Chapter Text
Standing by the car, torturing himself with hope, Crowley watched the Metatron lead his only friend away. The Metatron was explaining something to him, false-genially, and even from across the street, Crowley could see the moment when Aziraphale understood what he was being summoned back to Heaven to do.
The Metaton stepped into the Transporter, and Aziraphale, who had been pointedly looking nowhere near where Crowley stood, now turned, at the threshold, and looked sidelong at him, pleadingly.
He looked very small, and very alone, and before he could think better of it—before he could think at all—Crowley had pushed off the side of the Bentley and was crossing the street, calling, “Oi, Angel. Wait up.”
Aziraphale turned to look at him more directly. Crowley could see him take a deep breath, the kind that shuddered in your lungs. “Yes, Crowley?” His voice was steadier than Crowley thought his own would be, in the circumstances.
“Are you.” Crowley swallowed hard. “Are you sure you want to do this? Really sure?”
Aziraphale glanced in toward the Metatron. Crowley kept his eyes focused on Aziraphale’s face--he didn’t care to know what kind of expression the blessed bastard was making—and saw the glint of steel shining out from the cloud of doubt and reluctance. “I have to,” he said, which wasn’t what Crowley had asked. “It’s where I need to be.”
Of course it was. Aziraphale hadn’t even entertained the notion of running away last time. Crowley wasn’t sure if his angel was once again thinking—hoping—that he could just explain it properly and the rest of Heaven would see the world was a mistake.
But even if he’d learned from last time, he’d still think he had to give them the chance. Even if they threw him in Hellfire for it.
“Right, then,” Crowley said, turning his face toward the Metatron—still without looking—and flashing a brilliant smile at him. “If you’re that certain, then we’d better give it a try.”
Aziraphale’s face softened and his eyes widened. “You mean…?”
Crowley nodded. “You, me, Heaven. Doing Good.”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, his hands coming up to clutch at Crowley’s. “Are you sure? It—” His eyes flicked toward the Metatron. “It could be awfully hard work.”
“Course,” Crowley said, stoutly. Now he did look at the Metatron. “If the offer’s still open.”
The Metatron’s face was very still. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but closed it again when Aziraphale said, “Of course it is, you dear old—” He giggled, shrilly. “Dear old angel, I should say.”
“That’ll take some getting used to,” Crowley said, stalling for a bit more time to get up the nerve to step into the elevator to Heaven, for the second time in as many days.
“Perhaps,” the Metatron spoke up, “you have affairs to settle here on Earth, before you, ah, assume your new role? Your,” he looked over at the Bentley, “material possessions?”
“Nah,” Crowley said, taking that crucial step. “I’ll pop down sometime later and sort that out. I’m sure we have loads to do up there. Don’t want to miss anything.” He turned to face the lift doors, shoving himself in between Aziraphale and the Metatron. Then, before he could chicken out, he reached across the Metatron and pushed the button for Up.
As the doors closed, Aziraphale looked toward him, and gave him the faintest trace of a real smile.
Crowley checked the angles of view and carefully, where the Metatron wouldn’t see, tangled their fingers together.
The ride seemed to take much longer than it had when he’d ridden up with Muriel before. The doors opened onto the same featureless not-space he’d seen in his most recent two visits to Heaven, but it didn’t seem quite as awful, somehow, with Aziraphale’s hand in his.
He would have let go, when he saw Michael, Uriel, and Saraqael there waiting just outside the doors, but Aziraphale clutched his hand all the harder.
It helped, a little, that the trio of archangels looked at least as nervous as Crowley felt.
The Metatron glanced at the two of them. “Would you, ah, like to make the announcement yourself?”
Aziraphale, with his free hand, made an after you gesture.
“Very well.” Turning to the archangels—the other archangels, of the second rank—the Metatron said, “I’m sure you’ll be as glad to hear, as I am to say, that Aziraphale, here, has accepted the position of Supreme Archangel and Commander of the Heavenly Host.”
They were all too well-conditioned by millennia in Heaven to say What the fuck?, but Crowley could see them thinking it. Uriel recovered first, and said, in a strangled voice, “Congratulations, Aziraphale.”
“He’ll need to be brought up to speed on the Next Phase,” the Metatron continued. “I’ve read him in on the basics, of course, but the rest of you can brief him on all the details, I’m sure.”
