Work Text:
"Should go, angel," Crowley says. Wheezes. It sounds as wet as his lips look. Sounds as pale as his lips look.
"Nonsense," Aziraphale scoffs. "And give you the opportunity to recover?" He's known Crowley for almost 2500 years now. Known the angel he once was for even longer. It's not hard to hear the real words underneath: please stay until it's over. They're not words he can say, of course. Not ever, and certainly not now, with blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth and his eyes struggling to focus.
There's no chance of him recovering whether Aziraphale stays or goes. It's awful. It's awful every time, but leaving him to discorporate alone is a mistake Aziraphale will never make again.
He can't take Crowley's hand and can't sit peacefully beside him. Can't ease him on his way, not any more than Crowley can beg for mercy. But he can stand over him like the fierce angel he's meant to be, sword arm still raised as if he's making sure the job gets done.
If his aura happens to dull a bit of pain on contact, well, it's just a side effect of being so physically close to an angel. Besides, Crowley’s already past the point of being able to feel it one way or the other.
When his lovely eyes close and the last rattling breath leaves his crushed chest, Aziraphale closes his eyes in kind and wishes he could say a prayer.
It's just stuff.
He's heard the humans saying as much lately. Sometimes to condescend to one another, but more often as a source of comfort following a disaster.
"It's just stuff," they tell each other in the face of a burned-out structure.
"It was only our temporary home, anyway," said after a particularly aggressive seasonal storm passed through and left with most of a roof.
"The most important things are safe," swears a man with his arms around his family, never mind that the flooded village they're leaving behind is the only safe place for acres and acres.
"This is only my earthly body," a woman assures her children as she dies. "My soul will be with God."
It should be the same with their corporations. Well, except for the God bit, when it comes to Crowley. They're tools more than anything else—technically expendable, technically replaceable, nothing to get attached to.
But Aziraphale has gone nearly 2500 years without having to leave his, and he thinks it's quite reasonable that one would get attached to something after so long.
That's not what he tells the Quartermaster the next time he checks in, of course.
"Not a scratch on it again this time." The angel—whose facial hair, Aziraphale thinks uncharitably, is really much too far ahead of its time—sounds suspicious, beady eyes squinting.
"Yes, well," Aziraphale begins, reaching for words that aren't that's because I don't put myself in the foolish situations Gabriel’s always sending me into.
"Bit of blood, though," the Quartermaster notices. He's impressed.
"Not mine," Aziraphale says tightly. Crowley's, no doubt. He hadn't gotten close enough to any of the humans he was sent to smite.
Hadn't needed to smite them, either. They'd been quite handily taking care of that all on their own by the time he'd arrived… and judging by the state of Crowley, he'd been the one to get them riled up in the first place.
And his body was only a tool in the first place, but—
Once it was empty, once it might just as easily have been the discarded shell of one of God's favored humans, Aziraphale had carried it out of the dwindling fray and tried not to think about how he'd have preferred to get it to safety with Crowley still inside. Easier to think the words he could allow himself: serves him right for doing Hell’s work.
"Nasty business, blood." The Quartermaster’s voice shudders, shaking him from his thoughts. "Don’t know how you handle going around with it all the time."
"It’s not as if I have a choice," Aziraphale mutters, "not if I want to blend in." Humans are easy enough to alarm without someone bleeding gold in their presence, not that this angel would know it. Not that any of them would aside from Aziraphale and a small handful of his colleagues with too much ambition or too much curiosity for their own good. Though, well, that latter number had… dwindled, somewhat, before the world had gotten started, and of the former, only Sandalphon and Michael had ever followed through on personally making anyone bleed at a close enough range to notice the difference.
The Quartermaster, whose ambition limited itself to Heavenly locales, is, as ever, more interested in speaking than listening, so he's sent on his way with a curt gesture. 1
Probably for the best.
A century passes before he sees Crowley again. It's not so unusual; with more people in more places these days, their assignments take them to further and further corners of the world.
