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A tempest burst upon the early morning city. Rain, verging hail bounced knee high off the pavements, pummelling the cars like so many tin roofs and plecking merry music off the awnings.
Aziraphale flattened his back to the wall, angling his umbrella forward and tippying up on his toes. The suede of his Oxfords was done for, not to mention his wool blend trousers. They'd be shrinking past his ankles if it didn't knock off soon. All the same—Aziraphale wrinkled his nose and grinned past the brim of his brolly, watching strangers dash and dabble—what a lark of a day!
“Ohshitohshitohshitoh…” Somebody didn't appear to agree. A soggy streak of plastered Henley, with a pale scruff of tummy beneath and a jacket thrown over its head whilst still wearing the sleeves, came cursing hissily towards him, hopping wet on drainpipe legs; bounced off his brolly and into the wall, where it slumphed in defeat like a tangled bat and pronounced with great feeling, “Ngheh.”
“Hello there!” Aziraphale answered, as though he often made acquaintances by comical collision.
The shrouded stranger flapped his hand a bit.
“Hi.”
“Would you care to come under?”
Aziraphale lifted his brolly to accommodate the stranger’s arm-gangling height. He waited politely after, while the dark- and damply dressed man wrangled his jacket from over his head, unveiling a sodden flop of, what had likely been awfully fashionable auburn hair, before the elements got at it. The stranger’s eyes, once they gave up avoiding the matter, were golden whisky-brown and feathered round with a history of numberless smiles, which quite betrayed his grumpen grimace.
“Put your tummy away, my dear. You’ll catch a chill.”
Aziraphale couldn’t be certain over the pounding of the rain, but the stranger’s answer to that had sounded rather like, “Ngk.”
With his tummy safely tucked away, he took a pressing interest in his snakeskin boots, and so Aziraphale—seeing he wouldn’t duck under, whether for pride or for shyness—took a shimmying side-step himself and sheltered them neatly together.
“It rather makes one wish to sing,” he disclosed, a nudge aside, like a marvellous, poorly-kept secret.
He looped his arm through the stranger’s as a newfound friend’s, jostling him into a gruff, startled laugh; serenading the tumbledown sky and the rivering gutters and clattering pigeons flown by from the traffic-lit spill of a puddle-bright stage—
“I’m siiiiingin’ in the raaaaain!”
“You're a nutcase!” the stranger exclaimed, but he was laughing; a snortish, half-embarrassed effusion of rather more delight than dismay.
“I'm theatrical, my dear. There's a difference.”
“Is this the theatre?” The stranger squinted past his shoulder, where the wall bore advertisements for the evening's show.
“One of many. Are you here for the—”
“Day thingy tickets, yes!” The stranger pointed past his shoulder in triumph. “Different Exactlies! Good thing your umbrella leapt at me, I’d’ve gone running right past.”
“You're very welcome. What's your name, dear? I can't keep referring to you as ‘the stranger’ whenever I wish to narrate you, though it does have a certain—”
“Narrate me?”
“Inside my head, yes.”
“Uhh… I'm Crowley,” said Crowley. “I would shake your hand, but—” Crowley gestured at their still enjoined arms.
“Oh, we’re well past that sort of formality,” Aziraphale assured him. “I'm your new friend, Aziraphale. Delighted to make your acquaintance.”
“Delighted. Yeah,” Crowley drawled, dripping wet from ankles to eyebrows. “Are you always this full of the joys when it rains?”
Aziraphale gave this some thought.
“More often than not. After all—” Crowley’s expression said he'd seen the rogue twinkle in his new friend Aziraphale's eyes; something between a grimace and a grappled back smile. “It is a gloooorious feee — Oh, they're opening!”
Aziraphale bundled Crowley in front of himself.
“You go first, my dear! Make sure you get some!”
“But there's only the two of us—pleh!” Crowley’s protest sputtered off as he was bounced in the head by a damp boink of brolly. “Wouldn't get this sort of treatment from Gene Kelly.”
“Oh, do shush. Farah’s waiting for you, look.”
Aziraphale gave a cheerful wave to the box office worker settling into the booth for their shift. Farah waved back at him, clearly delighted by the damp, grouchy fellow being ushered through the door for their perusal.
“I didn't know you had a beau, Mr. Fell!” Thus exclaiming, Farah tipped a meaningful wink which, had it been performed on stage, could have been seen from the theatre's very back row.
