Chapter Text
The Demon stands with his hip leaning against the boot of the Bentley; the last of the boxes cradled in his arms.
He’s frozen in place. His feet won’t move forward and his muscles won’t launch and the simple human brain his mind as old as time occupies is mostly offline. Something in him wants to run again. Yet the inaction keeps him there. It’s a blessing and a curse. A strange limbo; which is a good way to describe where he’s been for the last three years… the last three weeks… the last three days…
Crowley flips through images from the last three days, and the last three weeks, and the last three years in his head; a series of pictures that when sped up create a sort of short film. What are those little paper things called? Flip books? Flip films? Aziraphale would know… the Angel knows about those sorts of things…
It occurs to Crowley that he can ask Aziraphale now… the answer to this question, about flip films, however mundane a question it might seem to be. After three years and three weeks of thinking of questions for the Angel and simply locking them away, he can actually ask him things in person…
Because the Angel is in the cottage right in front of him. The little house by the sea in the South Downs that Crowley could just walk into if he could get his bloody feet to move, or his body to launch him and the box forward, or his simpleton brain to make either of those things happen.
But he can’t.
He just can’t quite find the spot in the flip book that makes any of this make sense.
He suddenly has no idea how he ended up here at all.
The flip book is out of pages, here and now with him leaning on a car, with a box on his hip and windows of a little house starting to glow as the sun sets. A cottage that he kind of wants to run from and kind of wants to go inside of in equal measure…
In the beginning…
He stays frozen but his mind calms a little…
He’s too focused on the middle of the book/film; he has to flip it back to the start. What is the first image there… Not necessarily the whole story, but this part… the part that brings him to this little cottage after the second almost end of the world…
A garden.
A bench.
A pond.
Ducks.
Yes.
That is where it had really begun… this new yet bizarrely familiar path…
Almost.
The parallels had been shocking, he remembered that very clearly…
***
It had been three years.
Three years since Heaven’s elevator door had closed and he had driven away in the Bentley. A sickening sweet and bitter taste of almonds still on his serpentine tongue. His first kiss. The first one that had counted anyway… Didn’t matter, it had been a failure.
Three years of driving, sleeping, waiting, searching for some kind of sign. Nothing had come.
More days than not he’d ended up at the bookshop and the coffee shop and the record store and the magic shop and the Chinese restaurant and the French restaurant and the foot of Ms. Sandwich’s stairs to chase away the man who lingered there trying to ‘cheat the seamstresses.’ A small collection of people; Aziraphale’s flock. Crowley ‘tended’ them as best as he could manage… and everyone else who found themselves on Whickber Street as well.
It gave him a kind of numb satisfaction. He liked doing it, knowing he was staying connected to the Angel in some way. And yet he didn’t, couldn’t, fully allow himself to feel anything. All of his feelings had left that morning, the only ones that counted anyway.
And so there was a routine. He went to visit everyone once a week. He took the same path Aziraphale had the night of the Ball, when he’d invited everyone to the bookshop. It was not a route that made sense, it practically doubled over on itself. But he took it anyway… because it had been Aziraphale’s path.
When you don’t know what path to take… any path will do… even a painful one.
And when he was finished, and the pain blared in his memories and singed heart, he would end up on the sofa in the bookshop. Sometimes he would drink, sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes he would literally toss stacks of books around, sometimes he would continue ‘Jim’s project’... alphabetizing them by the first letter of the first word. He read the books his friend Jane Austen had written in her spare time. And hated them. And then read them again… and didn’t hate them nearly as much.
That had been his routine. For three years. Not worthy of a flip book; too repetitive, too sad.
And then, much like the arrival of the Antichrist nearly 18 years before, everything suddenly began anew… the flip book burst almost unceremoniously to life.
He vaguely remembered, before the garden and pond and ducks on those first pages, drinking quite heavily in the back of the bookshop on a blazing hot summer day, noting through his haze how Muriel had become shockingly good at talking about the weather with customers…
Only they hadn’t been talking to a customer, but the postman. Not the regular postman, but a familiar postman nonetheless. One of those that bring special deliveries. Where had Crowley heard that voice before? Why was the name ‘Lesley’ familiar? Crowley had drunk half a bottle of whiskey on a hot summer day and couldn’t be arsed to remember why Lesley the Delivery Man might be important.