Aziraphale has been busying himself (between assignments, that is… and occasionally during them, if something really catches his attention) with close observation of the development of human writing systems.
Their major innovations up to this point have largely come from necessity: shelter, transportation, safe food and drink. This, too, is focused on utility, but already some are putting it to creative use. The symbols created by one culture are being given new meaning by another, and there are discussions of clarity and consistency and efficiency. It sounds a bit like Heaven, considered that way, but that's not the part Aziraphale is following.
There are poets, you see. There always have been, but they've never before been able to make their words unchangeable. Still can't, really. There's too much up to context and interpretation, and there's no way at all to hint at the rhythm or rhyme, but—
But words can outlive their speakers now without the need for them to find a new vessel. Things can last and survive and even be rediscovered by people who'd never otherwise have contact with a story whose keepers all died in a raid. It's imperfect, but Aziraphale is of the opinion that imperfect is better than gone.
For most things, anyway. For others, the flaws are just too… unseemly, and it's sometimes better for them to be gone altogether.
Food, for one. Angels, for another. If he learned anything at all from the War Before, it's that. And if he needed another lesson on it, his own isolation does the trick whenever he slips and allows himself to think of it that way.
So there he is in Thebes, surrounded by a truly distracting amount of people and resolutely not missing his imperfect enemy-acquaintance, who might not be as delighted as Aziraphale by the emergence of graphical depictions of phonetic units but who would certainly listen about it over drinks. So caught he is in considering what an expanded alphabet might allow in terms of written correspondence—Heaven’s word delivered to humanity, of course, and only that—Aziraphale figures he can hardly be blamed for feeling overwhelmed by the crowd. There really are so many humans in one place these days, and… and there are good reasons for not noticing a demonic presence right away.
It takes him so long to notice, his running mental report says, because of fiendish goings-on in the city that drum up a constant low-level demonic fug. And so it is only his instinct to care for God's favorite creations that leads him to steady the person who crashes into him with both hands on slim shoulders. To slide his arm around that bony back to brace the poor soul and keep them from toppling over.
Brace, he will stress, and not embrace. A touch that lingers out of necessity; the unfortunate creature really is unsteady on their feet, almost as if they're unused to walking.
And if he murmurs, "Oh, my dear, are you quite alright?" then he is firmly referring only to this moment of unexpected collision.
And of course he steps back immediately when the figure’s identity is revealed. Of course his hand jerks back as if burned and does not trail along an alarmingly pale arm.
This is what the report will say. It is close enough to the truth for something likely to go unread for eternity, Aziraphale reckons, and then bites down on his own bitterness. If it is read. If it is, it will need to be impeccable.
No news is good news, Gabriel had cheerfully reminded him last time Aziraphale had bothered to ask for feedback.
He's certainly done things more newsworthy just lately than this, and he's heard nothing about them.
So maybe he lets their fingertips graze each other when Crowley reaches up to adjust his clothing, and maybe he looks a little too long at those eyes to make sure they're clear and alive.
This part will not go into the report. Nor will his cataloging of Crowley's evident exhaustion and discomfort—at least, not without some dressing up first, an increasingly common tactic in Aziraphale's repertoire.
Perhaps something like: The demon Crowley has returned to Earth looking significantly worse for wear. Discorporation looks painful, but getting back into the swing of things doesn't look any easier. Lucky for me that angels are sturdier. He could take a few lessons! Or, er, best not, I suppose. It's only reasonable that he should… should suffer that way. Demons have done Wrong, after all, and—and getting repeatedly discorporated is just another layer of their punishment. Which is eternal, naturally.
Lord, he can't even sound confident in his own head. Better to leave it out entirely.
Better to forget the wobbly smirk and the warm murmur of, "Better now, angel," before they each go on their way.
Or—maybe he doesn't need to forget. Maybe, like more and more local shopkeepers are beginning to, he can record it just for himself.
