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The Garden of Eden, 4004 BC
“I think,” the first man said pensively, “I’ll call that one a giraffe.”
“Oh, very good,” said the angel of the eastern gate, who was walking beside him, and wrote it down.
Watching them from his perch in a nearby tree, the demon Crawly did not think it was very good. It seemed silly to him to let the man, who was called Adam, go around assigning names to all the other creatures in creation. They might want to come up with their own names, mightn’t they? Just because they couldn’t speak like the angels and demons and the human could didn’t mean they didn’t have names for themselves.
Crawly had been given a name by the Almighty, and then a new one by Lucifer after he fell. He didn’t much like either of them. He wondered if he should choose a new one.
“And that one,” said the first man, who the Almighty had called Adam, “I think I’ll call a platypus.”
Crawly quietly felt sorry for the creature, which already looked like a mistake God had made.
“And that one—“ Adam pointed a finger at the demon.
“This one,” Crawly hissed, “you’ll call sssserpent,” and he showed the human all his teeth.
“Oh dear,” said the angel of the eastern gate, and took Adam by the shoulder to lead him away. “Oh, I think we’d better stay away from that one.”
But his eyes lingered, even after Adam had looked away.
Later, the Almighty made the first man a companion, the first woman, and Adam chose her name. He called her Eve.
Crawly was the second being she ever spoke to, after Adam. He’d only been trying to give her a choice.
***
Paperwork was one of Hell’s specialities. Crowley hadn’t needed to invent bureaucracy, once human civilization had advanced sufficiently that it would be a useful form of menace. He’d simply imported it. Forms that needed to be signed in triplicate, trips required to four different offices for a request that could have been completed at one, automated telephone menus that had a dozen options, none of them useful. Humans called it “Kafkaesque,” but it might as well have been called Luciferian.
The bonus twist of the knife, to ensure an eternity in Hell was just unpleasant for a demonic soul as a human one, was that every literally-infernal form had to be signed with a demon’s given name. Demons couldn’t speak them out loud anymore, the names they’d been given by their Creator on the day they were summoned into being from raw firmament. Even their minds couldn’t quite form the sounds.
But they could write their names, and did, in triplicate, on every form Hell required them to sign. It burned every time. When Crowley had filled out the reams of paperwork required of him after the temptation of Christ, his hand had remained scorched for weeks.
The only blessing, he supposed, was that no one ever spoke that name out loud.
***
Rome, 71 AD
“Crawly—“ Aziraphale said, and cut himself off. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, that isn’t right. It’s Crowley.”
Crowley nodded and evaluated Aziraphale over the rim of his glass of wine.
“That’s alright. It’s only one syllable’s difference. You’ll get it eventually.”
“Yes, but it’s your name,” Aziraphale said fretfully. “I really don’t know why I keep getting it wrong. I don’t mean to offend, really.”
Aziraphale genuinely didn’t mean to offend, Crowley thought wonderingly, and wasn’t that strange? Shouldn’t an angel mean to offend a demon, and not invite them out to Rome’s most stylish dining spot for a meal and a round of cocktails?
Well, he supposed Aziraphale had never been much like other angels. He was looking at Crowley now with a worried, embarrassed expression that said he really did care what Crowley thought. And that was no good, that made Crowley start having those thoughts again he’d had when Aziraphale had said he’d given away the sword. They were ill-defined, uncertain thoughts, but they had hung about his head like a flock of nervous birds ever since. They had something to do with the feelings of being sheltered under another’s wing, and they were definitely not very demonic.
Crowley bit his lip. “I know you don’t,” he said.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale recited, almost to himself. “Crowley, Crowley, Crowley. I won’t get it wrong again.” He started to pour himself another glass of wine.
“You might,” Crowley said sharply. Aziraphale spilled a bit of the wine, and miracled it away with a flourish. “You might just… remember me as Crawly. I mean, I expect you still see me as a sort of creeping thing getting underneath your feet.”
