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Crowley was a dreamer.
This, on paper, was a bad thing for a demon to be. True, thinking outside the box was what had made them all demons in the first place, but it was therefore a sensitive subject. Most demons preferred not to bother. It had landed them in this mess, and they preferred to react by pretending that they liked the mess and couldn’t ask for anything better. Better, they sneered, was for angels.
Besides, dreaming in the sense that humans meant it was optimistic, an act of good faith in humanity, life, and the universe that was inadvisable for denizens of Hell. But Crowley was an optimist. Not only was he an optimist, but he also had an imagination, and, the killing blow, he absolutely loved falling asleep on the sofa after a long and unproductive day, still dressed and in the least healthy position possible, which made it frankly inevitable. He was going to dream, metaphorically and literally, and there was no stopping it.
His continual attempts to make his dreams into reality, however, could be blamed on no one but himself.
Crowley and Aziraphale exited the theater into the crisp night air. Aziraphale walked ahead of the demon, steps unhurried but purposeful, as though he knew where he was going, as always, while Crowley lingered behind, hands in his pockets. It was as much for the sake of keeping them to himself as it was for lack of knowing what to do with his arms. He’d been tempted to do silly things with them while they’d been watching the play. He might have dared resting one arm across the back of Aziraphale’s chair, if the angel didn’t sit so ramrod straight that he undoubtedly would have noticed. Of course, the angel could get away with things Crowley wouldn’t let himself dream of. He’d touched the serpent gently in the small of his back while he was passing him to get to the door. It had felt like being shot. All that warmth inside him might as well have been a sign of internal bleeding.
Crowley kept his distance now as he hung back behind him. He watched the angel as he slowed to a stop in the middle of the pavement and breathed in deeply, his eyes closed, oblivious to the sea of pedestrians that parted around him without complaint simply because he expected they would. Crowley couldn’t blame them.
“Where next?” Aziraphale asked. “I’m feeling peckish.”
Crowley smiled, hidden behind the angel’s back. There weren’t so many Isn’t it getting late’s these days, not so much implication of That’s enough for now. He’d suggested the play, but the angel suggested dessert. Forget good and evil, this was the balance he’d longed for between them for so many eons. Funnily enough, it made their whole progression towards something together more slow moving, as Aziraphale wanted, and also longer lasting, which suited Crowley just fine. Nothing messed with time in a better way than late evenings not ending, turning into midnights, one after the other, nothing really changing, but going on and on anyway.
“Crowley?”
Crowley shook his head and blinked. He really needed to get a handle on his thoughts. “Er—bakery, then bookshop?”
“I fear all the bakeries are closed.”
“All the bakeries? In London? Surely not. Must be a—” He made a face and shrugged. “—some modern thing somewhere, for young people, who are up at all hours, craving biscuits.”
“Exactly,” Aziraphale said distastefully.
“Ah. Well then.”
“Perhaps we should head home.”
Finally, Crowley was sprung into action. He sauntered in front of the angel. “Nah. We can—dunno. Get some chips somewhere.”
“Chips?” Aziraphale said, looking at him askew.
“Come on, angel. Don’t pretend you don’t like them. Just because they’re sold on the street, which never stopped you back when the streets were also full of mules and the like.”
“But it’s a different sort of atmosphere, now, isn’t it,” the angel said fretfully. “What with the papers littered all across the roads, and—and the carbohydrates—”
“Carbohydrates?” Crowley’s eyebrows flew to the sky. “And what do you call those muffins you ate three of yesterday, ketogenic?”
Aziraphale tried and failed not to snicker. He soldiered on, “Grease, then. It’ll give me funny dreams.”
“I didn’t know you dreamt,” Crowley said, voice suddenly losing its humor. He quickly added it back, saying, “Slept, I meant. Not regularly, anyway. Thought your books kept you up until dawn, when you—well, read more books.”
“I thought I might tonight,” Aziraphale said in an airy voice that made it hard for Crowley to believe he wasn’t being mysterious on purpose. “It’d gotten so cold, I don’t like taking my hands out from under the blanket to turn the pages.”
“Mittens,” Crowley said, trying to shut down the visual side of his imagination.
“And those are the best nights for sleeping, as you told me once. All snuggled up and cozy.”
“Mmh.”
“Though the moon is too bright. And the stars. They shine in through the window and—”
Lucky stars, Crowley thought.
“—did you say mittens?”
“What?”
“My dear fellow,” Aziraphale said, turning to him. “Do you know how hard it is to turn the pages of a crumbling sixteenth century manuscript with mittens?”