The way he writes it down will always be true: Friendpartnerassociate at market. Cold. Preciousresource. Warm. Away. Not gone.
It hardly does the encounter justice. He's not sure if all the world's words could. Even so, he tucks the tablet away when it's finished, dreading and yearning for the advent of more complex writing systems.
The first time, Crowley had come back as something horrible. More than that, he’d come back as something lonely. The kind of lonely that comes only from being abandoned. He'd been abandoned by God and by Heaven when he Fell, of course, and Hell never stood a chance of winning any sort of accolades for supporting its employees.
Which could only mean that Aziraphale's speedy exit had been the last straw. The tenuous connection they shared after two hundred years of seeing no one but humans and each other (with rare exceptions) had, apparently, meant something to Crowley.
Meant enough that when his last moments revealed Aziraphale hurrying away from his trampled serpent's body, he must have decided not to bother requisitioning a familiar one in the return. He really ought to have known better than to snake around near horses.
Or maybe it had been a punishment for dying in such a mundane, avoidable manner.
There will never be a way to ask.
Regardless, Aziraphale had next encountered Crowley as a sloughing mass of mottled flesh and scales, constantly set upon by flies and playing host to uncountable larvae. A caterpillar torn apart in metamorphosis with no chrysalis to shield it. A hermit crab out of its shell, practically defenseless and ill-suited to the Earth’s surface.
And he had—
God help him—
He'd taken pity.
No. He'd done his duty, that's all. Smiting demons came with the territory.
But Crowley had come to him, his many milky eyes beseeching as he'd made a clumsy attempt at an attack, barely believable even to the most naive onlooker, and Aziraphale had sliced that dripping head right off its malformed shoulders.
And he had wept, but that, too, was his duty. An angel must mourn a brother fallen from God, mustn't he?
He'd closed as many of Crowley's eyes as had eyelids, and he had prayed only a brief expression of gratitude for prevailing. He dared not let even God catch wind of the hope in his soft human chest. A better angel would have blessed the weapon first and been done with it.
Crowley had stumbled and fallen upon seeing him again thirty years later—a natural consequence, certainly, of coming near a holy presence after only just reemerging from Hell. 2 Aziraphale had kept him on his knees, the top of his very humanoid head pressed wearily to Aziraphale's thigh, in a show of Heavenly dominance that might, to the most naive onlooker, have appeared affectionate.
But naive onlookers never could be trusted to understand the scope of a thing, could they?
He starts a timeline of accounts—obscured, of course, if not yet truly encrypted—as extra insurance. When he transcribes it for the first time, it reads something like:
198th year—saw the enemy meet consequences of actions
263rd year—slew dangerous beast
292nd year—reminded the enemy of his place relative to agents of Heaven
644th year—saw to removal of demonic remains from local water source to avoid leaching of contaminants
895th year—saw to removal of demonic remains from courtyard to prevent wicked locals from attempting a summoning
That last one had been by Crowley's request. He'd been tried and found guilty of witchcraft, and he had thought it better to let the farce play out.
"Not like you can leave ’til your bit here's done," he'd said, casually as one might talk about the weather. "And they know we're—associated—"
"Hardly," Aziraphale had said, recoiling in something close to panic and hoping it looked like indignant disgust.
"So best they don't think you helped me make a break for it. Just one thing. A favor. Claim my body, yeah? Heard some talk of them trying to get my arm, after, to summon a demon, and." He'd swallowed then, eyes gone all yellow, "Thing is, it just might work. Not much fun, being summoned. Especially when you have to possess them."
He'd been pressed that time, and Aziraphale had found it marginally less awful than the drowning. The drowning had taken a great deal more hands-on human effort, and it had been quite horrifying to note how easily and gleefully new hands could be called to participate.
Crowley doesn't need to breathe. Aziraphale will never be able to ask what he really died of.
All he can do is squirrel away his list of excuses and hope he's never questioned about demanding a proper disposal ritual in the 1400th year with Crowley's limp body still warm in his arms.
