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***
In the dream, Aziraphale is sitting in the armchair by the fireplace he’s never seen before, unlike the person that slides in the chair next to him.
“What are you doing here?” Aziraphale asks the boy. His features are vague and distorted, and Aziraphale remembers his face perfectly enough to notice that.
“I’ve come for you,” the boy says simply.
Aziraphale’s breath catches and the fog around him clouds his vision. “I’m sorry,” he says in a small shaky voice. “I’ve never got the chance to say it, my dear boy. But I am so, so sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” the boy says, and his eyes are two pools of darkness spreading around, forming a storm of black misty clouds everywhere around him, as the room and everything but the darkness fades. “I will carve your heart out.”
Aziraphale wakes up, gasping and crying, and Crowley’s arms are tight as vice around him.
“It’s just a dream, sweetheart, it’s alright,” Crowley is whispering into his ear, rocking him back and forth as Aziraphale shakes and sobs and hurts. I’m here, sweetheart, he says again and again, I’m here, and:
I’ve got you.
***
The first time it happens – or the first time Aziraphale has to acknowledge it happens – he is waiting for Crowley in Surrey, where they are supposed to view a nice one-bedroom cottage Aziraphale has found for them. He’s even managed to go on the internet and search for it all by himself – and it’s a nice house, too, quite old but charming, with a whole lot of garden area for Crowley to go mad with his plants. Aziraphale has hoped Crowley would like it as much as he had – he’s only seen the photographs on the website, but still – in fact, Aziraphale has liked it so much he went to bed imagining the two of them living in this kind of domestic bliss he’s only ever read about in his numerous novels.
Except – Crowley doesn’t show up.
Aziraphale waits for twenty minutes, then a half hour more. Crowley is not picking up his mobile. The realtor is clearing her throat uncomfortably, throwing him pointed looks, and Aziraphale has to give up and cancel the viewing.
Later, when he knocks on the door of Crowley’s flat, worried out of his mind – all kinds of scenarios of Hell claiming Crowley (or worse, even – Angels) running through his head – Crowley opens the door looking like he’s just been awoken from a nap.
“What’s up?” he says and yawns widely, rubbing a hand over his eyes. He doesn’t offer Aziraphale to come in.
“What’s up? What’s up?” Aziraphale sputters, indignant and more than a little hurt. “I’ve waited for you for an hour! And you haven’t even bothered to let me know you decided to stay in and have a little nap!”
Crowley blinks, then raises an eyebrow.
“Calm down, would you?” he says in a tone as if Aziraphale’s the one being unreasonable. “What’s got your knickers in a twist? I forgot.”
“You… forgot?” Aziraphale repeats, and his heart is speeding up uncomfortably in his chest. Something is wrong. “We were supposed to look at the one-bedroom in—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Crowley cuts in, yawning yet again. “I don’t see what the big deal is – so we’ll go see it another day, then! Happy?”
He looks at Aziraphale expectantly, as if actually waiting for an answer. His palms sweating and face flushing, Aziraphale feels anything but.
He swallows. “Um. Alright, then. Another time.”
Crowley doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at him silently, expectantly. Aziraphale is kind of waiting for him to invite him in, still.
“So… that’ll be it, then?” Crowley says impatiently after a few beats of uncomfortable silence. His fingers are drumming an erratic rhythm on the door jam. Aziraphale frowns.
“Well, yes, but… uh, are you free for lunch, at least?”
Crowley straightens out. “Nope. I’m not. Sorry.”
“Oh,” Aziraphale huffs out, and wipes his sweaty hands on his trousers. It doesn’t help. There’s a vague panicky dread lodged deep in his chest as he struggles to catch up to Crowley’s sour mood.
Well, no, not sour. Indifferent.
“Listen, I gotta go,” Crowley says in a fake apologetic tone one would use when accidentally running into an old acquaintance at the grocery store and trying to avoid awkward chatting. “I’ll see you.”
And with that, the door slams into Aziraphale’s face.
And that’s the first time it happens.
Even then, Aziraphale refuses to really think about it.
***
The second time it happens, it’s almost a week later, and Aziraphale hasn’t seen Crowley since that house-viewing that didn’t happen.
He’s at Crowley’s place again – or more specifically, he’s at Crowley’s doorstep again, and Crowley hasn’t invited him in – again.
“How about we just go see it now?” Aziraphale blurts out, impatient and anxious with the pent-up tension he’s been carrying around for the past week. Crowley is unnaturally calm, leaning against the doorway, looking down at Aziraphale with distant politeness.
“See what?” he says.
Aziraphale flails. “The house, my dear, the house we were supposed to check out!”
“Ah,” Crowley hums. “That.”