Crowley pressed his lips together. Aziraphale stared at him for a moment.
Then, the two of them burst out laughing.
“Ahh,” Crowley sighed. “I can just picture you, half drowned under quilts.”
“I do tend to—to sink further into my chair—” the angel could barely get out.
“Clawing away at a page with thick alpaca wool hands. Mind you, at least you could hold your cocoa without burning yourself.”
“My cocoa’s always gone tepid,” Aziraphale snorted.
Crowley let out one last laugh, directed up at the sky. He let his head fall back and looked up, watching his breath fog the air. Aziraphale was still quietly giggling. When he glanced at him, he was looking up at the sky, too.
“Far too bright,” Aziraphale said, once his laughter had quieted down. His voice was almost a whisper. “The stars.”
They both looked up, smiles fading into appreciation of the beauty.
Then came the silence.
Then, suddenly, Aziraphale asked the question that Crowley had feared, ever since that day, still not too long ago.
“How would we have done that?” he said while looking at the distant stars.
Of course, Crowley knew what he was referring to, but he had no way to answer. Back then as long as Aziraphale was willing to run away with him to Alpha Centauri, he would have been able to find a way. That had never happened, so details were blurry.
Aziraphale looked at him now, face crystal clear in the present. Questioning.
“Oh, you know,” Crowley said, waving a hand through the air.
Aziraphale’s face quivered. “Er—not exactly, dear boy.”
Crowley shuffled his feet. They felt like ice. His hands were back in his pockets, but given the size of the pockets on these tight trousers, that hardly did them any good. He repressed a shiver. “Physics, angel. We don’t need to follow it.”
“Not for brief moments, perhaps. Not when we’re doing a miracle, or a—whatever it is you do. But for extended periods of time, I find that even I can’t quite break all of the rules of the universe.”
“Well, no, not all of them,” Crowley said. “Of course. I mean, we wouldn’t be going against physics. Just sort of—using it to our advantage.”
“Right.” Aziraphale was all of a sudden looking at him differently, with a slightly smug curl to his lips. His eyes glimmered.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No, no,” the angel said with a low laugh. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to doubt.”
Crowley fumed, but could hardly accuse the angel of being unfair.
Aziraphale looked back up to the stars. And then, final nail in the coffin, his amused expression slipped. He sighed. “I suppose it would have been impossible, anyway. I could hardly have expected—well, never mind.”
“I would have done it.”
Aziraphale looked back at him in surprise.
Crowley swallowed. It was the truth—only, he wasn’t sure how, but he knew it was true. “I’d have gotten us there. Promise.”
Aziraphale looked a bit pale. Crowley wasn’t sure if it was because he doubted him, or because he’d made such a promise at all.
“I had a plan,” Crowley said, making his tone light. He waved it off as though it were nothing, which was, unfortunately, true.
“Oh.” Aziraphale blinked. “Oh.” His eyes grew wide, but this time he was smiling. He sounded excited when he said, “You did?”
“Sure. Yeah. Of course.”
“I didn’t realize—”
“Wouldn’t have been much of an offer if I hadn’t had a plan, would it?” Crowley said. He laughed.
“Well, what was it?”
“Can’t tell you.”
The angel’s face dropped. Crowley felt the familiar motion within him of barreling forward, to get as far away from that particular expression as possible.
“Show you,” he said. “Next weekend. I mean, I’ll show you instead.”
Aziraphale perked right back up again. He practically hopped. “Next weekend! Wait. Why? Do you have to set things up? I mean, I don’t need you to go to any trouble—”
“No, no,” Crowley said, shaking his head. Next weekend, he thought, because all my survival instinct amounted to was giving me one whole blessed week to think. “Nuh, not a problem.”
Aziraphale hesitated. He reached out to lay his hand on Crowley’s shoulder. The ring on his pinky finger reflected a glint of starlight that caught Crowley’s eye as it passed by his face. He blinked and tried not to move while the angel touched him. It wasn’t very long before he drew his hand back, but the accompanying smile was blinding.
“This is really quite thrilling,” he said. “I didn’t know—well—and now that it isn’t the end of the world.”
“Yesss,” Crowley said. He coughed. “Yeah. Sure. Just got to—do a few things. Simple, mind. Er, it would have been quicker, then, due to the—uh—nature of the Apocalypse, but now that Earth is continuing on, I just need to be a bit more careful with the—er—setup, yes. Yep.”
Aziraphale’s smile had gone softer, less like a blazing star, more like a beam of moonlight. He half turned from him, but kept his eyes on Crowley’s. “I can hardly wait.”
