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“We’re so good at this,” Nina whispers to Maggie as she lights the candle in the middle of the table, and Maggie nods excitedly. See, Nina and Maggie are attempting to pull off what Aziraphale and Crowley had tried to do to them: shove them into a romantic situation until they realize they’re in love. Of course, they hadn’t appreciated when Crowley and Aziraphale had done this to them, but Nina and Maggie haven’t been in a push-and-pull for six thousand years (or longer, they aren’t sure).
Currently, Nina and Maggie have laid out a tablecloth upon one of the tables in Give Me Coffee Or Give Me Death and are setting up doilies and a candle. Alongside them, an old record player croons out old melodies.
Aziraphale has just returned from Heaven, and he and Crowley have done nothing but look at each other really hard and then sit in the bookshop and drink until they are both passed out. Apparently, this is a “coping mechanism” to “deal with” the “near-Second Apocalypse”.
Maggie thinks they’re sick in the head.
Nina thinks they’re… well, she believes them. She’s seen crazier. But she doesn’t think they should be ignoring the things they’ve avoided for six thousand years—honestly, how do they get anything done?
Six thousand years and neither of them have confessed to feeling at least… friendly towards one another?
That’s embarrassing, Nina thinks, for both of them.
Her and Maggie smile gently at each other over the soft orange light of the candle.
“Do you really think this will work?” Maggie asks gleefully.
Nina shakes her head uncertainly. “I’ve no idea. If worse comes to worse, we’ll lock them in.”
“They can just… do that thing they do… get it back open again.” Maggie waves her hands in the air vaguely.
Nina pouts thoughtfully. “Worth a try.”
They set four chairs up around the table then call the bookshop.
“We’ve got a nice little table,” Maggie says into the phone, “but we might be late, we’re running to get some, er…” Nina gives her a c’mon gesture with her hands , “supplies for the store. They’re relevant to the dinner.”
Before whichever one of the two is on the other end can respond, she hangs up. They leave the store (you know, to keep up appearances) just as the door to the bookshop opens, and then they round the building and sneak back in through another door. The two women kneel behind the counter just in time for the bell above the door to jingle.
“Where’re Maggie and Nina?” Crowley asks. Nina can practically feel the suspicion oozing off of him.
“Er, they said they would be late. Had to get some things, they said.”
They hear Crowley sigh, and then it goes quiet for a minute.
“Erm…” Aziraphale begins, “where should we sit?”
They both hear Crowley sigh. Again. Louder.
“Aziraphale, there’s one table set. Where do you think?”
There’s a soft sound of a pat—presumably Aziraphale hitting Crowley’s arm in jest—before the angel speaks.
“I meant what chairs, dear? You don’t have to be so obtuse.”
“I’m not being obtuse! I’m being… equilateral!”
Nina chokes trying not to chuckle at the image of Crowley flailing his arms in distress.
There are footfalls before Maggie and Nina hear a chair scrape along the ground.
“What’re you doing?”
“Look at this record player,” Aziraphale murmurs fondly, “it’s been very well-kept. Do you have any preferences?”
Maggie looks straight at Nina. “I told you the records were a good idea,” Maggie teases under her breath. Nina rolls her eyes.
“I don’t care what you put on, Aziraphale.”
It’s now hitting Maggie and Nina that not once has Crowley said the word “angel” in the conversation. Perhaps things aren’t flowing as smoothly as they would like to think.
Nina peeks over the counter, and Aziraphale is standing by the record player looking a little stiff. “Alright,” he says, and cards through them, “I’ll… find something.”
She glances at Crowley, who’s pouring himself a glass of wine. Aziraphale glances back at Crowley, and just when Nina think’s he’ll scold him (as usual—something like, “Oh, Crowley, shouldn’t we wait up? Maggie and Nina aren’t here.”), the angel turns back towards the device quietly.
He picks out a record, and sets it up to play. It’s an instrumental Queen vinyl.
Maggie kneels up by Nina, and they both watch Aziraphale politely pull out a chair across from Crowley. The light of the candle flickers gently across their faces, turning them orange.
There’s a palpable silence between the two as they stare at each other for a moment—except for, of course, the music.
“‘S been a minute since we’ve both been sober,” Crowley comments. Aziraphale exhales, chuckling.
“I suppose it has.”
Silence, in this moment, is orange and soft, and it’s something gentle and firey between the angel and the demon. Much like the physical properties of fire itself, the silent conversation between the looks Aziraphale and Crowley give each other is something the women will never understand.
“What was Heaven like?” Crowley questions thickly, but he’s not angry or sad. The question is purely objective.
“Ah,” Aziraphale mutters when he glances at the table, and Maggie watches an expression fall over his face that looks betrayed and longing all at once, “it was…”
Aziraphale looks up at Crowley, blue eyes locking in.
“… lonely.”
Crowley takes a drink. “Sorry to hear it.”
The angel shrugs and looks away. “Perhaps it was for the best. No more people for me to muddle with…” he chuckles in a way that someone who hates themself a whole lot does, and scratches his neck, “… and, you know… all my unbridled chaos never meeting a single other angel was also probably for the best.”
Crowley’s mouth twitches. “What’d you do up there?”
“Well, since you… stayed on Earth, I didn’t have to worry about you being in the crossfire of my restructuring, with it being, er, chaotic and such.”
Eyebrows raise above glasses as Crowley looks pointedly at the angel. “You caused problems? Up in Heaven? No way,” he says, sarcastically.
