Casablanca - Hope In Sight fic for Cato
Title/Link: Casablanca
Author: doctor_caduceus
Pairing/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,144
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale have been apart for a decade, and it wasn't Aziraphale's idea.
Author's Note: For the hope_in_sight, as requested by catoasapun. I think this is my first 100% Good Omens fic...anyway, thank you for the hospitality! Beta'd by the inestimable piping_hot.
He never wanted to see England again.
England was cold and miserable. England was a mud pit, and all the cosmopolitan features, the roads, the landscaping, the towers, the bridges, the chunnels, did not change the fact that underneath it all, it was a still a disgusting, clammy mud pit. It still had that 14th century stink all over it, mystery plays and Cromwell who might not have been 14th century but who was dour enough to fit right in.
Sure, the whole antichrist situation could have gone significantly worse. For one thing, it could have gone right and then one of the two of them would've been enslaved for all eternity. Instead, Crowley had sauntered vaguely upwards and was told he was being demoted out of hell, and Aziraphale…
Aziraphale.
Crowley's new body looked rather like his old body. Good cheekbones, dark hair, and he still wore sunglasses every waking hour. Crowley, however, did not feel even remotely like the old Crowley in the slightest. His hair was actual bedhead, rather than the carefully construed bedhead that was so constantly in fashion. He was clean shaven, but that was only because he couldn't concentrate well enough to grow rakish stubble. The constant sunglasses were now purchased at tourist dives and petrol stations rather than hand crafted French things costing a skilled worker's annual salary (or two thirds that if said worker was in a union).
He still slept. Sometimes for days at a time.
He still had the beautiful car. It was rusting inexorably from the salt of the ocean and the sand, mostly because he couldn't be bothered to exor the rust right back off.
He still had the plants. They were dropping leaves all over the place because he was really depressing them.
He still spent an inordinate amount of time in restaurants and bars.
Or rather bars. Or rather bar. And rather than 'an inordinate amount,' he spent closer to 'all.' Sangfreda, Crowley had called it, after himself, and it was his bar. Having once been hell's most approachable demon, Crowley had, in recent years, become Casablanca's least approachable bartender, notorious for being drunk himself almost every hour of the day or night.
Crowley had been told that if he liked earth so much he could fucking stay there and that was fine, no feathers off his wings. Rising that little bit didn't hurt. Aziraphale...
The last time Crowley had seen Aziraphale, he'd been burning. Immolating. Because heaven had told Aziraphale the same blessed thing that hell had told Crowley, but Aziraphale didn't get to rise. He'd had to fall. Not all the way, not completely, not as far as Crowley had all those centuries ago, but he fell. And the thing they never mentioned- presumably back in Crowley's day because no one actually knew yet- was that falling hurt. Crowley had never mentioned that part to Aziraphale, because, well, it never seemed like it was going to be applicable. Fall, Aziraphale? Never, Crowley had thought, there was just no way.
The last time Crowley had seen Aziraphale, he'd been incinerating, burning, like a statue of burning phosphorus in agony, alight in a heat that Crowley couldn't even approach, though he did try. Hours later, the flames finally died away.
Aziraphale's new body looked very little like his old body. The rolly-polly, professorial physique, huggable like a beanbag animal, was replaced by razor sharp lines and angles. He was lean in a way that Crowley was not. Crowley was flexible and smooth like the serpent he was, made for escape. Aziraphale's new body looked nothing like escape, or like comfort. Aziraphale's new body looked like it was made to make people ache, weep, maybe bleed.
“Aziraphale?” Crowley had said tentatively as Aziraphale, still smoldering, shaking ash off his wings as he rose. Aziraphale looked over his shoulder and smiled, bright and in so much pain.
“In the flesh, darling,” he said to Crowley, eyes sharp like cut glass, brushing golden hair out off his forehead.