“Mister Crowley?”
Sweet voice, sweet face… Crowley wanted to despise Muriel and their chipper demeanor and just couldn’t… They were doing far too good a job at maintaining the bookshop, not selling books and letting Crowley squat in the back without judgment whenever he liked to actually despise them…
“Wot?”
“Mister Lesley brought this for you. Not sure about why all the fuss for such a small piece of paper…”
Crowley had seen the little folded paper with a familiar shade of green to seal it up, snatched it from Muriel and turned into the couch on his side to hide it from them as he read. A childish reaction, but he’d hardly been able to contain himself, seeing Aziraphale’s handwriting and the seal he had only ever used when corresponding with Crowley over the years; back before telephones became their primary form of communication.
‘Crowley, my diaries, read them please. And once you have, meet me in primary location #1. I will be there, waiting.’
He’d snapped his fingers and burned away the paper without even thinking; it would have looked like a closeup magic trick to anyone watching. And with visions of another piece of paper, short and in his own scratch handwriting burning away in the pond located at ‘primary location #1’ in his mind, he’d sought out the Angel’s desk and the diaries therein.
He’d read them… it had taken him three weeks.
***
They had started in the 14th century. Crowley hated the 14th century. He learned that Aziraphale had hated that time even more.
Day and night, not moving from the chair at the desk, he’d sat there, turning page after page.
He read of triumphs and quiet joys.
He read of countless encounters with ‘fascinating’ humans and things he’d learned from them.
He read of the world moving forward: endless inventions and new ideas and modernization and the cyclical nature of development and destruction.
He read of deep crushing sadness over the inability to save every soul, of loss, of death, of people he’d been especially fond of and their fragile hearts giving out.
He read of the many funerals Aziraphale had attended. He’d had no idea the Angel went to so many.
And…
Somehow shockingly and not, he read so much about himself…
The arrangement.
Their adventures.
Their close scrapes and near discorporation.
The dinners in quiet little restaurants where they knew Aziraphale’s name.
The concerts and plays and performances.
The walks in the park and feeding ducks and the meeting spots that came and went and changed.
The opening of the Bookshop in which he sat.
Their apology dances and bottles of wine and arguments and hours upon hours of laughter.
Aziraphale had written about so much, in almost agonizingly precise detail.
And then… starting in 1941… the Angel changed the way he addressed Crowley in his diaries…
Instead of simply ‘Crowley’ or ‘Demon’ or ‘Adversary’ or ‘Serpent’ or ‘Wiley Old Serpent’...
He started referring to him as…
‘My’ Crowley.
‘Dearest’ Crowley.
‘My Dearest’ Crowley.
‘Darling’ Crowley.
‘My Darling’ Crowely.
“Sweet’ Crowley.
“Thoughtful’ Crowley.
And, on one occasion where the Angel must have been at a level of drunkenness the likes Crowley had never seen…
‘Dear Dearest Darling Dastardly Demon’ Crowley…
It wasn’t a confession of love per se. The word ‘love’ hardly appeared in the diaries at all. But it was a seismic shift, these terms of endearment he used so little with any other specific individual in the rest of the Angel’s scribblings.
And more so than anything else, the terms of endearment highlighted other radical shifts in the way Aziraphale felt about him…
The entries after 1941 spoke of trust. Care. Concern. A desire to spend more time together. More and more notes to remind the Angel to tell Crowley something ‘important’ he didn’t want to forget.
They contained plans. Plans of things and places to see together. Meals to share. Bottles of wine to try. A topic for a future discussion. Even with detailed entries of the coming apocalypse, their years taking care of Warlock, the showdown at the airbase, the quiet years after… Crowley was in nearly every entry… mundane details… but details none the less of time spent and a desire to plan for the next time they would meet.
