Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aziraphale was excited to see Crowley. He was always excited to see Crowley, but today felt different. Maybe something about holding hands on the bus, spending the night at Crowley’s flat, swapping corporations, and spending hours talking at the Ritz made it different. Maybe it was the dull, empty ache Aziraphale had felt when Crowley had announced that he couldn’t be awake any longer, and was going to drive home. 

He was out the door before Aziraphale could mention the down comforter and miraculously fluffed pillows upstairs. He hoped Crowley didn’t know about the bedroom. He had never been upstairs before. Aziraphale was going to bring him upstairs the moment he arrived. Then Crowley could do all his sleeping in the bookshop. He would never have to leave if he didn’t want to. 

It had been nearly eight hours since the demon had left, and Aziraphale was close to bursting. He was considering buying one of those cellular telephones that Crowley was always going on about, just so he could get a text message when Crowley was on his way. 

He was pacing. He hated pacing. He only paced when he was incredibly anxious. Or at least he did. He didn’t think he was anxious. 

A distraction, Aziraphale thought. That would be just the thing. He would get something ready for Crowley. A surprise for Crowley. He checked the time. Eight o’clock. He probably had another hour or two before the demon awoke. Too soon to make him something to drink. He glanced out the window. The record shop would be opening in an hour. Maybe something there would inspire him. Maggie always had the best ideas. 

He tried to read, but found himself having to reread the same passages over and over again. So he returned to pacing. 

“Good morning Mr. Fell! You’re certainly up early!” Maggie smiled when she saw him. 

“I’ve had quite the weekend, if you would believe it,” Aziraphale said. 

“Hopefully some music will be just the trick. Is there a composer you’re after?”

“I’m looking for something rather modern today, Maggie!” 

“I have some Benny Goodman over here,” Maggie suggested, and moved towards one of the crates. 

“Far more modern than that!” Aziraphale said. Maggie gave him a soft smile. 

“Expanding your horizons?”

“A gift. But something he wouldn’t usually listen to, perhaps? Something different.” 

“For your friend in the vintage car?” 

“Yes, actually!” Aziraphale smiled. 

“What does he usually listen to?” 

“His car seems to like the band Queen .” 

“Does he ?” 

“Sometimes I’m not sure,” Aziraphale said. “He likes the Velvet Underground. And David Bowie.” 

“Radiohead?” Maggie asked. Aziraphale rubbed his temples as he tried to remember all of the compact disks in the Bentley. 

“I think so,” he said after a moment. 

“Then I have just the thing!” Maggie rummaged around in one of the boxes for a moment and came back to the counter with a record in a black sleeve printed with a rainbow representation of a sound wave. 

“Vitamin String Quartet?” Aziraphale read aloud. 

“You said you wanted something he wouldn’t usually listen to!” 

Aziraphale kept reading. “Performs Radiohead’s In Rainbows. I like rainbows.” 

“Not a surprise there,” Maggie said, giving Aziraphale a knowing look. Humans often did that, gave him knowing looks about something he decidedly did not know. They meant well. 

“And he’d never listen to a string quartet. Unless we listened to it together. This is just marvelous!” 

“Would you like me to wrap it?” 

“Maybe a bow?” 

“Of course! Any particular color?” 

Aziraphale thought for a moment. He pictured Crowley in all of his black. His golden eyes. Then he remembered the one color Crowley chose for himself. “Red.” 

Crowley had done the unthinkable when he got back to his flat the previous night: he had set an alarm. He had, of course, snoozed it nine times, but still, eleven thirty was preferable to a month from now, which was the likely outcome of not setting an alarm. He hadn’t slept since Warlock’s - Adam’s - birthday, and he was still feeling it after eleven and a half hours of rest.

He glared at his phone as it went off for the tenth time. He was finally awake to recognize the song. He had been in the Bentley when he’d set it, so she had picked the sound.

“Ooh love, ooh lover boy!” played out over the speaker. Crowley shut the alarm off. 

“Lunch didn’t mean anything!” he said, as if the car could hear him. He snapped his fingers. Silk pajamas were replaced with skin tight jeans and a sinfully soft turtleneck. Aziraphale had liked all the turtlenecks he had worn back in the sixties. He thought for another moment and felt the sunglasses appear on his face. He couldn’t let Pearl downstairs see his eyes. What if she wouldn’t take the plants anymore? 

He got in the car. The Bentley immediately began playing Crazy Little Thing Called Love. Crowley groaned. “Lunch didn’t mean anything!” 