Things went down hill from there. Rapidly. For about a week, they'd tried to keep calm and carry on, feeding ducks, going to lunch, but every word from Aziraphale's lips seemed like a taunting parody of his former self. Every sweet and modest admonishment when Crowley said something cruel, every platitude, all were the same on paper. The way Aziraphale said them, though... a spark of tempted curiosity in his eyes when he did, a fond amusement at Crowley's more wicked ideas, that was new, and chilling. Crowley had tried upping the ante, suggesting far more atrocious things than the petty aggravations that he'd once used to spread evil, and even those were met only with mild amusement and maybe a click of the tongue.
The balance, their gentlemen's agreement, had lost its fulcrum.
They'd agreed, or rather, Crowley had agreed and Aziraphale had laughed, that it would be wisest to spend some time apart. It was an easy lie: who knew whose radar they were still on, and the Antichrist was still out there. It certainly wasn't because Crowley was running hard and fast from his friend, his only friend, and now (technically) the only member of his species that he knew of since neither was an angel or a demon but something... else. It wasn't that at all.
He certainly hadn't been drinking for the past decade to try to selectively eradicate memories of Aziraphale, trying to bring back the way things had been before, trying to get rid of the image of Aziraphale's new, horrifying beauty and resurrect the doughy, dowdy, bookish angel with whom he'd spent nearly all of his life.
It was New Year's Eve, two thousand and nine, and the people of Casablanca were looking forward to ringing out a decade that had been incredibly shit for just about everyone. Crowley was still trying to ring out the last millennium, and a decade hadn't been enough to do it yet, so he was redoubling his efforts in these last several minutes. Drunken celebrants periodically tried to get into the bar, pushing at the glass and brass door, then pulling it, confused. It was a bar, right?
“Fuck off!” Crowley roared at the door, hurling a valuable crystal decanter from when the city was just born and shattering it to spook away the playboys, the tourists, the everyone. “I've seen the Antichrist, you brats! Thwarted the apocalypse! And tonight, I want to get drunk alone! So show some bloody respect.”
He tried to get close enough to the door to get it open to throw something else valuable closer to someone's head, forgetting just how long he'd been drinking. Moments later, he was slightly surprised to find himself on the floor, legs puddled under him in a big lump, sunglasses skidding across the floor to points unknown. He was about to shake enough alcohol from his system to get enough coordination back to scream at the locals, when he heard a warbly tinkle of out of tune piano keys.
“That takes me back,” a voice chuckled, holding middle C down and letting the ill-tuned tone echo though the empty bar. “You run a bar and people want alcohol, yet on the most alcohol drenched day of the year, you do everything in your power to drive them off, and you keep everything you're supposed to be selling for yourself.”
Crowley made an incoherent noise, much like the piano, but lower pitched.
“I remember a certain angel who used to behave in such a way with books,” the voice chuckled, playing a glissando which got more in tune the higher he went. He went back to the bottom of the keyboard and started playing a chromatic scale, now acoustically perfect.
“Zphh...” Crowley sputtered from the floor, pushing enough alcohol out to at least find his feet.
“Of course, I couldn't actually consume the books in the most literal sense, whereas you seem to have drunk about half your own bar.”
Crowley managed to get the soles of both feet on the floor without dislocating his ankles and rolled forward, elbows, knees, okay...
“Honestly, darling, this is no way to run a business,” the voice added, striking up a few chords.
“'Zrphale,” Crowley tried again.
“Yes, dearest, Aziraphale,” he said, and Crowley started to recognize the tune as he managed to pull himself into one of the chairs he never bothered to put up on the tables. The not-really-so-much-an-angel anymore continued:
“You've been avoiding me,” he said, a tightness in his voice. “But by the sheer number of Queen albums in your poor car, you've been avoiding everything. I suppose it's silly to be offended by the cold shoulder I've gotten-”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley finally got out, muscles going slack again as he went limp in the chair.
“In the flesh, darling,” Aziraphale echoed from years ago, but his eyes looked less like cut glass and more like glass that had been tumbled and softened by sea and sand for decades, all the sharp edges worn away.
Aziraphale was playing Queen. Be-bop. Crowley tittered a slightly hysterical laugh. Aziraphale was playing “You're My Best Friend” in his bar, looking every bit as fit as he had when they were standing around outside the garden of Eden.
