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athena-nation · 9 months

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walk-through

Aziraphale slowly traces their finger along the ledge of the mantle. Photos of holidays past with what would be considered friends and family reach along, nearly teetering, its entire length. They come to a photo in particular and stop.

“I married.” Crowley points with his wine hand, “And that's our son.”.

Their shoulders slack a bit and Crowley, without fear of being too close now, reaches his right arm over Aziraphale’s shoulder, plucks up the photo, and brings it around so they can look at it together.

And they look at it together

Crowley points out “This is my wife, Sarah. This is my son, Eli. My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, and …” a few other people with hyphens and descriptors but the words trail off in Aziraphale’s ears, their interior self starting to take on blighted emotions.

Crowley walks a long look from the photo to his former love’s face.

“What was I going to do? I gave up everything.” He inhales, then elongates an exhale. “I love my kid. He, he's a fucken Giant! He's so gentle, though. I call him my we bull Ferdinand.” He places the photo back on the mantle.

“He's Nephilim?”

Crowley nods.

“Erm, is that why the flood was so hard?”

“Didn't understand why it hurt so much until I became” he pats his weathered human hand on his chest “this. Then, crews of memories came and I saw myself after that. Your kind were killing the children of angels who what? Married and loved humans.” He moves towards the couch. “I walked among them, you know. Wishing I could have the same thing. A partner, a lover, a family of Nephilim children and mixed villages and beliefs and homes? What a blessed funny thing, to love and create love? Angels, humans, Nephilim, Elioud.”

He pauses to look at the mantle full of human relatives now.

“Then, they were found. They were a scourge to-”

“The Plan.” Aziraphale whispers.

“The great. fucking. ineffable plan.”

++++++++++++

They are now both sitting on the couch, Crowley to the right of the angel.

“I asked Hell to take everything including the throne that waited for me. Take my flight. Take my immortality. Don’t take my eyes, I loved them - so, of course, they did. But, I think they sort of felt bad because they gave me these eyes almost the same color. Which, which is yet another thing Eli did not inherit. He has no Angelic properties. Thank G-...."

He stops.

"I had to lose everything Angelic about me to get my memories back and now there are millions and millions of years of them that it hurts too much, my head is too small and the memories too big. Worst of the worst part? I didn’t realize there was a point that there was no more joy.”

“No more…joy? When?” Aziraphale quietly asked.

“I understand better now what happened.” Crowly skips over the too-hard-to-admit question. “Why they cast us out…”. His hurt makes a small place in his voice, “The audacity to think we could even share a little attention towards something so beautiful to us it outshone the sun? Brighter than God? How dare Her spotlight move an inch away from Her. A Seraphim who could fall In Love, no. That would not do. But, I couldn’t help it.

“I had already fallen in love with you.”

Aziraphale jolts, inhaling guilt hot and old. It awakens and spreads like a smoldering field under a forest fire floor. It was a new sensation. It was an unrealized shame.

“You fell. Because of me?” he asks.

Crowly nods. “And that, that is also why they bullied you. Why they called you soft, Azazel, scapegoat, weak.” In a teasing voice, he recollects, “Haha an angel fell for you and then he fell from heaven! Haha, you gonna start questioning the war against heaven. nyah nyah you’re crying because you’re becoming human.”

The replay of those schoolyard cruelties does bump up against a repression or ten.

++++++++++++

“I met Sarah 4 years after my wings were taken back. I was always sick after that happened and had these intense rolling fevers under my skin all the time. I didn’t know it was a human thing happening. So, I had to see a human doctor. After I came out of it, I…and she…” and trails off still feeling the burning in his arms. “...has a conference this week and will visit our boy at university.” He sounds lonely. “She’s back Sunday.” he sniffs, picks up his wine and finishes it.

“Eli is a good kid. BIG and yet quiet and beautiful and a painter and a footballer. Children are amazing things - he can be anything he wants. But best of all - he's not an angel. Not a single angelic power except when he looks at me. Oooch that crushes me.” Crowley says as he smiles thinking about that very feeling. I know he loves me and he tells me nearly every day. Twenty-four! And still tells his father he loves him. I think that's what I was looking for. All my heavenly creations and to never have any of them say that they loved me…”

ah. Hurt.

Crowly catches what he said, but is somewhere between apologizing for what was a fauxpax and letting the old love just feel it.

Aziraphale tries to equalize the conversation.

“I don't know if we had anything that would be considered ‘love’. A lot of it was fear and questioning and warm things and watching you and feeling you watching me, but…I had never fallen for anything before and definitely not the way…”

“But, I did. Because of you. Two times.”

“no no, nonononono…so this is MY fault? That’s not very fair. It's… a resentment now.” Aziraphale is growing hot underneath and the sadness becomes confusing.

Crowly moves his head almost serpent-like conveying what we would think is maybe, maybe not.

They are both staring at untouched drinks, Crowley’s wine, Aziraphale’s tea.

That. That is true hurt.

