cleopatra
[TW: major character death, happy ending, angst]
The day Adam Young decided to save the world, Aziraphale’s world shattered.
It happened in an instant. The Morning Star howled, thrashed, screamed his rage at being thwarted even as Adam’s power banished him back to the depths of Hell. One massive clawed hand caught on an edge of broken cement and sent it flying, right at the Devil’s wayward son.
Crowley moved first.
He pushed Adam and Aziraphale both out of the way and was vaporized instantly by the flying piece of scalding cement. One moment he was there, and the next he was gone. Satan himself sank back into the earth, still screaming, but the damage was already done. Aziraphale didn’t even have the time to say Crowley’s name.
He shut down. He only managed to keep going through sheer act of will, the major part of himself as offline as the computers Newton Pulsifer crashed to avert Armageddon. Aziraphale got everyone else through the rest of clean up, saw to it that the emblems of the Horsepeople got returned. Eventually, he found himself back in London, standing in front of the burnt ruins of his bookshop holding the crank to Crowley’s Bentley in his hand.
Six thousand years of dancing around, of waiting, of putting Crowley off and ignoring his own feelings, and for what? They had saved the world, but there was no longer anyone left in it for him to share it with.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale whispered.
There was no answer.
Adam Young put the world back to rights. The next day, Aziraphale’s bookshop was just as it had been, and he was able to go inside without incident. His heart leapt to see the black Bentley parked outside it. But no slouching demon appeared inside the bookshop to lounge against his doorway, drink his wine and complain about his taste in patterns. No golden eyes smirked at him from above dark glasses; no sarcastic drawl filled his ears when he was trying to read.
Aziraphale went to the Ritz, had celebratory pudding and champagne to go with it. The waiter set the table for two, just as he asked, but though he waited six hours, no one ever arrived to join him.
Days passed, turning to one week, then two, then four. Every time the bell at the door would ring, Aziraphale would turn too quickly, his heart leaping to his throat despite himself. But it was only ever humans stumbling in from the street, confused at the turn things had taken.
Heaven did not bother him. Aziraphale rather suspected it was because they knew what had happened, and felt it was a worse punishment to leave him as he was.
Aziraphale started sleeping at Crowley’s flat, took up tending his plants; the Euclinia longifora was kind enough to not notice when Aziraphale dampened it with salt tears instead of its proper food. He was too afraid to drive the Bentley—couldn’t bear the idea of damaging it—but after awhile he got a car of his own instead.
He took to performing a sort of celestial taxi service. He didn’t pick up fares, per se, but he drove around the city until he located someone who had somewhere specific they desperately needed to go, even if they didn’t always know it themselves. Day in, day out, Aziraphale saw to it that humans would arrive where they were wanted, where they most had need.
He couldn’t quite explain, even to himself, why he decided to do it. It was more than a little like torture, and more than a little like penance. He was always exactly on time. It did nothing at all to alleviate the fact that he’d been too late for the love of his life, but it was all he knew how to do.
One night some six months after the world failed to end, on an evening when snow blanketed London’s streets almost a foot deep, on the birthday of a certain kind-hearted carpenter, Aziraphale got very drunk. He prayed for the first time since that fateful night in his bookshop—not as angels do, with sigils and candles and bright white lights, but as humans do, on his knees blinded by his own tears.
He begged, not knowing if She was listening, not knowing if She still cared. He wrung his hands and wept and asked for the impossible: that he might be given one last chance to prove he could be braver than the coward he’d been for six thousand years. Eventually, Aziraphale fell asleep on the floor. He dreamed of long, sinuous coils wrapped around him, of a shovel-shaped head resting on his shoulder.
The next day, the roads were plowed. Aziraphale got into his car just after ten, rubbing his hands together to warm them as a human would while the car rumbled to life. He was just preparing to steer into traffic when the rear passenger door opened and someone climbed inside.
“Sorry,” said Aziraphale, “I’m not actually—”
“My, my, angel,” drawled the person in the back seat. “What have you been up to?” Aziraphale’s heart stopped dead in his chest. He jerked his head up to stare in the rear-view mirror and found himself riveted by the golden eyes looking back at him.
“Crowley,” he breathed.
“No, go on,” said Crowley, leaning forward between the seats. “I need to see this with my own two eyes. The angel of the eastern gate driving a bloody Honda Civic—”
Aziraphale turned and grabbed Crowley’s face in both hands, silencing that dear, wicked drawl with the only possible greeting there was to give. Crowley took all of four seconds to reel in shock before he covered Aziraphale’s hands with his own, kissing back hard enough to steal all the air in the world.
Eventually—after Crowley had pulled Aziraphale into the back seat and they had spent a good long while getting reacquinted and simultaneously fogging up the glass—Crowley pulled back just enough to give Aziraphale a thoughtful look.
“You know, I was hoping for a nice welcome home party, but this is really over-the-top, even for you,” he said. The tease in his voice was rather undercut by being wrapped around more of Aziraphale than any being corporated as human should have been able to manage.
Aziraphale smiled. It still hurt, but it was the good kind, the sweet, aching kind. “You’ll have to forgive me, my dear,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
****
(also on ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20358379 )
