Archive of Our Own

Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

- 1 Corinthians 13:6-7

They wait for him at the top of the lift.

He should have known, or maybe he already did. A ‘de facto partnership’ is what the Metatron called it, and that’s certainly one way to describe it. An angel could Fall for less, but Crowley said he would know if he had. Not all of Heaven’s punishments involve wings, though. There are those that are far more subtle, but no less fatal.

That’s why they grab him.

“Not to worry”, the Metatron says as their hands close around his upper arms. “Just one quick thing to do before we can get started. Won't even take a minute.”

Michael and Uriel. Their grip is like hatred itself, a black, venomous thing that sometimes coils around the unfortunate, or constricts, crushing the life out of its prey and always strikes without warning, much like the hands currently on his biceps did, unwavering, unblinking, perhaps, and- oh, why even bother describing it? However he tries, he can't avoid the serpentine connotations, and Aziraphale knows hatred is the furthest thing from a snake as anything could be. A snake is a beautiful thing, a graceful thing of amber and starlight. He left a snake behind, once. A minute or two ago. That was crushing, actually, and something has been constricting his corporeal heart since, so maybe-

He doesn't have time for this, because the Metatron mutters “just a precaution”, and Aziraphale sees it too late to stop it. The tome. He has seen it before, but only at a distance. Has heard about it, but only as a cautionary tale. He didn’t think they would dare. Who knows what could happen?

It is garish, and the Metatron’s fingers, with nails as perfectly manicured as Aziraphale’s own, trace over the gemstones on its cover in reverence, though ‘gemstones’ is the wrong word. They’re small, and they’re hard, and they twinkle like Crowley’s stars, but they’re nothing like gemstones. Perhaps they’re more like black holes – Crowley created those too, Crowley created everything worth mentioning – but the very opposite, because they don’t absorb, they radiate. They’re small shards of divinity and pure holiness, packed so tightly they become tangible. Little jewels of grace. Little crystals of love.

Or so they say. It's a mockery, because the Almighty’s love shouldn't be so destructive.

“You see, we can't risk your partnership with the demon affecting your work in Heaven. I'm sure you understand.”

The Metatron plucks one of his feathers, and, look, he's not proud of it – he is a man-shaped being of standards – but in that moment he lets all of it go, and allows the hatred from the grip on his arms to slither through his skin. It's easy, accepting it into him, because Aziraphale knows a thing or two about slithering. He has never known what it might feel like against his body, though, not beyond a quick glimpse, but he’s eager to find out. He has spent a fair share of time imagining it, after all.

An angel can't hate, but in that moment Aziraphale does.

He thrashes and fights, nothing matters beyond stopping that feather from touching the page, but it's useless. They're two against one and Aziraphale has always been a bit soft, a bit comfortable, not a warrior.

“It's just a demon, Aziraphale. Don't embarrass yourself.”

The Metatron scribbles unceremoniously, as if this is nothing, as if this isn’t the greatest tragedy that will ever come to pass throughout all of eternity. The sound of his own feather carving out Crowley’s name carves out Aziraphale’s heart. He feels the the shards – the ones packed full of with the Almighty’s love, the ones the Metatron wields like butcher’s knives – slice through Creation, and he wonders if the ever-silent Almighty is also crying.

Because this isn’t love – love always protects – and he has to believe Her ineffable love will protect them. He knows it’s there, despite Her silence he's always felt it, and he trusts – love always trusts – in Her ineffable plan for Creation, hopes – love always hopes – that She knows that Crowley can't disappear because- oh God, Aziraphale realises – love always perseveres – that all this time, Crowley has loved him, and all this time – and his conviction is a monolith now – he has loved Crowley, and he prays for Her plan, prays for Her love, prays for ineffability to save Crowley now, because love always perseveres love always perseveres love

He blinks. There’s something wrong, there’s something very, very wrong: it feels like there might be something on his cheeks. But that can’t be, because there’s never been anything anywhere, and he doesn’t have anything to feel with in the first place.

He thinks to move, but remembers that he's being held back. “Excuse me? Do you think you could unhand me?” he says, instinctively, and then he wonders why he said that.

Michael and Uriel stare at him. First in confusion – because how can they hold him back when there are no bodies?, then in disgust – because how can there be something on his cheek when there is no matter?

Trust him. He’s asking himself the same things.

“What's that on your face?” Michael asks and points. They take a step back, as if this weird wetness there is no name for would be contagious, and in doing so, they back right into Gabriel, as if they forgot he had been standing there the whole time. Aziraphale doesn’t blame them – he had, too. Gabriel isn’t usually that subtle. In fact, it almost looks like Gabriel himself forgot that he had been standing there, and hadn’t been off in a faraway land just a second ago – which of course is a silly thought, because there aren’t and have never been any faraway lands to be off to in the first place.

It’s all a bit unsettling. “I- I don't know what it is”.

Something starts swirling gently around him. It breaks Gabriel out of his haze.

“What's that?” he accuses, as if this all is somehow Aziraphale’s fault. Maybe it is.

Aziraphale tries to wave it off, stalls for a second before the answer comes to him, and the words fall off his tongue as naturally as an ‘amen’. “Oh, it's just one of those pesky thoughts, isn’t it?”

A moment later, the others recognise it, too. Of course, the thoughts. How could they have forgotten?

Gabriel’s face contorts and Aziraphale winces apologetically, because he’s not too proud to gentle the storm. “Well, get rid of it!”

That’s easy for Gabriel to say. It comes naturally to him. Aziraphale, on the other hand, has always struggled with the concept of not-thinking, has always been positively overclouded with this nettlesome fog- wait, has he? always? really?

He notices Gabriel eyeing him sternly, as the fog of thoughts thickens around him. He tries his best to gentle, gentle, but it’s all just grimaces.

“You should get that looked at. Between that, and whatever’s going on with your face, you might be malfunctioning.”

The next one to speak is the Metatron, who does not at all look confused but furious, rather, and perhaps a little scared. Aziraphale feels his voice in his Grace, and knows it’s rippling through the very filament itself, knows he bends it to form the words. “WHAT ARE YOU NITWITS DOING?”