“Oh, no!” cried Aziraphale. “No. No, no—I shall have to demote you back to ‘the stranger’ if you don't stop smirking, Crowley—no. We just met in the queue.”
“The… queue?” Farah peered past them at the unpeopled deluge outside.
“Two people qualifies as a queue,” Aziraphale persisted. “If they stand…” His logic wavered just a smidge. “One… behind the other.”
“That's right.” The stranger continued to smirk. “Some might say it was a real meet queue- tuh.”
Oh, good Lord… swooned Aziraphale privately.
“Oh, good Lord,” snarked Aziraphale aloud.
If Aziraphale had broken out his fanciest cologne and starched his favourite bowtie, before tying, untying and retying it three times in preparation for the theatre that evening, well; his first edition Wilde’s would never tell. If he had settled himself in his front row seat with rather more than his usual shimmying glee at the prospect of seeing a show, well; Different Exactlies was a particular favourite of his, and he did so love to see it up close.
The seat beside him remained untaken, and with every coming person who passed it by to settle elsewhere along the row, the little flutter in his tummy grew. It had to be Crowley's seat. It simply must! The whole play was about how the universe looked out for the oddest of ducks in the end. But seat A7 remained stubbornly vacant, and when the house lights went down at showtime, Aziraphale’s spirits took a lurching dip quite unlike their usual soar.
The music was scarcely beginning when his fortunes took a turn. A tumble of boisterous drums almost drowning out the hurried thump of footsteps down a carpeted aisle. A clash of cymbals, censoring a startled curse, where Aziraphale—craning his neck and beaming so widely it practically lit up his ears—spied a tall, chaotic figure, staggering out of a stumble, dashing headlong towards the stage.
Aziraphale rose half-off his bottom as if he might catch Crowley coming, though his arms were several tens of metres short. Shifting the tails of his coat, he lowered the seat at his side instead and held it down in dauntless hope. Crowley veered in his direction, eeking down along the row, intent upon going unnoticed; though the people upon whom’s toes he trod and, very definitely, the lucky old fellow whose lap he almost toppled into couldn’t have missed him if he'd turned transparent.
When he spied the empty seat at Aziraphale's left elbow, Crowley struck towards it like a shade on scorching sands. He threw himself onto the cushion and slouched in spectacularly mortified fashion; not even looking at the stage for all his fluster, never mind who sat beside him.
Aziraphale cleared his throat and, politely, extricated his sat-upon hand from under Crowley’s thigh. Crowley’s gaze snapped aside, aghast, and then—“Are all your entrances quite so dramatic, my dear?” at a whispering lull in the music—he smiled.
The intermission fell upon them like damnation. A shrouding silence in the darkness where belief hung, half-suspended for a last, breathtaken beat—before the house lights came up on reality and broke the spell to a clatter of applause.
The inevitable exodus to bar and loos began shortly after, and with it the apian hum of friends and strangers excitedly lauding the show’s first half for the giddy-making masterpiece it was.
Crowley remained in his seat. He stared ahead at the fallen safety curtain with a look of consternation on his face.
“Crowley, is—?”
“How can they do that?”
“Do—?”
“How can they—?” Crowley gestured erratically at the audience around them; nattering, and filing away up the aisles, and purchasing diminutive pots of overpriced ice cream. “Didn't they see?”
Aziraphale understood. Didn't they see the human tragedy played out against the pyrotechnic fires of hell? Hadn't they heaved themselves, bloodied and gasping for breath, with the sod of the earth in their teeth, out of the devilish maw of a story, to find themselves back in their seat?
“Self preservation, I suppose?” Aziraphale gave his best guess. It would be bubbling in the brains of them, beneath the humdrum surface, and would find them in the chaos of their dreams.
Crowley scoffed as though he thought this awfully stupid. Not Aziraphale's suggestion, but rather the notion of keeping oneself from such immensity of feeling to begin with. His hand was resting on his chest as though his heart required the comfort, and fierce emotion glistered like sharp-focus in his eye.
“But, why come? If it's all just—set pieces and actors dressed up, saying words? If their story doesn't matter. What's the point?”
Aziraphale hadn't an answer to that. He felt rather moved by Crowley’s very obvious frustration. By his belief that the characters should matter. That their story deserved to be felt in every idle watcher's heart. He tried to think of something comforting to offer, but the silence had spread too thin.
Crowley sniffed self-consciously and rose from his seat. He wedged his fingers in the pockets of his jeans and shrugged one shoulder, as though the proverbial devil upon it had slipped.