And something is surely wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
Aziraphale feels himself sweating profoundly, one clammy drop forming on his forehead one breath at a time. The bowtie around his neck feels unnervingly like a boa choking him, suffocating him under Crowley’s cold unmoving eyes.
“Listen, how about we do it another time?” Crowley says, plastering another one of those plastic apologetic smiles on his face. “I’m not really in the mood now.”
“You’re not—in the mood—” Aziraphalerepeats faintly, voice cracking. There’s a distant ringing in his ears, and then a heavy thump in the centre of his chest. “Darling, please, just tell me what’s going on—are you cross with me?”
“Cross with you?” Crowley huffs out in a laugh, amused. “I’m not cross with you.”
“Then what is it?” Aziraphale pleads, completely and utterly out of his depth. The thumping in his chest turns into a searing hot pressure, shaking his entire body up.
“Like I said,” Crowley says slower, as if talking to a dimwit. “I’m not in the mood.”
And there’s that.
Aziraphale is left on the doorstep with teary eyes and burning pressure in his body. Yet again, he doesn’t let himself concentrate too much on this. Whatever it is, Crowley just needs some time to sort things out, he tells himself again and again on his way back to the bookstore.
Crowley just needs to sort himself out.
***
The third time it happens, it’s not really about either of them.
They are in the Bentley on their way to Tadfield to visit Adam, and the silence in the car is oppressive and twisted. Aziraphale’s hands are shaking ever so slightly and he sits on them to keep them in place. Crowley doesn’t talk.
And it would’ve stayed that way if Aziraphale didn’t notice the road sign through the window.
It says: Welcome to Tadfield, population 2450
He perks up, frowns.
“My dear, that sign must be wrong,” he mutters, shaking his head.
“What?” Crowley says, distantly, like he hasn’t been listening.
“That sign,” Aziraphale says again, uncomfortable and suddenly chill. “It said Tadfield had a population of only 2500 people.”
“So?” Crowley says, and no matter how much Aziraphale stares and squints and tries to see something beneath the surface – the indifference of Crowley’s expression when he glances at Aziraphale is genuine.
“So I’m sure it’s at least ten thousand!” Aziraphale exclaims, shivering with the sudden drop of the temperature in the car. He’s astonished Crowley can’t feel it, too. “Last time we were here, Adam said—”
“Who?” Crowley interrupts with a confused frown.
Aziraphale stares. “Is this some kind of a joke?” he says haltingly, and his insides are trembling now. “I must confess, I don’t always understand your humour, darling—”
“Who’s Adam?” Crowley snaps, impatient and annoyed. The world around him is suddenly vague and jittery, and Aziraphale blinks his bleary eyes a few times. Dimly, he wonders if he’s awake.
“Adam,” he says stupidly, unable to come up with anything that would convey his compete incomprehension of whatever Crowley’s playing at. “The boy we are currently on our way to visit—”
“No,” Crowley says with a confidence of someone who knows he is arguing with an idiot. “You dragged me to Tadfield because you said you needed to see a priest.”
The silence that follows seems to be eating him up alive. Aziraphale blinks and blinks and blinks, squinting through the haze that surrounds him, and the dread that forms in his gut spreads to every last nerve of his body.
This isn’t happening, he thinks distantly, as if even this thought is not his but someone else’s. This isn’t happening.
Icy panic surging up to the surface, suffocating and burning, he looks wildly around, looks outside the Bentley windows – but there’s nothing, nothing outside at all, just scratches of scenery flashing by at unhuman speed – as if they were traveling in a rocket instead of a car.
What’s wrong, Crowley’s voice carries to him as if through a cement wall. Am I going too fast for you?
“What—no—wait, Crowley—what—” he stutters, squeezing his eyes shut as the world around him spins and spins and spins. There’s something moving in his chest.
And then, just like that, it stops.
He opens his eyes.
He is sitting in a chair across the table from Crowley. There’s a bowl of ice cream on the table in front of him. They are in a café, people chattering away and laughing around them.
“I don’t see why you’d need to see a priest, anyway,” Crowley is saying without looking at him. His eyes are not visible behind his glasses, but Aziraphale knows he’s not looking at him.
Aziraphale has no idea what he is talking about. His heart is hammering away in his chest wildly, and he is soaked with cold sweat. He rubs some of it away from his eyes with a shaking hand, and for the first time he thinks there’s something wrong with me.
Crowley won’t even look at him from across the table.
There’s something very wrong with me.
***
It’s been more than a month, and they haven’t gone to see the house after all. Aziraphale would call, and Crowley would not pick up. Aziraphale would show up at Crowley’s place and get a cold polite rejection for his trouble.
Meanwhile, something is happening to him.
