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It was all rather silly really. It had started when his cocoa went cold. He had reached without thinking, up, for the store of energy that hummed in the Other above, as ever he had, and—come down with nothing.
How he had gotten from there to sitting on the floor in some indeterminate corner of the bookshop with his wings wrapped about him, he wasn’t entirely sure.
There had been, he thought, quite a few more fruitless snaps of his fingers with regards to the lukewarm cocoa. A great deal of telling himself it was probably nothing and pacing whilst wringing his hands. After that, it had all gotten rather more frantic.
The books hadn’t wished to be divested of their dust when he’d wiggled his fingers their way. He’d tried adding a ‘let there be light’ to his second attempt to ignite the Tiffany lamp, and a plaintive ‘please’ to the third when that didn’t work. Shouting ‘play, God damn you!’ at the gramophone hadn't gotten him anywhere either.
He had first tried snapping upwards after that.
It hadn't worked. He'd been able to feel the energy broiling below, where he'd never thought to feel for it before, but it hadn't moved through him. It hadn't risen to him; no more than heaven's would descend.
After that he had given up trying and begun to quietly murmur Crowley's name instead, as though the demon might appear and take care of every frivolous miracle for him. As though that would solve everything.
Crowley hadn't, of course and, in rather a violent panic, Aziraphale had grasped for his wings, dragging them into the realm of sight and heaving a sob to find their feathers still white.
He supposed the relief had had something to do with him ending up on the floor.
“Angel?"
“I think so.”
Crowley kept very still. If he kept very still then whatever the heaven that meant might not spot him and eat him alive.
“Why are your wings out? What's going on?”
“Are they white?” Aziraphale didn’t look up. He was gazing at his feathers where they draped across his lap. His voice was light, but toneless. “I can't quite see them all.”
Crowley flung his sunglasses at an ancient history shelf. He veered towards the corner where Aziraphale was sitting with his back against the tallboy, and went to the sprawl of his knees.
“Could do with preening,” he said through his teeth, and Aziraphale tutted at him, which was more than he’d been hoping for, considering.
Aziraphale eased aside for him to look. If Crowley had to tuck his pinkies in his fists to keep from smoothing the delicate down of Aziraphale’s feathers, well—only God would see.
He’d been holding his breath, he realised, and let it out slowly.
“White as anything, angel.”
Aziraphale nodded.
“Jolly good."
Crowley held himself calm as he settled at Aziraphale’s side, being mindful not to sit on any feathers.
“Jolly nothing.” He cupped the angel's hand in his, willing it not to tremble. “What's this all about?”
Aziraphale's focus shifted, from the feathers of his wing to their hands, heaped together against the soft whiteness. He curled his fingers under Crowley's.
“Cold cocoa.”
“Mm’not sure I follow?”
“I couldn't warm it.” The angel breathed a mirthless snuff. “I rather fear I've lost my miracles.”
“Lost?” Crowley coaxed his voice down from the ceiling. “Lost where?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I!”
“R’right, keep your hair on.”
Aziraphale drew a deep breath.
“Well, really, Crowley. It isn’t as though I've lost them down the back of the sofa, is it? I reach up and I can feel the energy there, but—I can't use it. It won't move through me. I—
—I think I might be falling.”
In retrospect, Aziraphale couldn’t be sure what he had expected Crowley to say, but—
“Wings away, angel. We’re going for a drive,” in an oddly idle tone had not been it.
He was driving uncommonly slowly as well, and Aziraphale sat in the passenger seat while the light, light/dark, light of the city rolled over him, feeling as though all his world had been displaced by half an inch.
He was scarcely aware of the Bentley stopping until Crowley spoke to him for the first time since leaving the bookshop. Impossibly gently.
“Here we are.”
Aziraphale tried to decide where here might be, but all he could see was a bus stop with melted plastic seats, a couple of wheelie bins and a dog poo.
“Oh,” he said. “How lovely. Did you make a reservation, dear?”
“Still a bastard at least.” Crowley’s hand touched his arm, and it steadied him. “This side, angel.”