“You're not my Aziraphale,” Crowley said hollowly, and jumped as Aziraphale slammed his elegant hands down on the ivories and rounded on him.
“And when, precisely, did you have the opportunity to make that assessment?” Aziraphale snapped. “You ran from me. You took one look and you faked your way through one week- pathetically, I might add- before you ran from me!”
Crowley cringed a bit, and Aziraphale's expression softened.
“Sober up, damn you, and talk to me, Crowley!” Aziraphale pleaded. “It's been ten years, and I miss you.”
Crowley pressed his hands against his eyes and sighed, grimacing as the alcohol vanished from his blood, then dropped limp hands back to his lap.
“Hi,” he grumbled.
“Hello,” Aziraphale replied, and paused, taking a breath. Crowley knew that look, the 'I've got something to get off my chest' look, the one that preceded ultimatums and interventions and phrases like 'I want a divorce' and felt queasy as Aziraphale continued:
“I've given you space, I've kept my distance and muddled through this debacle all on my own. Are you ready to act like an adult and talk about it?”
Crowley made a non-committal noise and looked at Aziraphale from under half-shut eyelids, suspicious. Aziraphale huffed and rose.
“Fine,” he snipped. “I'll just fuck off and try again in a decade, then, hm?”
Crowley flinched at the unexpected vulgarity (still not used to that) and sighed, flapping his hand in the air like a dying fish.
“Come back, just--” he glared at the door, which locked itself again every time Aziraphale attempted to unlock it. He caught sight of his sunglasses by the door and called them back to his hand, putting them back on.
“You didn't call, and I wasn't expecting company,” Crowley started, “And I was really, really drunk.”
Aziraphale turned back to him, looking resentful and hurt underneath all that preternatural prettiness.
“You left me, Crowley,” he said again. Crowley shrugged.
“I'm here now?” Crowley replied helplessly, and that made Aziraphale's platinum brow knit and the bottles on the wall started to shake.
“You're here?!” Aziraphale exclaimed. “You were drunk! I came over the fucking ocean to see you! You're not here now, I'm here now!”
And with that, tears shimmered in Aziraphale's perfect blue eyes, coral lip quivering, and Crowley snapped his fingers in paranoid triumph.
“That!” Crowley cried, waving his index finger in the air suspiciously. “That is exactly what I'm talking about! Everything about you is a trap now, it's... it's all temptation. You're a trick, Aziraphale!”
Aziraphale's tears spilled over the edges of his eyelids.
“What does that even mean, Crowley?” he sniffled. “Tricks and traps and temptation are your sort of thing, not mine! I thought you knew every trick in the book, that's your side's whole raison d'être, deceit and temptation and--”
The guilt twisted in Crowley's gut as Aziraphale drew a sob, and Crowley flinched, darting behind the bar and grabbing another bottle, twisting off the top and splashing himself a shot, downing it quickly, and then a second.
“See, that right there, that's perfect. That's amazing. Perfectly designed to make anyone just take you right into his arms and comfort you and tell you everything's going to be all right and do anything he can to make it all better!” Crowley said with a faint hiss to all his S's. “It's the perfect way to bait a trap for me. I'm onto them. Ten years I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Aziraphale looked so small on the other side of the polished wood.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “What shoe?”
“I saw Aziraphale punished,” Crowley said, pacing back and forth behind the bar. “I watched Aziraphale burn, and burn, and scream."
"Why are you taking about me like I'm not here?" Aziraphale whimpered, but Crowley plowed on.
"I watched Aziraphale pay for what we did, for cocking up the ineffable plan.”
Crowley whipped up the nozzle of the seltzer dispenser and pointed it at the man who looked like the man who used to look like his friend.
“Got you now, Hastur! Beelzebub! Whoever!” he cried dramatically and sprayed the figure.
Surprisingly there was no screaming, just a yelp, and no oily smoke, just a fine back splash of holy water mist. Crowley couldn't help but cringe, even though it was just water to him these days, but the grisly meltdown never came.
