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Nina looked speculatively at the bottle of wine on the table, then at the demon sitting on her sofa, draped so languidly he looked almost inhuman.
He wasn’t human, Nina reminded herself. That was the entire point. Crowley was a demon shaped like a man.
“What’s Hell like?” she said, into the silence, having judged they had drunk enough that she might actually get an answer.
“What d’you mean?” Crowley heaved himself slightly more upright and took a long drink.
“Well, where is it for a start?”
Crowley looked at the floor. Nina got the impression it was a reflexive movement and thought it rather answered the question. At least, it would if she could believe it for a second.
“Seriously?” she griped. “You’re telling me Hell is down there?”
“Yep.” Crowley shrugged nonchalantly. “All those ancient people had it right. The earth is hollow. Hell is underground. All that business of a molten core is just because of the fire and brimstone.”
Nina supressed a sigh. She had the awkward feeling she was being made fun of.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me Heaven is in the sky as well,” she said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Angels fluttering around up there in the clouds playing harps and all that.”
“Well, they don’t play harps, but yes.” He gave her a hard look. “And no.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “You really expect me to believe that? That Heaven is up there in the sky?”
“Like I said. Yes and no.” Crowley waved a hand vaguely, almost spilling his wine.
“Where is it then? Further out? I suppose there is all that empty space up there. Is Heaven just floating around between the stars?”
“Yes,” he said flatly, “and no.” His eyes were fixed on the far wall and Nina got the impression he was lost in some old memory. “I touched the stars,” he said softly. “Once upon a time.”
“You can’t touch stars,” Nina said, rather breaking through his reverie.
Crowley shrugged, as if her disbelief wasn’t particularly important, though she could see the slightly annoyed curl to his lip
“Aren’t they big flaming balls of gas?” she asked, after a while. “Wouldn’t you burn before you even got near them?”
“Only if I took this corporation with me. I’m not human, remember? I can visit the stars if I want to."
They lapsed into silence. Nina wasn’t sure if she should disturb him again. Not when he had that faraway look back on his face and the ghost of a smile on his lips.
She still wanted an answer though, so after a while she spoke again. “So, Heaven is in space?”
The question seemed to bring him back from wherever he’d disappeared to, though all he did was shrug again. “Yes,” he said, “and no.”
Nina sighed and topped up their wine glasses.
“I suppose,” she said, sitting back more comfortably in her armchair and tucking her feet underneath her, “that with the universe being infinite Heaven could be floating around up there and we’d never know.”
“The universe isn’t infinite,” Crowley pointed out. “That’s just a thing humans say. Though you know it isn’t infinite really, your clever scientists know it’s got an edge.”
“Because it’s expanding,” Nina said, remember her high school physics.
“Exactly.”
“So what’s it expanding into?” She frowned in confusion, recalling that even as a teenager the whole question had bothered her. “I’ve always wondered that.”
“Nothing,” said Crowley.
“How can it expand into nothing?”
Crowley shrugged. “It’s not really nothing. It’s just nothing to you.”
Nina blew out a long, frustrated breath, not at all enjoying how cryptic he was being.
“So what you’re telling me is that earth may, or may not, be hollow and that Hell may, or may not, be inside it. Also Heaven may, or may not, be in space, which isn’t infinite, but is big enough to hold it anyway.”
“No,” said Crowley firmly. “That’s human talk.”
“I am human.” Nina frowned and took another drink. “So is the earth hollow or not?”
“Yes.”
“And Hell is inside it?”
“Yes. And also no.”
Nina made a frustrated noise.
“Look,” said Crowley leaning forward to pour himself another glass of wine. “Hell is down there. It’s the Underworld, Pandemonium, the Abyss, the Bottomless Pit. It’s inside the earth, but also it’s not. Earth is hollow. Hell is an infinite void.”
“What?”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly?”
