“i’m a little bemused as to why crowley should risk destruction for you. you don’t seem his type at all.”
aziraphale raises his eyebrows, but he would laugh if he wasn’t so stressed. the mention of gabriel almost had him crashing the bentley into the treeline, and crowley would never let him hear the end of it if aziraphale wrecked his prized possession. for heaven's sake, crowley threatened to sell his books at a mere color change.
he’s on edge. the driving (which he hasn’t done in decades), the amnesiac archangel in his bookshop (where he should be heading back to now), the demon in his (their!) car suddenly grilling him on his personal relations to crowley.
aziraphale won’t agree with shax. lying would be a sin.
“i can tell hell crowley’s got him.”
“crowley doesn’t have gabriel.” well, some lies…some lies are necessary evils. “where would he put him? gabriel would never go to crowley. he hates crowley.”
“he hates you,” says shax.
aziraphale glances at her, thinks about “jim” and hot chocolate, then returns to the road. “i don’t know where he is, but he isn’t with crowley.”
the denial comes easy. aziraphale’s been practicing it for so long now that it’s second nature. he’s mastered the art of deflecting, and what’s he supposed to say anyway? in fact, if you must know, i invented crowley’s type. slightly conceited, for an angel, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
“you know what?” shax starts, and aziraphale is pretty certain he does not want to know. “sometime in the last eighty, ninety years, i remember hearing that you and crowley were an item. i didn’t believe it then. not really. poor old furfur. he thought you were his ticket to the big time. now he’s in requisitions.”
perhaps her plan was to catch him off guard, use crowley as a means to…what’s the expression, rattle the ship? it’s close enough, and it works enough because aziraphale can hear bombs and guns going off in his head like he’s back in 1941, even after shax gets out of the bentley.
aziraphale is still fretting over how much information he revealed. he considers calling crowley to warn him, but with that night so clear in his mind, he’s afraid of revealing more.
aziraphale thinks about it the whole drive home, though. even the parts he tried to forget.