He is listening to the news broadcast on the radio one day, and though he can’t even remember the context after a few seconds – he still hears it, the 3-million population of London in the strong and confident voice of the radio host.
He hurries to turn on his computer, fires up the internet browser, types in London population in the search bar, feeling like a complete idiot. The paragraph at the top of the page reads population 2.96 million.
He might be losing his mind a bit.
Crowley doesn’t call.
***
One night, when he’s skittering around in the kitchen for a sugary snack, there’s a dark figure standing there in the corner. Aziraphale drops the chocolate’s he’s fished out of the cupboard, and stares at it through the darkness of the room.
It doesn’t move. It just… hovers there.
It’s a vaguely humanoid silhouette with limbs too long and body too tall. It looms there, staring at him from the corner, deadly and unmoving, and through the haze of horror and panic, Aziraphale shuts his eyes and counts to ten.
This isn’t happening.
When he opens his eyes, the figure is there.
Aziraphale could turn the lights on, but he knows best not to. Something hot and painful is moving about in his chest, right under his skin.
Footsteps heavy in the quiet room, he leaves the kitchen. He doesn’t turn to see if the thing follows.
This isn’t happening.
***
He doesn’t ring Crowley for a few more days, hoping the delay would give him enough time to cool off or sort whatever it is that’s happening with him, but then Aziraphale’s attempts to reach him only grow more frantic and aggressive. Finally, unnerved by this completely and utterly incomprehensive ghosting he’s been subjected to, he gives up and shows up at Crowley’s door yet again.
“Something is happening to me,” he lets out as soon as Crowley opens the door. Crowley leans on the side of the doorway in a gracious and practiced movement.
“Isn’t it always,” he drawls, folding his arms at his chest. Aziraphale gapes.
"There's only-" he pants, shakes his head. "There are only 3 million people left in London!"
Crowley's eyebrows come up over his glasses. "And? London's always been too crowded, if you ask me."
Hands spasming, Aziraphale stares at Crowley with wide eyes and gaping mouth.
"Is that all?" Crowley sneers. "You came here to spout nonsense about the city's population?"
“No, no, Crowley, I mean—” he pants, breaths coming out heavy and ragged. “Something is wrong with me—please—I need your help!”
“Typical,” Crowley says and purses his lips.
A few beats of silence and then: “What?” Aziraphale gasps.
“Typical,” Crowley repeats, cold and detached. He watches Aziraphale as one would a subject in an experiment. “Typical of you to blow everything out of proportion as soon as I’m not slobbering all over you like a sick puppy.”
“What?!” Aziraphale says again, uncomprehending. The thing that’s skittering in his chest moves to his shoulders, then forearms.
“You, unable to withstand not being the centre of my universe,” Crowley explains with raised eyebrows. There’s an ugly smirk pulling on his lips.
“No, no—what—” Aziraphale shakes his head, feeling dizzy all over, and there’s something like snakes moving around under his skin. He needs to sit down. He needs to sleep. This isn’t happening. “Can I come in?”
“Nah, I think you’re fine,” Crowley says, harsh as a bullet fired. In the reflection on his glasses Aziraphale sees his own trembling frame.
“Darling, please—”
“What, you’ve showed up to hear odes of adoration?” Crowley continues, voice sharp as needles. “Thought I’d tell you how wonderful you are? How pure? How kind? Disabuse you of the notion that you could ever do anything wrong? What, your ego not coping without me there to stroke it for you every other minute?”
Crowley’s speech cutting and slicing at him one word at a time, Aziraphale stands frozen on the doorstep, torn in all directions at once. He needs to run home and hide, he needs to step in and get closer to Crowley, he needs to not be here, and he needs to stay and listen.
This isn’t happening.
“I’ve always known you were an arrogant bastard, but this is just pathetic,” Crowley says in wonder, as if finally unwrapping some deep and personal secret, getting to the bottom of a life-long mystery. “You are supposed to be a blessed angel—”
“No—no—” Aziraphale cuts in, and now there’s water in his eyes. His voice is a pathetic high-pitched thing when he pleads: “no, I’m a—I’m a good person!”
Crowley stares at him with something like pity twisting his features.
“Well,” he says thoughtfully. “Are you?”
Later, when Aziraphale is back to his little flat above the bookstore, the dark faceless figure laughs at him mockingly from the darkness.
***
Aziraphale looks through the dusty window of his flat onto the almost-empty street outside. The movie poster on the side of the pub outside catches his eye. The film must be new, he's never seen the poster before. New enough. Aziraphale’s not sure how long it's been since he was on the other side of these windows.
But then, there’s no reason to leave his old little flat. Crowley won’t pick up the phone.
The moving in his arms goes on and on, turns into hot torturous itching, and finally Aziraphale gives up and starts scratching, until there’s red under his fingernails.