Crowley simply nodded, mute.
“Well. I really must be going. Got to rest up, before we head off into the stars.”
“Yeh.”
“Alpha Centauri, was it? Which one is that?”
Crowley pointed to it in the sky. Aziraphale let his gaze linger on him for a moment before turning to look up.
“Wow.”
“Yep.”
Aziraphale smiled at the stars for a few seconds longer. Then he said, softly, “Good night, Crowley.”
So, now Crowley was stuck with a plan. An ineffable one, you might say. He’d never had an ineffable plan before. Frankly, it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
The problem was that Crowley’s plan was ineffable to himself, as well.
“Brilliant,” the demon muttered as he paced his flat, pulling on his hair. “Brilliant. That’s what you are. An astrophysicist? Absolutely. Bloody astronaut, here. Right.”
He stopped and put his hands on his desk.
“To work.”
Before long, pages of his astronomy book were strewn about the room, in a slightly less frantic array than they had been the last time. He had far more electronic devices opened up to internet searches than he liked, and with all of this slipshod research, he felt like a discount, crummy Aziraphale, and desperately wished he was as good as the angel at reading five things at once.
“So much blessed security in these places,” he grumbled, closing another window on spaceports in Europe. He closed the one on cosmodromes as well.
Crowley hated to admit it, but the angel’d had a point when he’d been going on, ruining Crowley’s metaphor about that stupid bird flying across space to sharpen his beak on the mountain. You can’t just go to space. You need a rocketship.
But humans were a bit stingy with their rocketships. It was like they didn’t want some sort of malevolent enemy entity to be able to just wander off with one. Of course, Crowley could have stolen one. Could if he wanted to. If he really wanted to.
He thought about Aziraphale, laying his hand on his arm to illustrate a point, warm palm barely touching him, something he hadn’t done in eons before Crowley’d asked him to run off with him.
He really wanted to.
It would have been simpler, had it been the end of the world, and setting a whole bunch of humans into global chaos wouldn’t have mattered much. That had been his excuse for why it was going to take him a week to ‘get things set up’, but a week wasn’t quite enough time to steal a rocketship secretly, after all.
There would be other options. There had to be. Space was out there, created for some reason, Crowley’d bedazzled the sky with stars, and it simply didn’t make sense for it to be completely inaccessible. Sure, humans had to wait a while to become technologically advanced. It was part of their whole challenge-of-being-human thing. But surely angels and demons weren’t meant to struggle with it so much.
It should have been easy. They weren’t living. They weren’t bound by reality. They weren’t made for the Earth, and the Earth certainly hadn’t been made for them. That said, neither had space, but it had always seemed more hospitable than Up or Down, to Crowley, and he was taking it rather hard that this was not proving to be the case, now. They shouldn’t need to be surrounded by matter to remain in existence. They shouldn’t need to breathe. The partial vacuum of space shouldn’t bother them, and yet an embarrassing experiment with his vacuum cleaner had removed the idea of simply floating as they were in outer space from the picture.
So, they needed to change the way they were. What went into outer space? Spaceships. If they couldn’t sneak into one, perhaps they could possess one, shrink themselves down to fit inside the computers that ran the thing. Five minutes of reading about how computers worked on Wikipedia told Crowley that they would inevitably end up lost, preyed upon by malware, and possibly even end up stuck in someone’s Outlook inbox, which was a fate worse than death. Crowley tossed technological possession out the window.
Light went into outer space. Sound didn’t. This was precisely for the same reason that Crowley couldn’t simply shrink himself down and shimmy up there on a wavelength. It was one thing traveling down a telephone line, where there were all sorts of matter to grab onto. Electromagnetic fields were simply too slippery.
He thought about simply magicking it. Simply tossing understanding out the window, and barreling the Bentley at the speed of light into the void. Who cared if it made sense? Who cared if, technically, they couldn’t possibly exist in such a place? Certainly no one Above or Below cared where they went, and they were typically the ones patrolling this sort of thing. If Crowley could imagine his car into functioning while it was fully aflame, then maybe, just maybe, if he was desperate enough—
That’d be what he’d have done, in The End, if he’d had to. If they’d had to. Simply banished all thoughts of reality and dreamed their way to the stars. Pulling off that kind of miracle—or whatever it was Crowley did—for that long—well, no one had ever done it before. But Crowley had imagination. He had optimism. He had style.
He had a whole lot of desperation, and a very good motivation for getting the both of them out of there and into the stars.
