Chapter Text
There were never any Greek gods.
None of the Incan or Egyptian gang, either. No Thor up in Norway. Just stories people told themselves to explain lightning and dead livestock and falling in love. (Occasionally someone did try some funny business with a cow, but that was more minor demons getting drunk and daring each other than anything with real power behind it.)
Crowley never did go in much for books, but he always liked the one about Hades and Persephone.
He thought it was interesting, a bit mischievous. Lonely god of the underworld tempts the personification of spring and light with a single piece of fruit – there’s the echo of Crowley again, in thousands of stories, a million lines, from people that will never know his name – and brings her down to love him.
Pomegranates, unlike apples, stain your hands red. Like you’ve been cut with a knife. Like you've had a bleeding heart lifted out of your grasp.
There is a brief moment, when he’s driving aimlessly past the edge of Regent’s Park, where he considers crashing the Bentley into the side of the London Zoo gates and just being done with the whole thing.
After all, there’s no need for a body and a car when he hasn’t got anywhere to go, or anything to see, or anyone to talk to.
He nudges the gas, tearing closer and closer to the wall, wheels about to leave the road and start running roughshod over grass. He refuses to turn his radio back on (talk about a traitor), so all he hears is his own heartbeat in his ears.
"It frightens a lot of men, listening to their own heartbeat," a young woman who would become Clara Barton told him once, on a bloody battlefield in Virginia. "Reminds them their bodies are only a thing, breakable and fragile. Life is fragile."
Crowley slams on the brakes, ignoring the angry cars blaring around them. If they really tried, they’d find they were more than capable of driving their own vehicles around him, through the impossibly tight spaces between the Bentley and the edges of the road.
He just needs a minute.
He counts to ten. Actually makes it through all the numbers this time. He stops hearing his heartbeat so loudly.
The weak afternoon sun – London, eternally under a cloud, he knows the feeling – dapples the earth in front of him, coming down in patches through the tree leaves. The zoo has planted neat rows of birches along the road, white branches arching over the pavement. There’s the smell of petrol in the air, from too many cars backed up in a small place, a shout from two little boys chasing each other down the sidewalk on metal scooters.
Right then.
He meant what he said. He's not going anywhere. He’s certainly not getting his discorporated essence kicked back to hell after the day he's had.
He loves this planet. Even, if like everything else in creation, it can’t love him back.
Crowley wants to groan in frustration, but his body is too numb, too tired. Instead, he reserves, makes another impossibly large U-turn on the road, back to SoHo.
He bangs the Bentley’s bumper against that of a nearby SUV.
An actual car accident. That’s the first time that’s happened in ninety-one years.
When he gets back to Whickber Street, Muriel has taken off her helmet, but is otherwise standing exactly where she was the last time he saw her in the bookshop. She beams when he shoves the front door open roughly.
“Welcome, fellow human, to the–” The first line of confusion forms between her eyes. “Mr. Crowley! What are you–”
He tells her it’s perfectly normal for a friend to sit on the floor of your business for as long as he wants, saying nothing and not moving. Humans do it every day. Cheerily, she agrees and says she’ll make some refreshments for his sit.
He’s about to snap at her to piss off, before turning and seeing she’s staring, perplexed, at an empty tea cup.
"How exactly does it...happen?"
“For Go–for fuck’s sake.”
Crowley shoves her aside, makes two cups of tea in mugs from the back of the cupboard, ones they haven’t used in hundreds of years, ones that hadn’t been on the side table, covered in fire extinguisher foam, when he lurched forward like an idiot and kissed–
Without conscious thought, he throws the newly filled, steaming cup at the wall, letting it shatter, a brown stain sliding down the wallpaper. The kind of thing that would make someone fussy pale, fret, feel a modicum of the panic that ran through him this afternoon.
“Oh.” Muriel doesn't seem upset so much as curious. She leans over the shards, examining them. "Doesn't this make it harder to transport the tea to your mouth?"
But that someone isn't here, anymore. Nothing lasts forever.
“Go upstairs,” he growls. “Do not come down until you see the sun.”
He doesn't even wait to see if she obeys. He destroys the other cup, too, getting tea on the toes of his boots. One by one, he reaches into the cabinet, pulling out delicate painted saucers from Versailles and cheap mugs from Waitrose and the stupid fucking ceramic with angel wings–
And one by one, they shatter on the threadbare rug, sending shards under chairs and bookshelves, ruining tea time forever, hundreds of years of priceless china reduced to debris in the dirt, something worthless to be ground to dust under a merciless heel, until it's too crushed to see, like it was never even–
And then he's run out of cups, breathing hard, sunglasses slightly askew on his nose, and none of the destruction he's wrought has changed the fact that Aziraphale didn't kiss him back.
Aziraphale didn't kiss him back.
At first, Crowley hadn't been thinking at all, beyond some base, primal sense of need you.
Then he'd been thinking Aziraphale was in shock, unsure of what to do (he's certainly not as experienced in these matters as someone would assume by looking at his leather outfits).
And then, finally, he'd been forced to realize he was desperately holding onto someone that wasn't trying to hold onto him, too.
The angel was frozen, tears in his eyes, and when he finally backed away…
Crowley has lived a long time. Technically, forever. He’s seen anger and anxiety and sadness, joy and pride and love. He can tell when his angel is worrying over him, or happy to see Crowley darkening his doorstep, or vaguely annoyed when he’s settled in with a cup of cocoa and a good book and would really rather be left alone right now.
In six thousand years, he had never seen Aziraphale look at him like that.
Disgusted. Disappointed. Like the darkness itself, come to wrap his fruit-stained hands around his soft wrists and drag him away from light, and summer, and all that was good.
I forgive you.
Like he was a monster. No more than the worst thing he’d ever done.
Some versions of the Hades and Persephone myth say they came to love each other, in their way. That, despite their rocky start, they complemented each other, provided something the other lacked, made whole in their union.
Humans love to imagine a happy ending, a toast to an adventure well had, everyone settling down with exactly what they wanted.
Crowley thinks they should live a little longer, see what happens after the champagne.