“They made you watch. Do you remember that?” Aziraphale wide and wet-eyed shook his head meekly. He did not. Not today. Crowley sucks in his lips, bites, and nods his head, “All 200 of us.” he snaps his fingers. “Just like that. No trial, just decided. Some all at once, some one by bloody one.” He quirks his mouth, “I was a ‘special case’. Because I had a head full of questions and a… a …a heart full of Love. Love that was not directed at God. So, I was the last one to go.”

Aziraphale looks away.

Crowley softens his speech.

“Maybe I should have said something sooner. Maybe, but I didn't and I would replay those days in the bookshop over and over in my head to try to get my mind around them and I couldn't and I know that I didn't want to know any of it anymore. One night I woke up soaked in tears - and all of a sudden I felt I was treading water and that THIS was the Karma of Eve. THIS is what I get for tempting her to bite the apple and now we alllll get to have Knowledge and that's pretty ba–. No, it isn’t bad. It’s a shame, really, cuz I thought,”

He puts his glass down and waits out the anger.

“I thought it was going to be a good thing, maybe even an ineffable thing of my own.”

+++++++++++

“Aziraphale, I broke."

It's cold. I wish I wore a thicker swear.

“It’s really hard to forgive you because you watched it happen and then didn't remember and then they punished you and punished you and punished you and you and we would have been a perfect foil to their hatred together, I guess. I don't know.

“You chose Heaven over us, for us.

“And I chose Earth over y-….” He pauses. “Let me correct that - I chose Earth, for me.

“Becoming mortal was not in anger towards you. It was time and I've never been consistently happier. I morbidly want to say thank you because I have this thing in my life now, but I'm not going to. I don't have a preternatural disposition for forgiveness. I can accept what happened and that’s it. And like every human should, I have a therapist and we just treat it all like a big traumatic brain injury. That seems to be the best way for me to get my head around what happened. Beginning of time to now. Like all of it was a dream. I was in a million-year coma. In a blackout.”

Blackout.

The visit has become humid. Aziraphale knows this has to happen.

+++++++++++

“Right,”

Crowley dusts off the top of his trousers, stands up, and puts his hand over to Aziraphale. They look up at him, put their hand in his, and get up from the couch. When standing, Crowley lets their hand go - it was merely to help. Aziraphale is numb.

“So, let me show you another thing…”

Crowley opens a set of French doors out into the garden. It’s dark out all around, but this is illuminated with tiny bulbs and solar lanterns in mason jars. They both nearly bump their heads on a few. “Wife.” Crowley smiles and hoists it up out of head-bumping reach.

It comes into view as they walk down a bit - a diminutive cottage Crowley steps over to, grabs the lock, and in two twists - opens it.

Aziraphale stifles weeping, slightly failing. Crowley had taken items from the bookshop and brought them here. The desk, the portfolios, notes, postcards, unread books and read ones.

It was a mini bookshop.

With only one chair.

Silence

“I…” Suddenly self-conscious, he tries again. “I weep myself to sleep, every night, right there.” He points to the chair, which bears evidence of a man whose face has folded many times into those arms and wept and slept and drank a little and wept and slept some more.

“Sarah knows she’ll never understand what happened. She’s never pried nor has tried to change my mind about keeping this” he moves his arm to wave it along the eyeline of the room, but drops it. He turns to Aziraphale. “She sees so many people at the hospital from veritable wars that she just accepted this habit of mine as…as a erm…traumatic brain injury. PTSD. An old coma’s ghosts.”

dead silence

“I've only recently begun to stop crying,” Crowley says, nodding, as he starts to. “and now you're fucking here, and for the first time in all our millennia together, seeing you here -

"I'm so fucking unhappy.”

Time stops, but in the human way.

“I can't bear to be near you. You're everything I ever needed and wanted and I couldn’t compete with God or the Second Coming that apparently NEVER happened.” He now gestures wide with his arms outstretched, one long fluid movement so intense and passionate it looks as if he never lost his wings.

“We….“ he bangs his chest, “weeeeeee all lived down here through whatever stupid thing you were all fighting over up there and maybe you fixed it and maybe nothing happened -

“but you didn't even throw a feather from the sky to let me know that there was some fucking kind of Peace going on.

”That you missed me.

“or you were just a little sorry.”

He is heaving and trying to hold onto any words without screaming. “Sure, it still rains fish in Texas and frogs in Croydon sometimes, there’s still some old mischievous magic from past events between us. but it does make me so so so fucking…….sad you. said. Nothing.”

silence is now an abyss

“You, too, then? Just like her? Not even one. fucking. Sign.”

Crowley drops his arms and all the energy he had brewing all evening, if not all the last 28 years, sinks out from him and into the ground cover.

“Aziraphale?”

so, … this is death

“Yes, Crowley.”

“Please leave.”

+++++++++++

The Angel is standing outside of the house, their back to the door, waiting to hear the click of a lock before walking away. It doesn't rain in this section of England very much which is very strange. It's almost like one last small miracle is left to protect the home, his wife, his son.

His humanity.

Aziraphael walks back to the car. No shade of yellow, just plain grey. A rental he doesn't drive through Soho on his way home to the end of the world.

#ao3 fanfic #good omens #goodomensseason2 #neil gaiman #michael sheen #aziracrow #crowley #aziraphale #ineffablehusbands #goodomensprime

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