“I,” Aziraphale began, fizzy water dripping over his face, down his curls, wiping the back of his hand under his nose, “am going to kill you, Crowley!”
“You're not melting,” Crowley said. Aziraphale clenched his fists at his sides.
“No I'm not melting! I'm not a demon, you idiot, any more than you are these days! What are you staring at?!”
Crowley's mouth felt a bit dry as he eyed Aziraphale's chest under the now drenched white shirt.
“They really went all out with your new kit, didn't they?” Crowley choked out. Aziraphale stomped his foot, picked up a shot glass from the bar and hurled it at Crowley, who ducked just in time.
“FIRST you avoid me for a decade,” he railed, “then you insult me, then you mistake me for an idiot like Hastur, then you try to kill me, and then, to wrap it all up, you ogle me?”
Aziraphale snapped his hands to shake some of the water off of his fingers, though it had the effect of stripping all of it away, rendering him dry and perfectly pressed again.
“The gall of you, Crowley, I mean really, the unbelievable cheek!” he fumed. “Whining that you can't bear to be around me because the new me doesn't look enough like the old me, all angst-ridden because I'm not all soft around the middle any more, and then the minute there's a wet t-shirt contest, you're suddenly amenable to me again? I needed you, I've been utterly alone for ten bloody years because you left me and none of my old crowd will return my calls, obviously, and now...”
“You're not a trap?” Crowley asked, dropping the nozzle.
“No,” Aziraphale replied with a pout, “though I really wouldn't be a very good one if I said 'yes,' would I?”
Crowley cautiously came out from behind the bar.
“So the betrayed expression, and the tears, that was...” Crowley began. Aziraphale looked at him resentfully.
“Because you betrayed me, you complete idiot, and the tears were because I was upset that you betrayed me!” Aziraphale snapped, then added, “You complete idiot!”
“I missed you,” Crowley said, approaching him with his hands trembling, almost as though getting the alcohol out of his blood had given him the DTs, even though that was impossible. Aziraphale wiped the back of his hand under his nose with a snuffle, looking so much younger than all-the-years old, and maybe he was. Maybe they both were.
With that, Crowley took a step forward and grabbed hold of Aziraphale, wrapping his arms around the weirdly lean, shining, not-quite-angel, hugging him so tightly that he knocked his own sunglasses crooked.
“I missed you and I'm sorry, and everything's going to be all right, and... tell me what...”
Crowley trailed off, not saying the last bit, 'what you need me to do to make it better,' because he'd screwed up so, so badly, and who knew if that sort of thing could be undone. Aziraphale could pull away, could slap him for thinking that he could just have a do-over.
But then, Aziraphale's fingers crept up his back, clinging to his shirt at the shoulders.
“It hurt,” he murmured. “All that burning.”
“I know,” Crowley sighed, guilt untwisting from his guts which immediately re-twisted in sympathy. “I'm so sorry. But I can't fix that. Why did you... You could've made friends with the humans if you were so damned lonely, why is it only me who counts?”
He could practically feel Aziraphale's withering look against his shoulder, because it would've been exactly the same look he'd be giving anyone who'd asked him such an idiotic question. Crowley was lucky that Aziraphale still had that bit of angelic nature in him, as his response was much more flattering.
“Because, you're the only one who's counted for centuries, stupid. Even before it all came undone, it's been you and me since Eden. You running off hurt worse than the fall,” Aziraphale babbled, every pain spilling out now that the floodgate was open. “God, Crowley, it's been so, so lonely, no one to talk to who understands even a little... Can you fix that?”
Crowley sighed, slit-pupiled eyes not meant for this sort of emotional display and sort of itching as a result.
“I can try, Aziraphale,” Crowley said. Aziraphale nodded against his shoulder.
"That's all I want, Crowley," he said, squeezing him tightly. "Just don't want you to run off again, and to stop looking at me like I have snakes for hair or something."
Crowley hissed fondly.
"You wish."
"And don't douse me with water again," Aziraphale added. Crowley paused, glancing down over Aziraphale's shoulder at the newly Adonis-esque backside his friend was sporting.