He’s never had an itch he didn’t scratch.
There’s red all over his arms, where he’s scratched them into a bloody mess, crimson trails running down his elbows and then there’s black – more and more of it – and he pulls on it, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain. He pulls out a black feather. Then another one, and another.
The itching ceases, for a bit. It’s a relief nevertheless.
He looks down at his feathered arms – small black feathers sticking out of ruined bloody skin and thinks this cannot be happening.
***
Walking down the streets, unwilling to watch the few pedestrians cross the street to avoid him, Aziraphale looks steadily on the ground. He’s made it a rule to never have eye contact with anyone, as more often than not, random strangers remind him of someone he thinks he once knew, or look at him with disappointment, judging him for all the sins he must have committed, but cannot recall.
Sometimes the creatures around look like people terrified at the sight before them, and sometimes they look like predators, prowling low, ready to attack, their eyes saying that even one so powerful must sleep sometime.
He feels as though he is dying a bit, every day, like more and more of him simply vanishes into nothingness and soon, there isn’t going to be much of anything left.
He goes into a café and orders a croissant from a wide-eyed terrified waitress, and then notices the dark figure in the corner of the room. It’s standing there, surrounded by darkness even at four in the afternoon, and Aziraphale can’t see it clearly even now. He chews on his croissant that tastes like ash in his mouth and waits. There aren't a lot of people in the cafe around him - not a whole lot of people left in the city itself.
The feathers springing from the skin of his arms are long and shiny now.
It will all be over soon.
***
Sometimes – so rare it’s almost not there at all – he wakes up disoriented, thinking I shouldn’t be here and I forgot something important. In those moments, everything around him feels unreal and strange, and he turns around frantically, his heart hammering in his chest, as if looking for something, someone, and not finding it.
And then the feeling passes, and he watches the red eyes looking back at him from the mirror, all white gone – just red surrounding whatever blue is left of his orbs.
Somewhere between scaring the people on the street into running away, screaming, and him blinking at the claws flickering in and out of his fingertips, Aziraphale goes a little mad.
He walks by the mirror once, throwing a short glance at it, and stops dead. An old man is staring back at him in the reflection. The man looks tired, so tired, and old – he must be a hundred years old at least – and in his eyes, in his mouth, in every wrinkle of his face there’s a screaming desire to keel over and die.
Aziraphale doesn’t look at the mirror at all, after that. He slides around his flat without looking anywhere at all, afraid to accidentally catch a reflection of the old man who looks dreadfully like him, and he doesn’t think about it, tries to continue living his measly life, mechanically, like a well-oiled machine.
This isn’t happening, he tells himself desperately, but it’s Christmas now and he can’t even remember how long he’s been here, locked up in his flat.
When the old man shakes his trembling withered finger at him from the reflection on the window, Aziraphale pretends he hasn’t seen anything.
The faceless figure is laughing at him silently, anyway.
***
What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, Aziraphale thinks, unwilling to theorize about the nature of the things happening to him. He chews on stale biscuits he’s scavenged out of the broken cupboard above the sink. At the mirror on the other side of the room, the wrinkled old man is repeating each and every action, his withered trembling hand holding the pastry shakily.
“I know you said you liked human food,” Gabriel says, leaning on the countertop next to Aziraphale. “But this is just sad. How long have these cookies been rotting in there?”
“What we don’t know, won’t hurt us, Gabriel” He says around a mouthful of biscuit that tastes more like plastic on his tongue. “That’s the mystery better left unsolved.”
“Speaking about mysteries,” Gabriel says, eyebrows up, and Aziraphale jolts a little from side to side nervously. “You figure out what’s happening to you yet?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Aziraphale says desperately, knuckles white against the countertop when he’s gripping the edge of it. They’re entering a territory Aziraphale dreads to go near to, and his head starts to spin a bit. “I’m alright, Gabriel, nothing is happening to me.”
“The level of which you’re capable to delude yourself never fucking ceases to amaze me,” Gabriel says, shaking his head, and then looking above as if asking heavens to help with Aziraphale’s exceptional stupidity. He nods at the corner of the room: “What’s that, then?”
The figure in the corner doesn’t move. Aziraphale glances at it, then looks away.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” he says, another part of him withering away – the part that’s sometimes felt ashamed of his own shaky sanity, the part that’s managed to keep going after everything that happened, clinging to some pathetic idea of a normal life—
“Maybe you might want to concern yourself with it, after all?” Gabriel says nonchalantly, and Aziraphale is getting angry now. He just doesn’t think it is healthy, being reminded all the time of the terrible and incomprehensible things that happened, of what he may or may not have done at some point in the past.
“I think you should go, Gabriel,” he says, putting the biscuits away. It’s not like he can taste them, anyway.