“You can never understand it. Heaven and Hell are both beyond human understanding.” Crowley paused and thought about it for a few moments. “To be honest, it’s beyond your understanding even once you end up there. When a human goes to Heaven or Hell they still perceive it in human terms. You get a bit more understanding, but it’s not as if you suddenly turn into an angel. Or a demon.”
“So what’s it like then, to a human?”
“Hell?”
“Whichever.”
“Hell’s full of torture chambers and pits of hellfire and horrible demons.” Nina nodded along. This was what she had been expecting. “It’s a nasty place. Dirty, damp, smelly, can’t get a decent coffee and all the pipes leak. Maintenance is shocking.”
This was much more unexpected.
“Leaky pipes?” she said, with a good deal of disbelief. Crowley shrugged.
“What’s more annoying than a leaky pipe that drips on your paperwork and never gets fixed?”
“I can think of a few things,” Nina said faintly.
“Anyway the leaky pipes are mostly just a demonic perception of the despair of the place. Their perceptions shape how they experience it.”
“I thought you said demons perceived things differently from humans.”
“Oh they can, but six millennia of interacting with humans means some habits start to rub off, even on eternal beings.”
“Habits like perceiving leaky pipes?”
“Yep, you could put it that way.”
“So even you don’t see Heaven and Hell as endless?”
“I can if I choose to. All angels and demons can, but it gets very wearing.”
“Looking at the infinite void gets wearing?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. Trying to interact with humans on a human level, whilst also perceiving the endlessness of Heaven and Hell is wearing. Most of the time we just don’t bother anymore.”
“So you see what the humans see?”
“More or less. Not quite. But think about it… can you imagine what it would be like to walk the earth constantly thinking about the endless void below and the infinity of Heaven above?”
“Not really.”
“Of course you can’t. It’s ineffable to humans. Beyond understanding.”
“I suppose you think us pathetic,” she said, because how else must an ageless being with knowledge of so much perceive humans? “Crawling around like ants on the earth.”
“No.” Crowley shook his head, sitting forward and looking suddenly serious, as if this was a point of great importance to him. “I like humans. I always have. Ever since the beginning. Well, nearly the beginning.”
“Really?” She doubted his declaration for several reasons. Not least because angels were the ones who were supposed to love humanity. Besides she’d always felt Crowley treated humans with a sort of careless dismissal, as if they were playthings. Not even particularly treasured playthings. The whole world was his playground after all.
“I like humanity,” he said quietly, staring into his wine glass and seeming suddenly full of introspection. “I’ve loved… humans.”
Nina looked at him, sensing now was not the time for a sarcastic remark. The mood seemed to have shifted. Even tipsy as she was she knew not to upset the balance.
Crowley sat for a few moments and then with a sigh he gestured.
A box appeared on the table. It was fairly small, not even the size of an A4 piece of paper and only a few inches deep, but although it was only a little worn at the edges it radiated a sense of age. As if it had been on the earth a very long time – carried around and treasured by someone who cared for it very much.
Crowley leaned forward slowly and lifted the lid. Nina slid onto the floor and knelt next to the coffee table to get a better look.
The box was full of pictures. Pictures of humans.
They were all carefully preserved and fresh looking, but as Crowley shuffled through them Nina sensed some of the pictures were very old indeed. Most of them were drawings or paintings, but there were a few photographs towards the bottom of the box.
“Who are they all?” Nina asked, looking at the drawing Crowley pulled out. It depicted a young man, possibly in his early 20s, head a mass of unruly curls. His clothes made Nina think of an Ancient Greek and the sketch was done in what looked like charcoal.
Crowley was regarding it fondly, almost wistfully.
“They’re humans I've known.”
“Who's that one?”
“Artemios.”
“Who was he? He looks like an Ancient Greek.”
“He was,” Crowley said, much to Nina's surprise. Though she knew Crowley had been around for as long as the earth existed the reminder that he had known people of the ancient world was always surprising. “I drew this of him around 800 BC, give or take a few decades.” He smiled ruefully. “Can’t remember so well now, I'm afraid.”
