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thelasthomelyurl · 5 years

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A hurt/comfort story spanning the last few hundred years before the end of the world. M Rating is mostly for mature themes (and just a little bit of the last chapter).

Read it on AO3. (Or under the cut below)

Heartfelt thanks to @curlycrowley/@letsgomindthestore for being an unbeatable beta!

Chapter 1: 1837 AD

It was a dark and smoggy night. Although humans hadn’t actually coined the word “smog” yet, they were already experts at producing it: the nascent Industrial Revolution was setting records for spewing pollutants into the air at an ever-increasing pace. Factories belched out a perpetual smoke that clung to the buildings and the air right around head-height. Theologically, Crowley was all for the despoiling of Earth’s bounty. Personally, though, he missed the smell of clean air. It used to be plentiful but had been slowly on the decline since the thirteenth century, although he supposed the increase in smoke and particulates was offset somewhat by the humans’ significant strides in the areas of hiding and surreptitiously dealing with their nightsoil. Gain a little, lose a little, he thought.

Neither pollution nor the exceedingly late hour kept Londoners pent up in their homes—leastways, not in the parts of town which Crowley frequented. He’d just come from depositing an archdeacon at the door of an establishment whose business day was only just beginning. Not his favourite part of the job, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that it was, at least, the kind of place whose chief attractions had made their own choice to be there and did quite well for themselves. It helped, a little.

Crowley was jolted out of his walking reverie by an abrupt sound from an alley off to his left—the thick slap of flesh-on-flesh cutting off a shout. He turned mid-stride and headed towards the noise, slit-pupiled eyes searching the darkness. Continuing sounds of a scuffle led him to them: two wretched forms crouched almost protectively over a child (Crowley was bad at human ages but guessed they couldn’t be more than eight or nine) who was doubled over and moaning weakly.

“Evening,” he said, hands shoved in the pockets of his breeches.

“Get yourself away,” snarled one of the adults, “if you know what’s best for you.”

“That your kid?” Crowley asked as if they were exchanging opinions about the weather.

“He is now,” said the other. This was accompanied by renewed whimpering and struggling from the child.

“‘S’that so?” asked Crowley. “And—beg pardon—when was the last time you had communion? Confession? Anything like that?”

“You can bugger yourself with your questions, priest,” came the reply.

Crowley smiled a tight-lipped smile into the darkness. “Not quite what I meant,” he said, and if there had been light to see it by, the two would-be kidnappers might have been tremendously alarmed by the sight of his forked tongue flickering out and tasting the tarnish on their souls.

“Excsssellent,” he breathed. He pulled his hands from his pockets.

Just a few moments and two soul-ripping shrieks later, the two adults were slumped lifelessly on the ground and a grinning Crowley hauled the child to his feet.

“Thank G-God for you, Mister,” the boy said. He sounded a little less grateful and a little more terrified, but who could blame him?

“No, don’t,” said Crowley. “D’you know where your home is?”

The boy nodded mutely and pointed.

“Good lad. Get yourself home, then. Don’t dawdle—and hail Satan.”

The boy hesitated for one bewildered moment, then took off like a startled deer in the direction he’d pointed. Crowley watched until he turned a corner, knowing that following the child would not precisely make matters better.

“Well, well,” hissed a voice in the darkness, and Crowley’s blood froze. His mind whirred into overdrive, trying to put odds on exactly how much trouble he was about to get himself into.

“Hastur,” he said with all the casual disaffectedness he could muster. “Fancy seeing you here.”

The inky shadows of the alleyway coalesced into two even inkier, shadowier forms. Two lords of Hell, Hastur and Dagon, stood there with hungry, excited looks about them.

“Odd night’s work for a demon, Crowley,” said Hastur.

“Oh, nothing special,” Crowley said. “Dropped the archdeacon off at the brothel and put a bob in his pocket. Little uninspired, I’ll grant you, but it’ll get the job d—“

“Save it, snake,” interrupted Dagon.