"No promises," Crowley replied.
Author: doctor_caduceus
Pairing/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,144
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale have been apart for a decade, and it wasn't Aziraphale's idea.
Author's Note: For the hope_in_sight, as requested by catoasapun. I think this is my first 100% Good Omens fic...anyway, thank you for the hospitality! Beta'd by the inestimable piping_hot.
He never wanted to see England again.
England was cold and miserable. England was a mud pit, and all the cosmopolitan features, the roads, the landscaping, the towers, the bridges, the chunnels, did not change the fact that underneath it all, it was a still a disgusting, clammy mud pit. It still had that 14th century stink all over it, mystery plays and Cromwell who might not have been 14th century but who was dour enough to fit right in.
Sure, the whole antichrist situation could have gone significantly worse. For one thing, it could have gone right and then one of the two of them would've been enslaved for all eternity. Instead, Crowley had sauntered vaguely upwards and was told he was being demoted out of hell, and Aziraphale…
Aziraphale.
Crowley's new body looked rather like his old body. Good cheekbones, dark hair, and he still wore sunglasses every waking hour. Crowley, however, did not feel even remotely like the old Crowley in the slightest. His hair was actual bedhead, rather than the carefully construed bedhead that was so constantly in fashion. He was clean shaven, but that was only because he couldn't concentrate well enough to grow rakish stubble. The constant sunglasses were now purchased at tourist dives and petrol stations rather than hand crafted French things costing a skilled worker's annual salary (or two thirds that if said worker was in a union).
He still slept. Sometimes for days at a time.
He still had the beautiful car. It was rusting inexorably from the salt of the ocean and the sand, mostly because he couldn't be bothered to exor the rust right back off.
He still had the plants. They were dropping leaves all over the place because he was really depressing them.
He still spent an inordinate amount of time in restaurants and bars.
Or rather bars. Or rather bar. And rather than 'an inordinate amount,' he spent closer to 'all.' Sangfreda, Crowley had called it, after himself, and it was his bar. Having once been hell's most approachable demon, Crowley had, in recent years, become Casablanca's least approachable bartender, notorious for being drunk himself almost every hour of the day or night.
Crowley had been told that if he liked earth so much he could fucking stay there and that was fine, no feathers off his wings. Rising that little bit didn't hurt. Aziraphale...
The last time Crowley had seen Aziraphale, he'd been burning. Immolating. Because heaven had told Aziraphale the same blessed thing that hell had told Crowley, but Aziraphale didn't get to rise. He'd had to fall. Not all the way, not completely, not as far as Crowley had all those centuries ago, but he fell. And the thing they never mentioned- presumably back in Crowley's day because no one actually knew yet- was that falling hurt. Crowley had never mentioned that part to Aziraphale, because, well, it never seemed like it was going to be applicable. Fall, Aziraphale? Never, Crowley had thought, there was just no way.
The last time Crowley had seen Aziraphale, he'd been incinerating, burning, like a statue of burning phosphorus in agony, alight in a heat that Crowley couldn't even approach, though he did try. Hours later, the flames finally died away.
Aziraphale's new body looked very little like his old body. The rolly-polly, professorial physique, huggable like a beanbag animal, was replaced by razor sharp lines and angles. He was lean in a way that Crowley was not. Crowley was flexible and smooth like the serpent he was, made for escape. Aziraphale's new body looked nothing like escape, or like comfort. Aziraphale's new body looked like it was made to make people ache, weep, maybe bleed.
“Aziraphale?” Crowley had said tentatively as Aziraphale, still smoldering, shaking ash off his wings as he rose. Aziraphale looked over his shoulder and smiled, bright and in so much pain.
“In the flesh, darling,” he said to Crowley, eyes sharp like cut glass, brushing golden hair out off his forehead.