Nina looked at the drawing, rendered with obvious care. Then she looked at the expression on the face of a demon, one who liked to remind her he was evil incarnate on a regular basis, and knew.
“You loved him,” she said softly.
His expression turned melancholy, though he did not look away. There was none of the awkwardness or embarrassment she might have expected, only a heavy sadness lingering over him as he gazed at her through his dark lenses.
“Yes, very much.” Gently he reached out and touched a finger to the parchment, before returning to the box and shuffling through the pictures again. This time he pulled out a drawing of an older looking man.
It took Nina a moment to realise it was the same person.
“We were together nearly 40 years. He had a long life, and we were happy.”
“You lived with him? Back then?”
Crowley seemed to know what she was implying.
“It was more accepted back then, even if everyone pretended it wasn’t happening. Officially we told everyone we were cousins living in the same house, unofficially everyone knew and turned a blind eye. He wasn't an eldest son so there was no pressure for him to marry and have children. I made sure we were comfortable and never wanted for anything. We had a good life together.”
“You were in love with an ancient Greek man,” Nina said wonderingly, gazing at the picture.
Crowley sighed and rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses.
“I’ve been in love lots of times, Nina.”
She blinked in wonder; this was not at all what she had expected to hear.
“Have you?”
“Yes. With lots of different people. Look.”
He pulled out a small rectangle. It looked like a tiny painting, too small to see any details. With a flick of his wrist he flung it into the air and before Nina had chance to cry out at the lack of care there was a whoosh of air as it expanded into a large oil painting.
It was pre-renaissance, from that time before artists had got a proper grip on perspective, when paintings always looked oddly flat.
Still, it was obvious who was in the portrait. Obvious who the woman with deep red curls was, sat on the chair with a man standing behind her, his hand laid affectionately on her shoulder.
“You pretended to be a woman,” Nina said, somewhat shocked.
Crowley gave her a despairing look, as if she was a small child who had disappointed him by failing yet again to grasp the point he was trying to teach.
“I pretended to be human,” he said. “I'm always pretending. I'm not a man.”
Nina subsided. Crowley plucked at the corner of the painting and it shrank away as he whisked it back down into the box.
“How long were you with him?”
“A lifetime,” said Crowley. “A human lifetime anyway.”
“Did he not notice you weren't aging?”
“I can age,” Crowley said with a bitter laugh. “Look.”
She watched and before her eyes he did indeed age, decades of life appearing on his body, until his face was wrinkled with age and his hair was white.
“Getting older was the easy part,” he said, with a grin full of aging teeth. The decades fell away all at once and he was back to the Crowley she knew.
“What did you do when they died?” she asked quietly.
“I mourned them.”
“I meant afterwards. You don’t die.”
“I’d just disappear.”
“Did no one notice?”
Crowley shrugged. “Humans have short memories.”
It wasn’t really an explanation, but then nothing this evening had really been much of one. It was probably all she was going to get.
Slowly Nina moved her hand toward the box, hesitating before she touched to glance up at Crowley. With a nonchalant shrug, that she could almost, but not quite believe, he sprawled back on the couch, though she could sense his gaze was locked on her as she carefully started to go through the pictures in the box.
There were more than she expected. The sheer number of drawings and paintings, some roughly done, some obviously completed by a more skilled artist, was a surprise to her. Though many were of the same people, drawn at different stages of their lives.
A lot of the pictures were of men, but some were a women. The ages and races of the people changed, as did their clothing styles, but each was as carefully preserved as the last. Loved and treasured over the centuries by someone who had loved the people in the pictures and did not want to forget.
A man with dark skin and even darker hair, drawn casually, but many times, over the course of several years, as if someone had been trying to capture something of him and had been unsatisfied with the results each time.
A young woman, resplendent in what Nina thought might be traditional Japanese dress, her almond shaped eyes sparkling with life in the carefully preserved oil painting.