~

Turns out, they're way behind schedule with the whole Creation business, though no one can quite figure out by how much, because time doesn’t exist. Neither do any of the other prerequisites for Earth to be created – there’s no matter, no gravity, and there’s certainly no such thing as light. Aziraphale can understand how this might make the Metatron a tad bit stressed, but he sees no need for the invention of anger as a result. The Almighty is a being of love and endless forgiveness, of course She will see that they tried their best. She won’t hold this against them. They will apologise, and it will all be forgiven. No harm done.

Management doesn't agree. There are emergency meetings. Gabriel fumbles with his clipboard.

“I don't understand”, he mutters, again and again. He double checks and triple checks the schedule, and even when he quadruple checks it he finds the same thing: he hasn’t assigned anyone to the creation of matter, gravity, time and, most importantly – as this was meant to be something of God's crown jewel – light.

His Grace starts flickering in and out of the filament itself. He barks out orders when the Metatron isn't around, gets orders barked at him when he is. It's all wrong, because Aziraphale remembers the meetings, and there was no mention of all this anger. He was told Creation would be a beautiful thing, and he had personally very much liked the ideas of the humans. Little things with flesh, inside a lush garden full of things that flesh would enjoy. Sunlight, was one. It hasn’t been made yet, of course, though there are extensive descriptions in the blueprints. Aziraphale read them. It all sounds rather nice. He hopes he will get to experience it some day.

That meeting is the last thing Aziraphale remembers.

Most angels seem to remember more after that. Not a lot more, but most can at least recall the focus groups discussing which song should be Heaven’s standardised theme song, and there is apparently a general consensus that ozone should be the eau de cologne of choice for the Heavenly Host, even though sound is just a vague notion, and smell is nothing but an abstract concept, and no one really knows anything of ozone beyond what little they can make out from the blueprints.

~

“Which one of you idiots created ideas before there was anything for them to stick to?” Gabriel asks, as he waves away yet another one of the clouding thoughts in front of him. Even Gabriel has those now. He sidesteps them as if they could hurt him, crouches as if they’re out to get him, and Aziraphale isn’t delighted, because that wouldn’t be a very angelic thing to be, but he’s not not delighted.

It was Uriel. Uriel, who always follows protocol, who always does things thoroughly, who has never once made a mistake since the very moment they popped out of the filament.

Gabriel created the senses – not a problem, they come and go as they wish, always there but never noticed.

Michael created the emotions – not a problem, they’re viscous but transparent, which would only be a problem for physical concepts, which angels decidedly are not, and neither is anything else, currently, for that matter.

Uriel created the thoughts – very much a problem, when twenty million angels are collectively thinking very, very hard about how to solve the even bigger problem at hand:

No one created reality.

Uriel shakes their head in confusion that's not quite disbelief because the evidence is floating right in front of them. Gabriel tells them to fix it. They turn grey before they stagger and disappear behind the blueprints he all but shoves into them. There are a lot of pages – 3,000,602, to be exact, though the first ten are just the index – and Uriel takes them with divine arms that could carry all of creation as if it were but a grain of salt, yet still seem to falter under the weight of the paper stack.

Aziraphale is, well, not jealous per se. He's an angel. Angels don't get jealous. But Aziraphale has noticed a surprising newfound interest in reading, and there's not a lot to read in Heaven other than blueprints of marvels and meeting minutes in perfect curlicue, and he wouldn’t mind the opportunity to study some of them more thoroughly.

There’s also the Book of Life, of course, but after it was found mysteriously wandering the filament, lost and alone, it’s been placed under strict guard, not allowed to be touched or tampered with, because who knows what a book could get up to, if it’s lost and alone? Who knows what could happen if it’s touched and tampered with?

Anyway, what Aziraphale wants doesn’t matter. He won’t get to read Uriel’s blueprints, because no one would involve him in a project, no matter how much he wants it, and he wants it a lot. He has accumulated a great deal of knowledge so far, and wishes he was allowed to create something beautiful with it. But he’s not a particularly competent angel to begin with, and with all these whirling thoughts he has, well- he’s a walking storm at this point. No one wants him near their work. That’s why he is left to roam.

So he roams. He moves unnoticed across the black filament of Before. He’s all swallowed up in thought clouds by now, a visible aura of imagination, or as visible as a thing can be in this dark void. The reason is, he reads. Clipboards with old meeting minutes, blueprints currently not in use, filled-in schedules and project outlines, and he knows something is missing. If any of the other angels thought even half as much as he does, they would notice it too. But thinking is discouraged in Heaven and besides, they’re all too busy working through their impossible backlog anyway.

The thing is, Gabriel isn’t always Aziraphale's favourite coworker, but he is not incompetent. Not like Aziraphale is, and not even Aziraphale would have missed the gaping holes in the project plan. Most notably on the front page, the one that says ‘TOP PRIORITY’ in big red letters. ‘SENSES’, it says in serious-looking block letters slightly below that, after which someone has typed ‘Gabriel’ in filigreed calligraphy. ‘EMOTIONS’ it says, and then ‘Michael’. ‘THOUGHTS’, and then ‘Uriel’. ‘REALITY’, and then... nothing. It’s not subtle. It’s as clear as the sky Aziraphale has read about that something has disappeared. Something that’s supposed to be there. Something that’s very, very important. He thinks of the Book of Life. He thinks: who knows what a book could get up to, if it’s lost and alone?, who knows what could happen if it’s touched and tampered with?, and his aura thickens.

He can’t do anything about matter, nor about light, and he wouldn’t even know where to begin with gravity. Time, however, is different. When the other concepts don’t exist, there is nothing. When time doesn’t exist, there is everything.

He's not an expert, but he has heard the gist of it: time is supposed to be linear, events happening in a certain order. It all sounded terribly complicated, because to Aziraphale, he thinks, wouldn't it just be a lot simpler if it wasn't like that? If you could, say, reach out for any moment at will? And it would all just be there, all the moments across all the the timelines – just a swirling soup of endless possibilities and infinite glimpses – hiding beyond the filament?

The clouds around him are so opaque now even light couldn’t help him see through it. They really should get this sorted soon, because it presses against his Grace in a terribly uncomfortable and wholly inconvenient way, he thinks, and then he reaches out, through the filament, into the swirling soup and grabs that which doesn't exist yet, yet has always existed.