Things went down hill from there. Rapidly. For about a week, they'd tried to keep calm and carry on, feeding ducks, going to lunch, but every word from Aziraphale's lips seemed like a taunting parody of his former self. Every sweet and modest admonishment when Crowley said something cruel, every platitude, all were the same on paper. The way Aziraphale said them, though... a spark of tempted curiosity in his eyes when he did, a fond amusement at Crowley's more wicked ideas, that was new, and chilling. Crowley had tried upping the ante, suggesting far more atrocious things than the petty aggravations that he'd once used to spread evil, and even those were met only with mild amusement and maybe a click of the tongue.
The balance, their gentlemen's agreement, had lost its fulcrum.
They'd agreed, or rather, Crowley had agreed and Aziraphale had laughed, that it would be wisest to spend some time apart. It was an easy lie: who knew whose radar they were still on, and the Antichrist was still out there. It certainly wasn't because Crowley was running hard and fast from his friend, his only friend, and now (technically) the only member of his species that he knew of since neither was an angel or a demon but something... else. It wasn't that at all.
He certainly hadn't been drinking for the past decade to try to selectively eradicate memories of Aziraphale, trying to bring back the way things had been before, trying to get rid of the image of Aziraphale's new, horrifying beauty and resurrect the doughy, dowdy, bookish angel with whom he'd spent nearly all of his life.
It was New Year's Eve, two thousand and nine, and the people of Casablanca were looking forward to ringing out a decade that had been incredibly shit for just about everyone. Crowley was still trying to ring out the last millennium, and a decade hadn't been enough to do it yet, so he was redoubling his efforts in these last several minutes. Drunken celebrants periodically tried to get into the bar, pushing at the glass and brass door, then pulling it, confused. It was a bar, right?
“Fuck off!” Crowley roared at the door, hurling a valuable crystal decanter from when the city was just born and shattering it to spook away the playboys, the tourists, the everyone. “I've seen the Antichrist, you brats! Thwarted the apocalypse! And tonight, I want to get drunk alone! So show some bloody respect.”
He tried to get close enough to the door to get it open to throw something else valuable closer to someone's head, forgetting just how long he'd been drinking. Moments later, he was slightly surprised to find himself on the floor, legs puddled under him in a big lump, sunglasses skidding across the floor to points unknown. He was about to shake enough alcohol from his system to get enough coordination back to scream at the locals, when he heard a warbly tinkle of out of tune piano keys.
“That takes me back,” a voice chuckled, holding middle C down and letting the ill-tuned tone echo though the empty bar. “You run a bar and people want alcohol, yet on the most alcohol drenched day of the year, you do everything in your power to drive them off, and you keep everything you're supposed to be selling for yourself.”
Crowley made an incoherent noise, much like the piano, but lower pitched.
“I remember a certain angel who used to behave in such a way with books,” the voice chuckled, playing a glissando which got more in tune the higher he went. He went back to the bottom of the keyboard and started playing a chromatic scale, now acoustically perfect.
“Zphh...” Crowley sputtered from the floor, pushing enough alcohol out to at least find his feet.
“Of course, I couldn't actually consume the books in the most literal sense, whereas you seem to have drunk about half your own bar.”
Crowley managed to get the soles of both feet on the floor without dislocating his ankles and rolled forward, elbows, knees, okay...
“Honestly, darling, this is no way to run a business,” the voice added, striking up a few chords.
“'Zrphale,” Crowley tried again.
“Yes, dearest, Aziraphale,” he said, and Crowley started to recognize the tune as he managed to pull himself into one of the chairs he never bothered to put up on the tables. The not-really-so-much-an-angel anymore continued:
“You've been avoiding me,” he said, a tightness in his voice. “But by the sheer number of Queen albums in your poor car, you've been avoiding everything. I suppose it's silly to be offended by the cold shoulder I've gotten-”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley finally got out, muscles going slack again as he went limp in the chair.
“In the flesh, darling,” Aziraphale echoed from years ago, but his eyes looked less like cut glass and more like glass that had been tumbled and softened by sea and sand for decades, all the sharp edges worn away.
Aziraphale was playing Queen. Be-bop. Crowley tittered a slightly hysterical laugh. Aziraphale was playing “You're My Best Friend” in his bar, looking every bit as fit as he had when they were standing around outside the garden of Eden.