“I meant just now. Explain yourself,” Hastur added.

“Two souls secured for our master forevermore,” Crowley said blithely.

“Not bad enough,” said Hastur.

“What do you mean?” Crowley asked. “I saved them from any deathbed conversions or inspiring redemption arcs. Done and dusted.”

“And the whelp?”

“Planted the seeds of disbelief,” Crowley said glibly. “Plinked away at the foundation of his faith. Ten years from now, he’ll—hnngk!”

Hnngk was not at all what Crowley had meant to say. Dagon had startled the noise out of him with the simple expedient of a fist to the stomach. Before Crowley could recover, this was followed by several more infernally strong blows, including one to the side of his knees that resulted in him collapsing to the filthy ground in a graceless heap.

“Nice try,” said Hastur, “but you’ll excuse us if we’re unimpressed.” He punctuated this with a brutal stomp to Crowley’s ribs which robbed him of the last of his breath. As a demon, Crowley did not need to breathe, but it was uncomfortable nonetheless to be denied air, especially in such a manner.

Dagon kicked the soft flesh of his side. “I never liked you,” they spat, and they lifted their leg again.

With his final half-lucid thought, Crowley sent a desperate plea into the aether—not a prayer, but a supplication to the only being he believed in. It was a fool’s hope, but Crowley had always admitted himself to be a fool—at least in this one regard.

Dagon’s boot came down directly on Crowley’s face, and his vision blacked out.

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Crowley couldn’t have said how much later it was that he regained awareness, but when he did, it was all at once with excruciating pain and clarity. He screamed, howled in agony as his nerve endings tore themselves asunder, as his skin ripped away from his flesh, as every muscle and sinew stretched beyond its limit. He wasn’t sure if he was shouting in any language or perhaps in all of them, but his whole being was focused on one thought—make it end. He begged for death, for utter exile, for the blankness of unbeing, whatever it took to escape the torment cracking apart the foundations of his very essence.

As suddenly as the torture had begun, it stopped, and an emptiness that was somehow worse crashed through the channels of agony that had been carved into his body and self. His vision cleared of the bloody, electric-fire haze of pain, and he caught the briefest glimpse of a dimly lit room before he succumbed to oblivion.

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It was to his own tremendous surprise that Crowley woke again later. In the deep recesses of unconsciousness, some part of him had accepted that this was The End and had been grateful that never existing again would at least mean no more pain. There had been some regret, but if Crowley was good at anything, it was consigning himself to the inevitable, so it had not hurt very much. As he became more alert, his suppositions were proven more and more incorrect. At the very least, the pain was not at an end, which he supposed was a decent indicator that his existence was also not finished.

His very being felt bruised and wrung-out. Thudding aches radiated from his nose, his head, his lip, his chest, his legs, his hands—he gave up trying to inventory the individual hurts.

Still, he was no longer in boiling torment, which was, well, something.

With a thought, he miracled his corporation to wellness—and gasped in renewed agony as not only did it not take, but a force slammed into him, shoving him harder against whatever it was he was laying on and sending spikes of pain through all his injuries. At the same time, the damp smell of rotting earth and mildew hit him. The sensations overwhelmed him and tore away his feeble grip on consciousness.

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His third awakening was to the strong scent of herbs and the feeling of gentle pressure against most of his body and the distinct sense of a familiar Presence. It was this last impression which roused him fully to wakefulness and caused him to sit upright—or, rather, to attempt to do so before his corporation told him very firmly that such an activity was quite definitely off-limits at present. After just the barest of movements, he fell back with a groan. He hurt too much to even be grateful that he was, apparently, safe, heavily bandaged, and being cushioned by something soft and plush.

“Crowley?” asked a voice from somewhere off to one side, and Crowley could have wept with relief. “Oh my, no, don’t even try—“ it continued, and then from the very corner of his one open eye, Crowley caught a glimpse of Aziraphale running into the room. “You must keep still, Crowley,” said the angel as he drew near the bed.