Aziraphale frowned. “Oh… I don’t really,” he said. “I see you as more sort of…” He waved a hand in a squiggling gesture that conveyed nothing at all. “One of those boa constrictors, hmm? Great big snake that wraps around its prey and squeezes all the life out of it. Captures you in its snares and you’re, ah, helpless to escape. Until you’ve been crushed.”
Crowley stared at him, and Aziraphale eventually offered him a small smile.
“Anyway, I’m sorry if that’s not what you’re going for,” he said. “But you really are a very wily adversary. I always mention it to Heaven.”
Crowley smirked. “Wily as anything,” he said. “I’ve got you sitting here having lunch with a demon and thinking it was your idea.”
Aziraphale laughed. His laughter was another one of the things that made Crowley think of wings, of the first rain. He shivered, almost feeling the raindrops on his skin.
“The next course is coming,” Aziraphale said, and then added pointedly, “Crowley,” and if Crowley hadn’t known better he would have thought the way he said it was almost fond.
***
He didn’t precisely remember when he’d started introducing himself to humans as Anthony, and variations thereof. He supposed he’d picked it up somewhere between Greece and Rome, from Hadrian’s Antinous or Marc Antony or both.
He liked it, though. It stuck. Quite a few Renaissance artists had sketches or sculptures titled after “Antonio.” It was even what Shakespeare had called him, the melancholy weirdo, and he’d made it into a few of the plays.
The J was a simpler addition. It looked good in the middle of a signature. It looked good on a business card, too. There were never any titles on Crowley’s business cards, and he rarely gave them away, but he liked to have them for those occasions when they could be left behind mysteriously or handed out with an impressive flourish. Anthony J. Crowley. It was a proper human name. It didn’t have any sigils in it. It could have belonged to anyone.
***
London, 1597
“If you make me sit through another damned play about two lovers from rival families who end up getting themselves killed, I’m going to find a way to put a curse on the English language that prevents them from ever writing one again,” Crowley said as they left the Globe.
Aziraphale frowned disapprovingly at him. “Really, Crowley,” he said. “I would think you could appreciate the play on its artistic merits, even if the themes are a bit — well, they’re timeless.”
“Timeless? They’re tired.” The throng of people filing out into the streets alongside them seemed to have enjoyed the play, which irritated Crowley more. “It’s just Pyramus and Thisbe, and that was old when Ovid did it. Fifteen centuries ago!”
“Well, it’s more about the usage of language in the retelling than including some unexpected plot twist,” Aziraphale said huffily. “Not that you ever appreciate good literature.”
“I liked some of it. Deny thy father and refuse thy name, that I liked.”
Aziraphale gave him a sharp look for that, but didn’t comment.
Crowley knew exactly what he didn’t like about all those plays, all those Romeos and Thisbes plunging daggers into their hearts. The lovers never did succeed in running away together, always got caught up in some complicated plan and ended up dead. Had to punished for wanting what they shouldn’t, even if the reasons why they shouldn’t were trivial and cruel. Crowley liked the plays with happier endings.
“Bit stupid of him not to check, ‘s all I’m saying,” Crowley muttered. “If you’re going to go killing yourself for love, you at least want to be really sure there’s no pulse. But it’s better than that awful tripe with Thisbe’s bloody veil, I’ll give you that.”
”Oh, honestly,” Aziraphale sniffed, “you haven’t any sense of romance at all, you know that?”
That stung. He couldn’t know that it did, but it hurt all the same, a little stab of bitter irony straight to the heart.
“I’m not meant to,” he said flatly, and continued to trail after Aziraphale out into the London night.
***
Names had a peculiar sort of power. Naming something formed its nature, in a way. There had been no angel of the eastern gate before the Almighty spoke the name “Aziraphale;” a fallen angel had not become a creeping serpent until he heard the name “Crawly.”