She turned up the volume, as if to ask “really?” 

“Neither did the bus.” He hoped he was convincing the car. He hoped she didn’t realize how difficult it was for him to convince himself. 

When he arrived at the bookshop, it occurred to Crowley that he didn’t have a reason to be there. He and Aziraphale didn’t have anything to discuss. They didn’t even have plans to thwart each other at a theater on the West End. He allowed himself a smile. 

The shop was closed and the front door was locked. Crowley turned the knob and walked inside. “Morning, Angel!” He called out as he put his glasses on a side table. 

“Dear boy, it’s half past twelve!” Aziraphale answered from somewhere in the shelves. Crowley grinned. The angel was so funny when he got this particular. “If you wanted to say good morning you really should have -” he cut himself off when he made his way around the shelves at last. “Oh, Crowley!”

“What?” Crowley asked. He knew Aziraphale liked the turtleneck and he had dreamed that would bring them somewhere, but this didn’t seem likely. 

“It’s lovely!” 

Crowley glanced down at the outfit. No, nothing out of the ordinary. 

“Your hair!” 

Crowley reached up. This wouldn’t be the first time his body got ahead of him in changing styles. Crowley believed his hair would always suit him, so it always did. 

“No, silly! The red!” 

Now Crowley was confused. “My hair’s always been red.” It had. He hadn’t chosen it, but he probably would have picked red if it had been an option. He hadn’t considered changing it. He’d never admit it, not even to himself, but red was his favorite color. His favorite color was supposed to be black, but he liked red. Red like apples and ice lollies and old leather bound books that made Aziraphale practically bounce with glee.

“Not this red.” Aziraphale held out a hand mirror. 

He was right. Crowley’s hair, usually tinged a dark mahogany, was the kind of red that humans had to buy hair dye for. Red like forbidden apples and ice lollies in the park and the curtains at a West End show where their knees almost touched. “That’s new.” 

“You didn’t do it?” Aziraphale asked.

“Didn’t mean to,” Crowley said. 

“It really is beautiful. ” 

And if Crowley hadn’t already liked the new red, he loved it now. 

Aziraphale believed he knew why Crowley’s hair was brighter, especially now that had gotten even more red in they years since the world didn’t end. Crowley liked color. He liked his plants to be the brightest green. He had always kept a vivid red under his collar. Now he was away from hell. They couldn’t tell him off, or worse, hurt him for the choices he made, so he could be colorful. 

Aziraphale had noticed the shifts twice. The first time was just a few months after Armageddon didn’t happen, when Aziraphale had suggested that Crowley simply stay the night upstairs. When he came back down, Aziraphale nearly gasped at the new shade. 

The second was after the lockdown. It had been hard to miss. When Crowley entered the bookshop for the first time in months, his grown out locks were nearly brown. When Aziraphale waved at him from the recommended two meters apart, it brightened to its pre-end of the world shade. 

“We’re not going to get sick, Angel. Our bodies don’t do that.” Crowley had said. 

“But what if we’re carriers? I heard that’s a large part of the problem.” 

“I’ll miracle it so we aren’t.” 

Aziraphale had dithered for a moment, but finally gave in. “Make it a really good miracle.” He walked over to the demon and gave him a hug. It was brief and gentle, but when they pulled apart, Crowley’s hair resembled a fire engine. 

And that did something to Aziraphale. The excitement, which had been building since he first realized that there would never again be a consequence for his friendship with Crowley, bubbled up and boiled over. 

“Are we the kind of friends who hug each other?” Aziraphale asked. 

Crowley raised a curious eyebrow. “Do you want to be?” 

“I think I’d like that very much.” 

They were the kind of friends who hugged each other. And the kind who fell asleep with their heads on each other’s shoulders while watching a film. They were the kind of friends that held hands while they walked to lunch, and the kind who said ‘I love you’ when they did something nice for one another. 

Aziraphale had always been partial to a certain color palette. White was traditional for angels, and gray was all the rage up in heaven, but it had never been him. He liked soft yellows and pastel blues. He loved gold, especially when there wasn’t any shine to it, and he liked dressing in tan. 

He was finding himself, all the sudden, quite partial to red.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale tried to turn the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. That was unusual, the angel thought. The bookshop was never locked. Well, not never, it was locked whenever it was closed, which was, of course, frequently. But Aziraphale never locked it, and it was never locked when he wanted to enter. He didn’t even have a key. 

He knocked on the door. That felt unusual. 