Crowley moved his head in the barest of nods, having come to much the same conclusion himself.

“You found me,” he said weakly, his voice grating with injury and wet with blood.

“And a good thing I did,” Aziraphale responded. “Lying there in the night, beside those two poor humans, like a—well, never mind.”

“What did they do,” Crowley asked at length. “I feel…”

“I know, pet,” Aziraphale said soothingly. “They’d beaten you within an inch of discorporation, how ever did they manage—”

“Not that,” Crowley said. “Not humans. Demons.” He frowned.

Aziraphale gave a soft gasp. “Oh, but how—and there were two humans…”

“Those were mine,” Crowley grunted. “Never mind that now, though—you found me in the alley? In London?”

“Yes, of course,” Aziraphale said, looking alarmed. “Where else would…?”

“I was—it was torture, like the first fall into the pit, like…” he struggled for an adequate analogy to explain the sensation he’d had upon first regaining consciousness. He had half-convinced himself that he’d been brought back to Hell and then been returned somehow.

“Ah, well,” said Aziraphale, and Crowley got the impression that if he could really look at the angel properly, he would catch him blushing. “You gave me quite a fright,” Aziraphale said, as if that explained anything at all.

“...And?” Crowley prompted.

“And I… well, I used a—you must understand, you were in such an awful state. I don’t know that I had any other choice.”

Crowley let out a hissing breath and waited.

“I used a miracle,” Aziraphale said, his voice brimming with contrition.

Ah.

“A divine… fucking… blessing?” Crowley asked, his limited vision swimming. The last time he’d been personally touched by Grace was when it had been ripped away from him. That did rather explain the sensation of being torn apart, body and essence. “You idiot.”

“I didn’t know what to do!” fretted Aziraphale. “I couldn’t feel any of you there, when I found you. It was like a… a human was lying there.”

“Hastur.” Crowley said the name like a curse. “He did—something. When I woke up before, I tried my own miracle and it, it backfired, or something. I can’t heal myself from it.”

“I panicked,” Aziraphale continued. “Tried to grant you a healing, but of course… well, it… sort of worked.”

Crowley thought of the sulfurous agony of his first waking and felt flames bite at his being at the mere memory. “Sort of worked?” he asked. If he’d had any energy, he would have filled the question with all the venom his snake-like self could muster.

“Well, yes. Some of the more vital bits pieced themselves back together.”

That stopped Crowley’s train of thoughts in its tracks.

“This is post-healing?” he croaked.

“Yes,” was all Aziraphale said, very quietly. That one word held so much anguish in it that Crowley found himself swamped by the ludicrous desire to reassure the angel, despite the fact that it was he himself who had taken the injuries.

“I didn’t realize…” Crowley replayed the memory of the abuse his corporation had been subjected to and felt his body’s heart give a lurch. A human would have been lucky to wake up after being left on the street in the condition he remembered being in. And who was to say that he remembered all of it, that Dagon and Hastur hadn’t gone on beating him after he had lost consciousness? Without his own powers available to him, what could have happened if Aziraphale hadn’t found him and risked a miracle? He swore.

“I am sorry to have done it,” the angel said, “only I wasn’t about to risk you discorporating—or worse.”

Worse.

Crowley made no response, his mind still wrapping itself around these revelations. Had the two demon lords meant for him to discorporate, or just to suffer? He suspected the latter, as discorporation was inconvenient at worst and not much of a punishment. Worse, then. Being trapped inside a mortal vessel in agony seemed very much in keeping with what Crowley knew of Hastur’s modus operandi. This was likely what passed for a first warning in Hell. Crowley made a note to endeavour not to merit a second warning.

“How are you feeling now?” prompted Aziraphale after several moments of silence.

“Um,” said Crowley. Frightened, he thought. Hunted. And somehow—miraculously—lucky. “Not… great.”

Aziraphale let out a huff of breath and Crowley knew he was rolling his eyes.