He thought about the way Aziraphale had smiled at him, when he’d said he had a plan.
How could the world ever have ended with you smiling at it like that?
Crowley was a fool. He was damned good at fooling himself. But even he couldn’t pretend that it was their final hour, and he’d never, ever see Aziraphale again, never see anything again, if he didn’t magic their way into space, not if this time, it wasn’t really true.
True, Aziraphale might be snippy with him, or worse, disappointed, when he found out Crowley couldn’t do it, but he was pretty sure the angel would forgive him eventually if he tempted him with tea enough times.
Crowley fell into his chair and dropped his head into his arms on the desk, letting out a sigh. The astronomy papers fell to the floor around him. The sky is falling, he thought, dimly. End of the world, all over again.
Telling Aziraphale the truth.
Well. Perhaps the angel would forgive him sometime before the next end-of-the-world.
Crowley tapped his fingers on the wheel of the Bentley, biting his lips. Aziraphale sat in the passenger seat, glancing at him from time to time, but clearly trying not to seem impatient. The demon had pulled the car over ages ago into a field outside London in the middle of nowhere. The stars glittered high above.
Crowley was reminded of a time when the angel had sat next to him, just like this, offering him something he needed, but had never wanted to give. He’d been so distracted by the way Aziraphale’s eyes had caught the neon lights from the street outside that he nearly forgot that what he was holding could destroy him if he tilted the thermos, if he let slip just one drop. The angel’s face had been strained, as though he could hardly bare to look at him. For once, he might have known how Crowley felt all the time, why he always faced away. For once, they’d been reversed, and Crowley couldn’t have turned away if he tried. Aziraphale, who had promised not to give him holy water, but who had, in the end, never letting him down.
Now Crowley was breaking his promise.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What’s that?” said Aziraphale, who had been looking out over the hill they’d stopped on, and who hadn’t heard him, voice still chipper.
“I need to apologize.” Crowley’s voice was choked.
“Oh?” The angel’s eyes grew wide, mouth a circle. He seemed more alarmed than disappointed, but not really much of either. He trusted him these days.
“I—I can’t do it.”
Aziraphale’s expression dimmed. Crowley wished he could shrink, could hide in an electromagnetic field, if not to escape to the stars, then to simply fade away. The angel tilted his head. He looked—
—not disappointed. That wasn’t what his expression had faded to. No, he had—softened. He looked softly at him.
“Well, of course you can’t,” he said, voice low. That melodious tone of something that always flowed straight to the center of Crowley’s chest still rang through it.
“I—” Crowley stuttered.
“I don’t think it’s possible, my dear boy.” His voice was slow and patient. He gave him a soft smile, brows pulled together. Crowley realized he was looking back at him, instead of looking away, which meant the angel could probably read everything flickering across his face, but for once he didn’t care. Aziraphale laid his hand on Crowley’s arm, light as a feather, not breaking eye contact.
Then, he did. He frowned as though remembering something, eyes staring off into the distance, and said, his voice more like it usually was, “I’ve tried and tried, and I couldn’t think of anything, myself.”
“You’ve—?”
“You’d think there would be a solution. We made the stars, after all, we must have been up there at some point in time. But all of a sudden, I can’t seem to fathom it. Existing, there, without a body, or any form to speak of. Strange, isn’t it? How addictive life can be.”
“Yeh,” Crowley said.
Aziraphale went on, growing more and more animated, as he always did, as he rambled. “Well, of course, I ruled out the stealing-a-spaceship option right away.”
“Er. Right.”
“That would be all good and well if we just needed to get away for a while, but there never would have been any Earth to go back to. Never a time to restock on things like oxygen. And it assumes that we’d be keeping our—” He glanced at Crowley with a slight blush. “—our physical, human forms, as they were. Would have been difficult to keep up without meeting human needs. We wouldn’t have been able to leave the ship, for a start, or we’d implode. Mind you, I’m good with tight spaces for long periods of time, but I do like to stretch my legs, and I know you’d get bored stuck in a silly little spaceship with old me.”
“Mrph,” Crowley said, trying to get up the nerve to intercede, but the angel was caught up in it now. His eyes were as distant as the stars that glimmered in them.
“So then, I thought we could be meteors.”
“What?”
“It’s not as strange as you think. If you can shrink yourself down to fit through a telephone, we could certainly change our forms somewhat. Just sort of chuck ourselves off good old Earth and float about a bit. It would take quite a lot of math to get the projectile right and end up in Alpha Centauri, but then, I thought the destination was less of the point than the company, er—sorry if I assumed.”