“We’re closed!” Murield called out from inside. “At least I think so!” 

“You think so?” Aziraphale called back. 

“The hours are ‘purposefully confusing.’” 

Aziraphale smiled. They were. He had struggled to make them quite confusing enough until Crowley had presented him with a full page of his neat, blocky writing. 

“This is simply demonic!” Aziraphale had cooed, “No one will ever know when we’re open!” 

“I noticed people were aware every once in a while,” Crowley shrugged. “I wouldn’t want them to have access to someplace nice and cozy with any regularity. Might inspire them to do good.” 

“Of course,” Aziraphale had smiled. He couldn’t say thank you, but he had put the sign in the window straight away. 

The sign wasn’t in the window anymore. “It’s me!” Aziraphale said. “The hours don’t apply to me!” 

There was a long, long pause. “You’re supposed to ‘wait a bloody second,’ you can come in when he’s gone.” Muriel said. 

Aziraphale returned to a more frantic attempt to turn the knob, his twisting accompanied by dozens of finger snaps. They were met with a wall of demonic energy coming from the door. It was easy for him to forget that Crowley was very good at keeping people out of places he didn’t want them going in. Aziraphale had never experienced it firsthand before. 

He realized, with a sinking feeling, that this miracle was only for him. No angelic intervention could open this door. Well, he’d just have to do it the human way. “I’m sorry, dear,” Aziraphale said to the door. Then he kicked it in. 

“Fuck.” It wasn’t an exclamation, but a bitter, resolute syllable. Crowley stood in the shadows of one of the shelves. 

“I’m sorry dear boy, but I really must speak to you at once.” 

Crowley barked out a sharp laugh. “You must speak to me at once? Got more forgiveness for me?” Aziraphale cringed. Crowley wasn’t done. “And what are you sorry for? Not letting me leave the bloody bookstore?” 

“The second coming,” Aziraphale said, which stopped Crowley. “Humanity needs you, Crowley. I need you.”  

Crowley stepped out from behind his shelf. “Are you sure you want to work with one of the bad guys?” 

Aziraphale couldn’t respond. All he could do was stare. “Oh, Crowley,” he started. 

“You don’t get to say that,” Crowley snapped. “And you don’t get to say it with that voice.” 

Aziraphale took a deep breath. “Yes, that’s quite fair.” 

“I’m going to help you, but only because I live on this godforsaken planet.” 

The blasphemy flew past Aziraphale in favor of one word. Black. 

Crowley wore a plain black shirt under his black jacket. Black jeans were tucked into black boots. That was all well and good, but there was no hint of red under his collar. There was no silver chain or gray knotted tie around his neck. Even the wire frames of his sunglasses were darker, as close to pure black as metal could get. 

“Your hair,” Aziraphale thought out loud. 

“You don’t get to use that voice.” Crowley didn’t yell, or even growl. It sounded like he was begging. 

Aziraphale couldn’t find any other voice to use in the face of Crowley’s jet black hair. 

Two years ago, Muriel found Crowley sitting outside the door to a church. 

“What are you doing?” 

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” The demon spat at them. 

“Crying?” 

“You’re not supposed to answer that!” What Crowley was doing, was talking himself down from the edge. He had driven here so purposefully, but the first sting of consecrated ground on his feet brought slowed him down. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe it was a good thing Muriel had stumbled upon him during their evening constitutional.  

“Would you like to go back to the bookshop together?” 

“I’m not going back to the bookshop.” He said it too fast. 

“I could still drive with you, if you wanted company.” 

The Crowley of a week earlier would have laughed. Muriel, having only been on earth a week, still dressed all in white, could not drive with him. They’d discorporate the second he went over twenty miles per hour, and he intended to go a lot more than twenty miles per hour. The current Crowley just said, “I’m going to my flat. It’s in the wrong direction.” 

Muriel’s perfectly perky expression faltered. “Alright then!” 

Crowley got into the car. Would he have been able to do what he intended? Could he have made it a few feet into the church? Could he have pressed his hands into the font? Or bent over it, sinking in face first? It didn’t matter anymore. 

He drove back to his flat. The plants were already there, withering. It was his fault they were withering. He had spent the last week sat on the floor, looking at nothing and thinking. It was the thinking that got you. 

The thinking got you to stand up and get in the car. To drive to a church on a Tuesday and pick the lock, since demonic miracles didn’t do much to church doors. To take the first step in and feel the burn on your feet through snakeskin boots. To immediately sink to the floor in tears, just to have it burn your hands and knees too. 