“You're not my Aziraphale,” Crowley said hollowly, and jumped as Aziraphale slammed his elegant hands down on the ivories and rounded on him.
“And when, precisely, did you have the opportunity to make that assessment?” Aziraphale snapped. “You ran from me. You took one look and you faked your way through one week- pathetically, I might add- before you ran from me!”
Crowley cringed a bit, and Aziraphale's expression softened.
“Sober up, damn you, and talk to me, Crowley!” Aziraphale pleaded. “It's been ten years, and I miss you.”
Crowley pressed his hands against his eyes and sighed, grimacing as the alcohol vanished from his blood, then dropped limp hands back to his lap.
“Hi,” he grumbled.
“Hello,” Aziraphale replied, and paused, taking a breath. Crowley knew that look, the 'I've got something to get off my chest' look, the one that preceded ultimatums and interventions and phrases like 'I want a divorce' and felt queasy as Aziraphale continued:
“I've given you space, I've kept my distance and muddled through this debacle all on my own. Are you ready to act like an adult and talk about it?”
Crowley made a non-committal noise and looked at Aziraphale from under half-shut eyelids, suspicious. Aziraphale huffed and rose.
“Fine,” he snipped. “I'll just fuck off and try again in a decade, then, hm?”
Crowley flinched at the unexpected vulgarity (still not used to that) and sighed, flapping his hand in the air like a dying fish.
“Come back, just--” he glared at the door, which locked itself again every time Aziraphale attempted to unlock it. He caught sight of his sunglasses by the door and called them back to his hand, putting them back on.
“You didn't call, and I wasn't expecting company,” Crowley started, “And I was really, really drunk.”
Aziraphale turned back to him, looking resentful and hurt underneath all that preternatural prettiness.
“You left me, Crowley,” he said again. Crowley shrugged.
“I'm here now?” Crowley replied helplessly, and that made Aziraphale's platinum brow knit and the bottles on the wall started to shake.
“You're here?!” Aziraphale exclaimed. “You were drunk! I came over the fucking ocean to see you! You're not here now, I'm here now!”
And with that, tears shimmered in Aziraphale's perfect blue eyes, coral lip quivering, and Crowley snapped his fingers in paranoid triumph.
“That!” Crowley cried, waving his index finger in the air suspiciously. “That is exactly what I'm talking about! Everything about you is a trap now, it's... it's all temptation. You're a trick, Aziraphale!”
Aziraphale's tears spilled over the edges of his eyelids.
“What does that even mean, Crowley?” he sniffled. “Tricks and traps and temptation are your sort of thing, not mine! I thought you knew every trick in the book, that's your side's whole raison d'être, deceit and temptation and--”
The guilt twisted in Crowley's gut as Aziraphale drew a sob, and Crowley flinched, darting behind the bar and grabbing another bottle, twisting off the top and splashing himself a shot, downing it quickly, and then a second.
“See, that right there, that's perfect. That's amazing. Perfectly designed to make anyone just take you right into his arms and comfort you and tell you everything's going to be all right and do anything he can to make it all better!” Crowley said with a faint hiss to all his S's. “It's the perfect way to bait a trap for me. I'm onto them. Ten years I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Aziraphale looked so small on the other side of the polished wood.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “What shoe?”
“I saw Aziraphale punished,” Crowley said, pacing back and forth behind the bar. “I watched Aziraphale burn, and burn, and scream."
"Why are you taking about me like I'm not here?" Aziraphale whimpered, but Crowley plowed on.
"I watched Aziraphale pay for what we did, for cocking up the ineffable plan.”
Crowley whipped up the nozzle of the seltzer dispenser and pointed it at the man who looked like the man who used to look like his friend.
“Got you now, Hastur! Beelzebub! Whoever!” he cried dramatically and sprayed the figure.
Surprisingly there was no screaming, just a yelp, and no oily smoke, just a fine back splash of holy water mist. Crowley couldn't help but cringe, even though it was just water to him these days, but the grisly meltdown never came.