The angel’s hand was still on his arm, and, unthinking, he had started to tighten his grip as he kept talking. Crowley did not budge.
“But meteors are hardly communicative things, and I do enjoy talking with you, at least in some way, even if it couldn’t have been through sound waves, so I thought, perhaps something a little less solid and separate. Meteors are so distinct from one another. But something that can exist in space, that mingles—"
Here, the angel finally stopped. He looked embarrassed. But Crowley had known him long enough to recognize that expression. It wasn’t just past—it was future—and the angel had more to say. Nearly all of the demon’s shame and guilt was gone. All he needed was for the angel to keep talking.
“Go on,” he said, still feeling a tad bit guilty about the amused tone that had crept into his own voice, and trying not to smile too slyly. “What were we going to become, that mingles in the stars?”
Always pushing buttons. But this time, Aziraphale didn’t scoff. He glanced at the serpent out of the corner of his eye, lips pressed together, but then he smiled. He looked back out of the Bentley’s window, looking up at the sky. “I thought maybe,” he said, slowly, “if it all did end in some great explosion, it wouldn’t really kill us. Just destroy our forms. But we don’t need to inhabit whole forms, really, and perhaps, with a lot of concentration—” He had removed his hand from Crowley’s arm to illustrate his point, and, realizing where it had been for so long, ironically, temporarily lost his train of thought. But he continued, “and—and a good enough reason, we could sort of—” He fluttered his fingers and rolled his eyes up at the sky with an embarrassed look. “Sort of hold on to our consciousnesses, just enough, to remain bound to what we were once made of, even after it had been obliterated, and, well, we could—drift off and we—we could be stardust.”
Crowley’s mouth hung open.
“Together,” Aziraphale amended. “Er, we could stay together. Sort of—float in the same direction.”
“We,” Crowley croaked. “We could be stardust together?”
Aziraphale pressed his lips together and nodded. “Mmhmm.”
Crowley felt a dazed smile crawl across his face. “You’ve—you really thought about this.”
Aziraphale raised one eyebrow.
“I mean,” Crowley said. “I thought you didn’t even pay it any mind.”
The angel blinked, then shook his head. “I—well—” He squinted, thoughtful. Then something in him seemed to still. Aziraphale said, quietly, looking straight at him, “I’ve thought about a lot of things.”
Crowley’s mouth suddenly felt very dry. “You have?”
“Crowley. I’ve thought about everything.”
And Crowley was in space. Gravity had stopped working. Everything was drifting, endless, weightless.
Then he was pulled down again by the one thing that might have any gravitational hold left over him, even if the world had exploded and disintegrated into smithereens.
He looked at Aziraphale. “Do you—want—?” he asked, tentative, watching for any signs of fear.
Aziraphale took in a sharp breath through his nose, almost of panic, but not exactly fear. More like determination. He said, “Do you know, I’m glad we don’t have to be in the stars. Odd as it is, I like having these forms. They feel like home. Especially together. I like us as we are.”
“We?” Crowley repeated, confirmed, or hoped to.
“We,” Aziraphale echoed.
The two of them looked at each other, golden eyes shaded and even more obscured by the darkness of evening, Aziraphale’s eyes with stars in them. The wind picked up outside, washing past the Bentley. Crowley waited. Aziraphale’s lips curled up into a smile, and then he let out the breath he seemed to have been holding for so long, shoulders relaxing at last. Crowley only saw the angel this calm rarely, usually not when they were staring at each other like that. He didn’t know how to react.
Aziraphale leaned forward, and kissed him on the cheek. Before Crowley could think to respond, the angel rested his head on the demon’s shoulder, wrapped his hands around his arm, and there he stayed.
Crowley closed his eyes for a moment. Then he turned and pressed his lips to the top of Aziraphale’s head, harder than he meant to, with all those years trying to hold back, and breathed in, not moving for several seconds, until finally he turned his head and rested his cheek against the angel’s hair.
They looked out the Bentley’s windowpane. The sky was still around them. Then, though it wasn’t clear how it happened, the stars seemed to move. There was the sensation like the wind was blowing past the car again, but the grass outside was motionless. The little lights in the sky grew closer, and it was as though they and the Bentley were propelled forward, through space itself, endless.
They might not really have been in space, or in the stars, but they might have been among them in their minds. Immortal minds are curious things, not bound by space or time. Or perhaps they truly had flown the Bentley to outer space after all, through galaxies and constellations, through sheer force of will. Through a miracle.
Or, Aziraphale thought, smiling, whatever wonderful thing it is Crowley does.