He had thought about the last six thousand years. He had believed, truly believed, that Aziraphale understood. Even if the angel couldn’t admit it, not even to himself, he understood that Crowley was better off than when he was an angel. He was wiser, more realistic. And he was himself. Mischievous and quick witted, traits that weren’t smiled upon upstairs. Falling, as painful as it had been, allowed him creativity, sarcasm, and a myriad of other things that heaven could never be changed to give him. 

But Aziraphale didn’t love him. Aziraphale didn’t even like him. Aziraphale liked that silly, naive angel that he had met before time. And if Crowley couldn’t be that, what was the point of him, really? 

He got into bed. He miracled himself asleep, so the thinking couldn’t start again. Hopefully he wouldn’t wake up for a long, long time. 

Crowley woke up the next morning. He groaned when he saw the date on his phone. He miracled himself dressed, then looked in the mirror. He wondered what his body, used to wearing sweaters for the past week, had found itself fitting into. 

“That’s new,” he noted. There was barely any red at all left in the brown of his hair. He turned up the collar of his jacket. It was lined with a deep, shiny black. 

Crowley made a note to take care of the plants when he got home. Most of them were dead. Those that weren’t would require a careful touch to bring back. Crowley would give them to Pearl downstairs if she wanted them. He didn’t have a gentle touch in him at the moment. 

That thought sent him back to the church, to the font, to the burns on his feet, and he had to get out of the house. 

“Hello, Anthony!” Pearl was the only being that ever called him Anthony. He was frequently ‘Mr. Crowley,’ or just Crowley, but Anthony was exclusively for paperwork. 

“Hey, Pearl.” Crowley tried not to hate her for wanting to get on the lift. 

“Anything new for me?” 

“I’ve been slacking off, they’re in rough shape. Don’t have to take ‘em if you don’t want to.” 

“I think I have a space for a plant in rough shape! Maybe it just wants to talk!” 

“No.” Crowley said. The lift accelerated towards the first floor. “It doesn’t. It just wants its… baby plants to have someone better to take care of them.” He got off the second the lift dinged its arrival. 

He drove to Whickber Street before he started thinking. His brain started working again just in time to avert his eyes. He didn’t think he could see the building without breaking. Instead, Crowley miracled himself a parking space right in front of Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death.

“Morning, Mr. Crowley,” Nina said when he got to the counter. “It’s odd seeing you without the hair dye.” 

“The what?” Crowley asked. 

“Your hair doesn’t look bloodstained?” Nina offered. 

“Oh, yeah, forgot.” 

“It must have taken ages to get it all out!”

“Yeah. Ages. Can I get a black coffee?” He handed Nina his credit card. He had never bothered to learn how credit cards worked, but he was sure it would pay for his drink. Aziraphale probably knew how credit cards worked. He probably got curious one day and went to the library to learn about them, then found the books really interesting and ordered them for the shop. 

Nina handed Crowley his coffee and he made his way to one of the tables in a corner by the bulletin board. He glanced at a poster for a local theater production. Aziraphale would insist they see it. He might have even auditioned if he saw the poster soon enough. 

Crowley shook his head as he turned away from the poster. He didn’t need to think about Aziraphale. 

He sat in the coffee shop for far longer than it took to drink his coffee. In his head, he made a list. Garden shop, back to his flat, down to Pearl’s flat. He’d leave the struggling plants by the door. No need to talk to her again today. There. He had a plan. 

That plan was immediately disrupted by the jingle of the coffee shop’s door being opened. Crowley groaned when he saw Muriel. 

“I’d like to purchase a human caffeinated beverages, please,” they said when Nin asked for their order. Crowley hated himself for it. He hated Muriel for it. He hated the coffee shop and Nina and the whole bloody world for it. He was at their side in an instant. 

“They’ll have an iced vanilla latte, extra milk and extra vanilla with a sprinkle of cinnamon.” The order made Crowley’s chest hollow out. It was the order he had used to show Aziraphale that coffee didn’t have to be bitter.  He leaned over to Muriel. “How are you paying for it?” 

“Paying?” They asked. 

“And it’s on me,” Crowley said to Nina, then to himself, “And I thought Aziraphale was bad at blending in.” 

Muriel offered to invite him to the bookshop, but Crowley shut it down. He couldn’t go back to the bookshop. They sat across from him at the table. 

“How are you?” Muriel asked. Crowley briefly considered punching them. 

“Shit.” 

“No need for that kind of language!” 