A man with dark kohl round his eyes, smooth skin and full lips. He was half smiling, staring from a picture created in a medium Nina didn’t recognise, but that made the sitter look soft and beautiful.
Drawings and paintings from across time were lifted from the box, until eventually she reached the photographs. Not old and faded by time, but as bright as they had been when they were taken. Older ones in black and white, some tinted with colour, showing a young man in a Victorian style suit, then again in clothes that made Nina think of India. The few that had been tinted showed him as darker skinned with black hair, as did the miniature painting Nina found among them.
Finally right at the bottom of the box was a stack of photos, more mixed in type – some black and white, some sepia, and even some in what passed for coloured photography at the time. Many of them were headshots, all of a beautiful young woman. Sometimes with short hair, sometimes with long cascading curls, wearing fashions Nina recognised as belonging to the 1920s and 30s. She looked very young, her smile vivacious and full of life in a way that made Nina envy her.
She thought vaguely of Crowley’s earlier words, “I made sure we were comfortable and never wanted for anything,” and thought how easy this young a woman’s life must have been. Made simple by a demon who would do anything to make her happy and make sure she had all she ever wanted.
“That's Kitty,” Crowley said suddenly, breaking the silence. He had sat forward again and was gazing at the photo in Nina’s hand.
“She looks young,” Nina couldn’t help saying a bit accusingly.
“Not really.”
He moved the photo aside, revealing the next one. This one full length, showing a woman who was tall and slender with short brown hair and a playful smile.
“She was 30 when this was taken in 1931.”
The woman still didn't look it to Nina, but she was rather impressed that Crowley remembered the year.
The next photo was unusual in that it showed the two of them together. For all the drawings and pictures of his lovers, there were very few that had Crowley in them. The portrait and a couple of pencil sketches from another time were all Nina had seen.
In this photo though Kitty was sitting on Crowley's knee, her hair long now, curls tumbling down her back as she laughed. Crowley's arm was around her slender waist and the photographer had caught the look of wistful adoration in his face as he looked at her. It was rather sweet.
“She was the last,” Crowley said quietly, as Nina flipped through final few photos. More candid shots now, of Kitty and sometimes others as well, taken in what looked like private gardens or houses, perhaps by Crowley himself, as camera technology advanced.
“What do you mean?” she asked, coming to the end of the stack and getting the sinking feeling she already knew the answer.
“The last human I ever loved. Probably the last one I ever will love.”
“What happened to her?” Nina asked. There was a trickle of something cold inside her. For all the photographs there were of her, Kitty had never got any older. She had never looked 30, for all that Crowley had claimed she was that age in 1931; and she had never looked much older than she did then, even in the later photographs.
“She died in 1940.” Crowley’s voice was rawer than Nina had yet heard it, as if this pain was still too new and too close to the surface to deny. “I had to go away for a while. I tried to persuade her to leave London, but she wouldn't. I protected the house with as many miracles as I could before I went, but in the end it didn't matter. She got caught in Balham tube station when it was bombed, and she died.”
He lifted his head, staring at the corner of the ceiling. Nina could see the emotions on his face despite the sunglasses, the way his throat bobbed as he tried to swallow down feelings that were bigger than he wanted them to be.
“She was so beautiful. So full of life,” he said softly. “And she died because of other humans.”
“You loved her very much.”
“I loved them all.” He swallowed again. “But yes, some more than others. Her more than most.”
Nina looked at the picture, of the smiling young woman with her whole life ahead of her and felt repulsed by her earlier jealousy. Having Crowley’s love might have made some things easier for her, but in the end it had not saved her. Had not stopped her life from being cut short so cruelly.
“She was killed and now you’ll never love a human again,” Nina said softly.
Crowley shifted and fiddled with his wineglass, still in the grip of the emotions he was trying not to show. “Not because of her.”
“Oh?”
