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Crowley had heard once, “Don’t marry someone until you spend seven hours locked together in a car.” He’d thought it decent advice, for humans at least. After all, he and Aziraphale had spent hundreds of thousands of hours in his car together and still liked each other well enough. Not that they were ever going to get married, of course, but it was a nice thing to know.
Crowley had, since he first heard that piece of advice, gotten married.
He’d married Aziraphale.
They were currently in his car.
And had been for quite a while.
“Oh, I know!” said Aziraphale, over the classical music disk in the player that was beginning to drift into an instrumental version of Love Of My Life. “Have you ever played a game known as I Spy?”
Crowley had played that game, in a sense. It was mainly the books he was acquainted with. He liked to find them in the children’s sections of libraries and bookshops and flip through the photos of delightfully organized messes and smile. Then, he would reach into the page, pull out an object or two, and know that whoever bought this book would feel such frustration at not being able to find that one last item they were told to. He would smile some more.
“I don’t think so,” said Crowley. “Might need you to explain it to me.”
“Oh!” Aziraphale clasped his hands tight in front of him, and looked out the windows, smiling and excited. “It’s a game that involves observing one's surroundings. I look around, pick something interesting, and then say I Spy with my Little Eye Something starting with an… S-”
“Sirius.”
“Hang on! I haven’t finished explaining the rules.”
“Sorry, sorry, go on then.”
They were heading to their honeymoon. Crowley had offered to simply wrap his arms around Aziraphale and take them there in the blink of a moment’s eye, but Aziraphale had insisted on taking his car- their car now, officially- and driving into the sunset, like they do in the films.
“Once I finish speaking the line,” Aziraphale continued. “You then look around and pick something that might match that description-”
“Sirius.”
“Crowley!”
They had done it. They tied little biscuit cans to the bumper of Crowley’s car and it sat waiting, now dressed, on the curb for the end of their wedding. A modest ceremony, mostly made of humans, a few of which were dead but excused from death for a day to be in attendance, and one or two other angel-demon-things. There wasn’t really a word for what they were now. Crowley liked that quite a lot.
“I hadn’t actually picked anything for you to find, it was just an example.” Aziraphale looked towards the window, crossing his arms over his chest in his pouting fashion. “And I’d never pick that, that one is far too easy for you.”
When the wedding was finished, they hopped in Crowley’s Bentley and drove off, biscuit cans clanging proudly on the road behind them as they drove off into the sunset. Then over the sunset. Then up and up and up beyond. The nothing that took up the space between stars becoming a road for the moments the Bently rolled over it before going back to nothing again. So it had been for the past hundred million miles and a few million more. Their biscuit cans rattling joyously the entire way.
Aziraphale and Crowley knew when they did finally come back, everything and everyone on Earth would be exactly as they left them. A new home waiting for them as if they’d never left at all. They could do things like that now, no one could ever tell them no.
But still, it was a long drive.
“C’mon!” said Crowley, nudging Aziraphale with all the excitement and love of a teenage boy in front of the first girl he would kiss. “You want to challenge me is it?”
Aziraphale turned back to him, and when their eyes met, Crowley winked.
Finally, Aziraphale smiled, starlight all over his face.
“Is that not my job now?” he said. He placed a hand on Crowley’s thigh and leaned over to him. He kissed him on the ridge of his cheekbone. Confidently. And then whispered, “Darling?”
Crowley was very lucky the road to Alpha Centauri followed the Bentley rather than the usual arrangements of the car being at the whim of the road. Otherwise, he would have most certainly driven off of it.
“I spy…” said Aziraphale, leaning back into his seat. Looking to the forest of stars passing by the windows. “With my little eye, something starting with C...”
“C…” said Crowley.
“That is what I said, yes.”
Crowley rubbed at the spot on his cheek Aziraphale had kissed, so it may settle deep into his skin there.
“You know, I made most of these stars,” Crowley said. After clearing his throat.
“You did,” answered Aziraphale.
“There’s a lot of them,” continued Crowley.
“There are.”
“And they’ve had a lot of damn names.”
“My dear, are you stumped?”
“No!” Crowley said. “Of course not.”
He leaned over the steering wheel and pointed at a thimble-sized blue glow in the corner of his windshield.
“Canopus,” he said.
“I’m afraid not,” Aziraphale answered.
Crowley raised an eyebrow. “Can’t be carinae…” he said. “We passed that already.”
“We did.”
“Castor?”
“No.”
“Capella?”
“I never said it was a star, dear.”
Crowley’s still raised eyebrow rose even more into a truly, deeply puzzled look. “What the Hell or Heaven else is there to look at?”
Aziraphale said nothing, instead, he simply looked at Crowley. Top to bottom. Shoetip to fingertip. Sleeves to sunglasses. Looked at all of him, for a very long time, until Crowley understood.
“Ooooh,” said Crowley, in a half-growl half-amused and wholely exaggerated tone. “Bet you think you’re clever for that one, don’t you?”
Aziraphale smiled.
“That doesn’t count, Angel,” said Crowley, raising his finger. “That’s against the rules.”
“I thought you hadn’t played before?” said Aziraphale.
“I might’ve or I might not’ve,” said Crowley. “But I know enough to know you can’t pick me.”
“And why not?” said Aziraphale. “I like looking at you.”
Once again, the road to Alpha Centauri shifted, as the wheels of the Bentley became subtly distracted.
“Do you now?” said Crowley.
“Very much.”
Finally, Crowley smiled. He took one hand from the wheel and placed it on Aziraphale’s back. “That’s good,” he began, and then gently pulled Aziraphale closer to him, to whisper in his ear, “I rather like looking at you, Angel.”
Aziraphale pulled away with a red-faced smile and giggle, much like a schoolgirl would.
Crowley stared at him, his heart so alight. Somewhere in the black of the universe a new, nameless, bright shape formed.
Aziraphale said, “It’s your turn now Crowley.”
Crowley sighed, “Is it now?”
He turned back to the windshield and looked out into the stars before him, his eyes catching on something, white and bright and new.
He said, “I spy with my little eye something starting with A…”