But nature also informed the connotations of a name. The thousands of cheated merchants, scandalized priests and scathingly-reviewed poets who had uttered the name “Crowley!” in anger throughout the years had given the name its dark and bitter taste.
Anthonys, however, remained relentlessly ordinary. Anthonys were greengrocers, maths teachers, nervous and lovestruck young men who wore glasses and could hardly speak to the objects of their affections.
If “Crowley” was ninety percent pure cacao, “Anthony” was at best milk chocolate.
***
London, 1941 AD
“Do you like the car?” Crowley said as he held the passenger’s side door open for Aziraphale. “It’s a Bentley. Quite stylish. Have you got one?”
The angel looked rattled, clearly still recovering from the nasty shock of realizing he’d been used by the Nazis and the unpleasant sensation of an explosion occurring around them. He sat down gingerly, as if he were afraid the car might explode as well, clutching his books to his chest tightly.
”An automobile?” he said distantly. “No, no I haven’t. Not much keen on the things.”
“Hmm.” Crowley crossed over to the driver’s side and sat down, making a minuscule adjustment to the rear view mirror while stealing another glance at Aziraphale.
He needn’t have worried about stealing, because Aziraphale was openly staring at him.
“What’s the matter, angel? Got something on my face?”
“No,” said Aziraphale distantly. “You saved me.”
“Sure,” said Crowley awkwardly, and kicked the Bentley into drive. “Anytime. I mean, not if I’m sleeping or I’m busy or I don’t feel like it. But any other time.”
Aziraphale just smiled at him. It was disquieting.
“They said…” he muttered, almost to himself. “They called you, the famous Anthony J. Crowley. Did you know them?”
“Not personally. I’ve been doing some work for British intelligence,” Crowley admitted reluctantly. He knew how Aziraphale was going to react to it, but the embarrassment was better than the angel thinking he might’ve been worked with Nazis. “I’ve helped arrange a few… discreet assassinations. Of a few high-ranking German party members.”
“Oh…” Aziraphale said marvelingly, and clutched the books even closer to his chest. “Oh, you’ve really been…”
“Don’t mention a word of it,” Crowley said testily. “I told the bosses that I started the whole bloody war, so if they find out I’ve been trying to stop it there’ll be no end of trouble.”
There was no excuse, none at all, for a demon to be playing peacekeeper. It could be argued that what he was doing fell generally under the heading of the toxic impulse of revenge, but Crowley wouldn’t have wanted to test that argument. He knew what he was risking. It wasn’t easy, being a demon who could develop a guilty conscience. You were damned if you did, damned if you didn’t, damned no matter what, really.
Aziraphale was still looking at him.
“Do you still live in Soho?” Crowley said abruptly, and that reminder of the years since they’d last seen each other seemed enough to jolt Aziraphale and made him look away.
“Oh, yes. Same address.”
Crowley drove for a few minutes in silence, and then Aziraphale broke in again, voice soft and hesitant.
“It really was quite extraordinary of you do to this, Crowley — or, would you like me to call you Anthony now? I promise I’ll remember this name more quickly than the last.”
“Doesn’t really make a difference,” Crowley said, just as they arrived at the bookshop. “Call me whatever you like.”
“We have a St. Anthony, you know,” Aziraphale said. “Patron of all sorts of odd things. Lost souls, primarily… very helpful chap.”
“Yes, well.”
“Well.”
Very gently and tentatively, Aziraphale extended a hand over to Crowley’s side of the car and patted him on the knee, just once and with firm determination. He didn’t look Crowley in the eye as he did it, and Crowley could feel a bright burning impression of his hand.
It was no good, to hope. Hope was on the list of strictly unapproved emotions, which would only result in him feeling as though he’d dashed his heart onto the rocky shore of some forsaken island for the hundredth time.
It was just unfair of Aziraphale to look at him like that.