“She wasn't the first I lost too soon,” Crowley said quietly, having won the fight with his tears. He smiled wistfully. “I couldn't keep them all. I couldn't save them all with my love.”
“Why then?”
“Because in 1941… I nearly kissed an angel.”
Aziraphale.
Nina had wondered, from the moment Crowley had told her what she was looking at, she had wondered where Aziraphale had fit into all this. Crowley had rarely spoken of him since he had left. One night, whilst very drunk, he had ranted about the unfairness of their existence, of the fact he had been left alone on earth. Then eventually he had cried, softly and heartbreakingly, talking about love and belonging and feeling understood by no one but him. How there was a hole in his heart and soul that only Aziraphale could fill.
That he loved him very much Nina did not doubt, and she wondered how the humans in the box fit into that. How he could love them, when he had claimed that night to have loved Aziraphale for more than six millennia.
He had told her stories since that night, about times in history when he and Aziraphale had been together. About the glorious madness of their attempt to stop the apocalypse, about how he and the angel had saved Job’s children, had parted the Red Sea together, had conspired to overthrow Oliver Cromwell and had helped prevent the Cold War turning into something more.
It was a surprise to find that in amongst all that he had loved humans. Had lived entire lives with some of them. She wondered if any of them had truly known him. Wondered if loving a demon had eventually condemned them to Hell.
She wondered if Aziraphale knew.
“You love Aziraphale,” she said quietly, when it became clear that Crowley was not going to say it and her curiosity became too much to bear.
Crowley shifted and sighed, draining his glass.
“I told you I was selfish,” he said, his voice back to the tone she was more used to hearing from him. Hard and tight, with an undercurrent of bitterness that had been there ever since the day he’d been left alone on the earth. “I loved them all in different ways. Different amounts too. But I never loved any of them with my whole heart or my whole being. I couldn't.”
Nina’s brow wrinkled in confusion. She poured them the last of the wine, for once waiting silently to see if Crowley would elaborate.
“I'm a demon,” he said eventually, when he had taken a gulp of his drink. “I’m not a human. I can love the way you can but that's not all the love I'm capable of.”
Perhaps it was the wine, or perhaps it was just the confusion of the revelations of this evening, but Nina blurted out the thought that suddenly sprang to mind.
“I'm surprised demons can love at all.”
Crowley regarded her sternly, and for a moment she thought she had offended him and he would leave, or at the very least refuse to answer. Eventually though he shook his head as if dismissing the thought entirely.
“I haven't always been a demon.”
There was silence. Nina could think of nothing to say to that apart from, “were you a human once?” Crowley acted so very human a lot of the time that it would not have surprised her. Though now she thought about it Crowley had also once claimed he was the Serpent of Eden, the one who had tempted Eve to bite the forbidden fruit, so perhaps not.
“Do you know what a demon is?” Crowley asked, head cocked towards her, curiosity obvious even behind the dark glasses.
Nina gave it some thought. “Creatures of hell,” was the best definition she could come up with.
She shrugged.
“I'm a fallen angel.”
Niina blinked. “I thought Satan was the fallen angel.” It was one of the few things she remembered from all those RE lessons she’d been subjected to at school.
“He wasn’t the only one,” Crowley said darkly. “I'm not an angel anymore but I am of angel stock. I'm immortal. I'm more than this corporal body. As a demon I can tempt and curse, but I can still bless as well and I can do miracles. If I loved a human with every facet of my being it would destroy them. No human could withstand it.”
“That's...” Nina wanted to say it was sad but she didn’t know why she felt instinctively that it was. It seemed like an odd thing to say to a declaration that someone was capable of more love than she could comprehend.
“There's only one being I've ever loved completely,” Crowley said, voice dropping back into the soft, melancholy tone of earlier.
“Aziraphale.”
“Aziraphale,” he agreed. He looked at the ceiling for a long moment, mouth twitching as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t. Eventually he looked down again at his wineglass. The silence stretched out as he twirled the stem through long fingers.