Gabriel smirks, surprised. “Go?” he says, incredulously. “I’m not even here, in the first place!”
Indeed, he isn’t. In awe, Aziraphale looks around the empty kitchen, silence ringing in his ears.
This is wrong, the old man tells him from the reflection in the window, smirking.
“Shut up!” Aziraphale yells at him, because he will not be spoken to in such a tone by some wrinkly old fool. He’s got at least some dignity left.
You’re losing it, the old man sing-songs from the reflection. Aziraphale ignores him.
***
On what might be a dark and rainy Tuesday, as Aziraphale wanders through his shop looking for something to chew on, the shop assistant pauses in his reading to give Aziraphale a key. “It’s for that room upstairs,” he says.
Aziraphale’s halfway up to the room when he wonders if there ever was a shop assistant before. He really should investigate that, but there’s a key to that one room he could never dream of getting into, and maybe he’ll find some answers there.
He opens it, and it’s just as he remembers. The hall is empty and huge and the ceiling so high he can’t even begin to imagine it.
“Have you been doing this to me?” he asks God.
No, God says. You’ve done it all to yourself.
And what’s even the use of asking all these stupid questions? He suddenly feels immensely used and betrayed and just hurting all over, his tired body unable to deal with all the pain. His blood is boiling in his veins, hot everywhere, each cell of his body burning as if on fire. Something inside him snaps and explodes – like a bomb finally going off – and the thing in him, the monster in him roars and gets to its feet, spreads the wings that are Aziraphale’s wings.
He understands now. He is the monster, and the monster is him. The transition is complete now.
He flaps his wings and feels his identity dissolving into something bigger and more powerful.
He’s in unbearable pain, everything around him starting to lose colour and shadows and smells. It hurts everywhere at once – his legs, his wings, his head, his heart. The pain is so overwhelming in its intensity, he thinks, with some relief, that he might die, finally, at last. He screams, limbs twitching uselessly, as the horrible heart-wrenching sound escapes his mutated lungs, his chest, his very soul. He screams and screams, thinking I will not survive this, and Crowley’s face flashes before his eyes.
Something around him explodes and breaks. He opens his eyes he hasn’t realised he’d closed, and his bookstore is in ruins around him. The pain has stopped.
He stretches his wings, picks at the stray feathers with his beak. At least there’s not going to be an old man watching him from every reflection anymore.
***
He wanders around the empty London streets, plops himself on the roofs of the building and watches the dead alleys, the eerie silent boulevards.
London, population 524, he reads on the road sign he isn’t sure ever existed before.
Not long now, he thinks, blinking through the thick fog that clouds his vision. Soon there won’t be much of anything left.
***
He’s been knocking on Crowley’s door for a while, when Crowley finally opens. He looks Aziraphale up and down but doesn’t comment on his mutilation.
“Now what?” he says, annoyed.
“I—I didn’t know where else to go,” Aziraphale croaks out.
“How about your own bloody house?” Crowley snaps.
“It’s—it’s gone now,” Aziraphale says, hoping to get at least some emotion out of Crowley that isn’t anger or annoyance. His eyes feel hot and watery and he’s shattering and disintegrating as they speak. “It’s completely destroyed.”
“What, again?” Crowley hisses, and purses his lips bitterly. “For someone who claims to care for books so much, you’re doing a shitty job of keeping them… existent”
“Can I come in?” Aziraphale begs, dignity be damned. “Please?”
“Looking like this?” Crowley says incredulously, pointing at the entirety of him. “Even if I wanted you before, you really think I’d let you in now?”
“Please, darling,” Aziraphale sobs out, wings flapping beyond his control. “Please, I—”
“No!” Crowley cuts off, sharp like a knife to his ribs. He looks disgusted. “And who asked you to bring that fucking thing with you!?”
He points at the far corner of the corridor, and Aziraphale notices the figure hovering over there. It must have followed him over to Crowley’s.
“No, no—” Aziraphale mumbles, words failing him, as he finds himself overwhelmed by a childlike hunger for his best friend, for Crowley who isn’t looking at him with disgust or contempt or, worst of all, indifference. “Don’t you mind that, it’s not going to bother you,” he babbles, as the faceless thing shifts and morphs into a vague cloudy shape. It’s big now, bigger than Aziraphale has ever seen it. “It’s just there, it’s only—”
“Take that fucking thing and go,” Crowley spits out. “Before it contaminates the rest of the fucking building.”
The door slams loud, raising a cloud of dust. Crowley’s distant footsteps follow down the hollow sound.
***
He sits on the rooftop of the building, picking out the dust and filth from his tail, looking at the decaying city below – the empty pubs and shops, the abandoned cars, the silent eerie streets where humans used to take up so much space. The weary old city where he’s spent so much of his life in, now puts him on edge.
