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“How could you?”
The words played over and over in his mind, as though behind his closed eyes a record player spun and spun, repeating the words he knew would fall from Crowley’s mouth the moment he saw him.
Aziraphale grimaced and lent forward on the table, hands flat on the surface, shaking his bowed head ever so slightly to try and clear it of the words.
It was no good. They were stuck like a stake through his heart. A stake that fit perfectly into the hole created by what he had left behind him on Earth.
It hadn’t been the right choice, he knew it hadn’t been the right choice from the beginning, but the kiss had sealed the deal.
And broken the seal.
That kiss, which showed him all of the possibility, all of the overwhelming possibility. That’s just what it all was. Overwhelming. To know that what he had felt was real and had a name and someone else felt it too and they could do something about it. It was endlessly looming, leeringly frightening.
And so he had chosen. He had chosen the path he knew, that he had always been a part of, though it crushed his spirit relentlessly and made him question every toe placed out of line, he had chosen Heaven because the Unknown was just as bad as Hell, and though he knew Heaven had its faults, he would never ever join their side.
“Your side.”
The words rattled around his brain, great spiked things that bit painfully every time they met with the corners of his mind. He had pushed Crowley away because he was scared.
Scared that he wouldn’t turn out to be what Crowley wanted.
Scared that Crowley wouldn’t turn out to be what he wanted.
He had told himself at the time that what he was doing was to protect Crowley, but that wasn’t it at all. It was fear plain and simple.
Aziraphale wasn’t used to love. That was the bottom line. Oh, he could recognize it, certainly, all angels can, but he was a facilitator. A bystander. A spectator. Love only ever flowed through him, over and out to a million different beings. But love never flowed to him. And if it had before now, he had been a rock in its stream, gently splitting its waves and guiding them onward to their final destination. Now, the water had finally tried to permeate him, to wash over his head and he found he was drowning. And he had let Crowley go, at least he told himself, so that he didn’t drown with him.
But now that he was in Heaven, trying to surface, he found that he had been underwater for so long, seemingly unknowingly, that when he tried to come up for air, tried to exist without Crowley, he found it even harder to breathe. And he didn’t know what to do.
How could he, indeed.