For the last entry in the last diary, Aziraphale had written about Gabriel’s mysterious appearance and their inevitable decision to work together to keep him protected while they figured out why he was there… but it was the entry before that Crowley hadn’t been able to shake…
It had only been a few lines long.
It recounted a conversation, with a customer of all people, who had told Aziraphale he had just put a cottage that had been in his family for decades on the market for sale. A cottage in the South Downs. And with absolutely no elaboration, the Angel had written, ‘I really must contact Crowley about taking a visit to this cottage. It will be a lovely day out in the Bentley, and perhaps my dear Crowley will find the idea of a lovely cottage by the sea just as appealing as I do; as an investment in our future…’
***
The flip book formally began, then.
He had closed the last diary after the last entry about Gabriel and gone straight to St. James. Not even bothering to say goodbye to Muriel.
A garden, a bench, a pond, the ducks…
And there he was; as if he’d known exactly how long it would take Crowley to read the diaries, plus the time to rush to the park.
Same coat, same spot, same bench, same hands in his lap and staring straight ahead with that same perfect posture.
Crowley had sat down and looked at Aziraphale and everything he had thought to say to him over the course of three years, and even more in the last three weeks, was completely gone.
He sat as if his mouth were zipped shut, with no chance of the emotions, curses, declarations and questions escaping.
Aziraphale had turned to him, an almost blank expression on his face, and had simply said, “I have a plan. We need to work together.”
Familiar words; shockingly so…
For three seconds, which is quite a bit longer than one might think it is, Crowley had searched Aziraphale’s face for something, anything, beyond the almost sterile tone of his voice and blankness of the Angel’s expression. And in the last half second, he had seen it, a flash of light in a storm-cloud blue eye… a tear… or at least the remnants of one… unshed and gleaming. A small spark of hope, remorse, determination, sadness and joy… all in a little flash.
“Ok.” Crowley had answered. Simple as anything. And after three seconds of hesitation of his own, Aziraphale had started telling the story of his life for the last three years and three weeks…
***
The thing about a flip book is that your fingers move through the first few images so much more slowly than the rest. It’s tentative; you want the pages to catch on your fingers just right, so that not a single piece is missed. And once you know you have it right, the pressure and the hold, the rest of the book goes so much more quickly… springing to life and telling a much more flowing story, the images moving swiftly towards a conclusion.
The rest of the book goes too fast for Crowley’s mind to fully catch up. He’s not sure how long it will take for everything to settle in.
Again, the things that stick are the parallels…
He remembers the Messiah, still confused and hurt over a ‘father’ that had forsaken him…
He remembers the Antichrist, Adam, now a man, choosing yet again to help them out of a giant celestial mess he had no part in making…
He remembers Anathema and Newt and Shadwell and Tracy and Gabriel and Beelzbub, arm in arm next to them on an airbase as two sides raged against each other yet again, both thinking theirs the correct path to take towards oblivion…
He remembers a pep talk, a reminder that sometimes a child must show the ultimate bravery to stand up to a parent, no matter how old they might be. That dynamic is still fraught and painful and complicated.
He remembers a flaming sword, and a crank used to start the Universe; but this time holding Aziraphale’s hand as fire and brimstone rained down from a new location…
He remembers a light, and a voice he hadn’t heard since the time of Job…
He remembers a reckoning…
He remembers a new promise…
He remembers an apology…
He remembers another rainbow… then a second, then a third…
He remembers a settling…
He remembers a weight lifted from his shoulders, from the earth, from all of time and space…
He remembers a voice, too big for his human incorporated brain to truly comprehend, with a residual message of ‘Questions and all, I have always loved you, such as it is. Go now, have what you’ve always wanted, and make something better than I ever could.’
And he remembers a hand in his, that hasn’t let go, that he somehow knows will not let go. A hand that is sorrowful, despite what it knew it needed to do…
‘You were right I was wrong you were right’ is the second to last page in the book… but there’s no malice or grudge in it. He had not trusted the Angel, and yet the Angel had been brave enough to do what needed to be done. To get them to this, the last page…
A cottage in the South Downs. A place to call their own. A retirement. A promise. An apology. A fresh start. A side… their side… for as long as Crowley will have him… A home.