“I,” Aziraphale began, fizzy water dripping over his face, down his curls, wiping the back of his hand under his nose, “am going to kill you, Crowley!”
“You're not melting,” Crowley said. Aziraphale clenched his fists at his sides.
“No I'm not melting! I'm not a demon, you idiot, any more than you are these days! What are you staring at?!”
Crowley's mouth felt a bit dry as he eyed Aziraphale's chest under the now drenched white shirt.
“They really went all out with your new kit, didn't they?” Crowley choked out. Aziraphale stomped his foot, picked up a shot glass from the bar and hurled it at Crowley, who ducked just in time.
“FIRST you avoid me for a decade,” he railed, “then you insult me, then you mistake me for an idiot like Hastur, then you try to kill me, and then, to wrap it all up, you ogle me?”
Aziraphale snapped his hands to shake some of the water off of his fingers, though it had the effect of stripping all of it away, rendering him dry and perfectly pressed again.
“The gall of you, Crowley, I mean really, the unbelievable cheek!” he fumed. “Whining that you can't bear to be around me because the new me doesn't look enough like the old me, all angst-ridden because I'm not all soft around the middle any more, and then the minute there's a wet t-shirt contest, you're suddenly amenable to me again? I needed you, I've been utterly alone for ten bloody years because you left me and none of my old crowd will return my calls, obviously, and now...”
“You're not a trap?” Crowley asked, dropping the nozzle.
“No,” Aziraphale replied with a pout, “though I really wouldn't be a very good one if I said 'yes,' would I?”
Crowley cautiously came out from behind the bar.
“So the betrayed expression, and the tears, that was...” Crowley began. Aziraphale looked at him resentfully.
“Because you betrayed me, you complete idiot, and the tears were because I was upset that you betrayed me!” Aziraphale snapped, then added, “You complete idiot!”
“I missed you,” Crowley said, approaching him with his hands trembling, almost as though getting the alcohol out of his blood had given him the DTs, even though that was impossible. Aziraphale wiped the back of his hand under his nose with a snuffle, looking so much younger than all-the-years old, and maybe he was. Maybe they both were.
With that, Crowley took a step forward and grabbed hold of Aziraphale, wrapping his arms around the weirdly lean, shining, not-quite-angel, hugging him so tightly that he knocked his own sunglasses crooked.
“I missed you and I'm sorry, and everything's going to be all right, and... tell me what...”
Crowley trailed off, not saying the last bit, 'what you need me to do to make it better,' because he'd screwed up so, so badly, and who knew if that sort of thing could be undone. Aziraphale could pull away, could slap him for thinking that he could just have a do-over.
But then, Aziraphale's fingers crept up his back, clinging to his shirt at the shoulders.
“It hurt,” he murmured. “All that burning.”
“I know,” Crowley sighed, guilt untwisting from his guts which immediately re-twisted in sympathy. “I'm so sorry. But I can't fix that. Why did you... You could've made friends with the humans if you were so damned lonely, why is it only me who counts?”
He could practically feel Aziraphale's withering look against his shoulder, because it would've been exactly the same look he'd be giving anyone who'd asked him such an idiotic question. Crowley was lucky that Aziraphale still had that bit of angelic nature in him, as his response was much more flattering.
“Because, you're the only one who's counted for centuries, stupid. Even before it all came undone, it's been you and me since Eden. You running off hurt worse than the fall,” Aziraphale babbled, every pain spilling out now that the floodgate was open. “God, Crowley, it's been so, so lonely, no one to talk to who understands even a little... Can you fix that?”
Crowley sighed, slit-pupiled eyes not meant for this sort of emotional display and sort of itching as a result.
“I can try, Aziraphale,” Crowley said. Aziraphale nodded against his shoulder.
"That's all I want, Crowley," he said, squeezing him tightly. "Just don't want you to run off again, and to stop looking at me like I have snakes for hair or something."
Crowley hissed fondly.
"You wish."
"And don't douse me with water again," Aziraphale added. Crowley paused, glancing down over Aziraphale's shoulder at the newly Adonis-esque backside his friend was sporting.
"No promises," Crowley replied.