They come fewer and farther between as the world matures. Not because it is any less dangerous or because people are any less inclined to violence, but mostly because Crowley develops better strategies for accomplishing his deeds and because, by about the 3000th year, they have both come to the realization that their head offices can only be bothered to watch so closely.
It's not as if they can actively help each other—not that Aziraphale would help a demon—but Crowley, at least, can be a bit less… committed. He starts finding escape hatches where there should have been none. Discovers that the world bends around him just as easily as it bends around Aziraphale.
It's unsettling, actually, knowing that. It made sense for God's creation to rearrange for God's will, but if it does the same for Crowley, if Crowley can emerge from a sandstorm without a speck of dust on him without using a miracle, if he can cause thrown rocks to miss him without putting any thought into dodging them—
A better angel would test his luck with holy weapons.
Aziraphale simply tries not to wonder what it means.
"If a demon is discorporated," Aziraphale starts, as drunk as he ought to be after the situation at Calvary, "and no one is there to see it, then what—what happens?"
Crowley is gone when he looks up.
Nothing lasts forever. Nothing earthly, anyway. Not the clay tablets he'd so adored, now far out of use in favor of wax and then parchment.
And each and every one of them, anyway, can be overwritten with just a bit of tweaking. 3
An angel’s memory is eternal. Ought to be eternal.
But it might, under the right circumstances, be susceptible to a bit of the same tweaking. A palimpsest of the mind, as it were. 4
What does a demon remember?
He is… privileged to put both to the test some 1100 years later.
Crowley is herself this time. It should have been worse when there were more eyes to accuse him and plead with him, but he finds that one pair is all it takes.
Crowley's limbs are slack in Michael's hold. Her countenance is calm.
Her eyes are not, but Aziraphale is the only one who could know it.
The same eyes that reflected his laughter at the very idea of other angels coming to participate in these awful crusades are yellow with fear and shaking as she tries to stop herself from meeting Aziraphale's gaze.
"Ah," Aziraphale says tightly. "That one."
He makes a quick decision—he’s gotten good at those—and shoves the nearest pike through Crowley's neck, aiming for the connections that will end it immediately. He must find his mark; nothing is left in Crowley's eyes when he steps back.
There's blood (Crowley's blood) on Michael's shift, and Aziraphale feels—
A whole assortment of things he shouldn't. It's not a new experience.
He hides it all before he looks back up at Michael. "Hardly—hardly worth your time, that one. Thought I'd, ah, take initiative."
Michael's face is furious for the briefest moment, but it soon smooths back into bland politeness.
"You ought to have blessed that weapon."
"Ah. Yes. Too right! I'll be sure to—to begin with that next time. It's only, well, one must be very careful about leaving holy relics around for any old human to stumble across. Dreadful things can happen. I suppose I let my concerns for them, the people, that is, get the better of me."
"Certainly it's an easy enough principle, then, to keep your own holy weapon on your person." Michael's tone is clipped and their hands are—
Their hands are free to dust the blood off their clothing because dust is the only thing left of Crowley's body.
Aziraphale forces a faltering smile. "Quite right."
He feels bereft without some way to deliver his usual meager care to Crowley. More than that, he feels envious: of the opportunity to hold her living body, of the ability to decide what to do with it once it was an empty vessel, and perhaps, even a bit, of the hot spray of her blood.
Or he would, if he weren't an angel. All he feels instead, once he clears his head, is the drive to record the encounter in the bound book he's taken to keeping.
It hasn't seen much use lately. At least, not for this specific purpose. There's nearly a thousand-year gap between the previous entry and today's.
5186th year—helped Michael subdue the enemy
There's one incident Aziraphale has thoroughly struck from the record. It was a professional failure and a personal failing all wrapped up in one, and he does not like to dwell on it.
But some days call for it, such as this one, which finds Nanny Ashtoreth by the fire with her feet up on the squat couch in Brother Francis’ modest accommodations.
