Chapter Text
Not long after they’d moved into the white-walled cottage, one of their new neighbours turned up with a house-warming gift—an old fashioned red cabbage rose, with an abundance of delicately furled petals and a heady, overpowering aroma. Crowley had accepted the gift silently and left Aziraphale to chit chat with the woman from next door while he stalked around the garden, stony-faced.
The plant mysteriously disappeared the next day.
Aziraphale never mentioned Crowley’s dislike of roses. Another of the things they never spoke about. Although that was changing too—once, late at night, sitting on the loveseat at the end of the garden, Aziraphale tentatively said I did so miss you, when I … went away , and Crowley took his hand and traced patterns on his palm.
S’alright, angel, it all worked out in the end, he finally said. Which was true, although it didn’t lessen the ache in Aziraphale’s chest. It was a tender, raw-edged wound, and he knew it would remain so for many years to come. And what of Crowley’s poor, battered heart? Aziraphale barely knew how to begin, there. It was possible to lift curses with kisses, but a kiss wasn’t enough, either. It took time, too, and Aziraphale was determined to offer Crowley all the time in the world.
With at least some of that time, Crowley gardened. And instead of roses, their garden flourished with every other sort of flower that would grow in the South Downs, and some that wouldn’t: desert flowers that opened in the cool darkness; tiny, hardy alpine plants that only bloomed in the thin air of mountain-tops; wildflowers that Aziraphale hadn’t seen in millenia; rare herbs that scientists declared extinct. ( Is that silphium, Aziraphale had asked one day about a feathery little thing growing in the window box. Crowley had only grinned in response.)
But never, ever, roses.
Aziraphale had rescued a box of books from Muriel’s stewardship of the bookshop—they never sold a thing, which Aziraphale deeply respected, but their method of organizing books by “how I feel about the ending” was preposterous—and bought them back to the cottage to organize and stack on the shelves of his new library.
Even though sunlight was dreadfully bad for the books, Aziraphale set the box on the cast iron table on the patio, beneath the dappled light from the honeysuckle vine over the archway. On such a glorious morning he couldn’t bear to sit inside while Crowley sank his hands into the summer-warm earth and did whatever exactly it was he did in the garden beds.
Mutter and threaten the plants, Aziraphale thought, looking up at the demon’s slim form in the sunlight. In a nod towards the late August warmth he was wearing a t-shirt, but he insisted on gardening in his black jeans no matter the heat.
“If the bastard anemones don’t flower soon they’re going straight to the compost heap,” he called in Aziraphale’s direction. A shiver passed through the garden, although it might have been the wind.
Aziraphale hummed something vaguely affirmative in response and set aside the top book, a first edition of Audobon’s Birds of Americ a. The second was a tawdy paperback that billed itself as a hockey romance, which he frowned at and set aside for the charity shop in the village.
But beneath that sat a slim, leather-bound volume. Despite its age, it was pristine, because Aziraphale hadn’t opened it in … a thousand years, almost.
He touched the cover lightly, and then delicately turned to the first page. Inside, he saw his own handwriting, unchanged since the dawn of the world. The latin words and numbers, the diagrams copied neatly from an Arabic volume. Linear and quadratic equations. Proofs and theorems. The oak gall ink looked as fresh as it had that day in the tower, the paper unyellowed by the years.
He turned page after page until the translation abruptly stopped. Ink stains scratched across the text on the final page, as though done not by a pen, but by claws.
“—I’ll have to go to the nursery in Hassocks, I need more of that seaweed fertiliser—” Crowley had waked up to him and he hadn’t even heard.
He shut the book almost guiltily and looked up at Crowley, who was wiping his hair back from his forehead with the back of one gloved hand.
“What’s this?” Crowley asked. He always knew when Aziraphale wanted to keep something from him.
“It’s a translation of algebra from Arabic to Latin.” Aziraphale resisted the urge to put his hand over the small book.
Crowley tugged off his gardening gloves off and stuffed them in his back pocket before picking up the book. He flipped through it until he came to the last page and stared at it for a moment.
Then he shut it again and handed it back to Aziraphale.
There were things they didn’t acknowledge. So many things. Those strange few days in the tower, and Crowley’s 97 years within it, was one of them. Even if the next time they’d met, in an Irish abbey, they’d made terrible, frantic love to each other in the stables.
Aziraphale took the slender book from Crowley’s long-fingered hands. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, as gently as he could manage.
Crowley let out a slow, long breath. “Do you?”
“I’ve always rather felt I should apologise to you for… taking advantage, of you, in that state,” Aziraphale replied.
That elicited a pained expression visible even from behind Crowley’s glasses. “And I told you already, it wasn’t like that.”
“But it felt like that to me.”
Crowley snorted. “And to me it felt like love, all right? So let’s not do that. You… you saved me. Besides, I seem to remember being the one who initiated it.”
“You were in rather an altered state at the time. Nowadays they’d call that diminished capacity for consent.”
Crowley slipped off his glasses and set them on the table beside the book. Unveiled. Unguarded. “Did you regret it, then, is that what you’re trying to say—”
“Of course not! But I regretted that you were there in the first place.”
“Occupational hazard of being a demon. Being summoned by idiotic sorcerers. Anyway. Like I said. You showed up, fixed everything. Clever angel. You’ve made a habit of showing up and fixing things.”
Aziraphale opened his mouth to say something else about how Crowley had nearly died and also what about when he’d left Crowley, when he’d gone back to Heaven, and yes it all had worked out at the end, but how could Crowley truly have forgiven him this time—
But Crowley leaned in and kissed him before he could speak, and then he forgot his point entirely for quite some time, because kisses weren’t just for breaking curses.
“I’ve always wondered though,” Crowley murmured, easing into his lap, nipping at his jaw. “If the half snake thing did it for you?”
Aziraphale stopped his steady exploration of the deliciously smooth skin beneath Crowley’s t-shirt and looked up at him. Crowley’s tone was joking, but he could feel the tension in his shoulders. Something else they’d never spoken of, not in the years that followed, their hasty assignations in rented rooms, the nights in smoky inns, the touches beneath tables, the whispered words in the dark.
“My love,” Aziraphale said, softly. “It was you. It is you. You in any shape or form. I just want you. Just as you are, however that might be.”
Crowley gave a slight, crooked smile. “Yeah, good, because having no legs is really an absolute pain in the arse, no pun intended.”
Aziraphale slid one hand up Crowley’s thigh and rubbed his thumb across his hip-bone in a slow, gentle circle. “I’m sure. Now what were you saying about the nursery in Hassocks? I rather fancy a nice lunch out myself, perhaps we should make a day of it.”
“Whatever you’d like, angel,” Crowley said.
Even though they’d agreed, for a very long time neither of them moved, they simply stayed together in the soft shade of the garden, as the thrushes and the robins and the larks moved and sang through the trees, and the flowers, and the long grass of the meadow beyond the garden, until it seemed like the whole world rang with birdsong.