Chapter Text
Aziraphale slips quietly into the chair across from Uriel. It feels a bit wrong, being here without Crowley, but Crowley has been asleep for twelve hours straight. Aziraphale had lingered beside him for a long time after the shock had worn off, after his breathing had gone slow and his limbs pliant, just watching him. At least they'd had a proper stroll in the park and lunch at the Ritz first. Inevitable, he'd supposed.
Ineffable.
"You survived, then," says Uriel, sliding the sunglasses down the bridge of her nose. She grins and takes them off, folding them neatly beside her champagne flute. "I knew those would catch your eye. This calls for a toast, doesn't it?"
"Which?" asks Aziraphale, before he can stop himself, and blushes for the first time since...gracious, he can't say when. He'd wondered what the situation on the ground was in North America, and although he'd popped in briefly here and there whilst discorporated, he hadn't got a clear picture of what was going on, not by any stretch.
"The End of the World," Uriel says, "or the confession you're this close to making."
"Very well, dear girl," he says wearily. "Both. There's no use in lying to you, is there?"
"Nope," she replies, miracling another glass of champagne so deftly Aziraphale could have sworn it had already been there. "When you work with humans as closely as I do, you learn to spot it a mile off." She clinks her glass against Aziraphale's and takes a long swallow. "Guess who turned up on my doorstep and hid in my flat till the worst of it had blown over? Couldn't take all the tremors. San Fran to Toronto, who'd have thought he could fly it in forty-five minutes?"
"No permanent damage done," Aziraphale sighs. "The boy was conscientious."
"You should see the state of my sheets," Uriel says. "Tell Adam Young to fix that."
"I'm, ah, not sure he can fix something of which he's not aware."
"He sure fixed you two," Uriel says, breaking into a mischievous smile.
Aziraphale squeezes his eyes shut for a few seconds, takes a deep breath.
"I should like to think," he says, "that it was our own decision. Just like the rest of it."
"You sided with them," Uriel says. "With mine. Listen, if it ever comes to it—"
"If it ever comes to it again," Aziraphale corrects her, "you know where to find us."
Uriel nods into her glass. "I'm sorry. I'd have come if Raphael hadn't—"
"It's the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety. Surely they'll wait a while."
"Or maybe they'll just forget," says Uriel, softly. "I hope they'll forget."
Aziraphale thinks of Crowley's warm skin and hitched breath, of the look on his face when he'd come. The look on his face when Aziraphale had come. Sheer wonder.
Uriel clears her throat, clandestinely refilling her glass.
"I never thought I'd see the day," she says. "Not that it's not sweet and all, but..."
"But what?" Aziraphale prompts, not liking the tilt of her frown.
Uriel flicks ash on the pavement. "I don't know what you see in him. Nice for what he is, yes, absolutely. You've got me there. He didn't so much Fall as trip and make an arse of himself, and part of him's been trying to make up for it ever since. You, though, you've got a lot to answer for. Is that what it is? He keeps you respectable?"
Aziraphale experiences a flash of genuine anger, but quells it as swiftly as he can.
Crowley wrapped around him. Crowley's startled laughter at the brush of Aziraphale's fingers behind his knee. Crowley's voice, low and drowsy, asking if Aziraphale thinks everything is going to be all right. Telling him yes, touching his hair. Holding him.
"He reminds me," Aziraphale tells her calmly, "of what matters."