It should be perfectly domestic. Her hair is down, her sunglasses set aside, her hands busy with a glass of wine. The gardener bustles in the background as if preparing her a meal.
But Crowley doesn't eat, and the nanny's posture is more performative than relaxed. As long as the gardener is busy, Aziraphale doesn't have to witness the way Crowley's eyes go haunted in winter firelight.
It had been so cold that night, so long ago, and Crowley had been even colder.
The gardener will never run out of tasks to prevent him from joining his companion, but the angel beneath the disguise has long since lost track of how long he's been polishing the same glass.
The storm had been, like the current one, unexpectedly vicious. Unlike the current one, no one had been able to prepare or take any better shelter than a damp cave and a poor excuse for a fire.
The people with Aziraphale, at least, hadn't needed to worry about the fire burning out, and if its warmth was slightly holy in nature and somewhat greater than its size should have allowed for, well, all the better to mark them as children of God.
He had promised to keep watch all night—then, people knew when they were among angels—and he had been doing just that when he detected a demonic presence.
There were more demons out and about, too, in those days, and Aziraphale hadn't recognized the stride, altered as it was by the highest snow drifts yet seen by man. 5
He'd hidden the cave. Of course he had; couldn't have demons wandering in if they were out there. His miracle would have doused the light to any outside observer, covered their sounds with the rush of wind, and made all but the keenest eye slide right past the opening.
But he could see out. He could see out, and even so it took the figure passing thrice, slower and more sodden each time, for him to recognize Crowley.
He hadn't rushed out.
The gardener would, but the angel long before the disguise could not.
But he did, after a shameful amount of internal debate, draw aside the illusion and allow Crowley to wander in, barely steady any longer and alive at all only by virtue of being inhuman.
"Oh," he had sighed miserably. "S’a fire."
And then he had collapsed.
Aziraphale had gathered him up then, thinking to lay him with the other bodies, not thinking about how he'd caused this, but Crowley gave the smallest of inhales, breath shivering even though his body no longer could.
And what was he to do then?
He had a watch to keep, and so he returned to it, Crowley still in his arms. The poor thing had flinched away from the fire with a whimper so meager even Aziraphale shouldn't have been able to hear it.
And in the moment, with Crowley's need more immediate, Aziraphale had sapped the holy force from the flames.
Crowley grew warmer by increments throughout the night, wrapped in Aziraphale's arms.
The people sleeping nearby, wrapped only in each other's, didn't even wake to become aware of growing too cold.
Aziraphale had spent most of the next century in Heaven for the kind of drawn-out questioning that told him his superiors already knew all the answers.
He aches to warm Crowley again, but the risk of being wrenched away is too great, especially now. There’s too much on the line.
But the gardener presses a steaming mug into the nanny's hands and drapes a lined tartan blanket over her legs, and the ghost of a hand on her shoulder makes them both shiver.
Two weeks later, when the nanny suffers a terrible accident while barely rescuing Warlock from an iced-over pond, it almost feels deliberate. Aziraphale hadn't been there himself, but he'd felt it happen. The too-familiar dissipation of his sense of Crowley, noticing the sudden distressing lack of him like a hand reaching for a light switch in the dark only to find that no amount of frantically flipping it causes the light to come back on.
Surely Crowley could have used a miracle. There would have been enough commotion, surely, and enough relief afterwards, that Crowley could have done any number of things to save the boy.
But Nanny Ashtoreth does not emerge from the lake until she's cold and pale and lifeless, and the gardener and the boy are the only ones who really notice at all.
For three weeks, Aziraphale takes over Crowley's duties, and all Harriet Dowling has to say about it is, "Oh. Thank goodness. I didn't know what I'd do when I signed her leave request."
There'd been no leave request, but memory remains as malleable as any other medium when the right factors are in play.
Crowley comes back acting as if nothing had happened at all, and they both allow Warlock to believe he'd wished her back into existence all on his own.