“You’ll have plenty of time to practice being more thoroughly descriptive,” the angel said. “It’ll be weeks before you can leave, and that’s only if you’re cooperative.”

“Eh?”

“I’m given to understand that healing the mundane way is a tiresome, lengthy process.”

Crowley swore again.

“It’ll be far more painful for me than for you, with that sunny disposition of yours,” Aziraphale said. He continued talking about his plans and preparations, including a lengthy detour about some books he’d recently picked up which just so happened to have some instructions regarding the care of injured human bodies. This time, when darkness crept through Crowley’s vision, it held no terror. The indistinct melody of the angel’s voice carried Crowley off to sleep.

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Crowley woke again in Aziraphale’s living area; he was greeted by the crackle of firewood, the smell of herbal tea, and the sight of Aziraphale sitting near his bedside, a woolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a thick cloth-bound book open in his hands. He seemed to be quite engrossed.

He could sit so still—it was an entrancing contrast to his normal flurry of little movements and gestures. Crowley imagined that if he could only find a big enough book, Aziraphale could pass an unmoving decade reading as easily as Crowley could in sleep.

“Angel,” he said after he grew tired of waiting for Aziraphale to look up from his book, “you can’t be serious about this.”

“Hmm? Serious about what?” Aziraphale asked, marking his place and closing the book.

“This,” Crowley repeated. He tried to gesture to the room, but found that he could barely lift his arms. He winced, then glared when Aziraphale let out an ill-concealed chuckle.

“You were saying?” Aziraphale asked pointedly.

“This is a bad idea,” Crowley said. “Me, being here.”

It was a bad idea because of the whole Heaven-and-Hell nonsense, of course, but more importantly, it was a mistake because it wasn’t what they did. They brushed past each other and Crowley pined and kept his walls up and Aziraphale plinked away at them and if either of them went off-script for even a moment, Crowley feared that the whole thing would end in a pile of rubble that left him exposed and alone in a way he hadn’t been in nearly six thousand years.

No matter how much he might wish it were otherwise, it was a bad idea because Crowley was an unforgivable demon who God Herself had decided was unworthy of love, and if they spent more than a long conversation in each other’s company, Aziraphale would surely remember that. The spiky bits of his personality would finally hurt the angel and that would be it; Aziraphale would recall that he was the Serpent of Eden and cast him out from the last place that mattered—his company.

Not that he could say any of that. That was the whole point.

“And what ought I have done, then, dumped you out on the street and hoped you rolled to a safe haven downhill?”

“Well—” he floundered.

“You should have thought of that before you called for me,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley sputtered. “Called you?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

Aziraphale regarded him with amusement. “Don’t play innocent, fiend, you do it poorly. Yes, called me. There I was, nose-deep in Lives of the Necromancers, when what should I hear but your voice?”

“What—what did it say?”

The angel pondered for a moment. “You know, I couldn’t tell you the exact words, now that I think about it. It was most definitely you, and I recall knowing that you needed help, but I can’t quite remember…” he trailed off.

“And then? How did you find me?” Laboriously, Crowley turned his head until he was looking directly at the angel.

“I’ve chalked it up to intuition,” Aziraphale said as he spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “I followed the feeling of you—” something fluttered in Crowley’s stomach at hearing that phrase “—although I can’t say how since when I got to you, as I said, it was like all the…” he paused, and Crowley could swear he had heard a tremor in the angel’s voice “like you… weren’t there.”

“Have you had that before? A sense of me?”

Aziraphale pondered for a moment before answering. “We are rather good at finding each other, are we not?” he said at length. “I notice when you’re near—” there was that odd flutter again “—but no, I can’t say I’ve ever thought I could just walk out and find you like that. Whatever did you do?”

“Not sure,” Crowley said. His mind flickered back to that last moment of consciousness in the alley, to the idea he’d had, and followed, of sending out a call for help. It had been a half-crazed impulse, driven more by pain and fear than anything. And yet—it had worked, somehow. Aziraphale had heard him, and more than that, he’d found him.