If Aziraphale wasn't mistaken, it was St. Dunstan in the West. A companion to another church, destroyed by a bomb in the Blitz and now a garden, where they'd shared a picnic once.
Aziraphale stared at the dark, arched doors, shut away behind their forbidding black railings. A flyer tacked upon them, proclaiming God's love.
Something ached in his chest, like betrayal.
Why couldn't Crowley just have told him, don’t be silly, you're not Falling, no one's Fallen since—well, the Fall. Why had Crowley seen fit to drag him here instead, to test the truth of his suspicion as though it might be real?
Crowley was watching him, bare serpent eyed, and Aziraphale knew, in the very instant he met that steadfast gaze, why Crowley could never have told him such a thing. Because Crowley would never have lied.
“You don't have to,” Crowley said, and he looked so afraid. “I just—”
“I know.”
Aziraphale clasped Crowley's shoulder. For a moment they sat in the shadows, sharing the half hope of uncertainty.
Aziraphale shifted first.
“No use putting it off, I suppose.”
Crowley had always admired Aziraphale’s strength in the face of, well—everything, really. Adversity, he supposed you could call it. The requisite unfairness of the world. He hadn’t ever, he thought, however, admired it quite so much as he did in that moment.
Aziraphale, passing in front of the Bentley, straightening out his waistcoat and smoothing his tum. Curling his fingers loosely till their tips just touched his palms and pausing at Crowley’s side.
They fell into step without speaking, God’s own angel brushing elbows with a demon on their idle way to church. As though it were merely a stroll. As though they weren’t, both of them, writhing with panic inside.
When Crowley snapped to free the railings from their bolts, the angel stopped and caught him calmly, far too calmly, by the hand.
Crowley fell a step back to be with him.
The gate of the railings was opening slowly. It kissed the wall behind and rang a doleful afternote. Aziraphale shook his head, staring where the church doors parted after, a pale wisp of smoke rising off them in protest at having been nudged by the will of a demon. He spoke Crowley’s name in a small, chalked voice that scarcely left his throat.
Crowley set his jaw and said—
“What am I?”
It took what felt an anguished while to Crowley for Aziraphale to answer. When the words came, they came like a thump to the chest.
“A fallen angel.”
Crowley’s hand clutched Aziraphale's hard. Of all the times, in all their years, to use those words instead of demon. Crowley cocked a startled glance aside, and Aziraphale's eyes shone opaline with tears as he met it.
Crowley swallowed and readied himself for the rest.
“And what else am I?”
Unforgivable, sang in his head, but he softened his walls so it couldn't make an echo.
Aziraphale smiled and it spilled a slow tear down the shift of his cheek.
“You're kind.”
Crowley felt his lip flinch, but resisted. He opened his chest as Aziraphale curled himself into it, smothering slanders of “—gentle, and patient, and loyal—” against the wild thump of his heart.
Crowley held him as though he might never let go.
“Not so bad, then.” He sniffed. “All in all."
Aziraphale could still smell Crowley on his clothes as he climbed the few stone steps and faltered, staring where his toes just touched the threshold of the church.
Whatever should happen, he wasn't alone. He could feel Crowley near him, for all he was hanging behind. Giving him space to do this on his own. But never alone.
He wondered whether Crowley could feel the consecration. Wondered what sort of a heat it might be. Beach in bare feet, he had said. Not a liar, but a lessener of certain unsavoury truths.
Aziraphale held to the memory of Crowley tripping his way down the aisle of that other St. Dunstan's—comical and dashing; suave and infinitely selfless—as he took his first step past the doorway and into the echoing dark beyond.
It didn't burn. That first step. Nor did the second. A third took him out of the porch and he kept his breath held as a fourth clipped the tiles of the nave. Still it didn't burn and, as he walked in measured steps between the rows of empty pews, their brackets lit with candles. Glowing softly in the darkness, two by two.
Crowley watched from the foot of the steps as Aziraphale vanished from view. He mounted them slowly after, with the lights of the city behind and the weight of old stone shadow ahead. Pausing on the threshold where his angel had, he could feel the consecration. A bare Saharan scorch on the curl of his toes.