He has forgotten something important – his keys, maybe, his wallet, his phone. But then – he doesn’t have anything to lock with keys anymore, he has no use for any money that any wallet could fit. The only person he’d ever use his phone for is indefinitely unavailable. His hat? Aziraphale doesn’t wear a hat. His bow-tie? No need for that, either, anymore.
London, population 2, he reads on the sign. He wonders if that means Crowley and he, but then he doubts he’d count as a person, anymore.
Days drag, painfully slowly, like the neon liquid in a lava lamp, pouring together in one miserable colourless mess. He wonders how odd it is, that going nowhere and doing nothing could take up so much time.
Paris, population 3
Moscow, population 0
He flies across the city to a vertical ghost-town, a high-rise of empty office space and unsold condos. In the mirrored elevator to the penthouse, Aziraphale shifts uncomfortably, avoiding his own reflection. He’s seen enough of that, lately.
What has he forgotten? He's certain he's left something behind, tucked on a side table in the bookstore, maybe, and promptly forgotten. Something that Aziraphale ought to be keeping with him.
Tokyo, population 0
The flat he enters is eerie and silent, just like the rest of the city. He wanders around, pats the dusty windowsills and bookshelves, thinks that maybe he’ll find it here, something that he’s forgotten.
It finds him, instead.
“Why have you come here?” the boy asks him, leaning against the wall. His face is twisted with misery and self-righteous anger. Aziraphale sympathizes with that. “Were you trying to run?”
He has no voice to answer the boy, so he just nods with a sad little smile.
“Don’t you realize?” the boy says, shaking his head. “Wherever you go – there you are.”
Indeed. Aziraphale learned that a long time ago.
Crimson blood stains the boy’s chest, the filthy muddy clothes he’s wearing. It’s spread down his back as well, when he turns. He only looks about fourteen or fifteen, but there’s the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“I could’ve been someone’s husband, someone’s father,” the boy says bitterly, folding his arms at his chest. “If only you hadn’t been such a fuck-up.”
There’s nothing Aziraphale can reply to that, nothing he can defend himself with. It’s the sad bitter truth, anyway, and he’s not going to pretend otherwise.
The dark shapeless thing is there at the far corner, watching silently, growing, spreading around.
“You’re disintegrating,” the boy observes. “Shattering – your mind faster than your body. I’ll only speed things up for you.”
Aziraphale nods in agreement. He’s right, there’s no sense in dragging this out. Not much longer now, he hopes.
There’s a blade in the boy’s hand. It shines and glistens as he approaches Aziraphale, slowly and surely, like a predator finally cornering his prey.
“I’ll carve your heart out,” the boy says, raising the blade, and Aziraphale suddenly realises he doesn’t even know the boy’s name. Only appropriate, if he’s going to be the one who finally finishes him for good. He says as much.
“Does it matter now?” the boy replies.
No. It really doesn’t.
The pain is sharp and cold as the blade cuts through him. He stays unmoving throughout the whole ordeal, waiting for the boy to be done. There’s a circular motion, and then Aziraphale’s heart falls out of his chest.
It lands on the floor with a hollow smack, dusty and filthy and rotten, and Aziraphale gapes at the undignified sight of it. As soon as it’s out, cockroaches run for it, eating their way inside, skittering in the nasty old thing.
Aziraphale bleeds and festers as he roams the penthouse, pats at the hole in his chest. His heart is lying on the filthy floor, rotten and pathetic, cockroaches and mice having their way with it.
Not much longer now.
“Oh, the irony,” Crowley says when he is there with him. He toes at Aziraphale’s heart with the tip of his shoe, as it pumps weakly and squirts blood pathetically. “All these millennia of wanting this thing, and this is what you actually have to offer.”
Aziraphale wonders if there’s anyone left in the world but the two of them. It makes some sort of sense, in a distantly romantic and silly way – that the two them were the first to walk the Earth and the two of them would be the last, also.
“I can’t believe I’ve ever thought I wanted it,” Crowley says, looking at the filth and mouse droppings stuck to Aziraphale’s decaying rotting heart. “Although… it kind of matches the rest of your state.”
Aziraphale settles into the chair by the window with a gusty exhale and thinks that he won't get up again. He lets the chair cradle him comfortably, watches the sky outside go pink and orange, and waits to see who finishes him first.
“That thing is growing like fucking cancer,” Crowley comments, looking over at the twisted mist of darkness spreading from the corner of the room. It's enveloped almost the the entire room now. Aziraphale sighs – not that he can help it anymore. Not that he ever could.