Crowley suddenly found that he couldn’t look at the angel, and he shifted again to hide his face better.

“It’s still daft, keeping me here,” he said after a while.

“Yes, well, the moment you can walk through the front door under your own steam, you’re welcome to leave.”

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A week passed before Crowley was able to sit upright, and even then he was not precisely comfortable. Aziraphale was a constant nuisance, reminding him to breathe in deeply (“I know it hurts, you broke three ribs, you dolt”), force-feeding him soups (“Stop complaining, this body needs all the help it can get”), and fussing with his bandages (“You do not want to get an infection, believe me”). When he wasn’t flitting about playing nursemaid, the angel was parked firmly in his wing-backed chair right beside Crowley’s bed. He had a habit of responding out loud to whatever he was reading—a laugh here, a sigh there, and the occasional under-his-breath refutation of a point every now and again. After one such interlude, Crowley griped at him that it wasn’t very polite to have just half a conversation in front of him. Aziraphale had looked at him coolly and then started reading his book aloud, adding his own commentary as he went, which had of course not been the point, the point had been to get the angel to shut up, but Crowley found himself listening with interest all the same.

And if he found himself agreeing with all of Aziraphale’s points, and missing the sound of his voice whenever the angel was away acquiring supplies or going about his own business (infrequent as such occasions were), well, what of it? It was bloody boring otherwise, and he couldn’t even sleep as he normally would have to pass the time—that is, he could sleep as a human might, but it turned out that humans did not frequently sleep for weeks, nor even days, at a time.

Occasionally, he was jolted awake from what sleep he did get with horrible nightmares that seemed to blend the impossibly far past with all his most awful fears in the present and left him thrashing as he woke, making a frightful mess of his bandages and anything set too near him. Each time this happened, Aziraphale was close by. The angel would shush him gently, would put a warm, soft hand to his forehead, would softly whisper that it was okay, you’re safe, I’m here. Each time, those words pulled Crowley in from spiraling terror. Aziraphale would wait until he quieted down then set everything to rights, tuck the blankets snugly around Crowley, and move his chair ever so slightly closer to the bed. “Back to sleep with you,” he’d say, “it’s the best thing you can do to heal.”

And heal he did. It was an infuriatingly slow process, but bit by bit the flesh and bone of his corporation knitted itself back together. By the time three weeks had passed, the splints on the fingers of his left hand came off and Aziraphale set him to practicing motions to rebuild strength. Crowley grumbled at this but eventually did what he was told, not bothering to wonder at the fact that the angel’s delighted encouragement felt like a reward rather than the pandering sop it was. After four weeks, most of his remaining bandages were able to come off. After six, Aziraphale removed the plaster from his ankle, and his face was healed enough that he could touch it—or, say, lie on his side—without too much pain.

Throughout the process, Aziraphale danced attendance on him: the angel chivvied him into sitting upright even when he was tired, flexing his various limbs and joints repeatedly, and generally paying more attention to his corporation than the demon had done in the last several centuries combined. Crowley put on a good show of disgruntlement, but found it predictably impossible to be well and truly annoyed by the angel’s ministrations.

There was one brief setback during the fifth week, when Crowley had thought once again to experiment with his miracles. Over the weeks, he had used them for small things—the first of which had been a change of clothes when Aziraphale suggested, a few days in, that he himself would need to attend to getting new clothing onto Crowley as the demon couldn’t very well wallow in the same outfit for weeks on end. Crowley had been mortified at the idea of such a service needing to be performed on his behalf and had conjured on a new set of pyjamas without even consciously deciding to do so. It had been more of a relief than he cared to admit to find himself still capable of such feats; Aziraphale’s fretting over how he had not “felt” like himself had left Crowley worried that he’d somehow been truly robbed of his powers, a concern he had quite carefully locked up, bound with chains, and buried in the deepest recesses of his mind before it could drive him over the brink.