“Thank you… Anthony,” Aziraphale said, trying out the feel of it in his mouth, and Crowley hissed. The pain wasn’t physical, but it hurt all the same, as much as standing in that blessed church had.
“Erugh,” Crowley managed, or something like it. “I think we’d better stick with Crowley, actually.”
***
Alpha Centauri was four point three seven lightyears away from Earth, and the nearest bar where someone could get absolutely plastered in peace was only a few blocks away from the bookshop, so Crowley went there instead. His head was pounding. He wasn’t capable of faster-than-light travel, and maybe would never be capable of a proper miracle again.
Crowley was probably the only demon who had ever been in love, unless you counted Satan, who was relentlessly in love with himself. Precious few angels had ever managed it either.
He had considered it an embarrassment, in the beginning. Demons were supposed to thrive on hate, but Crowley just didn’t do hate well. He didn’t have the energy for it. He could manage a lot of low-grade annoyance, but even that tended to turn towards fondness if you weren’t careful. And with Aziraphale he had never even had a chance.
It was ridiculous, Crowley thought, often, for the first several thousand years, but he thought it with the thrill of young love. It was the kind of dizzy newness more suitable for a human adolescent, just following a different timetable and distorted by the rareness of his actual encounters with Aziraphale. It seemed a new and mortifying discovery every time that he could feel this way.
It hardly even occurred to him until after they formalized their Arrangement that what you were supposed to do with love was tell the other person about it, in hopes of it being requited.
And of course he could never do that. It wasn’t demonic, for one thing, and of course Aziraphale could never, because that wouldn’t be angelic.
Once the idea had occurred, it was difficult to stop thinking about. After that, Crowley had wandered around for the next few centuries feeling half shattered.
He’d attempted to put it into words, over the years, written all sorts of sickening love letters and poems that he hated as soon as he finished them. He’d learned a few musical instruments in hopes of being able to put it into music, but he couldn’t, and he’d never even tried the visual arts because the idea of painting or sculpting something wrong revolted him.
Still, as the centuries stretched on it had become sometime of a point of pride. If he were going to be the only demon stupid enough to fall in love, at least he was also the best in history at it. Humans had a distinct advantage over occult beings in many areas, but no human had loved anyone as deeply or for as long as he had loved Aziraphale. He would see couples together on their fiftieth anniversary and feel more than a little smug.
It was nothing much, that kind of secret devotion, carried close to his heart as an achievement that ranked above all others. But it was something, and it belonged to him.
And now it was hollow, its light source burned out, and he was a solitary star spiraling across the universe and down, inexorably, into a black hole.
Stupid, he’d always thought, dying for love. He’d always wanted to live for it instead, to keep orbiting his distant star. He understood it now, though, and he wished he’d saved some of his holy water, wished for the simple finality of nonexistence.
And then Aziraphale’s vague outline was appearing it his field of vision, and his heart was leaping into his throat, and he thought Romeo, you idiot. You didn’t even check her pulse.
***
Earlier that day, Crowley had been staring into a glass of whiskey at the bar he’d wandered into, thinking about Romeo and Juliet. Now, he was sitting on a bus that was bound for Oxford but driving to London, and Aziraphale was holding his hand.
“We’re going to find a way through this, my dear,” Aziraphale said softly.
The first time Aziraphale had called him “my dear” was in 1632, and Crowley had fallen off the horse he was riding at the time and fractured his skull. Aziraphale hadn’t said it since. He said “my dear fellow” and “my dear chap” like a proper member of the English gentry but he didn’t say it like that, not as a modifier but as a noun.
“Angel…” Crowley said, because sometimes his true name was just too painful, and Aziraphale squeezed his hand more tightly.
My dear. It was really very possessive. It implied belonging-to, in addition to fondness. Aziraphale didn’t start letters that way or say it to strangers on the street. It was… nice.
Crowley wondered if Aziraphale was, by the law of transference and having forsaken all cosmic sides, his angel.