“He helped me make them, you know.”
“Helped you make what?” Nina asked.
“The stars,” Crowley said, his expression one of wistful longing as he remembered something further back in the past than Nina could ever hope to conceive of. “Some of them anyway. We made them together.”
“Oh.” There didn’t seem to be much else to say.
“Does he know you love him?” Nina asked after a while. They’d never discussed it, whether Crowley had confessed, after that day in the bookshop when she and Maggie had urged him to.
“Yes.” Crowley spoke slowly, as if each word was a struggle. “He knows. He knew already anyway.”
“He rejected you.” The realisation had Nina flaring into annoyance on Crowley’s behalf. How could Aziraphale have done that? After all the two of them had been through – six millennia of history together on earth and he had just walked away, leaving Crowley heartbroken and alone. What sort of angel was he?
“No.” Crowley said emphatically, definitively. “No. He did what he had to do.”
Nina was not mollified. “He rejected you in the process.”
“No,” Crowley said again. “It wasn't rejection. He loves me and I love him. We both know that. He left because it was the only choice he could ever have made and still be himself. I shouldn't have asked him to stay here with me, it was asking him not to be who he is.”
“Did he ask you to go with him?” Nina said, after she had contemplated this for a while. It seemed the obvious answer. If Aziraphale couldn’t stay but had not rejected Crowley, then why had they not both gone together?
“Yes. He did. Of course he did.” Crowley looked so fierce that for a moment Nina was half afraid. She suspected only the fact she could not see his eyes prevented it becoming full blown fear. For a moment the room was full of anger. Towards her, for daring to suggest Aziraphale might have gone without asking him to go too, but also she sensed, towards Aziraphale, for doing the asking in the first place.
“Why didn’t you?” she asked, swallowing down the fear, desperate to know what had motivated two beings so in love to rend their own hearts in two.
“I'd have had to change myself,” he said bitterly. “I’d have had to give up things that make me, me.”
“He shouldn't have asked you to do that,” Nina said consolingly, because she could still feel that current of anger swirling through the room.
“No, he shouldn't,” Crowley said, and the anger subsided back into sadness. “Neither of us should have asked,” he said softly. “It was wrong of both of us.”
“What will you do?” Nina couldn’t help asking. So far, the answer appeared to be nothing. From what she could see Crowley had done very little since Aziraphale had left, except sit around in the bookshop and drink coffee, or sit around in her flat drinking wine. Sometimes he went out for a drive, though Nina never asked where he had been, sensing he would not tell her anyway.
“Wait,” he said, as if this was the only obvious answer.
“How long though?” At some point, she thought, he would have to move on. If Aziraphale never came back then surely he would; perhaps even allow himself to fall in love with another human. That would be the healthy thing to do; it was what she would say to a fellow human after a breakup. It was what she had done for herself.
“Forever.”
“That’s…” Stupid, she wanted to say, but caught herself and instead said, “romantic,” even though she wasn’t sure it was.
“No, it’s not,” said Crowley matter of factly. “You don’t understand forever.”
“What do you mean, I don’t understand forever? Of course I do!”
“All right, I’ll put it another way. I’ll wait until the last star burns out in the sky.”
Even Nina, jaded as she was, could appreciate the poetic symbolism in that.
“That is romantic,” she said. Crowley, to her surprised, smirked.
“I’ll wait until the day one of us is destroyed completely and all hope is lost.”
Nina flinched at the sudden alteration in tone. “That’s…” She searched for the right word. “That’s morbid. And sad.”
“I’ll wait however long it takes, until the day we are reunited and can spend eternity together,” Crowley said, with a sigh that sounded more weary than anything. “I'll wait. I've waited six millennia. I can wait longer.”
“But what if he never comes back? Shouldn’t you move on? Live your life? Look at all these humans you’ve been with.” Nina waved her hand towards the box still sitting open on the table. “You loved them. You lived whole lives with some of them. You must have enjoyed it or you wouldn’t have done it. Why don’t you allow yourself that joy again?”