The archangels fell all over each other to say that yes, they could, certainly, whatever the Metatron wished. Michael, with a nervous flick of a glance at Crowley, added, “Although the plans so far hadn’t included any…close liaising with Downstairs.”
Crowley affected an air of innocence and waited to see how the Metatron was going to deal with that one.
Not very well, as it turned out. “Ah, yes,” he said, and then seemed to run out of ideas.
Glancing worriedly around the little circle of them—Crowley, Metatron, archangels, Crowley again—Aziraphale squeezed his hand and said, “Crowley resigned from the Other Firm a few years ago, as it happens.” There was a hint of a question in it, and he looked imploringly at the Metatron.
“Yes,” Crowley said, looking at him also. “I’ve been freelancing for a bit. Consulting. But apparently the Supreme Archangel has broad latitude to choose his second-in-command, so….”
Saraqael blurted out, “You can’t mean—” and then abruptly shut up, folding her hands primly.
“I do,” said Aziraphale, just as primly. “Crowley and I have worked together on a number of projects. There is no one I trust more.”
“But he’s—” Uriel began.
Aziraphale raised an eyebrow, and nobody said what Crowley was. Neither did the Metatron explain how this difficulty would be dealt with. In fact, he began making little I really must be going sort of motions.
If he thought the Metatron had the means to actually grant what he had offered, Crowley would have happily let him avoid the subject as long as possible. But as it was becoming increasingly clear that he hadn’t, Crowley slid the needle in a little further. “Yes, just how is this supposed to work?” “The, ah.” He gestured with his free hand. “Change of status?”
The Metatron looked at him for a moment with intense and open dislike, before the genial mask slipped back into place. “Well, I should think the place to start would be Form 26-B, Change of Rank.” With a gesture of his fingers, the form in question appeared, on a transparent glass desk—or, rather, the idea of a glass desk—that had also appeared in front of them.
Aziraphale picked up the idea-of-a-pen that was next to it, and clicked it. The first line read Name of Angel. “Should I put—” Crowley saw his mouth form the shape of a Name that hadn’t been spoken since the Great War, but the sound that came out was, “Crowley?”
The Metatron said nothing, and Crowley answered, “Anthony J., I should think. Just to be thorough.”
Aziraphale wrote that, and on the line for Previous Rank, put “Hell’s Emissary on Earth, European Division.”
“Technically, I was a Baron of Hell as well,” Crowley added. “Order of the First Fallen, Chapter of the Fiery Lake.”
The relevant section of the form expanded to several lines as Aziraphale filled in this information. “Should you properly be styled Sir Anthony J. Crowley, then?” he asked.
“Eh. I never used it.” It had been a small rebellion; everyone else in Hell made as much as they could of whatever titles they had.
The next line was for New Rank. Crowley eyed it with wary curiosity. His old, old post had never been filled, as far as he knew. He supposed he could bear it, if that was what Aziraphale decided to put.
But instead, Aziraphale wrote, “Special Consultant and Second-in-Command to Supreme Archangel,” and glanced a question over his shoulder at Crowley.
“To Supreme Archangel Aziraphale, I think would sound better,” Crowley suggested. Not that Heaven was likely to try to keep him if Aziraphale left, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
Aziraphale made that change. “There. I think that’s all in order.” He looked round the group with a pointedly pleasant expression, and got no objections. After signing the document in both ink and a blaze of celestial Light, he pushed it toward Crowley and said, “Your signature, there, on the second-to-last line.”
Crowley studied the form carefully. In Hell, even a requisition for lavatory paper involved five paragraphs of small print, but Heaven had never quite caught on to the value of a really twisty contract. All it said was who Crowley was, and the job he was taking. There was no word of it a lie.
Swallowing hard, he took up the pen. Carefully, he wrote, Anthony J. Crowley. Then, with a glance at Aziraphale, he licked his fingertip and signed his demonic sigil in Hellfire.
Absolutely nothing happened. Crowley had known that nothing would, and was definitely not either disappointed or relieved to experience no change whatsoever in his appearance, perceptions, or ontological status.
If Crowley was any judge of Aziraphale’s facial expressions—and, after six millennia, he was—the Supreme Archangel was also not-experiencing the same jumble of feelings.
“Well!” the Metatron said, bringing his hands together in a clap, like a primary-school teacher. “That’s the formalities taken care of. I’m sure you’ll both want to get right to work.”