Best not to go thinking like that, he decided. Best not to go getting any ideas, when everything was very fragile and could shatter between his hands like stained glass.
But still, Crowley thought, it was reassuring really. If he died tomorrow, he’d die having held Aziraphale’s hand.
***
It took until after lunch at the Ritz the next day, when they’d come back to the bookshop on the pretext of checking Adam had put everything back suitably, for Aziraphale to kiss him.
“You could’ve done that yesterday,” Crowley said when Aziraphale stopped kissing him, which was much sooner than he would have liked. “You could’ve done that last night, or, or on the bus from Tadfield, or…” Several thousand years ago, he didn’t add.
“Ah, well, yes,” Aziraphale replied distractedly, running his hands down the length of Crowley’s arms in a pattern that was probably meant to be soothing. “There were people there.”
“I would’ve made them stop looking,” Crowley hissed. He couldn’t quite bring himself to initiate a second kiss, but Aziraphale in his infinite mercy did it for him, angling Crowley’s jaw down gently until he was right where he wanted him and taking his hands, winding their fingers together. Crowley was probably holding on too tight. He wasn’t remembering to breathe.
“Yes, you would have,” Aziraphale agreed, his lips still a mere millimeter away from Crowley’s. “But I was rather worried that once I’d started I wouldn’t be able to stop, my dear.”
Crowley immediately understood this to apply to a much longer timeframe than just the bus trip back from Tadfield. “Oh,” he managed, and he let his head fall forward onto Aziraphale’s shoulder.
It was a good thing, he thought, that he had more or less been cast out of Hell already, because he’d never be allowed back now. He was really failing at the basic standards of being a demon. Human virgins on prom night managed this with considerably more dignity and finesse.
“You going to call me that all the time, then?” he said after a moment, while Aziraphale’s hands rubbed careful circles into his back, where wings would have been. “Your dear?”
“Oh yes, if you let me,” Aziraphale said guilelessly. “You are, you know. Very dear to me. I know I’ve done a poor job of showing it.”
Crowley did kiss him then, just briefly, just reassuringly. “That’s all in the past,” he said briskly. “We’re alive, right, and it’s just us now, and I know you do like me a bit after all.”
“So much more than that,” Aziraphale breathed. “If I could express how sorry I am… you must know I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying; darling, not really.”
Darling. Crowley was certain he shouldn’t have survived that.
“Right,” he said resolutely, and disentangled himself from Aziraphale to take him by the hand and drag him toward the staircase. “Let’s go upstairs. Now.”
And Aziraphale laughed, a little, but fondly, and he followed.
***
“We would’ve hated Alpha Centauri,” he told Aziraphale one night, while he was reading a volume on the history of Eastern philosophy with very small print and Crowley was half-heartedly reporting corporate Twitter accounts on his phone with his head resting on Aziraphale’s thigh.
“Nothing grows on any of those planets. They just made them to vibrate in time with celestial harmonies and light up the heavens for humans and all of that.”
“I don’t understand,” he had said to an angel who would later be called Dagon once, before time began.
“Who is it for? All this empty expanse?”
“Suppose it’s for them,” she had said uncertainly. “Those new creatures She’s working on. The stars will hang above them in the sky, and they’ll see them.”
“They’ll only see tiny pricks of light!”
All of his hard work, all of that beauty, wasted on them.
“Why couldn’t we just hang a sort of canvas over the Earth then? This all must belong to someone!”
He didn’t like how cold it felt, vacant stars spinning on and on for eternities. Nothing nearby, nothing for thousands of empty miles. He’d made some of them companion stars, made them orbit each other, close, touching. It wasn’t in the plan, but unless you looked closely you couldn’t tell they were separate stars at all.
“Who is it all for?” he asked, and the Morningstar answered, “It could be for us. If we take it.”
“Hmm.” Aziraphale reached down to stroke Crowley’s hair back from his forehead.
“What would we have done there, then?”