“I think it’s time now,” the boy says and Aziraphale hears the distant sound of a bullet fired in the dark alley somewhere deep and far away in his fractured mind. He agrees. He doesn’t have to wait any longer.
“I’d rather do it myself,” Crowley says, taking the bloodied blade from the boy. “Only fair, after all this time, that I do it.”
“Yes, you might have gotten it worse than I did,” the boy agrees, and lets go of the blade. “Off you go now.”
Crowley raises the blade, and it’s really symbolic, isn’t it? Aziraphale can’t even mind – it’s better that way, bloody and harsh, more of a shock to the system.
As the blade pierces his dying heart on the floor, the pain floods him, a scream tearing out, and the very next moment Aziraphale remembers. The dark nights in a warm candle-lit room, sharing a whiskey-wine-scotch-gin-vodka-whatever to the long-winded conversations about everything and nothing. The uncomfortable sort of desire bursting through him, Crowley’s affectionate look from across the table making it worth it. Decades and centuries and millennia of wandering the world, finding each other again and again. Crowley, sleepy in the afternoons after nights of heavy drinking, and gulping down water in the haze of hangovers, and I love you so much, it hurts. The pain of having that and losing it, letting it slip away between his fingers, the pain of the realization of never getting it again, is not survivable.
His life, unlike a simple human’s, hasn't been short, and there would always, always come a reckoning. Aziraphale remembers now.
“Finally,” Crowley’s voice says from far, far away.
And there they are: anger, hurt, betrayal, bitterness, grief, regret. He hopes they don’t follow him wherever he’s going.
The pain, pressing down on him from everywhere at once, is not survivable.
Aziraphale dies.
***
Everything hurts.
Logically, he must exist, then.
“Sweetheart,” a voice says.
Tentatively, he tries to open his eyes. The simple movement sets all of his nerve endings on fire.
“Shh, darling, don’t move, I’m here,” the voice says again.
He listens to the voice. After a while he fades into the darkness again, and everything’s easier.
***
The next time he becomes aware, he feels hands touching his face.
He realizes he has a face again. It’s been a long time.
“I’m here, angel, I’m here, I’ve got you”
His mind must be playing tricks on him. Crowley wouldn’t speak to him in a voice like that, not anymore. He doesn’t want to hear it, but then, he doesn’t want to wake up either. It’s a nice dream, but he knows it’s got to have an expiration date, so he might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
“I’ve got you, love, I’ve got you now.”
He doesn’t open his eyes.
***
The third time he wakes, he hurts considerably less.
He risks opening his eyes. Crowley’s face is the only thing in his line of vision.
“Angel—” Crowley croaks out, and his voice dies. He looks utterly wrecked.
“What—” Aziraphale tries to say, but all that comes out is a rusty rasp. He coughs out the bile in his throat, tries again: “What’s—happening?”
“Angel—” Crowley rasps out again, and his hands come up to cup Aziraphale’s cheeks. The touch feels alien and wrong, and Aziraphale flinches. Crowley looks tortured.
“Why are you here?” Aziraphale croaks. His hands fly up to touch his own chest, and his throat constricts when he finds no hole there.
“I got you out,” Crowley whispers in a watery voice.
“Out of where?” Aziraphale says, hoarse and rusty and aching all over.
Crowley pauses, shuts his eyes tight. He looks like every word coming out of his mouth is hurting him immensely.
“Out of Hell, love,” he finally says, quickly like getting the band-aid off. “I got you out of Hell, don’t you remember?”
Aziraphale doesn’t know what he remembers. He remembers everything that he thinks has happened to him in the last—well, he is not sure how long, and then – in light of this new information, he can’t even tell what actually happened and what he thinks happened.
Not that there’s a difference, technically speaking.
He looks around. They are lying on the bed on their sides, facing each other, and the room – well, it’s his own bedroom, the one that’s exploded to dust—
He jolts upright ignoring the pain in his body.
“You restored the bookstore!” He says, a mixture of elevation and dread firing up inside him. “And the flat—”
“Angel, I didn’t restore anything,” Crowley says softly and so, so gently. “Nothing ever happened to it.”
“But I—” Aziraphale tries to say, and his lips are trembling, and his eyes are tearing up. “You—you weren’t—”
He halts to a stop. Whatever he thinks happened, it didn’t happen to Crowley. Whatever happened to him, there’re no words in any human language to convey the whole experience of it to Crowley in a way that he would understand.
“What happened?” he says instead.
Crowley looks like he’s been asked the one question he’s been dreading most to hear.
But then, deep inside, Aziraphale already knows the answer.
“You fell, darling,” a whisper, barely even vocal. Aziraphale shuts his eyes tight. The words are still ringing in his ears. Crowley’s hands grasp his and hold tight. “You fell through all nine rings of Hell, and I couldn’t—” his voice breaks to pieces, “I couldn’t find you—I looked and looked—”
He fades out, breathing heavily, hands leaden and heavy around Aziraphale’s.