***
With the last box still on his hip, the warm light beckoning, the Demon still hesitates.
Trust doesn’t appear, even after you spend three days saving the world with someone for a second time.
There is still so very very much unsaid between them, despite Crowley’s near immediate answer of ‘yes’ on the end of that third day to Aziraphale, when the Angel had asked if he’d be willing to drive them to look at a cottage in the South Downs a former customer had told him about once.
It had still, by some miracle, gone unsold.
Crowley had walked through it, seen every detail and view and spot he could call his, and the places he could call theirs, and had spun around to say ‘Yes.’
Packing had been easy, there was no rush to sell or give up their other properties back in London. Muriel had been content in the aftermath to be caretaker of the bookshop, and Hell had made it clear that the flat in Mayfair would always be there if Crowley wanted it.
And it is now, with the flip book out of pages, that Crowley truly doesn’t know what he’s gotten into and what to do next.
Saving the world is somehow easier than what comes next. He learned that the hard way with the Antichrist. What comes next requires more vulnerability than he has ever shown before. A greater leap than he has ever taken; and he just doesn’t know if he can.
“Crowley?”
He’s broken from his thoughts by a silhouette in the door.
“Are you coming in? Only it’s getting a bit chilly. Do you need some help?”
Crowley suddenly finds his feet moving, and meets Aziraphale at the door.
The Angel is beautiful. He’s always beautiful. Framed in the hearth-warm light from the house, he is more beautiful than Crowley has ever seen him. He wants to give him everything. He wants everything Aziraphale spoke of at length in the diaries.
And…
He knows that before they can have any of those things, he needs to say four incredibly important words to him first.
“You hurt me, Aziraphale.”
A pause, but not nearly as long as Crowley is expecting.
“I know. You hurt me too, Crowley.”
Another pause, but also not nearly as long as Crowley is expecting.
“I know.”
He’s surprised by how little it stings to hear and say, on both sides.
Because it’s true. Because it’s something he’s been thinking about for three years, three weeks and three or more days… how much they've hurt each other. How much THEY left unsaid that led them into indescribable pain. All the things that each of them could have and should have done differently.
He also realizes in this moment that where they are now, this cottage, is where they were meant to end up… Even if the road to get there was rockier than it could/should have been.
“I’m sorry.” Aziraphale says, his voice so very close to breaking.
“I’m sorry too.” Crowley replies, the magnitude of the words making his chest seize.
It’s not enough. Not really. Not for either of them. But it’s a start.
‘In the beginning…’
“So…” he tentatively ventures to ask of the Angel standing before him, vulnerable and sad and hopeful all at once, “... what now?”
“I, um… I suppose we simply… go day by day. And, we live together, and do what we like, and… We’ll just do what feels comfortable…”
Aziraphale’s storm cloud eyes are brimming with hope, but also fear and uncertainty.
Crowley tries to stay steady as he replies, “We’ll do what feels comfortable, but… we’ll also talk about things first. No matter how hard they are. That’s… that’s why we hurt each other, Angel. We don’t know how to bloody talk and we need to. From now on, we’ll talk, yeah?”
Crowley isn’t certain where that courage came from, to name these things they need to do, as difficult as they might be, but Aziraphale closes his eyes, smiles gently and nods his head in agreement.
“How about we have some tea?” the Angel asks gently. “And, perhaps we can sit together? On the new couch while we drink? And, perhaps we can discuss how you’d like to arrange your things with my things, and we can find a way for the things to… you know… exist together?”
It’s not direct communication. Not exactly. It’s still wrapped in metaphors and representations. But it’s a start. Crowley knows how to start things. They can talk about their stuff and in doing so talk about themselves, and find a path forward. He believes this to be true, in spite of everything.
“Yeah, yeah let’s do that.”
And so, with an almost painfully sweet smile from Aziraphale, they both cross the threshold into the warm light… of a place they both hope will truly become their home.