“I dunno. Plan was to sort of miracle up facsimiles of everything we had here, but they probably wouldn’t have been very good. Can’t create life, you know.”
“The only limit on your powers, I assure you.”
Crowley smiled. “We’d have gotten bored,” he said. “No humans thinking up new things for us to do. No one writing new books for you to read. It’s a good job we stayed.”
“I’d have gone with you,” Aziraphale said softly, “if it truly came to that. I wouldn’t have fought in any war that opposed you.”
Crowley pressed a kiss to Aziraphale’s knee. “Sure. But it didn’t come to that.”
We could have just been twin stars, he thought. Forget about human bodies and just be light and burning hydrogen, that’d be alright. Orbit each other forever.
He preferred Earth, he preferred being human-shaped and having eyes and lips and hands and all the rest. But when it came down to it there were things you could live without and things you couldn’t.
“Well, whatever comes next, we’ll stop that too,” Aziraphale said resolutely, as if he could hear Crowley thinking. “This is our place. We don’t belong anywhere else.”
Do I love you because you love the world, Crowley thought, or do I love it because I love you? Which came first?
It was a question you could devote a lifetime of philosophical study to. It didn’t matter. They were undivided loves, indivisible. He wouldn’t ever have to choose.
***
Aziraphale called him any number of dreadfully embarrassing things, in the new and glorious era after the apocalypse. Aziraphale called him “my dear” and “darling” but also “my love” and “beloved” and “dearest” and, mortifyingly, “sweetheart.”
He introduced Crowley as “my better half” to a woman in the bookshop, who he was later appalled Crowley hadn’t recognized as a famous science fiction writer. This was so offensive to the remnants of his demonic image that he had to go home and watch hours of cable news to darken the overwhelming brightness of his soul.
Crowley caught himself thinking sometimes that it was stupid, silly to cherish it so much, that surely there must have been some measure of condescension in it and Aziraphale was only humoring him. Aziraphale would reply that he only wanted to say it, wasn’t he allowed to say what he wanted after all this time, and there was always so much sincerity in his voice.
Not a good liar, Aziraphale, not really.
“It’s just that you don’t have to say it on my behalf,” Crowley said, secretly ashamed that Aziraphale could practically recite romantic monologues while he could just about manage to say “Love you, angel,” with his eyes closed.
Aziraphale frowned. “But you’ve said it so many other ways. I only… I only know how to say it like this.”
It was quiet, apologetic. Crowley thought of the Tower of Babel and how Aziraphale had whirled on him, furious, in the ruins.
“You!” Aziraphale had accused, and Crowley had said, “Me? I didn’t do anything!” and they hadn’t thought to be surprised that they still spoke the same language.
“You say it other ways, too,” he said, reaching for Aziraphale’s hand. “I hear you.”
***
The thing was, hardly anyone ever actually called him Anthony. Anyone he encountered in the course of doing business on Earth called him Mr. Crowley. Demons called him, or had called him, Crowley, because even princes of Hell lived in fear of complaints filed to the infernal HR department.
“Anthony” was the exclusive province of the telemarketers and political pollsters who always managed to get his name somehow, of baristas who asked for something to write on the cup, of waiters who read his name on the credit card and got a little too friendly. And sometimes of actual friends.
Crowley thought of himself as a person who had a lot of friends. This was true in some senses, though not temporally, because with the exceptions of Aziraphale and a wealthy widow who lived a floor down from him and sometimes came over to complain about awards shows with him, most of them were dead.
So were most of the other people who had ever called him by his first name, but there was an exception to that as well.
“Madame Tracey called,” Aziraphale informed him sternly one afternoon as soon he had crossed the threshold of the bookshop. Aziraphale was in a Mood. This was immediately apparent from the untidy stack of books he was standing over, because he only reorganized anything when he was in the midst of a suppressed rage.
Crowley raised his eyebrows. “What could she have said to you that’s worth alphabetizing the poets?”