Aziraphale feels certain that he would have wished harder, if such a thing were allowed. But angels don't wish; they only pray, and his prayers are no place for a demon to end up.
It almost feels like cheating to get discorporated the way he does. It's so easy. Just a bright flash and a moment of panic. Nothing at all like the ordeals he's seen Crowley go through (or the ones he's put Crowley through).
The aftermath, too, feels like a cakewalk; he's too driven by the task at hand to divert any time to existential uncertainty.
It's nothing at all to hunt for a vessel. To dance on the edge of comforting Crowley. To squeeze himself gently and reverently into the open door of Marjorie Potts’ consciousness.
Less than nothing to decide on the spot that he would never again allow Crowley to suffer the sense of disconnect and loss of self that had lurked just at the edges of him the whole time, waiting for him to slip.
Did Crowley fight to return, too, or was it Hell's idea of a punishment to send him back over and over? Aziraphale had never known to question even that much, and the knowing of it now colors every memory he has of Crowley's departures in a new shade.
How easy it is, after all, to overwrite a memory.
The expensive couch in Crowley’s Mayfair flat has never before had occasion to house two bodies, but it is doing an admirable job on its first try. Perhaps it helps that they are as far to each of its ends as they can manage when Aziraphale says, "If you get discorporated again—"
Crowley blanches, and Aziraphale fiercely understands the sentiment. He feels woozy at the idea himself. If Crowley could never be lost to him again, never stuck again in that terrible limbo, all the better.
Besides all that, it's optimistic to imagine that either of them is facing down something so mundane as discorporation. Still, it's better than thinking about the alternatives, which Aziraphale assumes are just as varied and terrible in Hell as they are in Heaven.
"If you get discorporated again, Crowley, we'll try it."
"Try…?"
"See if we both explode after all. If we… share." If he is left with both his sense of himself and a body in which to house it, if he can reach Crowley's consciousness with so much as a fingertip—
"Share." Crowley nods with the gravity and blankness of a tourist who's just been asked for directions by another, more informed tourist.
"This body, Crowley. I would—" he can say it now, at least, even if it's a bit uncomfortable to consider— "I would… prefer it. Both of us ceasing to exist at once, if that's how it must be. Better than—than not knowing if you'll make it back."
Crowley's gone as white as the wine label he's picking to death. "You can't. I. In your body?"
"Yes."
"Heaven doesn't need to know," Aziraphale sniffs. "It's not their property, anyway, the corporation. Adam technically created it, and… something tells me that he's not watching." Something also tells him that Adam would want Aziraphale to offer space to Crowley, as it were, both because that's what friends do for each other. 6
Crowley is openly gaping at him now, all movement stilled, even his fingernails scraping at the glass. "Heaven doesn't need to know?" he asks, bewildered.
He doesn't dignify it with a response. How many things, over so very many years, had they elected to treat the same way? "I saw you once," he says instead. "In another form."
"Serpent," Crowley jumps in, too quickly. He must remember as keenly as Aziraphale does.
So Crowley does remember.
"No." There's time now, isn't there, to ask all the things he never could?
"Angel," Crowley croaks. "Please…"
"Hush, Crowley. I am trying to tell you something. I saw you, Crowley, and I knew you. You came to me."
"Tried to kill you," he mutters.
"Yes, that's how I recall it as well," he lies. It's the sort of lie that used to soothe them both. It's all wrong tonight. "Officially," he adds, and watches with satisfaction as Crowley's eyes go wide.
"Aziraphale—"
"Shh. Come here."
"It is unfair," he begins, "that Michael in one visit managed to hold you longer than I have in six thousand years. 7 Do you know. Do you know I can identify every one of your damned bones? Do you know, Crowley, how many times I carried you, lifeless, out of a battle or a mass grave or the bottom of a lake? Carried you and never once held you. There's a difference." He's had six thousand years of practice to learn the difference.
He's only half a moment short of demanding—or maybe pleading—but then Crowley is there, in his arms and living, blood all still in his body and superfluous heart and lungs awake and working in his thin chest.
