched a hand to the glass, over his view of the apple tree. “Why did you do it?”
“Oh, the apples? Eve did that. She had me try it. That’s why I like women.”
“So it wasn’t you, the temptation,” Azirapahale mused.
“No. She fed it to me to make sure she could eat it. After all, if God said it was forbidden, it was for a reason, but Eve wanted to know.”
“I want to know.”
“I think we both wanted to know, Angel,” Crowley said, sighing. “What our purpose was.”
“Clearly, it’s to keep each other from discorporation by drunkenness.”
“Mmm,” said Crowley, head on Aziraphale’s shoulder, Aziraphale’s wing folding around him.
“Love you, my dear.”
“Love you, angel.”
And they watched the rain.