“Oh, she didn’t say anything,” Aziraphale sniffed. “She did however put Sergeant Shadwell on the line, and he told me to, quote, ‘say hello to that Anthony.’”
Oh, Hell, Crowley thought, there was no escaping eternal punishment after all.
“Ah,” he said with forced casualness. “Worked out I’m not actually my own father then, has he?”
Aziraphale was giving him a Look, which was worse than a Mood and might even precede a dreaded Having A Few Words. “In all the years I’ve paid his expenses I don’t believe Sergeant Shadwell has ever once asked my name,” he said.
Crowley threw up his hands. “Don’t look at me like that! It was only a few times in the late sixties, you weren’t talking to me! He kept hanging around talking about witches! You can’t honestly be jealous. Of Shadwell.”
“Oh, well, certainly not.” He clearly was. It was ridiculous; it only made Crowley more fond of him.
He crossed the distance between them and took both of Aziraphale’s hands, looking at him seriously. “I forbid you to be jealous of Shadwell,” he said. “I don’t even know his first name. It’s probably something like Archibald.”
Aziraphale laughed a little. “It’s only — he called you Anthony?”
Crowley’s heart traitorously skipped a beat just hearing him say it. “Uh — yeah?”
“You told me not to call you that.” Aziraphale’s voice was soft, but his gaze was searching.
“I did say that,” Crowley admitted, remembering. “In 1941.”
Aziraphale looked at him expectantly. “Well. Things are different now than they were in 1941, surely.”
“Yes.” Aziraphale had stepped forward until he was occupying considerably more of Crowley’s personal space.
“Why don’t you want me to call you Anthony?” he said, sounding honestly sad about it.
“I…” Stalling for time, Crowley took off his glasses, folded them precisely and put them in his breast pocket. “I, the thing is, I did want you to? Do want you to. Maybe too much.”
Aziraphale smiled, leaned a little closer. “Why?” he said again, because he was infuriating, because he wasn’t even teasing, he just honestly wanted to know.
“It’s just.” He swallowed hard, attempting to think it through rationally, because Aziraphale would want him to do that. “It’s what people call me when they think I’m just human, just someone that they’re meeting who has—“ He waved a hand dismissively. “I dunno, human things, parents, a career, whatnot. And you know I’m not that, not human. So.”
Aziraphale kissed him, softly and briefly, a reward. “I think you are quite human, my dear,” he said. “We’ve made a choice, haven’t we, and who you choose to be is who you are. Isn’t that right, Anthony?”
Crowley swallowed hard. This was high-caliber smug-bastard behavior, from Aziraphale. “Y-yeah.”
“It’s intimate, isn’t it? It’s for people who know you.” They had gravitated closer together, they always did, the tension between them measured in the smallest of distances separating their bodies. “And I know you better than anyone, don’t I? My dear Anthony.”
Crowley made an incoherent noise and the tension snapped. He flung his arms around Aziraphale’s neck, flung himself forward into a kiss so forcefully that Aziraphale had to catch him, and he did, he did, arms around him holding him steady. The sign on the door of the bookshop discreetly flipped to the “Closed” position.
They managed to navigate, between kisses, to the sofa in the back of the shop, and Crowley sprawled across it, pulling Aziraphale down with him. Aziraphale grinned at him, looking very satisfied with where he’d ended up.
“You know me too well,” Crowley said, more softly than he meant to.
“Never well enough,” Aziraphale said. “I do like the name. I always did. Latin origin, I believe… it suits you, my dear. My Anthony.”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley responded, a full statement in itself, true name for true name. It occurred to him fleetingly that there was no one else on Earth who had called Aziraphale by his name in at least a thousand years. Even the other angels never said it quite correctly.
