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By the time the waiter was bringing their coffee, Aziraphale couldn’t speak any more. It wasn’t that he’d run out of words. He had six thousand years of things to say, six thousand years of things he’d wanted to say at the time and hadn’t, for reasons which seemed from this new lofty peak of hindsight to be so absurd, so phenomenally ridiculous, that he couldn’t quite understand how he’d ever believed them real in the first place. And all those pent-up words were stuck behind all the new ones he wanted to say now, more of them with every passing minute, except Crowley was sitting with him, turned at just the right angle so Aziraphale could look at him and be beside him at the same time, what a lovely table this was, what lovely chairs, what a lovely room, on this most wonderful and unexpected of all days, the first day after the end of the world, unimaginable loveliness, and Aziraphale was so happy that he didn’t want to speak. He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance, he wanted to go somewhere and fall down in worship of Creation.
He reached out and took Crowley’s hand, and when Crowley looked inquiring eyebrows at him, he smiled, wet and joyful. Crowley smiled back at him, the sharp angled lines of his face drawing together into softness by contradiction, the gleam of his eyes behind the dark lenses a promise of light, and said, “Let’s go,” agreeing with him.
Aziraphale nodded and they got up and went out, leaving a slightly puzzled maitre-d to wonder why she’d left her best table standing empty all evening, and a puzzled but also pleased waiter to wonder where the very large tip credited to his account had come from.
The night air was pleasant without being warm, and birdsong followed them across the street as they crossed to the park still holding hands, and Aziraphale did sing a little, softly, along with that clear high music: something about joy and gratitude, and about Crowley matching his lanky swinging stride to his steps. He might have drawn Crowley into a dance around the fountain of Diana, but instead impulsively he said, “Dear one, would you come—home with me?” indulging in that word for the first time, another truth he hadn’t spoken, thinking with luxurious delight of the musty dry-paper smell of the bookshop, the quiet sighing of overladen shelves, the whistle of his kettle, infinitely far away from Heaven and infinitely more desirable.
“Mm. Mine’s bigger,” Crowley said.
“It is not,” Aziraphale said in mild indignation.
“The bed,” Crowley clarified.
“The bed?” Aziraphale said puzzledly. That was true, his own snug bed was unquestionably only a single, and impossible to persuade it to be anything else without pushing the books around really unmercifully—he had nine on the bedside table and sixteen on the floor next to it. But he didn’t see why that should matter.
Crowley looked over and raised his eyebrows, and Aziraphale paused and said, “Oh.”
“Wasn’t that the idea?” Crowley said.
“Well, it certainly is now,” Aziraphale said, and perhaps it had been all along. It certainly felt appropriate to his mood, in all the very best ways. “Lead on,” and Crowley did take him back to his razor-sharp flat, where the glorious jungle of plants quivered in fear at his passage, poor things, but Aziraphale only brushed one of the philodendrons in apology, in passing, and thought no more of them that night.
“My darling, my very dearest,” he said, kissing Crowley over and over, full of hunger and the delight of satisfying it in this simply magnificent way, nudging away his clothing piece by piece as it interfered. Crowley had already shrugged off all of his and was beginning to let go some of his form, becoming a lithe squirming presence entwining itself around him, only Aziraphale protested, “But I want the corporeal.”
“All right,” Crowley said, obligingly firming up in a most satisfactory way. “Always seemed a bit messy, from what I’ve seen of it. No?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, with a wealth of meaning. “I should like to make an absolute mess with you.”
“Oh, right, got it,” Crowley said, and even more obligingly rolled him over in the vast expanse of the bed and began to bite and nuzzle his way along the bone ridges where Aziraphale’s wings weren’t, at the moment, and by the time he’d worked his way from one side all the way to the other, Aziraphale was remarkably sweaty and on the verge of making a substantial mess at any moment.
“Please, darling, please,” he groaned, and Crowley kissed him behind the ear and penetrated him, a lovely piercing sensation that wasn’t at all like being in Crowley’s body, except for how it was just like that, and they lasted only a little while longer, but that was part of what made it so wonderful: one last part of this shining, ephemeral, ineffable moment, after the end of the world, and the start of a new one.
# End