~

It's a lot.

It takes him a moment (and he feels them in this strange place, just like he feels the seconds and the minutes and even, yes, the hours, turning like cogwheels on another plane of existence, tugging the universe forward one excruciatingly slow tooth at a time) to gather himself. There are things. Light and matter, he gathers, and also the sounds that he could hear but not really before, only there’s more of them here – not just a voice or an echo like in the filament, but small sounds, like the whooshing of air, and large sounds, like the sudden pounding of a heart (his heart) inside ears (his ears).

He has a nose too. He knows this because it tickles from the cacophony of scents and odours and everything in between, and not even in his wildest, stormiest dreams could he have imagined their richness. Most smells seem to come from life – or death, but that's all the same – and he could almost swear he smells love, too, seeping from the books lining the walls. There are hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, neither guarded nor feared, and they make this whole ‘when’ reek of love to an almost staggering degree.

He thinks it’s the books, at least.

There are other things here too, actual matter things that aren’t just books. Aziraphale thought he would know things – thought the thousands, if not millions of blueprints he has read would have prepared him for this – but it turns out the blueprints will barely even matter in the end. It turns out, he thinks and marvels, that Creation has somehow started creating itself, has somehow created an abundance of things made of shapes, and colours, and sizes, and Heaven will have no hand in either of them. He sees no lands or seas here, no stars or skies, no animals or plants – save for a pair of animals he vaguely recognises as potential contenders to the horse as riding animals. They were passed over, despite the ergonomic concerns of the horse, and he wonders if that’s why they don’t have the pumping and flowing life force he thought they were supposed to have. He must have missed a memo, because there’s no life force in these at all.

Except, he thinks and squints, there is, but it’s of a completely different kind. It’s a tiny kind with jagged pieces that push and pull, that vibrate and move. And not only in the animals. He sees it in everything, and just like that, Aziraphale understands matter, understands life, understands how they’re connected – and he knows instantly, to the very core of his being, that no words, no matter how many they invent, not even in Enochian, will ever be enough to describe the beauty of this ‘when’.

He tentatively reaches out to touch one of the animals – the ones that don’t pump but push and pull, the ones that don’t flow but vibrate – just to see what it would feel like against his fingers. He wonders how finely tuned this sense is. Will it feel as smooth and still as when he looks at it, or as jagged and alive as when he squints at it?

“Uh, angel?”

Oh dear, is that a human? Where are his manners! He retracts his hand quickly, and racks his brain for the correct first contact protocols, finds them buried deep down under the nothingness inside his alarmingly empty mind. He dusts off their cobwebs. Raises his arms. There were meetings, and he even remembers them. He's prepared for this.

“BE NOT AFRAID.”

“I'm not”, the human says.

“I COME BEARING-” The human doesn't look particularly scared at all, and Aziraphale feels his momentum slip through his wholly corporeal fingers. He stares at them, the treacherous things.

“What are you doing, angel?”

He stares at the human next. It's delightful how he looks just like him. He has two arms, and two legs. Each limb ends in five small digits that can sometimes balance, sometimes grip, and Aziraphale knows which ones are which, too. He's seen all the diagrams.

There are differences, too. The human doesn't have any flowing robes. Instead, his corporation is covered in a strange material that he wears like a second skin. It's of another colour, too, an opposite colour to Aziraphale's. Aziraphale’s is a pure colour, a generous colour that gives light away, guides it on its path, allows it to brighten what’s around them. The human’s is instead a colour that welcomes all the light into it, cradles it, protects it, and lets the light call it its home. Aziraphale thinks that's beautiful in its own way.

Wait, did he say ‘angel’?

“You know I'm an angel?”

“Do I know- of course I know you're an angel! What’s going on, Aziraphale?”

“… You know my name?

Aziraphale was under the impression that the humans would be as excited about the angels as he himself was about the humans, but this one doesn't seem at all excited. Everything seems to be moving backwards (maybe there’s something wrong with time after all? It seemed like a terribly complicated endeavor, he said that from the very beginni- well, that is to say, the… Oh, bother, the point is that he has said it) because he should have been ‘scared’ first, and then ‘excited’, not the other way around. That’s what the instructions said.

“You’re not Aziraphale”, the human states, with a slight slump to his shoulders, as if Aziraphale has disappointed him somehow, as if the human’s not the one who just offended Aziraphale, “so who are you?” The human narrows his eyes at him in a way that Aziraphale suspects must mean something, but he can’t linger on that, because they are too beautiful for him to think about anything else. They’re gold, just like the lace on the angels’ robes, but not just one gold, there are five or even ten different golds. Aziraphale shouldn't have expected anything less from the Almighty than to gift the humans the most beautifully coloured eyes.

“Who are you?” the human repeats again, but it sounds hard and cold this time, in a way that doesn’t at all match his eyes.

“I assure you, I am Aziraphale.” The human grimaces, and for some peculiar reason, Aziraphale feels the need to add, “I would like to believe I know my own name!”

“You’re the wrong one, then, if you don’t know who I am”, the human says, simply, but Aziraphale doesn’t feel like he’s the wrong one.

He wonders if all humans are supposed to be this rude. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because Aziraphale is a messenger of the Lord, and he will rise above. “I can’t very well know who you are, we don't have humans yet where I come from.”

“You think I’m human?” the human spits then, somewhere between the anger the Metatron invented, and the disbelief Uriel almost invented, and a third thing that has indeed been invented but never named, because only Aziraphale himself has experienced it, a rare few times, when his metaphysical nose is deeply buried in a set of particularly exciting blueprints.

“Well you’re clearly not an angel, so what are you, then?” he says in a way that’s certainly not ever mentioned in the first contact protocols, but this human is making things terribly hard for him, and even a messenger of the Lord has his limits.

The maybe-not-a-human hesitates. “… What are my options?”

“Well, there are angels, and soon humans, hopefully, once we figure out this whole light-matter-time situation, we’re terribly behind schedule in creating that, you see, but those are all the options there are. Well, unless I missed a memo. Easily done, you know how it is, you look away once and suddenly the whole mail system has been swallowed by the aether, it’s very hard to keep up with-”

“What was that bit about the light?”

