The Known/Unknown Quantity

Chapter 126: Enduring Light

Chapter 126: Enduring Light

Aziraphale wasn't taking Crowley through the shift. Crowley was taking Aziraphale.

Unheeding, unhindered, they drifted. They saw Alpha Centuri, and lingered at Proxima, but got no further than the edge of its gravitational pull.

They floated through Crowley's soul, and became audience to the images playing out eternally on their surfaces. The snake in the center flicked a tongue at them, but it coiled in warmth and light and not in frozen stillness.

Back to the universe of their own making, the two-hundred-year conversation, back and forth, they witnessed the moments of their lives together in that space made only for them, by them.

He did not take him down to the place the tyrant held reign in his life. But he did take him to the two years afterwards.

Through Crowley's timeline, and his own, the angel drifted with his Beloved. Nothing more than passerbys, to every point their paths had crossed. But not to the future. Only the past.

Distant, free of thought, free of emotion, Crowley took Aziraphale through their lives. And as they came back to the bright and brilliant pain of the present, a tiny part of the demon looked to him, and begged him endure.

When the angel awoke, he was weak. Someone helped him sit up. He didn't know who. His vision swam, and his body felt like warm jelly. Water was pressed to his lips. A moist cloth on his wide forehead. He was aware of his mouth speaking words, explaining to the air what he saw, but it all seemed so very far away. They told him Crowley was still alive. But they told him no more. And he slept.

Endure.

Endure what, exactly?

Had Crowley meant just hang on? Clever angel, you'll think of something?

Or had he meant let me go, angel? The eleventh hours is here?

After all they'd been through, after all they endured together, had he finally meant, please, go one without me?

Aziraphale woke emotionally numb.

So much information the little group had. No real solutions. And as for the angel? The clever, faithful, ever-ready, enduring angel?

The clever angel was all out of ideas.

Another hour past, and soon Aziraphale was on his feet and alert, if a bit wobbly. They spoke to him of painful events, and he took the news somberly, wearily. And without a word, and with some steady hands supporting him, he went to the basement to be with his demon, to provide what little comfort he could, and to spend, together, whatever time they might have left.

Someone was calling him. Newt.

He looked back at Crowley, who weakly squeezed his hand.

"Go on," the demon mouthed, too frail now to utter much sound. "He'll be down shortly." The angel blankly looked at him.

Through those rusty bandages, he perceived Crowley's eyebrows raise in macabre humor. His trembling mouth relaxed from its tight grimace and beamed toward him. "Don't you worry. I won't leave without saying good-bye."

The just told him he loved him. He brought his cold fingers up to kiss them, and then left soundlessly, and reluctantly.

As he came up, he felt drained. Every step was a leaden weight.