“You asked how I am.” 

“And that’s how you are?” 

“Yeah. That’s how people feel when they tell someone their feelings and he leaves them forever to go work for their abusive ex boss.”   

“Oh.” Muriel pulled out a notebook. 

“Don’t write that down.” 

They put the notebook away. “How do you know all of this?” 

“Been here a long time,” Crowley shrugged. “You need to learn about paying for things.” 

And he taught them, sitting in the coffee shop, about credit cards and just believing you had a bank account, and the best people to miracle the cash away from, the ones who wouldn’t miss it. 

“Stealing isn’t a sin, greed is. You’re just helping them share with small businesses.” 

“Well that’s alright then!” Muriel was so cheery. Crowley thought about the time before time. About the excitable angel Aziraphale wanted. 

“I’ve got to go home,” He told Muriel. 

“Can we do this again?” They asked. 

“Not at the bookshop.” 

“No, here,” Muriel promised. Crowley could do that. 

The car started playing music before he put the key into the ignition. 

“Oooh baby do you know what that’s worth? Ooh heaven is a place on earth.” 

Crowley tried to turn the sound system off, but considering the fact that he hadn’t turned it on, it didn’t do anything. 

“Stop it,” he growled at the Bentley. “It was bad enough when it was just Queen.” 

“Look into his angeleyes! One look and you’re hypnotized!” 

“Shut the fuck up!” Crowley yelled, then closed in on himself. “He’s not a part of my life anymore.” 

The car put on some Bowie. Crowley could listen to Bowie. A little less on the nose. Crowley breathed out a sigh of relief. 

Then the sharp, tingling sensation raced across his scalp. “What the fuck?” he said, to no one in particular. Then the sensation stopped. 

Crowley ran his hand through his hair. It didn’t feel different. He couldn’t imagine what had just happened. He opened his phone’s camera to check if there was anything he had missed with touch. There was. 

A distinct lack of red. Crowley’s hair was a true brown. He sighed in resignation. Aziraphale wouldn’t like this. 

I don’t care what Aziraphale thinks, he thought. His scalp tingled again. He glanced at the screen. Darker brown. 

Crowley felt the sharp, hot sensation when he put the statue of the angel and demon “wrestling” into a cupboard in his flat. Again when he drank the whole bottle of wine he had been saving for an extra special occasion with the angel. Again when he changed the route he took to get to Whickber Street to avoid driving by the Ritz. 

He would never forget the worst time. 

“Nina’s out of town,” Muriel said when Crowley met them by the closed shop. 

“We can go to the bookshop,” Crowley suggested. 

“Will you be okay?” Crowley had told them enough that they understood the basics of why it was so hard for him to go into the bookshop. 

“It’s been long enough. I don’t think of it as his bookshop anymore.” Immediately, fire raced from Crowley’s forehead to the nape of his neck. He bent over with the pain of it. 

“It’s getting quite dark, isn’t it?” Muriel noted, gesturing at Crowley’s hair. 

“Almost black,” Crowley said, looking at his reflection in the shop window. 

He had almost black hair while he stood in the bookshop, talking to Muriel. It got closer to black when he promised himself that he could sit in his usual chair, even without Aziraphale there. He might as well sit. It wasn’t like Aziraphale was coming back. 

The worst time was replaced by the time he heard Aziraphale’s voice. He didn’t want to hear it. He told Muriel he didn’t want to hear it, or see him, and Aziraphale would have to wait a bloody second and he could come in when he left. And he keeled over with the pain. 

“Get in, your grace,” Crowley said. Aziraphale got into the car, holding back from actually voicing how much he missed the lilt of endearment that had always come when Crowley called him ‘Angel.’ Maybe he could handle ‘your grace’ if it was teasing or sarcastic. It wasn’t. 

“Love of my life, you hurt me,” the Bentley really wasn’t pulling any punches. 

“Crowley I’m so sorry I-” 

“I don’t want to hear it. We have an apocalypse to deal with, then you can get back to work, and I can get back to doing just fine on my own.” Crowley inhaled sharply as Aziraphale watched his hair get impossibly darker. 

The angel took a deep, albeit unnecessary, breath. Crowley was right. They had a world to save. 

Then he could find a way to tell Crowley that the black was just as lovely. He just had to convince himself of it first. The black looked like it was consuming him, bit by bit. Crowley was left without the energy, the mischief, the humor that made him Crowley . 

Aziraphale looked straight ahead. They had an apocalypse in front of them.