Aziraphale grasps at him ravenously. Crowley has never been something he could consume, and maybe that's what makes Aziraphale want to keep him instead.
What brings Crowley back to him each time, he'll never know. Or he already does and it's simply too big to see, like Adam's aura over Tadfield. A love so large and fierce that it changes the very landscape around them, and, oh, hasn't it? Hasn't it always done exactly that? The perfect chair appearing from nowhere. Aziraphale's favorites always in stock. That now-ancient image of Crowley coming out of a sandstorm looking barely windswept and perfectly clean just so that he didn't shed it all over Aziraphale's new rugs. It had never been a secret, not really. Not even to the angel too stubborn and afraid to take it at more than face value.
The question it really begs, then, is: what takes Crowley away from him each time?
He doesn't beg, but he does, finally, ask. With Crowley cradled to his chest like a precious resource—for he is one and always has been, and Aziraphale has never allowed himself to wonder too much about his renewability—he asks.
"Why did you let it happen so often? Er, not that you—what I mean to say is—there were times when you could have used a miracle, were there not? I… it took me too long to realize that you might have been waiting for me to save you, and then, the time I did, you… you didn't speak to me for nearly two centuries."
Crowley's head snaps back, his too-many vertebrae arranging themselves into a curved slouch that allows him to look into Aziraphale's eyes without moving too far from his embrace. "You—I got you into trouble, angel. ’Course I stayed away. That's not—it was never—hrrnngh."
Aziraphale sighs, sliding his hand up into Crowley's hair and trying not to wince at the amount of dried product and leftover soot. They don't, in all likelihood, have a lot of time, but he'll give all that's left to Crowley if he needs it.
"Not gonna like the answer," Crowley warns, settled back in with his forehead dropped against Aziraphale's shoulder and one long leg snaked over Aziraphale's thighs.
"I didn't believe for a moment that I would." He allows himself to stroke down Crowley's back and up again, and a second pass makes Crowley melt against him, so he keeps going.
Crowley fidgets a moment longer, then finally sucks his teeth and expels, "There was a quota."
"Pardon?" He must tense all over because Crowley hisses and tries to squirm away from his hand, which is now—ah. Digging rather ferociously into his lower back. "Apologies, my dear. You were saying?"
"Wasn’t," Crowley grumbles, as if he'd believed for even one moment that Aziraphale wouldn't ask for clarification. He sighs. "Look, you up there, you get, what, glory and suchlike for keeping a body in tip-top condition, yeah?"
"I don't know about all that, but it's certainly expected."
"Right. Well, downstairs, it's sort of like… depends who you're working for. Someone like Beelzebub’ll say that if you're not working yourself to literal death, you're not working hard enough. And someone like Hastur’ll say that it's no good for a demon to forget what dying feels like. And if they get wind of the fact that you've gone, say, a few hundred years without a reminder, they're likely to take it into their own hands. So."
Aziraphale had expected to be displeased, but he's not sure that he'd correctly anticipated how horrified he feels. "So, rather than let it get to that point, you…"
"Let a rowdy handful of humans get away with it now and then? Sure."
"Or an angel," Aziraphale reminds him sternly.
"Or an angel. Sure. One I could. Ngk. One I could rely on. To see it through the way I wanted and not go slinging around holy weapons."
"You used me," Aziraphale realizes, "to die on your own terms. Over and over."
Crowley flinches hard, drawing inward. "Aziraphale, I—"
"Did it make it easier," he wonders, throat closed up too tightly to shape it into a question.
"Yes," Crowley says without hesitation.
"Then. Then I'm—" he can't say that he's glad. Can't be even minimally, performatively glad about a moment of it. "Oh, Crowley, my dearest. I'm not upset with you," he says in response to the increased clinging from the demon wrapped around him. "Only that… that it had to be. Is that why, when you saved Warlock…?" That one seems the most improbable of his deaths, to Aziraphale, given the new context. Surely staying alive to coach the antichrist would have taken precedence? Then again, he is forever learning how tenuous Hell's relationship with logic is.