“I could do with the toilet, actually,” he lied.
Aziraphale felt too guilty to buy his customary tub of interval ice cream after that. He rather began to fear that Crowley mightn't come back, but when the call went out for stragglers to return to their seats; there appeared the carefree-seeming fiend, sauntering down the aisle with less than a minute to spare.
“I shall dub thee Sir Crowley-come-lately,” Aziraphale cautioned as he sat.
“Oh, yeah?” Crowley snuffed. “Don't you need a sword for that?”
Aziraphale looked about himself in performative earnest, patting his pockets and lifting up out of his seat to check beneath his bottom.
“Must have left it around here somewhere,” he insisted, and a lopsided smile was the last thing he saw as the lights went down once more.
The third act advanced with momentum enough to leave one physically breathless. Aziraphale had seen it now some six or seven times, but the staging never lost its dizzying dimension, nor the acting its grasp upon what felt his very soul.
He was hanging on the cliff’s edge of a pivotal scene when he found himself nudged from the moment. Crowley had grasped at the armrest between them, catching his coat in the fumble, and Aziraphale saw, by a fire-whoomph of pyrotechnic heat, how his nerves were drawn taut as a bow.
He was trembling, to the flopped forehead kiss of his artfully tousled hair; his handsome face an anguished grimace, his throat all fret and bob. Aziraphale might have hesitated, but a cry went up on stage—“What were you thinking?”—and he was taking Crowley's hand, knowing he'd need it, folding it into his own.
“Only how I adore you.” The angel’s voice was creased with pain, but you could hear how he was smiling. “No other thought in my head, I'm afraid.”
“You idiot—” But it was spoken like I love you, and Crowley gave a strangled hiccup; his gaze focused desperately, unblinkingly ahead where the fallen starmaker, beginning to sob in raggeding earnest himself, gathered the wounded angel to his chest.
Aziraphale saw very little of the climactic scenes that followed; trusting them to play out as they always had. Instead he watched, with his head tipped surreptitiously aside, while Crowley witnessed them a first, heart-swallowing time—and felt as though he hadn't missed a thing.
The dart, and leap, and gather of those impossibly eloquent eyebrows seemed a masterpiece of tragedy itself. The overspilling of a tear, like liquid silver when he blinked. A stubborn sniff, and then his mouth drawn in; sucking the salt from his lips. The gasp he gave in captivated disbelief that dared not hope. His hand, shifting under Aziraphale's, grappling his fingers through all the wrong spaces, and holding—and pleading—in bare-knuckled dread.
Please let them be okay.
The sputter of laughter that escaped him as he realised they would be; as he trusted to the ending, was a precious, pearl-bright thing. A small, rough particle of hope transformed to something improbably beautiful.
Aziraphale's eyes were swimming. His heart felt as full as an orchestral swell.
“It's a garden,” the angel was breathing.
The demon, feather-soft, in awe, “It begins as it will end—”
And Aziraphale knew, when the angel had taken up their clasped hands and gently kissed his fallen love upon the knuckles, by the flinch of Crowley's nose.
“Exactly.”
“Exactly.”
The standing ovation that followed swept Aziraphale all off kilter. Crowley wrangled his hand from their holding, leaping up out of his seat to clap, and whoop, and grin, and sniffle, and swipe at his nose with his sleeve. All through the bows, and feinted curtain falls, and bows, and blown kisses, and hands upon hearts, and inevitably—just the two of them, angel and demon with triumphant hands enjoined—through a final, humble bow as the curtain came down on the start of the rest of their lives.
And Crowley was hoarse when it ended. And Crowley said, “Ghh—” and sat his bottom on the upturned edge of his seat, his fingers crushing nameless sigils in the velvet. And Crowley stared beyond the curtain, unseeing in reality, at the cottage garden blooming from the hell-cracked stone and charred earth in his head.
Aziraphale balanced his bottom as well, ignoring the hubbub behind and the side-shuffled passing before them. He stole a glance at Crowley and decided not to speak, letting him be for a wildered while, in peace.
But the ushers came in, with a rustling of bin bags and tip-pan clatter and brushes, while Aziraphale tried lifting off from his toes, defying the mechanics of his seat, and of gravity, simply for something to do.
“They'll be throwing us out in a minute—” Crowley spoke from a distance away, and Aziraphale smiled.
“They won't mind. So long as you lift your feet up when they bring the hoover round.”