“Because,” Crowley said, and then paused, with a frown. “You don’t understand. Aziraphale and I were forbidden from loving each other. We could never act on it. One or both of us would have been destroyed if they had ever found out. I carried my love for him around for six millennia knowing I could never do anything about it and though I knew he cared, that he loved me back in some way, I never truly knew until 1941 how he felt about me. I let myself fall in love with humans over and over because… well…”
Because you wanted to be loved, Nina thought, the realisation hitting her like a freight train. Because you are so full of love you needed to let some of it out. Because you love fiercely and deeply, even if you claim it was not with your whole self. Because you can love more than one person at a time.
And then Nina knew something else. That Crowley still loved all those humans. It was why they were all stored carefully in a box, preserved and treasured and kept safe. Because Crowley still loved each and every one of them and he had lost them all. His heart broken over and over as the humans he had loved faded away and died, lost to him forever.
Now he had lost Aziraphale too.
Silence stretched out between them, until it felt thin and worn. The fabric of it carrying too much weight to not eventually give way.
“I love Aziraphale,” Crowley said quietly, “And he loves me. No human can ever come close that. You don’t understand the depths of the love we can feel because you don’t understand eternity. Or infinity.”
“We must understand them, we named them,” Nina pointed out, slightly offended on behalf of humanity.
“No. When you think of infinity or eternity you never think big enough. You always think of finite things.”
“What do you mean?”
“All those stories about birds wearing down mountains by sharpening their beaks. Or the hare never winning the race, because each time it reaches the point where the tortoise was the tortoise has moved some infinitesimal step further forward. Or the hotel that has infinite rooms and infinite guests and always room for one more.”
“What?” said Nina, thoroughly baffled and wondering if Crowley was drunker than she had thought. Or maybe she was. She looked speculatively at the glass of wine in her hand and the empty bottle sitting accusingly on the table next to the box.
“My point is,” said Crowley, “that you think of the furthest distance or the longest amount of time you can and then you imagine infinity or eternity are just that little bit longer. But they aren’t. No matter how far you go there’s still an infinity in front of you. No matter how long you wait there’s still an eternity waiting. It's not a point that's always just out of each. There is no end point. It goes on and on, forever and ever and ever.”
Oddly, considering she still thought the explanation made no sense, Nina somehow felt she knew what he meant.
Crowley took off his sunglass and leaned forward suddenly.
“Look at me,” he said, firmly but not unkindly. “I’m not human, Nina. Don’t ever forget that.”
She looked into his eyes, sad, and lonely and filled with emotion, and despite the colour and the oddly shaped pupils thought “but you are a little bit.”
Then something shifted in her awareness and suddenly she was not looking into the eyes of a man-shaped creature anymore, but into the soul of a being who was ageless and endless. One whose existence stretched on into eternity, whose consciousness was filled with infinity, and whose love was so boundless she felt she was drowning in it. It consumed every last bit of her awareness, subsumed every thought in her head and every function of her body. Suddenly there was nothing but that love. Endless, ageless and deeply deeply frightening.
She gasped and some primal instinct buried within must have reacted because her head jerked back, the eye contact was broken, and awareness came flooding back.
“Bloody hell,” she said, when her racing heart had calmed somewhat, and her thoughts had come back to some sort of rational order.
She chuckled awkwardly and somewhat unsteadily in the way humans tend to do when faced with something unexpected and too big for them to process. Crowley replaced his glasses and sat back, looking at her as if he were sorry but didn’t want to say it.
“That’s…” Nina didn’t really know what it was. Already the feeling was fading from her memory, too big for her human mind to grasp. She was left only with a profound sense of sadness for the creature who sat on her very human sofa, drinking her very human wine and carrying a love no human could ever comprehend.
Beneath them the hollow earth kept turning and above them the stars twinkled in the night sky.
“I’ll wait,” said Crowley quietly.