“When?” he asks, because that seems very important now.
“When what?” Crowley says, confused and teary-eyed.
“When did I—when did it happen?”
Crowley swallows hard, and Aziraphale can see his Adam’s apple bob. “We were going to look at the house – the one at Surrey, remember?” he says and bites his lip. “And right the night before—”
“So—” Aziraphale rasps, and the dam is broken - the water flowing from his eyes, spilling out on his cheeks, running down his nose and chin. His heart is trembling in his chest. “You didn’t—you didn’t forget?”
Crowley’s face contorts, melts and rearranges. “Angel, you were in Hell… of course, I didn’t forget"
It’s a tempting thing to believe. Worse even, Aziraphale feels himself beginning to hope.
He wipes the wetness away from his face angrily, sniffs, shuts his eyes.
“I want to believe you are here,” he says, and his voice is simply pathetic, but he doesn’t have the energy nor the dignity left to feel embarrassed about it. “But you’ve been—I thought you’ve been—”
He doesn’t know how to explain it, doesn’t have the words to explain it.
“Oh, Angel,” Crowley says, heartbroken.
“Maybe you shouldn’t call me that now,” Aziraphale says distantly.
“Oh fuck it,” Crowley says, sounding angry for the first time. Aziraphale’s eyes snap open. “You are still an angel – my angel, my favourite fucking angel in the world, and no one – you hear me? – no one is to say otherwise.”
Aziraphale’s heart pounders in his chest – and it’s just a wonder all of its own to even feel a heart in his chest once again.
“Do I, um—” he stutters, overwhelmingly paranoid about what he’s going to ask, “do I look different?”
“Not to me,” Crowley says immediately, and Aziraphale gathers – yes. Yes, he does.
He scrambles off the bed, joints aching and limbs sour, and he hurries to the bathroom to inspect himself in the mirror, Crowley following close behind him.
It’s not what he expects – but then, he isn’t sure what he expected.
He pretty much looks the same, except for his hair. It’s a few shades darker now, having lost its unearthly glow and light. His eyes are the same blue he’s remembered them. His face looks the same.
And then – he sees a dark spot under his ear.
“What’s that?” he says, trying to stretch his neck enough to see what it is. Crowley holds a small mirror helpfully, letting him look at the small tattoo formed on his neck.
It’s a crow.
Well, figures.
“I think it’s a raven,” Crowley babbles, probably trying to distract him from spiralling down into a wild hysteric reaction that is due to happen any time now. “It looks rather handsome on you, angel—”
“It’s a crow,” Aziraphale says, thoughtfully, remembering the feel of it in his body, over his body, being his body.
He examines his reflection again. For the first time in a long time, there’s no one else but himself looking back at him from the mirror.
Aziraphale can live with that.
“Are you… ah, even remotely alright?” Crowley says tentatively next to him.
“I am remotely alright,” Aziraphale says, panic surging up for a second, paranoid that this whole scene will flicker out of existence. He grabs Crowley’s hand in a wild motion, afraid to let go.
“Okay, maybe a little less that remotely,” Crowley says in an overly casual tone. “It’s a good thing, then, that at least one of us has already gone through this whole shitty deal.”
Aziraphale’s throat closes up, then, just imagining the way Crowley must have felt having to go through that alone. He feels dimly ashamed of himself.
He turns around, arms going up around Crowley, and hides his face in the crook of Crowley’s neck, breathes his scent. He could just stay like this for ages, he knows – clear as day, without a single doubt. He could just stay like this forever, with only Crowley by his side.
He’ll never have enough of this.
“I’ve always imagined Hell to be this distinct place of fire and people screaming in pain and colour red everywhere—” he babbles, remembering what it looked like there when he ventured down that one time in Crowley’s body to fool all the demons. It appears, he’s the one who’s been fooled, after all.
“It’s Hell, angel,” Crowley says into his hair. “It’s so much more complex and horrible than that.”
They stand there, embracing, with silence between them, and the sound of lively bubbling streets full of actual, living humans outside, going around their business, is cacophonous to his ears.
“Turns out,” he mutters into the skin of Crowley’s collarbone, “that the most horrible thing that could ever happen to me – is you leaving me, darling.”
The endearment feels tight and bittersweet in his mouth. But it’ll be alright, he hopes even as his heart is thundering painfully in his chest. It’ll be alright. He’ll get there.
“Well, it’s a good thing I’m not ever leaving you, then, Angel” Crowley whispers at the crown of his head.
An Angel or a demon or a bloody goddamn human, Aziraphale thinks.
He’ll get there.