Crowley sucks in another breath and holds on more tightly. "Don’t want to talk about that one."
"Alright," Aziraphale concedes, picking up the soothing petting again despite the sudden desperate need to know. Crowley has already said more than he likely intended to by virtue of choosing not to lie about it, not to give a simple "yeah, was coming up on time, you know."
If they have a later, perhaps they can talk about it then.
Crowley is the one to break the silence some time later. "Aziraphale?"
"Hm?"
"What do we do?"
The question itself is a knife to the chest, and Crowley's raw and broken tone only twists it. Crowley should be the one with the daring and surprisingly foolproof plan. Crowley should have all exits covered. Crowley should be swaggering in triumphantly and announcing every detail. Crowley has always had the key—
Crowley has always had the key. And he has, on occasion, entrusted it to Aziraphale.
"Oh," he says softly, resituating Crowley in his lap and to give him room to reach into his own pocket.
He pulls out the little scrap of prophecy and reads it aloud. "You don't suppose… well, you don't suppose it's literal, do you? It can't be that simple." They'd worn each other's faces dozens of times since formally beginning their Arrangement—or, at least, given humans the impression of seeing one when the other was actually present. It had gotten to be necessary once people were living for quite a while and had good methods of recording a visitor's appearance. Wouldn't do for a prospective investor, for example, to look like Crowley one week and like Aziraphale the next. 8
Crowley seems to consider. "Fooled plenty of people that way, sure. But I don't think it's people we need to worry about."
"No," Aziraphale agrees, wheels still turning in his mind, and, yes, that's it, wheels—
"What’s that look?" Crowley wonders, sat back again in response to Aziraphale's stiffened posture.
"We’ll have to trade all of it," he determines, not answering Crowley so much as verbalizing thoughts as they arrive. "Not only faces, but faces, you see?"
"Er." Crowley stares at him. "Not faces, but faces? What are you—oh. Oh, no, angel, that's not—you can't—"
"I will need to look like you no matter how closely another demon looks at me. Exactly like you on all planes. And you… I'm afraid it'll be a bit of a style change for you, but…"
"You want me to dress like you?" Crowley asks, and it's clear by his unsettled shifting that he knows he's not asking the real question.
"Crowley."
"Mmph."
"Hell is going to come for you, and I will not let them have you. All I have been able to offer you up to this point is a choice about your own death, so, please. Allow me this time to help you survive instead."
"You did," Crowley says, near tears, and oh, that's too terrible to witness, so Aziraphale reels him in again. "And when you did, Heaven came for you. I can't—"
"Do you imagine they won't come for me now?" he asks mildly. "I can't bear to think what they'd do if they acquired you, but if the disguise is perfect—if the face you're wearing tells them that Heavenly punishments would only be an inconvenience, then…"
"You think they want to do more than inconvenience you," Crowley surmises, clawed now where he's holding on, but Aziraphale doesn't mind at all.
"My dear, I have rarely been more certain of anything."
"Hell might not cut to the chase like that," he warns. "Plenty down there they can do to draw things out, demon or no. I don't—I don't want you down there, Aziraphale."
"And I don't want you up there. I want us both right where we are. But…"
"But," Crowley agrees, nodding miserably. "Best chance we have, isn't it?"
"I believe so."
Nothing lasts forever. Aziraphale had come to terms with this ages ago, and he'd gotten more proof only days earlier, when his body of 6000 years had burnt up on him.
But days later, back in his own shape with his lips tracing over every inch of Crowley's (still breathing, still living) body, even dearer and more familiar to him now for the time he'd spent wearing it (and then in it in a different sense, and wrapped around it, and close beside it—), he is grateful that they, at least, will last a little bit longer.
Something ends, anyway:
6,023rd year—There will be no further entries to be recorded. This record is concluded.