After five weeks of carefully avoiding miracles on his own person, though, he’d thought it was time to try something. He had been able to change his hair (it was now unfashionably long, falling to the middle of his back) and while Aziraphale wasn’t looking, he’d jabbed himself with a knife and was able to heal the damage from that. Feeling reassured, he’d tried to miracle away the remaining damage from his encounter in the alleyway—only to once again find himself buffeted back by an invisible force.

When Aziraphale came in to find him crumpled on the bed, the angel had heaved a long-suffering sigh, asked if Crowley was aware that his instincts for self-preservation were vastly overmatched by his curiosity, and done a quick inventory to make sure that nothing was too badly re-injured by the experiment.

“How else was I supposed to find out whether it would work or not?” Crowley asked sourly.

“You might have at least enlisted my help,” Aziraphale said. “What if the knife bit hadn’t worked at all? A fine thing it would be, to have worked so hard to get you well again only to come in and find you exsanguinated on the floor.”

He had a point, of course, but Crowley only grumbled in response.

Now that he knew his power was not entirely lost to him, Crowley was able to examine the question of what, precisely, Hastur and Dagon might have done. He discussed it with the angel; there wasn’t a wealth of documented research on the ability of celestial or infernal beings to impose injury or disability on one another, but they came at last to the conclusion that once Crowley’s wounds from the encounter were healed, he’d be back to normal and no longer hampered. As to what Crowley might do in the future to avoid or negate such interference, Aziraphale had no good ideas. The question wriggled around uncomfortably in Crowley’s mind, no matter how much he might try to put it aside.

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A strange thing happened as Crowley healed: Aziraphale didn’t stop doting on him. Even as his human body needed less and less help taking care of the injuries, Aziraphale continued feeding him, for example. Crowley had begun flatly refusing the thin soups which had filled the early days, but in response the angel had merely begun fetching more and more enticing delicacies to present to him. It would be rude, the demon explained to himself, to turn up his nose at those, too. And despite the fact that Crowley now needed considerably less (if, indeed, any) supervision, Aziraphale still spent a great deal of his time sat in his chair near the demon, reading or doing his accounts or talking.

One Sunday evening, when the angel was away from the shop, Crowley had hauled his poor frame downstairs, curious as to the state of the shop in its proprietor’s preoccupation. He’d all but crawled to the front door, where he’d seen a sign: Closed Until Further Notice, it said. Family Emergency. His heart had thumped oddly at reading the note, and he’d slumped against the door for a while before pulling himself back upstairs.

The difficult part of it was not, Crowley admitted, putting up with the angel’s behavior. No, the true tribulation came in trying to appear impatient with the attention. The indulgent warmth that flooded him whenever the angel was being particularly adorable made keeping up his aura of casual disinterest agonizingly difficult. Crowley was famously so bad at accommodating company that he’d not only gotten himself kicked out of Heaven and into Hell, but then he’d gotten himself stationed on this little rock to get away from his fellow demons. In the past, he’d told himself that he simply didn’t see Aziraphale often enough—once or twice in one century, a handful of times in another decade—to chafe at his company (and vice versa). Yet these weeks were proving how foolish and futile that long-running self-deception has been.

Grow weary of Aziraphale? He now had incontrovertible proof that such a thing was as unlikely as losing his awe of the stars. Like growing bored of the very idea of music. It would be losing a part of himself more fundamental than the grace which had been stripped from him when he fell. It was more than impossible; it was no longer even imaginable.

It was a biting irony that now, finally faced by the circumstances he’d always assumed were out of his reach and would drive him nutters anyway, Crowley found himself bending his every energy toward not enjoying himself overmuch, lest the whole thing collapse like a poorly made flan.

(Aziraphale had recently brought him a flan of surpassing craftsmanship. Crowley himself had taken only a few bites, as the sight of Aziraphale enjoying the rest was far sweeter and more satisfying.)