With a slow fingered flourish, Crowley coaxed sequential flames from the candles he imagined must have lined the church aisle. They leaned a light upon the angel as he walked, his long, pale coat and goldspun seeming hair emerging from the shadows, and showed his way to hope, out of darkness.
Aziraphale drew to a halt and the candleshine slid off his furrows and folds, and cast into them long fingered shadows. He stood in the sway of his coat like a flickering film reel of himself. His head tipped back, his hands wrung helplessly.
“I don't understand.”
“Try again.” Crowley's voice felt its way off the walls, through the archway and into the candlelit nave. “Light the rest of them. Strike a chord off the organ. Anything. Try again.”
Crowley watched as Aziraphale drew down a snap, from a little above his own head. Nothing came of it, and he blew out a huff. Crowley saw the frustration, bunched up in his shoulders and sensed his rising panic, like a remedy dosed to his own .
He crossed the porch in two long, leaping strides and vaulted the back of a pew.
“Try again!”
Aziraphale had glanced behind at the burst of commotion, but his face was cast dark between candles, and with half the nave's length between them, Crowley couldn't decipher the look he'd been given. The air smelled of old wood and incense, and somewhere up, up in the eaves Crowley's words were still echoing, faintly, more faintly. Try again.
Aziraphale did, with a growing impatience. He flung up his hand and snatched it back down as though proving a point. Crowley felt the faint friction of something. A miracle failing to strike, like a match. Aziraphale faltered and peered at his hand, and Crowley knew he'd felt it too.
Crowley clambered the length of the nave in a haste of clumsied hope, pew over pew, on his longfellow limbs.
The hallowing leapt from the ground like a flung tongue of flame, but couldn't reach him.
“Try again.”
Aziraphale stood, peering up at him, haloed with a hope that dared not trust itself.
“Reach higher."
Aziraphale reached. But not up towards the heavens, and not with his miracle hand. Aziraphale reached from his left, catching Crowley by the right, and before he quite knew it had happened, the demon had an angel standing, hand in certain hand, on the pew at his side.
“Higher?” His eyes flashed a spark of blind faith, not in heaven or God, but in Crowley.
“Higher!” The demon's heart rattled its cage and he swallowed hard. “Higher than Heaven!”
Aziraphale held Crowley's hand as he felt through the depths of the heavenly power they had both once drawn upon. The power he had drawn upon many millions of times by now. Aziraphale reached until his whole hand felt immersed in the current of energy, and gasped as a ticklishness of something like amusement swirled past the tips of his fingers.
Crowley clutched him tighter.
“It's alright,” soothed Aziraphale absently, watching where his fingers hovered, pale against the darkness. He thumbed Crowley's hand and laughed shakily. “Higher than Heaven. Well, I'll be damned."
Crowley watched as Aziraphale drew down a flourish and smeared his open hand across the darkness. He watched as the pale bellied streak of a galaxy trailed like blown glitter behind.
It was only an amateur's try, too unstable to hold its own delicate balance, shedding struck star flecks like bonfire sparks and collapsing beneath its own existence. A crude imitation of Crowley's own masterworks, smeared on the dark of the heavens, aeons before the earth was hung in the perilous midst of it all. But Crowley thought it the second most beautiful thing he'd seen in all Creation.
The first was gazing back at him, tear-bright by the light of dying stars.
“Straight from the source,” Crowley marvelled.
“Straight from the source.”
“No middleman.”
“No one watching.”
The significance of that struck them both.
Crowley blinked. Aziraphale, startling himself with a sudden exclamation of joy, caught his mouth behind his hand. Crowley watched the relief leave him giddy, drawing nearer to him, like a gravitating planet.
When he leaned to kiss the knuckles of that hand, he tasted stardust, like a memory of the Holy thing he'd been.
Aziraphale turned a dazed touch to his lips.
“Lift home?" asked Crowley, breathlessly.
“Please.”