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While retiring to a farm is out of the question--they certainly didn’t build the Ritz next to a farm, now did they?-- Aziraphale decides it’s worth a miracle to give Crowley a proper garden next to their apartment. One with lavender, and philodendron, and—
“Apples?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale beams, the slightest bit proud. “I thought it a good touch. A little nostalgia, of our first meeting. You do remember, don’t you?”
The withering glare Crowley gives him is the closest to demonic he’s been in many decades. “I suppose I remember, angel.”
“They may not meet your standards now-- please, Crowley, don’t yell too harshly at them. You promised. Just a few lectures, and it will all be delightful. Don’t you think?”
“Did you put the aloe in the shade?”
“I spent a few miracles rearranging the layout of the building and changing the soil fertility. I could hardly indulge in another just to make myself a competent gardener, could I?” He lays one gentle hand on Crowley’s shoulder. “Besides, dear. That’s what you’re for.”
“I’M A DEMON. I’M NO COMMON GARDENER,” Crowley snarls, and proceeds to be an exceptional one. He’s quietly hissing at all the plants—only some of which are his old house plants that already know to tremble before him. “Think you’re special, deserve a garden, do you? You like the sun and a nice spot of rain before teatime? You lot don’t deserve a drop right now and when I come back tomorrow, you’d better straighten up! Except,” and Aziraphale doesn’t quite understand, the hesitant way he touches the young wood of apple sapling, “except you. You can’t stay, I’m afraid.”
When Aziraphale visits the garden the next morning—naturally he would make a garden omelette, now that he owns a garden—the apple tree is gone.
“Where did he put you,” Aziraphale huffs. The sapling was chosen specifically because it had grown first in Tadfield—Aziraphale likes details like that. He finds the sapling, clearly put out about being tossed this way and that, on a lovely hill a few streets over.
There’s nothing visibly wrong with the sapling. No leaf spots. She is strong and sweet and will make fine apples, someday. Crowley loves him for his kindness, and that’s what spurs him into bringing her right back, and hiding her behind a fig tree, encouraging her to look like it. Surely after a few days in the garden, the sapling will overcome whatever small insufficiency exiled her, and Aziraphale can bring her out of hiding.
Or, well, he truly intends to. It’s just that he gets—distracted. There’s Adam’s puberty and his engagement and then his wedding to work through, and Crowley’s strange behavior surrounding said wedding, and Aziraphale is trying to learn how to bake. All those years of chasing scrummy things, when he could’ve made them in his own home. His best friend as sous chef. Next time there’s a revolution on, Aziraphale will stay firmly planted in his armchair, thank you very much. (It was all Crowley’s idea. Crowley has the best ideas. Aziraphale doesn’t reject any of them anymore.)
“What do you think of weddings?” Crowley demands, nearly violently, at dinner at the Ritz one evening.
“Wedding cake is scrumptious,” Aziraphale confirms in reply. All he gets in return is stormy pouting.
Crowley is Aziraphale’s most beloved friend, and yet he’s still shrouded in dramatic mystery.
So in summary: busy. Very busy.
Thus it’s only years later, when Aziraphale finds a fat worm in his bag of apples from the market, that he manages to remember. In his hunger he sees her out the bright kitchen window: the apple sapling that’s still masquerading as a fig tree.
Fresh is best. Nothing is fresher than off the branch. And apple pie does deserve the best.
The wriggling worm is carefully deposited onto their garden soil, and Aziraphale hums as he fills a basket.
They look delicious, plump and crisp and deep, deep red. Aziraphale feels a glimmer of pride on behalf of his demon. Supposedly harsh, and all he does is foster blooming. That’s partially why Aziraphale loves him.
(Aziraphale does love him. That fact has been unavoidable since Crowley spastically hopped through a church and saved his books. And Aziraphale will tell him this, as soon as—well, as soon as Aziraphale has time. He’s very busy being in love with Crowley, you see. And Crowley must be busy doing anything but loving him back. Crowley had pleaded run away with me and Aziraphale had replied no. Crowley likes to go fast. Waiting around for a stubborn, slow lost angel isn’t his style.)
Crowley lacks in gluttony, but no one appreciates a good pie like Adam. He meets Crowley and the former Antichrist in the perfect summer of Tadfield’s fall, and portions them both off a generous slice. Angels are meant to be generous.