The interruption throws him off. “Sorry, what was that?” Oh dear, he probably went off on a tangent again. This is what Gabriel always talks about. Get your head out of the clouds he says, but it’s hard when they follow Aziraphale around.

“The light”, the human growls, sounds flattened through clenched teeth.

“Oh, that? There was just a slight oversight, a little mixup in the schedules. But between you and me, I think the angel responsible has mysteriously disappeared. Don’t worry though, it’ll all be sorted soon. We have our best angels on it!”

The strange being doesn’t look reassured at all.

“Satan” he whispers. “They erased me?”

And that's when another being comes into view, enters into this strange place inside from the equally strange place outside. “Oh Crowley, I just saw the loveliest little restaurant, we simply must-”

That being looks even more like himself than the other human does, he thinks, and then he stops thinking.

~

Here’s the thing about ineffability: you can never quite tell it apart from mere coincidences. It gets even trickier when those coincidences start to make all kinds of sense - at which point, if you think about it for more than a second, you’ll find yourself with Schrödinger's purring cat in your lap.

That’s why it’s impossible to say whether it was a hollow coincidence, a glitch in time, the Almighty Herself, or something entirely different that caused both beings to lock eyes, freeze, and breathe out a simultaneous, strangled ‘oh’, followed, after an unbearable pause, by an equally strangled ‘hello.’

Aziraphale hasn’t learnt to question ineffability, but he learns something else in this moment – he notices how time’s cogwheels tug the universe forward at the same, slow pace, even when nothing fills it, even when he’s not particularly fond of its current pacing, even though this silent pause is truly unbearable, and he feels each tug of each tooth to his core – he learns the word ‘relentless’.

~

It’s him, or a version of him at least, but he looks different, though he can't quite put his finger on why. It's not just the clothes – no robe, his instead look fluffy and soft like feathers, and there's something that almost looks like tiny wings at his neck – nor is it the colour – not as good at guiding the light, but still much better than most things he sees around him. Maybe it's the way he moves like he belongs inside that corporation, how his movements are small and precise, and how his face is unreadable to Aziraphale, because there's too much in it, too many subtle layers, too much knowledge.

Eventually, the other him clears his throat. “What- what seems to be the problem?”

The words break the tension, and the strange being called Crowley starts pacing wildly, arms waving, a thought storm of limbs. “They fucking erased me from the Book of Life, angel! And now everything is gone! Light, time, matter. Everything!” He stills for a second, and finds a silver lining. “Gabriel must be having a terrible time, though.”

“Oh, the absolute worst”, Aziraphale himself says, with a kind of glee he didn’t know he possessed in the first place.

Crowley laughs. It’s not like any laughter Aziraphale has heard before in the filament – what little there is, mostly his own, when his metaphysical nose is deeply buried in a set of particularly exciting blueprints – the kind that ebbs and flows like the waves of a robe in motion. It’s sharper, harder, though not at all unpleasant.

The other him is not laughing. “Why are you here?”

Aziraphale still hasn't quite adjusted to the first new situation (the overwhelming reality situation), and now there’s both a second, and a third ‘new situation’ going on simultaneously as well, and he hasn’t been able to even start processing those (the unhelpful probably-human and the surprising second-Aziraphale situation, respectively). It all keeps getting worse, somehow, and he feels frightfully unequipped to handle interactions beyond those in the filament. It shouldn’t be this hard. The meetings were quite straightforward.

“I'm not actually certain myself”, he admits.

“He just showed up being all”, Crowley does things with his hands, makes them sparkle, “holy.”

“I’m not being all holy, I am holy!” he snaps, and Crowley turns towards the other him with a pointed look. The other him rolls his eyes at Crowley. Aziraphale wonders how well they know each other. “I think I’m looking for someone that’s missing.”

“Yeah”, Crowley says, “that’d be me.”

The other Aziraphale looks at Crowley for a few moments. “Right”, he says, and nothing more.

Aziraphale himself has things to add to that statement, though. “Obviously you’re missing, we don’t have humans yet.” He really tries to channel his best angelic patience, but not even that is enough to keep the snark out of his voice. From the corner of his eye, he think he catches his other self eyeing him fondly.

“I am not a human”, Crowley growls, with even less patience than Aziraphale had, and the other him lets his soft gaze land upon Crowley again. “I created light, for Somebody’s sake!”

“You created light? You’re an angel?”

At this, Crowley starts to stutter. “I'm- no, I'm, well I guess from your perspective-”

“Yes”, the other Aziraphale says, and Crowley sends him a strange look. “He is.” And though he doesn’t bend the filament to say it, Aziraphale still feels its truth to his Grace.

Well, that makes more sense, despite it making no sense, because Crowley does not feel like any angel Aziraphale has met before. He wonders where his Grace is, but Aziraphale wouldn’t lie, Aziraphale is an angel, as is his other self, and angels are trustworthy.

“I should probably take you back, then”, Aziraphale decides. “Everyone is very stressed that you're gone.”

He doesn’t know how he knows, but he can feel the energy change. He doesn’t even know what ‘energy’ is, but thinks it’s something with the vibrations, as if the tiny life force has more jagged edges prickling his skin now. He can tell the others feel it too, or maybe they were the cause for it in the first place. Either way, when he speaks, Crowley’s voice has lost all traces of emotion.

“No. That’s not happening.”

He looks at the other Aziraphale, as if he too will say it’s a ridiculous notion, but he looks away, and he wrings his hands, twists them around each other, as if he’s holding onto them. As if he can’t hold on to anything else.

“Crowley, darling”, he says, and his voice is a small, small sound, and Crowley mimes a silent “no”, “If you’ve been erased from the Book of Life-”

“No, I can’t be, I’m right here, aren’t I?” he says triumphantly, the words begging to be true. They rest between them for a few tugs of a cogwheel’s teeth, before he sees them for the lie they are. He groans. “It’s time, isn’t it? It’s always time”, he spits, and Aziraphale feels his Grace flinch. He starts pacing again, as if it helps him think. “If they start time and I’m not there, I’ll be gone in all timelines, won’t I? Time!” he spits again. “Can’t believe I agreed to creating it in the first place. What a bloody mess it’s turned out to be.”