While the archangels of the second rank were busy exchanging looks of disbelief, Aziraphale said, “Yes, I believe the office is—this way?” They hurried off before anyone could get up the courage to say anything.
#
Gabriel’s former office—the office of the Supreme Archangel—was another featureless void. With a snap of his fingers, Aziraphale summoned the idea of a mahogany partners’ desk, with a green leather top and exotic hardwood inlay on the pedestal drawers.
It was no more a material object than the not-glass used in the rest of Heaven, but looked a great deal more convincing. It even showed marks of wear, and the two chairs that appeared on either side had mismatched cushions.
“Decorating already?” Crowley asked, slouching nonchalantly against nothing in particular and eyeing the new furniture.
“We can change it if you’d like something else,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Only I thought of it when…when the Metatron first said.” He knew, of course, that most of what he’d imagined in those first few moments of wild joy was impossible, but perhaps they could have this, at least.
“It’s great,” Crowley told him. Resting his hands on the back of one of the chairs, he said, “Angel, you know—”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Yes. I didn’t, when we first spoke, in the bookshop, but the Metatron told me, just after. Of course I realized—but how did you know?”
Crowley hestiated. “Wait—which thing that we know are we talking about?”
“The, ah, Second Coming, I thought,” Aziraphale said.
“Oh, that. Found out when I was up here with Muriel. That was what Gabriel was in trouble for—he refused to do it.”
“Gabriel did?” Somehow, Aziraphale had thought they’d thrown him out simply over consorting with the Grand Duke of Hell. “Goodness. The power of love.” He frowned. “Which thing did you mean?”
Crowley’s mouth worked for a moment, until he finally spat out, “This,” and spread his wings, like spilled ink in the vast emptiness of Heaven. They were as black as at Eden, and as beautiful. “You did know? That nothing changed?”
He had known, really, no matter what the lump forming in his throat seemed to indicate otherwise. “You don’t, ah…feel any different?” he asked, just to quash the last of his foolish hope.
“Nope,” Crowley said. “No sudden urges to wear beige and be pompous and annoying.”
“The Presence, Crowley,” he said, in no mood for jokes. “You still don’t….” He felt tears prickling behind his eyes—the idea of tears, behind the idea of his eyes—at the thought that Crowley, beautiful, beloved, loving Crowley, would remain cut off forever from the echoes of the Love that had created the universe.
“No,” Crowley said again, more gently this time.
“I—I thought it was true, when I came to tell you,” Aziraphale explained, wanting Crowley to understand that he’d not have held out that hope falsely. “I realized after, that he never thought you would accept.” He drew in a sharp breath through his nose. “I wanted it to be true.”
“I didn’t,” Crowley snarled. “You have to understand that, angel. I can’t go—” He stopped and looked around. “I’ll go anywhere you’ll have me, evidently,” he corrected himself. “But I can’t be anything other than what I am. And I can’t hide it from the rest of that lot. Wouldn’t even if I could.” He looked away, raising his chin a bit, the way he had back in the bookshop, when he’d been telling Aziraphale he loved him and trying not to cry. “So if that isn’t good enough for you, I’d better go.”
“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said. “It wasn’t ever…I was hopeful, for what it would say about Heaven. And about—” He looked up, the way humans did when they were talking about Her. “I thought—I hoped—it was a sign that things could really change. But you don’t need to change. You’re perfectly—” He glanced up again. Aziraphale hated how small and scared it made him feel, but no matter how true it was, and how much Crowley deserved to hear it, he couldn’t stand in Heaven and say out loud that a demon was perfectly good. “You’re enough for me the way you are. Never doubt that.”
Crowley swallowed hard, and nodded, looking solemn enough that Aziraphale dared hope he’d heard what he hadn’t dared say. “And—me, here, like this?” (Aziraphale hated even more how small and scared Crowley sounded, saying that.) “You think that can work?”
“It has to,” Aziraphale said, because it did. He couldn’t possibly face the task ahead without Crowley by his side. He couldn’t, and he prayed She wouldn’t make him, because if She did, he would have to try. “For now, at least. Once we have this Second Coming business sorted, we can…work out what’s best to do next.” Once the world was safe, if Crowley still wanted to go to Alpha Centauri, or anywhere else, Aziraphale would go with him. He couldn’t do anything less, and even begin to deserve what Crowley’d done, coming with him here.