“Tea first,” Adam says firmly. He likes to enjoy things to the fullest.
“Bah,” says Crowley, which means I don’t see the point of adding things to something Aziraphale made to be perfect.
Aziraphale beams at him, and Crowley takes a bite. Then, several things happen in quick succession.
Adam’s slice and one of the nice plates they’d bought as a wedding present end up on the floor. Shattered and splattered. Crowley spits out his bite of pie, which Aziraphale doesn’t want to admit nearly brings him to hot tears.
“What the hell,” Crowley says, “was that, angel? No!” Adam’s got a dustpan and broom, and Crowley nearly beats him over the head with it. “Don’t touch it, you’re too human for that!”
“I thought that was a good thing,” Adam sighs, but he recognizes a tiff when he sees one starting. “All I wanted was company, tea, and something sweet.”
“Give us five minutes,” Crowley hisses. Adam leaves.
They stare at each other over the mess.
“I know you don’t favor cinnamon,” Aziraphale begins, “but I balanced it with—“
“The apples,” Crowley interrupts loudly. “Where. Did. You. Get. The Apples.”
“They’re organic,” Aziraphale tries to say cheerily, clasping his hands together in front of him. “We grew them. Or, I suppose, you did. Why, are you worried I ruined the tree?”
“Fuck,” Crowley says, and smashes his own plate. “Don’t say ‘we.’” That merits a flinch.
All Crowley ever wanted before was we. Aziraphale wanted we* for a while, but he’d come around.
*similar to we, but with the caveat of existing in an entirely different world where Heaven and Hell didn’t care who their reports spent their time with, and where Heaven was inherently good rather than robotically bloodthirsty.
“We did,” Aziraphale insists, trying not to sound as miffed as he is, “you took a poor little sapling out of the garden and I put her back, and you cared for her. Crowley, dear, she looks perfect to--”
“I CAN’T GROW APPLES,” Crowley roars.
Aziraphale looks at his soft lap. “You already did.”
“Apples,” Crowley moans, looking defeated, “take to my brand of horticulture too well. I can make a Bentley play a Queen record while it’s on fire. Apple trees, they—I. Do you remember Eden?”
“Of course,” Aziraphale says, even though he mostly remembers dark wings and yellow eyes and a young, pregnant woman, shivering in the cold.
“Hell said to cause trouble,” Crowley says. “Which I am not necessarily good at. I thought it was an excellent opportunity to wander through paradise and to—garden a little. Relax.”
“Crowley,” Aziraphale wonders, trying to keep his voice from shaking, “Crowley. Did you help grow the tree of knowledge of good and evil?”
“What? No!”
“Goodness me,” Aziraphale sighs, and resists the urge to pull Crowley against him. “You had me for a second, dear—“
“I wouldn’t garden something like that out in the middle of Eden,” Crowley hisses. “God—Satan—whoever—agh! But I did the other one.”
“The… other one.”
“You really had no idea what your job description was at the time, did you, angel?”
Aziraphale wrinkles his nose. “Apple guarding duty. Followed shortly by protecting the gate with the flaming sword, because if they’d gotten back into Eden and eaten the fruit of the tree of life they’d—“
The tree of life.
The tree of immortality.
“Darling, you…” is all Aziraphale can breathe, and Crowley tenses. Unfortunately, that’s as far as Aziraphale gets, because there’s snuffling at their feet.
“Shit,” Crowley says. “We forgot about Dog.”
Dog, who was once a Hellhound, had an extraordinarily long life as Adam’s pet. Old age gifted him silver in his fur, a tiny limp in his step. Furthermore, Adam’s reset of the world had made him, for most intents and purposes, a normal dog.
But now Dog is licking pie off his lips, and oh, he’s not a normal dog anymore. Ironic, Dog thinks, that he’d been held back from human food for so long because it wasn’t good for him.
Aziraphale can’t help but gasp, and that has Adam sticking his head back into the kitchen.
“What happened?”
“Dog’s immortal,” Crowley tells him briskly. “But we broke another one of your wedding gift plates.”
Adam has taken Armageddon in stride before. He’s Adam. The news merits nothing but a smile.
“I’ve been meaning to exchange the plates out and get the credit to purchase immortality for a while.” A glance between the angel and demon. “Dog, let’s go.”