“Yes, rather”, mutters the other Aziraphale, and so far, Aziraphale himself could only agree. He has been skeptical of time even before this conversation, and he has even less faith in the concept now.

Crowley stops suddenly, as if he freezes himself in time, as if he gives in to it. His arms go limp at his sides. “Well, I guess that’s that. ‘Cause I’m not going anywhere.”

“Crowley...”

“No. I’m not leaving you.”

The other Aziraphale’s words come out uneven now, as if they too are things of different sizes and colours and shapes, but his tone is soft as feathers. “Crowley. Listen. You’re being ridiculous. You know how temperamental time can be. It will start either way, with or without you, and I’d very much prefer you still exist when it does. You just pop on over, create time, and you’ll be right back in the Book of Life again. All the different timelines will be fine, and you’ll be right back here with me. All tickety-boo.”

Crowley stares at the other him, golden eyes wide. “Are you serious, angel?”

“I do believe I am. Better get this pesky problem sorted sooner rather than later. It’ll just take a minute”, the other him insists, and Aziraphale spots that strange wetness – the one he found on his own cheeks right before everything became weird – in the eyes of the other him.

Crowley’s words are tentative and deep when they eventually come. “You know that’s not how a time reset works, though, angel. We’ll start over. We’ll forget.”

“A minor inconvenience, is all”, the other him says, and Aziraphale watches some of the wetness start crawling down his cheeks in drops, leaving behind thin streaks of wet lines. “We won’t remember either way, will we?”

Crowley keeps staring, and the wetness, that glistening, fragile thing, emerges in his eyes now, too, clinging to his lashes like drops of gold, and suddenly, Aziraphale understands why God made light her favourite. There’s something in the way it catches in the drops that makes him think of books wandering the filament, lost and alone, as if the drops are shards of pure divinity overflowing in his eyes. As if his lashes are lined with jewels of grace, and his cheeks are streaked with crystals of the Almighty’s love. It looks like God Herself is watching over him, protecting him, or, Aziraphale thinks, maybe She isn’t watching over him at all. Maybe that’s just the way the light falls.

“Just some technical issues”, the other him whispers, and blinks his own crystals out of his eyes. “You’ll fix it right back up.”

“No. NO”, Crowley protests suddenly, in a very large sound, and the largeness cracks his voice, or maybe it’s not the largeness at all. “We’ll figure something else out. We’ll bypass it some other way. We’ll-“ and then the voice cracks all the way through, splits in two, but it doesn’t really matter, because there are no objections left to say anyway.

Crowley moves like that other life force now. He shifts and darts, he’s jagged and prickly, and the flowing to his face has stopped, turning it the colour of Aziraphale’s robe. No, that’s not quite right. The pumping and flowing has stopped completely, as if the mechanism broke beyond repair along with his voice, as if there’s nothing left inside of him worthy of pumping and flowing for. Yet he’s still moving, even without the lifeforce, like an angel would, and if Aziraphale would have still doubted his divinity, this would be definite proof.

“It’s the Book of Life, Crowley, you can’t just figure out a way to bypass it”, the other him says, and takes Crowley’s cold, pale hands in his. “It's not like there's an abundance of options to choose from. This opportunity is a miracle”, he says, though Aziraphale knows it's not. He didn't do a miracle. He just reached out.

And Crowley shakes his head as the crystals fall from his eyes, and Aziraphale himself doesn’t understand any of this. He knows some emotions, of course – Michael created the concept, though not all are invented yet – but even though he has studied the blueprints extensively, he only knows a few by name. None of the ones he knows seem to apply here, though it’s hard to tell because there are so many different ones at the same time between the two of them, and he wonders if emotions are really made to be this intense in the first place. It’s all hard to know, because Aziraphale himself doesn’t have much experience with feeling anything. It looks like this version of him has.

He watches as his own hands, in the hands of someone else, travel up Crowley's arms, landing on Crowley's shoulders. Crowley's chest rises hard, and fast, constantly in motion, and Aziraphale looks at his own chest. It’s still. As it should be. His other chest is moving, however, which Aziraphale himself finds worrying, but it doesn’t seem to bother the other him. He seems more concerned with Crowley's, because he places a hand on it, and Crowley closes his eyes.

And suddenly, Aziraphale feels it. He has noticed it before, only it's a completely different thing now. It smells a bit like the books, only much, much stronger, and there's no wonder that smell is so strong in this when. Love. Like the Almighty’s love, maybe, but he can't be sure, because there are so many layers, and this is so much more nuanced, and Aziraphale can't stop himself from raising a hand to his chest to stabilise himself in its presence.

And then they press their lips together. It's a hurried sort of thing, hands on arms, hands on necks, hands in hair, so many limbs in so many places, and Aziraphale doesn't understand that either. The wetness on their cheeks intermingle, become one and the same, and they’re not scared of it. He sees his other self lift his hand and wipe it gently off of Crowley's face with his thumb, and Crowley rubs more of it off when he digs his head into the other Aziraphale’s shoulder, though it keeps flowing and flowing. The other Aziraphale’s hand has never left his hair, and he strokes it, reveres it, as if it were the vane of a feather, over and over, until eventually, he breaks the silence.

“Come on then. There's no time to waste. Can't have them figure out how to create time before you get back.”

“Angel, please don’t”, Crowley whispers, but the other Aziraphale only pushes him towards Aziraphale himself.

Crowley’s hand is shoved into his, and Crowley flinches away at the contact. The other Aziraphale is relentless (much like time), and holds his and Crowley’s hands together, clasps them in place so they’re all holding hands, and he doesn’t release them until Crowley has succumbed, until his hand has relaxed, until he’s resigned to the touch of Aziraphale himself, the Aziraphale he really doesn’t want, the wrong Aziraphale.

“There you go”, the right Aziraphale says to the wrong one, and it looks difficult, as if he’s almost empty of words, and he has to pry out the last ones he has. “You take good care of him now, please.”

“Of course I will”, the wrong one says.