So he grew more waspish. As far as he could see, there was no alternative. He flexed his healing fingers when told to and refused to allow Aziraphale to help, lest he find himself trying to entwine those fingers with the angel’s. He paced around the room to rebuild his strength and snapped when Aziraphale stepped in to steady him for fear he’d never let go of the angel afterwards. Yet his discipline was not perfect, and too often he found himself leaning into the angel’s touch when Aziraphale pushed his hair back from his brow or patted him on the shoulder.

Around the middle of the ninth week, several truths occurred to Crowley at once: that he was certainly recovered sufficiently, now, to leave the premises under his own steam; that if he did not do so soon, he risked alienating the angel either by being too forthright or too churlish; and that admitting himself healed and leaving would forever end this level of involvement in the angel’s life. He had spent the majority of each day with Aziraphale for more than two months—how many years would it be before he could see him again, after he left? They’d spoken for hours every day—how many times in the next decade would he hear the angel’s voice?

He disliked the thought of leaving, but saw little choice as he abhorred the thought of being asked to leave. In their past acquaintance, Aziraphale had occasionally indicated that whatever social frivolity they were enjoying should end soon as the angel had business to attend to, and Crowley had largely succeeded in not taking such hints personally. He was very sure he could not summon the same equanimity if the angel politely suggested that he had overstayed his welcome in this case.

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The decision was taken out of his hands several days later. It was early in the afternoon and a pleasant summer drizzle drummed lazily against the window. Aziraphale was, as ever, in his chair, although now his stockinged feet were propped up on the bed. Crowley was sprawled on top of the bed trying desperately to project an air of malaise and weakness despite feeling quite recovered. They had been in the middle of some conversation at one point, but had somehow let it slide into a drowsy sort of quietness that Crowley had never known could be enjoyable.

He was well on his way to a lovely nap when the dreadfully bright sound of an ethereal bell sounded from downstairs, and a voice rang out.

“Aziraphale?”

The angel’s face went bone-white as he snapped his book shut and locked eyes with Crowley.

“It’s Gabriel,” he hissed in a panicked whisper. “Stay here.”

Crowley nodded mutely. Aziraphale set down the book and briefly covered one of Crowley’s hands with his own.

“Just a moment!” he called loudly enough to be heard downstairs. With a final look, he stood up and scurried from the room.

The sounds of conversation drifted up the staircase: sharp, abrupt noises from Gabriel and fluttering responses from Aziraphale that Crowley couldn’t quite make out. Even without words, though, he heard the thread of anxiety in his angel’s voice, and for the first time in months, he remembered—really remembered, not just as an abstract annoyance—why it was they normally stayed so far away from each other.

That was it, then. What if Gabriel was here about Crowley’s presence? If they’d been seen, if someone had found out—even the merest suspicion—what would that mean for the angel? Even if the archangel’s visit had been incidental, what if he could smell a demon the same way that Crowley could even now begin to detect a whiff of the overripe scent of someone who spent too much time Above?

Another thought caught him—what if Aziraphale didn’t come back with the archangel, but was reminded of the danger of their situation all the same? It’d be over just as surely. Aziraphale would come back upstairs and sigh at him. “Nearly had us there,” he’d say, “Probably best you be off,” and Crowley would have to look at him, would have to thank him, would have to pretend that, yeah, it really was time for me to be getting on, wasn’t it? He’d have to come up with some impossibly insipid parting shot like “At least now I’ll get some peace and quiet” or perhaps a joke about being behind on his temptation quota and—no, it was all just too horrible to face. He couldn’t do any of that.

Those were his two options, then, if he stayed: condemn Aziraphale, or be condemned and cast out himself.

With barely more than a thought, Crowley vanished from the room and reappeared in the townhouse that was not his home .

#aziraphale #crowley #aziraphale x crowley #aziraphale/crowley #good omens #good omens fic #ineffable husbands #ineffable husbands fic #mine fic #my point is MY POINT IS i love them

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