That leaves only Crowley, Aziraphale, and a host of questions. For once, Aziraphale is the one with all of them.
“How,” he hums, “do you accidentally grow the tree of life?”
“We’ll need a few dinners and several crates of wine,” Crowley groans.
“That’s all? There should be forests of them.”
“No, angel. That’s what we’ll need for me to explain.”
Crowley does explain. It only takes one dinner, because for all his dramatics—the lounging and the pacing and the circling and the excessively loud record player that Crowley keeps on at their apartment while he tosses through their wine cellar—the answer is simple. When dinner is ready, Crowley carries Aziraphale’s homemade crepes to their garden, and they sit in the light of the sunset beneath the apple tree.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Wine first,” Crowley hisses, and tucks his dark glasses into his shirt pocket. A bottle of Sauvignon later, and he puts a hand atop Aziraphale’s warm, soft-skinned one. “The first tree of life was an accident, too. It’s just that saplings are good listeners.”
“I see,” Aziraphale says encouragingly, even though he does not.
The answer is this: as you water and prune and rearrange the sapling, you must whisper to it. Not just any careless whisper, no—apple trees like confessions. Apple trees like sincere, pure truth. (Much like truth, if you consume incorrectly, they're made of bitter poison.) This is why they, and only they, are capable of holding life, and knowledge of good and evil.
Crowley had absolute truths to offer, most of them about how the world was morally gray. He had questions, just as he’d always had questions. Except with apple trees, questions didn’t get you into trouble. (Until First Adam overheard a particularly impassioned question, and thought it compelling enough that he chose to eat what the Lord God commanded he never eat. Crowley means it, when he says the fall of man was easy—as with most things Crowley, it was accidental but inevitably significant.)
Apple trees liked trouble, and questions, and most of all…
“Love?” Aziraphale nearly sputters.
“Not in Eden,” Crowley freely admits. “It was a—fascination, then, that I confessed.”
“Whoever with?” Aziraphale swallows. “Did you have Adam eat the apple to… remove him from the picture?”
“Angel,” Crowley grits out.
“Yes?”
After a few moments of silence, it becomes clear that Crowley wasn’t admonishing him so much as giving him an answer.
“Someone,” Crowley says accusingly, “was eating all the figs. Washing his heavenly robes in Eden’s springs, which he also swam in. Gallivanting around in his brand new body like it was,” he snorts, “tickety-boo, even though I hated the skinsuit then. All the laws of physics this bloody thing has to obey. I’d never seen a soul like him. I was—I was certain he would fall.”
Aziraphale has been processing his relationship with Crowley for over six thousand years, and it never fails to surprise him.
“Did he?”
“No,” Crowley says, wistful and soft. “No, he was the best of them. The angels. I saw that, eventually. Everyone else locked in God’s Ineffable Pissing Contest while he was appreciating God’s creation, instead.”
That apple tree had drunk in the first few sunbeams and never known a drop of rain. Crowley showered it in the first hesitant blooming of love, and it bore Life as its fruit.
Crowley was in love with me.
Perhaps that isn’t right.
The taste of that knowledge, so tempting and sweeter than anything Aziraphale’s ever had, brings him to his feet.
“This apple tree,” he says, “what did you tell her?” Crowley has been vulnerable enough for the day. He coils, tongue flickering across his lips. “More than you’ve told me,” the angel deduces.
“Yes.”
“More than I’ve told you.”
Shrugging, hunching, spindling. “Depends.”
Crowley waits for small saplings to grow. He waits for rain. For answers. He waits and waits and waits for Aziraphale. There’s absolutely nothing ineffable about it.
“My dear,” Aziraphale says. “You give me life, too.”
Their fingers are intertwined. Somewhere above, the tree of life gives a little tremble, and down a single red apple falls.
“I think,” Aziraphale murmurs, smiling as brightly as he can, “that we are outside the definitions of Heaven and Hell. But around me— you are unfailingly good, Crowley. For once, let’s not balance out. Let me be good to you too.” Please let me.
“Whatever you want,” Crowley says hoarsely. “Anything, anywhere, that you want.”
Anything. A demonic miracle away. Aziraphale thinks about it.
“Pie,” he finally concludes, squeezing Crowley’s pale hand. “Then maybe we’ll ring up Adam, and get recommendations for cake. Oh, I do hope the Ritz holds weddings.”