This is the good thing to do. This will solve all of Heaven’s problems, and it will protect Crowley from erasure, too. Not that he knows Crowley, but Aziraphale doesn’t think anyone’s existence should be erased, no matter the reason. It’s only temporary anyway, only until time has reset, and Crowley is back in the Book again. Crowley will be back with the right Aziraphale in no time, so there’s really no need to feel such strong emotions about it. Aziraphale does what he can to help: he’s an angel, and as such, he’s nothing if not trustworthy. He adds an “I promise”, and hopes it will soothe their worries.

The right Aziraphale watches the wrong Aziraphale pull his Crowley away. “I love you”, he whispers, and Crowley’s hopeless hand twitches. “It will just be a moment”, he says. “Mind how you go,” and he nods, and he watches them, expressionless, as they disappear.

~

Aziraphale pushes them through the filament, out of time (which does not exist yet anymore) and the next moment (which also doesn't exist yet anymore) they emerge on the other side, and suddenly Crowley has lost much of that beauty there was an abundance of inside time. He has lost his colours. Gone is the colour that cherishes light and lets it rest protected. Gone is the colour that puts even the most divine of laces to shame. Aziraphale thinks Crowley maybe lost more than just his colours, too, because his previously vivid expression is now blank, and his thought storm of limbs is now still.

He looks much more like an angel like this, Aziraphale thinks, and though he’s never owned anything in the first place, he feels like he lost something of value.

“Hi!” this bland Crowley says, and Aziraphale doesn’t recognise his voice, but he politely says “hello”, back. It doesn’t seem like Crowley remembers him from when they were inside of time together, which is strange, or maybe it isn’t. Maybe the strange thing is that Aziraphale remembers.

“I'm Samael. Nice to meet you”, he says, and Aziraphale wonders if Crowley broke somehow when he was dragged out of time, because that wasn’t his name, and he seems to be a completely different being now.

Oh dear.

“Whoops”, Samael exclaims suddenly. “This is embarrassing, but I seem to have missed the deadline by quite a lot! Can’t stand here and chat all day, I’m sure you understand!” and Aziraphale wonders if he just invented a new emotion he’s not entirely fond of, because as Samael rushes off, there’s something not-good, or at least not-good-adjacent, moving in his chest. He hopes it will pass.

Time, he thinks, and the fog whirls around him. What an ineffable concept.

~

Aziraphale watches Samael create time and matter and light – and everything else from pages 11 to 3,000,602 inclusive – with nothing but an audience and a tire iron, and he saw that it was good. ‘Good’ is a small word, too small in Aziraphale's humble opinion, but if it is enough for God, it is certainly enough for Aziraphale as well. It’s not like any other word could better describe the perfectly chaotic and exquisitely imbalanced reality that those slender fingers have spun from the filament, anyway. But Aziraphale already knows that.

“You're not in any of our papers”, says Gabriel suspiciously, and Aziraphale knows that, too. Because time's running now, and Aziraphale still remembers Crowley, stuck in the wrong timeline, stuck with the wrong Aziraphale, and he knows he can never tell him.

He thinks it's the Book of Life, Crowley. You can't just bypass it. He thinks this might be the only Crowley he has managed to save, that all the other soupy timelines that ever had a Crowley in them have been erased, that Crowley's right Aziraphale has been erased too, and he knows he can never tell him.

“I'm not?” Samael says and tilts his head. “Must be an oversight. I assure you everything works as intended! Especially light, God was very clear about light. You can't mess that one up, she said!” he says, blithely, as if he didn't just work through their entire backlog with one mere spin of a tire iron, as if he didn't just do what no one else was able to do. He pats the universe on the head. “I assure you, this bad boy will run forever!”

“We only need it for 6000 years”, Gabriel says, “which you would have known if you had bothered to sign your name on any of the papers.”

That's the first time Aziraphale sees Samael frowning, and he starts thinking that he might end up becoming quite familiar with that not-good-adjacent feeling in his chest after all.

The bell above the bookshop door chimes when Crowley stumbles over the threshold. Aziraphale doesn't need to look up to know what comes next – the familiar thud of a hip colliding with the side table, the muttered “watch it or you'll wake up as firewood next”, and the careless toss of his shades that inevitably land across one of the bulls.

As always.

Aziraphale smiles, turning a page without glancing up. “Welcome home, darling.”

Crowley grunts in response.

“How did your temptation go?”

“Well enough. I got them to put fidget spinners on discount as a little freebie.” He grins, in that way that he does, and Aziraphale tuts, in that way that he does, and all is well in the world.

“Here, I got you this”, Crowley murmurs then, almost as if it’s one word, and looks away so Aziraphale won’t see his blush. He knows it’s there though, knows it as if it were his own. Knows from Crowley’s words it doesn’t reach his cheekbones yet, knows from his tone exactly how warm it would feel against his palm.

In Crowley’s outstretched hand lies a small blue box.

And Aziraphale knows – with that rare clarity that sometimes hits him nowadays – exactly what’s in the box.

“Oh”, he says, because what else is there to say?

At first, it was nothing but curious glimpses of a memory slowly unshrouding itself, a slow unfolding of the blank Crowley into the beautiful being he was always meant to be.

It began in a garden.

Aziraphale tried to beg during the Fall. When that failed, he prayed. When that failed too, he fell into despair. He didn’t know Samael very well then, but he had made a promise to protect him, and those things matter. But even a promise wasn’t enough. In the end, he couldn’t change it, and Samael was lost to him. In the end, Aziraphale let evil take him, and harm come upon him.

That’s when he learnt what water on cheeks meant, and what loss is, and suddenly Aziraphale understood. He felt the memory of impossible wetness against incorporeal cheeks like burn marks, because he knew that’s when he failed the first time. He heard you’re not in any of our papers echoing in his mind after a sacrifice made in vain, because he knew that’s when he failed the second time. He saw glimpses of burning wings, of screams and war, because he knew that’s when he failed the third time, and if his heart hadn’t already been broken from what he couldn’t protect, it would have broken from what he knew he had torn apart.