Blue eyes sparkle with mirth, and Nina and Maggie can tell it’s probably the first of it Aziraphale has felt in a long time. “Yes, I did. I’m… actually glad you weren’t there. If you’d seen what I’d done, you’d think much differently of me.”
The little fire on the candle dances angrily as Aziraphale becomes tense. “I changed the colors. Too much white, I think. Then I added a suggestion box to my office.”
Something changes then, and Crowley seems to brighten immensely at the mention. Perhaps it’s an inside joke of some kind—yet another thing Maggie and Nina will never understand.
“You did?” Crowley asks, and his voice is gentle and open.
Aziraphale looks a little flustered, and Crowley tosses an anxious glance towards the counter, and Maggie and Nina kneel back down. “It’s working,” Maggie whispers, and Nina nods excitedly. “We did almost get caught, though.”
On the other side of the counter, they hear Aziraphale clear his throat out of habit. “I did. And then some things happened, the Second Coming was planned… I punched the Metatron in the nose…”
Nina and Maggie look at each other in shock while Crowley chokes on his drink out of sight. “You w-what?” he coughs.
“Now, now,” Aziraphale says softly, “don’t go discorporating yourself while drinking wine. That’d be a terribly embarrassing way to go out.”
Crowley chuckles and clears his throat. “Sorry. Caught me off-guard.”
“… I would not have wanted you to see me in such a way. I was trying to make things better, and—“
“Are you kidding? That’s awesome! You’re awesome, Aziraphale!”
Adoration oozes from either of them. The women tucked behind the counter glance at each other once more while it falls quiet, and an instrumental cover of I Want To Break Free plays among the silence.
“Well, I-“ Aziraphale stammers, “I’m above violence. Usually. Besides, Heaven hadn’t been good enough, and I hadn’t… I couldn’t do what I wanted.”
“What did you want?”
The tone shifts suddenly, and Maggie and Nina feel as if they are intruding on something with the intimacy of thousands of years layered upon it like sedimentary rock—something that has been there and withstood the tests of time, and something that is weathered and chipped.
“I wanted to make things good enough,” they hear the angel confess, “I wanted…”
Tentatively, Maggie and Nina peek over the countertop again.
“I wanted to be good enough.”
“… for Her?”
“For you.”
Quickly, Maggie and Nina understand that this is what is happening now, and that Aziraphale is still trying to be good enough for Crowley, who looks at him with all the love in the world.
They understand that Crowley and Aziraphale love in a way that is much too soft and much too hard for them to ever even try to comprehend.
“Angel,” Crowley whispers, and Aziraphale turns away.
“You’ve always been better than me, dear,” Aziraphale confesses with the weight of a million sins, “you… there’s so much good inside of you, Crowley, and not in an angelic way, or an anti-demonic way.”
Slowly, Maggie and Nina’s eyes track Aziraphale’s hand, where it reaches across the table to meet Crowley’s.
“You are the best thing that has happened to this existence. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it worthy.”
The women glance at Crowley, who looks as if he is experiencing every human event that has ever happened on Earth right in that second.
“I…” he says, and the thousands of ways he’s invented how humans love each other today seem to slam into him, “Angel, you are my existence.”
It’s like life is breathed back into either otherworldly being as they breathe softly towards each other, like humans do. They grab hands, like humans do, and they stand up and fumble around the table, like humans do.
They rip each other closer, like humans do, and they meet face-to-face and lip-to-lip passionately and compassionately, like humans do. They love each other so hard in that moment, like humans do, but it’s becoming all the more likely that they two are the reason humans love as they do.
They stand in the middle of the shop and embrace, like a couple thousand years apart are being closed and sealed between them. Crowley pulls away, and his hands crown Aziraphale’s head and brush away stray hairs because he would bow to Aziraphale at any given moment, and Aziraphale holds Crowley’s face in his hands and caresses the undersides of his eyes gently because he is holding the world.
Maggie and Nina stare at each other in… emotions they can’t begin to describe.
“Holy shit,” Maggie mutters, and Nina nods.
“Holy shit,” she agrees.
They crawl into the backroom and reenter quietly with armfuls of wine.
Aziraphale and Crowley are still tasting each other like they were born hungry when Maggie and Nina reemerge.
“Did we come into the middle of something?” Nina calls awkwardly, and Aziraphale and Crowley both freeze.
Wide-eyed, still tugged into a passionate embrace and lips consuming those of the other, they enter an intensely awkward staring contest with Nina and Maggie.
In a split second, they’re apart, bright red in the faces, and disheveled.
“Erm, not at all!” Aziraphale says, at the same time Crowley goes, “You didn’t see that.”
Nina and Maggie laugh.
“Sorry we took so long,” Maggie apologizes, “we, uh, got caught up.”
“We knew you were here,” Crowley says plainly.
That’s embarrassing. Oops.
Nina and Maggie are blushing like they’ve stumbled upon something more intimate than just a kiss.
“And you kept going?” Nina asks incredulously.
It’s Crowley and Aziraphale’s turn to blush.
“We, um,” Aziraphale mumbles, “sort of… forgot.”
Everyone laughs now.
When they sit down, Crowley glares pointedly at the humans. “I thought you said it was wrong to try and corral two people together.”
Maggie and Nina share a glance.
“We haven’t known each other for six thousand years,” Maggie says.
“You needed a kick in the arse,” Nina supplies helpfully.
Crowley shuts up and Aziraphale bites his lip. “That’s… that’s true,” the angel says.
Crowley and Aziraphale spend the rest of the evening teasing Maggie and Nina for their hypocrisy.