Aziraphale bent to kiss him again, and Crowley decided he would not have been content spinning around in space in the forms of stars. It would have been tolerable, probably, but nothing compared to this, the physicality of it, the language of human bodies the only real way to express this kind of love. It was the best kind of love, Crowley was sure of it; he would have tested it for strength and purity against the most pristine, sanctified divine love and been certain who would come out the winner.
It was not, Crowley was sure, in anyone’s Plan, except the one they had written for themselves, and that made it only theirs, like the name he had chosen, which Aziraphale whispered to him again and again, Anthony, Anthony. Almost like a prayer, but really, much better.
***
“Best not say it all the time,” Crowley muttered sometime later into the vicinity of Aziraphale’s collarbone. “Bit of a, whatsit, reaction, with the dogs and the bells.”
“Pavlovian,” Aziraphale supplied helpfully. “That’s the one.”
Aziraphale tilted Crowley’s chin upward to look him in the eye. “Please never think you need be less than honest with me,” he said. “Because whether your name is Anthony J. Crowley or anything else, I know you. And I love you.”
Crowley shut his eyes tightly. Aziraphale was so bright, always, it took time to adjust to the light.
“Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d,” he said before he could think better of it, and was immediately embarrassed.
“I knew you liked that one,” Aziraphale said smugly. “Didn’t like the ending. Never liked the endings.”
Aziraphale stroked his hair, almost absentmindedly, and radiated warmth and love and just a touch of being incredibly pleased with himself.
“S’always been easier with you,” Crowley said. “Don’t know why, really, seems counterintuitive, but it was always easiest with you to… forget. I suppose because you already knew what I was and you didn’t turn me away, not really, and with humans I was always pretending to be something, and who knew what they’d do to me if they knew…”
“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said, a soft, comforting sound. Crowley still couldn’t quite look at him.
“But you knew,” he said. “You knew, and you never hurt me. So with you, it’s always been easier to just be… a person.” Aziraphale held him tightly, kissed the top of his head.
“Yes,” he said. “Just people, that’s exactly what we are.”
***
Aziraphale insisted on having tea with Madame Tracey and Sergeant Shadwell a week later, because Crowley was right about him and he was an awful, self-satisfied bastard.
Tracey was winding up some anecdote about how Shadwell was a terrible driver, and Aziraphale, sitting next to him on a violently pink sofa, draped an arm around Crowley’s shoulder and said, “Oh, yes, my Anthony is just the same.”
He was looking Shadwell directly in the eye. Crowley choked on his tea, and Shadwell immediately went scarlet in the face and sputtered something, and Madame Tracey looked between the three of them in bewilderment.
“You two make a lovely couple,” Madame Tracey offered.
“Thanks,” Crowley said automatically, while Aziraphale beamed at her. She beamed right back.
“Mr. Fell was right, you are a sweetheart,” Tracey said to him. “Especially for a demon.”
“A what?” Shadwell said hoarsely, teacup falling from his hands and shattering on the floor.
“She’s a very nice woman, really,” Aziraphale said conversationally on the drive home, after they had both been exorcised from the residence in the form of being shoved out the front door by a Sergeant Shadwell clearly having at least two personal crises, while Madame Tracey apologized over his shoulder and told them to come visit again. “Despite being an occultist. I do hope things work out with her and Sergeant Shadwell, but, do you know, I think he might be rather hung up on you.”
Crowley couldn’t help laughing. “Absolute bastard, I always said it. You’re a public menace. That poor man.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t want him getting any ideas,” Aziraphale sniffed. “Wouldn’t want anyone thinking they know you half so well as I do. And he did come to my shop and accuse me of bewitching women into sin, or some such nonsense.”
“Wouldn’t want him to get the wrong impression,” Crowley agreed, an irrepressible smile sneaking across his face. “You know, I think you’re getting possessive. Is that a sin?”
“Of course not,” Aziraphale said. “You can’t covet what’s already yours, after all.”
He just said it simply, matter-of-fact, and Crowley didn’t have to take his eyes off the road to know precisely how Aziraphale would be smiling.