Crawly had been broken, too. He had been tortured and left in ruins, and when he eventually emerged again it was right next to Aziraphale. He barely recognised him then, hollow from the pieces they had ripped out of him, and he was scared of the emptiness, scared of what could fill it. They were adversaries this time, in the garden, the one with the flesh and the sunlight, and Aziraphale learnt that he liked both very much indeed. Though he would have liked it more if it hadn’t meant he would, eventually, have to stare down into the hollow, beady eyes that kept haunting him. But Aziraphale had a job to do, he couldn’t avoid his broken promise with the gaping holes forever. And so, one day, he inevitably saw the sun reflect in Crawly’s scales for the first time, and this time, Crawly wasn’t covered in white, but in that other colour, the one he had worn then, the one to call home.

“Oh”, Aziraphale said. “Hello.”

Crawly stared at him with suspicious eyes, and though they were beady, they were also suddenly more radiant than any divine lace could ever be, more beautiful than any colour The Almighty could ever gift to the humans, and again Aziraphale said “oh.”

And he was never scared of the serpent of Eden again.

The snake hissed something or other, a threat probably, or a curse, yet Aziraphale laid down his sword in the grass, and sat down next to him. And there was peace, just for one moment, just a few tugs of time’s teeth, before Crawly slithered off again, spitting threats at his adversary, spitting curses at the warmth in his scales.

It hadn't taken much longer before Aziraphale realised what the lip pressing was, and he spent the rest of the week blushing, completely unable to look at the serpent and, well, things had gone down like a lead balloon after that.

It wasn’t until the Flood that it happened again, when Crawly told him, two hundred or so days into the flood, that he had changed his name.

“It doesn’t feel relevant anymore”, he muttered, picking at his softened scales. “I haven’t crawled even once since these bloody rains started, and it was a pretty shitty name to begin with anyway.”

“So what is it now?” Aziraphale said, absentmindedly, because he never foresaw these things happening in the beginning. “Swimmy?”

And Crawly said, “Crowley”, and Aziraphale said “oh”.

The first time he saw Crowley look at him in that way, the way that he does, the way that makes Aziraphale's heart race and every sharp hard thing in the world soften, was during one of their many drunken evenings in Babylon. It took him by surprise, because Crowley shouldn’t be looking at him like that. It hadn’t taken Aziraphale long to start looking at Crowley in that way, whether by coincidence or ineffability, but he was the wrong Aziraphale. This Crowley wasn’t for him. But he watched Crowley then, from the corner of his eye, as a mirror of his own expression, and suddenly his head was flooding with images of lips pressing together, of hands on arms hands on necks hands in hair.

“Oh”, he whispered and blushed, and then quickly decided to call it a night before his thoughts travelled as far as flesh in gardens, thank you very much. He was the wrong Aziraphale.

Then one day, Aziraphale somehow found himself the proud owner of a bookshop, chock-full of knicknacks, and well-stocked with volumes he would never sell. He looked around this new territory, proud to call it his, and suddenly found himself wondering whether he didn’t recognise this shop from a long, long time ago somewhere?

One day, he saw himself in the mirror, dressed in his new dapper sweater vest, and suddenly found himself wondering whether he didn’t recognise this sweater vest from a long, long time ago somewhere?

One day, he placed the bulls on the side tables, the bulls he had bought because Crowley had said they looked like perfect resting places for shades, and suddenly found himself wondering whether he didn’t recognise them from a long, long time ago somewhere?

And suddenly one day, from the very right angle, he saw it in his periphery: time, baring its teeth. Maybe Crowley was not the only echo unshrouding. Maybe Aziraphale was also an echo, and maybe, soon, there would be nothing left to unshroud.

And Aziraphale said “oh”.

The first time he kissed Crowley was the day he realised he might have to live out the rest of eternity without him.

Because the thing was, time hadn’t been reset. When Aziraphale walked with Crowley through the filament, and when Samael said ‘let there be light’, Aziraphale still remembered everything. It wasn’t time.

It was Crowley.

Crowley wasn't supposed to be there, yet suddenly there he was, just a borrowed fragment, a stolen moment, and the question was – who had he been stolen from?

He has replayed every word that the other Aziraphale said in his memory, looked at it from all possible angles, and asked himself, over and over, whether the other Aziraphale knew what was going to happen, whether the other Aziraphale lied.

Because this Aziraphale would know what’s going to happen. This Aziraphale would lie. This Aziraphale would know how time would go on to stalk him in every shadow, how the only gift he could give himself was hope, how the only gift he could give Crowley was 6000 years. Because maybe, he thinks like a millstone, maybe there never was such a thing as infinite timelines. Maybe there was only ever just this one.

Maybe he stole Crowley from himself.

It was ten years ago. Crowley had stumbled into the bookshop, bumped into the table and thrown off his glasses, as he always did, and when Aziraphale turned around to welcome him home, Crowley was standing right there, in that place, and Aziraphale suddenly realised what he hadn’t realised before, because this time Crowley also had that hairstyle. And Aziraphale saw it all – the bookshop, the sweater vest, the god-awful bulls – and he felt the “oh” squeeze out of him, as if he suddenly found himself wedged between time’s cogwheels, stuck between the teeth of that godforsaken concept as it kept its relentless tugging.

“What do you think, angel?” Crowley said and spun around, showing off his new look, and Aziraphale shed his last feeble loyalties to a Heaven that might never have been good in the first place, set aside his crumbling obligations to another Aziraphale that might never have existed in the first place, and he took Crowley in his arms, cradling him, protecting him, begging him to call him home.

Crowley yelped in surprise when he pressed their lips together, but then he softened, and grabbed on to Aziraphale, grasped for him, even, with a different kind of desperation than the one Aziraphale tampered with in that moment, and Aziraphale knew exactly how it looked from the outside – he had seen them kiss in desperation before, or at least an alternate version of them, or at least an alternate timeline of them – and while his heart was breaking, it was everything he had ever wanted.

Sometimes he wonders if he wanted it since before he had learnt what ‘want’ was, maybe even before he had been given a body to ‘want’ with at all, but it hadn’t mattered, because it hadn't been for him to have. He wasn't the right Aziraphale, he wasn't the lucky one. He still doesn't know if he is, but in that moment – lost in Crowley’s arms, in his breath, in his soft, soft flesh – he understood the cost of being the right one. And still, Aziraphale would consider him lucky.

“I would have got my hair cut a lot earlier if I had known you had a thing for short hair”, Crowley muttered later.