Crowley laughed, but it sounded unmoored somehow and died away as though he'd forgotten quite why he was making the sound.
“We should go though,” he murmured.
“Whenever you're ready.”
He was ready, or thereabouts, a few slow minutes after that. Aziraphale wandered a half step ahead up the aisle, while Crowley meandered after, glancing behind himself now and again as if to be certain the stage was still there.
The night was faintly mistish, stepping out, like the drifting of a cob’s web; and Crowley breathed a long, slow lungful of the cool, autumnal air, coming back to himself by degrees while they crossed the sparsely peopled square towards the great, dark swathe of the Thames.
“Which way are you heading?”
“Oh, I'm Soho bound,” Aziraphale answered. “Yourself?”
Crowley was sounding much more like himself now, smiling idly as he answered.
“Mayfair.”
“Oh! Well, we’re practically neighbours!” Aziraphale exclaimed, and they started to walk with more direction, but no more hurry, after that; without quite acknowledging they were doing so together.
“It's a lot like a stage show itself, don't you think?” Aziraphale ventured, halfway over the river and all the way enchanted with the twinkle in the countless, cryptid eyes of London Town. “The city by night?”
Crowley considered this analogy with something of the sceptic about his eyebrows, peering out across the darksome spangle of water, towards a misty-haloed distance where the city narrowed in from either side.
“All the lights!” Aziraphale persisted. “The ever shifting panorama!” Here, he framed the far bank’s skyline with his hands, the buildings shifting like set pieces, vanishing into the wings past the webbing of his thumb. “And the players!” He gestured ebulliently about them, drawing a few choice looks from several strangers passing by. “Every person, playing out their own small part in our story. Enter, stage right!” Aziraphale gleefully cast a grand old lady with brilliantly violet hair, upon the arm of a chappie in bright yellow trousers and endowed with a curling moustache, in their parts. “We overhear them, perhaps, in stage whispers and then—”
“Exeunt, pursued by a bear?”
“Well.” Aziraphale felt giddy with delight, coming neatly out of a turn in the dallying tails of his overcoat. “As I say, I live in Soho. Stranger things have happened.”
“Oh, I can imagine.” Crowley gave a gruff laugh which made Aziraphale wish to press their chests up close against each other.
“It's the, um…” He almost choked on his breath. “The closing week of Seance and Sensibility, this—um, well, this week, as it happens. I was thinking of getting a ticket, for Wednesday night, perhaps? If you like, I could—pick up two?”
Crowley looked at him then with very sudden; comically capitalised; embarrassingly italicised Understanding. Aziraphale's courage, such as it was, began to fail him. He hadn't asked a person out in a decade, at least, and never anyone as wonderful as Crowley. He only hoped he wasn't winking in his growing desperation.
“I think you'd enjoy it. It has a… flying scooter.”
There was a spell of standing silence thereafter, against which Crowley tested out several vaguely preparative sounds before he settled on one he could work with.
“Well, that’s—” He scrunched his nose. “Really? Like, a little put-put scooter that flies?”
Aziraphale shrugged from the elbows.
“So I'm given to understand.”
“Huh—” Crowley pronounced with the air of an individual who’s just had their world view nudged three quarters of an inch or thereabouts to the left. “Well then. Can't say no to that.”
Aziraphale had to concentrate awfully hard to keep from skipping for glee as they continued on their way. Luckily, his attention was occupied soon after by scribbling his mobile telephone number on the cast list of Different Exactlies, which Crowley had handed to him for the purpose.
“Souvenir,” Crowley murmured, rather stubbornly abashed, when Aziraphale noted that he might have dictated the number instead, for Crowley to enter straight into his phone. And if there hadn't been a gentle sweep of incidental music for that moment in their story, well; their violinist was clearly sleeping on the job.
“This is where we part ways, I'm afraid.” On a street wet with memories of rain from the scene we first met in, painted with streaks of a dark city’s lights, while the company cross ways about us.
“Until Wednesday?”
“Until Wednesday.”
Aziraphale's heart took a flourishing curtsey. They should make that the name of our stage play, he thought. And as he dodged along the dappled streets of Soho, glancing behind a time to find that Crowley happened to have glanced behind him too—each of them lifting an opposite hand to acknowledge their hopelessness at going, as though they'd been lovingly choreographed—Aziraphale hoped the roles they'd taken in their story might strike magic off each other till the final curtain’s close.