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For six thousand years, the garden had grown from their words. Sharp angry words became thistles. Insults became nettles, stinging and painful. Words of kindness and affection blossomed as flowers, rare specks of colour among the greenery. And in its centre, two apple trees twined so tightly together that neither could live without the other.
For six thousand years, they had worn their respective uniforms of black and white. Crowley's colour drained into Hell's darkness. Aziraphale's colour bleached by Heaven's light.
After everything was over, they came home to their garden and created a cottage within it. Now, finally on their own side, in their own place, colour came back slowly.
"Mind how you go!" Aziraphale called, as Crowley set off for the local town. Tiny blue speedwell flowers suddenly poked their way through the nettles.
"I brought your favourite!" Crowley called on his return, holding up a bakery bag. Rose vines shot up the cottage walls, pink and white and yellow and red flowers mingling with vivid green leaves.
"You look beautiful today," Aziraphale murmured to the demon dozing beside him in the bed, and threaded his fingers into hair that became a brighter red with every passing year. Outside, in the garden, a line of scarlet poppies appeared along the boundary.
Crowley opened one drowsy, golden, eye, and traced the stretchmarks on Aziraphale's wide, soft, belly with an adoring finger. "Retirement suits you, angel." A swathe of bluebells spread out from the entwined trees.
"Y'r brave, angel," Crowley mumbled, burying his face in Aziraphale's shoulder after a night spent taking turns to pull each other out of panics and nightmares. "Got more guts than anyone gives you credit for." Outside, a riot of yellow dandelions popped up across the garden, bright and tough and defiant, with deeper roots than most ever realise.
Aziraphale blinked exhausted eyes. "It's because I love you," he mumbled back. "You know that, don't you? Everything I've done, everything I've said - it was to protect you, love."
Every remaining thistle came into bloom at once, their thorns no less painful, but awash with purple tufts nonetheless.
They toasted a century of their own side under the apple trees, stretched out on a tartan picnic blanket, each with their wing curled around and above the other. Even their wings had more colour now, with Crowley's shimmering irridescent with greens and blues and purples, and Aziraphale's opalescent with pinks and blues and greens.
Crowley reached out his free hand and twined his fingers with Aziraphale's, feeling the calluses of his angel's multi-millennia-long reading habit. "My heart's not much to look at," he whispered, "but what there is of it is yours. It has been since Eden."
He tipped his head back, rather than watch his angel process that, and was rewarded with the sight of the apple trees, for the first time in over six thousand years, blossoming.