“I don't have a thing for short hair. I love you in spite of what hairstyle you wear”, Aziraphale huffed, and Crowley grumbled because that wasn't quite how he had wanted to hear it said, but Aziraphale maintained that it was true and that Crowley could take it or leave it, and if he didn’t stop complaining Aziraphale might reconsider the entire affair.

“You wish you could say no to this”, Crowley replied in that ridiculous snake-like way that would have been very easy to say no to, if everything in Aziraphale, all the way down to his Grace, hadn't been screaming yes.

It wasn’t not true. He had seen Crowley in an abundance of different hairstyles over the years and he has loved them all. But when he saw Crowley the first time, overwhelmed by the world and its beauty, a first glimpse of what Samael would go on to create, Crowley was the infuriating being at its centre, and he had short tousled hair and a mocking grin (and later on, after Babylon, Aziraphale has thought about hands – exactly like his though not in the way that mattered – stroking that short tousled hair, and could almost imagine them as his own). He loves all of Crowley’s hairstyles, but he loves none as much as he loves this one.

He also fears none as much as he fears this one.

And yet, Aziraphale has never, not once, asked him to grow it out.

Time is a complicated beast, Aziraphale has always known. It stalks him, and he feels it every time he looks at something and breathes “oh”. He wonders if it's ever going to pounce. Whether its claws will mark him. Whether its tugging teeth will ever tear his flesh, or whether it will show him mercy in the end.

Either way, Aziraphale doesn’t understand much about time, except for the one thing: there's no running from it.

That's how he knows what's in the gift.

He makes a big show of opening it, playing up the eagerness just a tad, while still allowing himself to appreciate every detail of the thoughtful wrappings, the way he always does, the way Crowley always sees through but pretends not to.

“Crowley! It's beautiful!” he breathes.

Crowley sniffs. “Whatever. Saw it and thought it'd look good on you. ‘S no big deal”, he says, in passing, as if Aziraphale doesn't know him, as if Aziraphale doesn't know that he spent hours picking the right one, and half as long on the elaborate wrappings.

“I love it”, Aziraphale says. “Thank you”.

“You're welcome” Crowley mutters and blushes. “I could, I mean, if you want to, I could put it on you. If, you know. If you wanted to.”

It's the bowtie. The tartan bowtie he's seen, and loved, but never bought because “oh”. He's never said a word about it, but of course Crowley would buy it for him. Crowley always buys the right things.

Crowley always does the right things.

Aziraphale has turned every detail from that memory around so many times they've started to erode. They were all just things with no name or concept to him then, and it was so long ago, too. Even an angel’s memory will become unreliable after 6000 years, and there’s nothing but fragments for him to desperately cling to, desperately try to weave into a tapestry of his greatest fear.

Most memories only come back to him after he’s already put the right thing in the right spot, but there are things he knows in advance. Over time though, and despite his best efforts, they've somehow all manifested in one way or another, and now he can count what's missing on a single finger: his bowtie. He remembers it clearly, and he has placed all his remaining faith in it, because he knows for certain that as long as he doesn't wear it, Crowley is safe. He swore never to buy it. And yet, like all other things on the list, it's somehow found it's way right into the very palm of his very hand.

“Not right now, darling”, Aziraphale says, and sets the box down. He leaves the lid off though, and keeps it within view, so he can get used to its presence. It truly is charming. A lovely gift.

Crowley watches him set it down with a frown, and Aziraphale can see how the uneasiness takes hold. “Don’t you like it? ‘Cause I can take it back. Or I can get another one, you can pick whichever one y-”

“Darling”, Aziraphale interrupts and smiles reassuringly. “It's perfect. I love it.” The smile comes easily, because Aziraphale has been battling this beast for years, and he refuses to yield. They’re roommates, all three of them, in this bookshop, and he has learnt to live with it. If this is all he will get, he will cherish every moment. If this is all he will get, it means he is the right one, after all. It means he is the lucky one.

They settle on the sofa, Crowley's head in his lap, his hand in Crowley's hair, the way Crowley likes it. Crowley's gaze is still set on the gift, and Aziraphale swears he can hear some very silent threats grumbled in its direction. Most days, Aziraphale would sigh and say that if he needs to threaten anyone's possessions he should stick to his own, but the poor bowtie will have to fend for itself because the question in his mind won't stop churning. Who did he steal Crowley from?

Maybe his past self will come barging through that wall as soon as Aziraphale puts on the bowtie. Maybe this was all Crowley would be in the end, just a borrowed fragment of someone who shouldn’t exist, and all Aziraphale was able to give him was almost 6000 years of stolen moments they never should have had in the first place. He hopes Crowley would have thought it to be worth it, had he known.

Or, he prays, maybe they’re not just stolen moments. Maybe they’re a second chance, miraculously gifted by the Almighty and theirs to keep – love always protects – because he has seen it himself, in a time before time, in a time inside time, in a time that is the present: this was never a coincidence. They were always meant to love eachother. He trusts in Crowley’s love for him, trusts in his own love for Crowley, trusts – love always trusts – that it’s ineffable, hopes – love always hopes – that this was all part of Her plan, because their love is older and greater than time itself, and love always, always, perseveres.

Then again, so does time, and while Aziraphale trusts love, he knows time: it never relents.

He feels Crowley shift a little, making his presence remembered, making sure Aziraphale hasn't forgotten about his wounded pride. “If you love it so much”, he grumbles and Aziraphale rolls his eyes fondly, “why aren’t you wearing it?”

Time is a complicated beast, Aziraphale thinks again, and feels its hot wet breath down his neck, its teeth tugging at his throat. He waits patiently for it to decide whether to strike or not, and he reminds himself, again and again, that if this is all he will get, if love isn't enough to protect them after all and Crowley will be taken from him as soon as he puts on that bowtie - it means he is, and always has been, the lucky one.

He smiles, and scratches Crowley's scalp just the way he likes it. Cherishes the content grunt it elicits. “I will wear it, darling. Tomorrow”, he tuts, soft and indulgent, and he knows – with that same clarity that sometimes hits him nowadays – despite his crumbling core keening at the very thought of it, despite everything there is, that he will.