The Interlude-Chapter 4: The Letter (pt 1)

Upon arriving back at the shop, Muriel set out tea, soup, and sandwiches (no salads-Mr. Fell was not a fan, said they cause an upset stomach) along with a heavily poured glass of wine for herself. The Protocol had specified that Crowley needed food and non-alcoholic fluids, however much he insisted otherwise. Even if he could technically survive without it, he would feel better once he had some.

After tea, Muriel led Crowley up to the loft, thinking he might be more comfortable on the original issue couch. They were correct; the demon splayed out immediately, settling into old grooves formed from decades of lying in this exact position. He inhaled the pillows like an addict getting his first fix in years. “Smells like ‘Ziraphale”, he explained, muffled by the tartan throws.

Muriel pulled The Letter out of the larger envelope. It was much thicker than they expected. Granted, after six thousand years of not saying things that needed to be said, the letter might need to be that thick. They just hoped Mr. Fell had focused more on the substance than the flowery “Pride and Prejudice” talk. She miracled up a letter opener for Mr. Crowley, then left him alone. Though they did keep working in earshot, just in case Crowley needed anything else.

They weren’t totally shocked to hear Crowley start reading out loud. “My Dearest Crowley…pretty bold start, angel. Didn’t feel particularly dear to you when you FORGAVE ME for a simple kiss like I’d committed a bloody genocide.”

Out of sight, Muriel was rolling her eyes at the demon’s outburst. From their memory, Crowley was greatly exaggerating the angel’s reaction. Also, while they had no basis for comparison at the time, they had seen the kiss from the window and found it more awkward, forced, and desperate than “simple”. While she and Mr. Fell didn’t exactly chat about the day a whole lot, he’d brought it up once in a roundabout manner. At a diner somewhere in America, Mr. Fell had become transfixed by a romance movie on the background television. The hero literally grabbed the woman and swept her off her feet without a word. On the screen, the resulting kiss looked grand and passionate. “Don’t think that’s the best way to go about it in real life, though.” Mr. Fell had remarked. “Silly books and movies giving us all a bad instruction manual. In the real world I’d imagine she’d have preferred to stay on her own two feet and a ‘would you mind terribly if I kissed you now, darling?’” He sighed. “Keep that in mind, Muriel, if you ever decide to go experimenting.” Replace “darling” with “angel” and she could just tell he was rewriting the past in his head, one of many things he wished could have played out differently.

“You were all I wanted…but not like this, not like this”

Shit. Was the sound system going rogue? She and Crowley had agreed to keep Taylor Swift off the main speakers. She quickly switched back to “Bicycle Song” and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

It was probably for the best that the Archangel wasn’t here to watch Crowley’s reaction to The Letter. A simple (okay, slightly complicated) greeting was already setting him off, and Mr. Fell would get all huffy and defensive about it and the fight would continue for another century that they may or may not have. Muriel’s dearest hope was that the demon would calm down, stop nitpicking at details, and see the bigger picture of how much Mr. Fell truly loved and missed him.

Crowley returned to the letter. After the greeting, an awful lot was scribbled out. He tried holding it up to the light to get a better look, but eventually gave up. All that was left was marginalia-a heart, a snake, some plants, a picture that might have been Crowley’s face had he posed for Picasso on a bad day. Finally at the bottom were three coherent sentences. “I believe I owe you several apologies for my conduct on the day of my Glorious Ascension.” He’d written the word “Glorious” with a leftward slant, possibly to indicate sarcasm. “But we will get there. First there is the matter of time, and my newly minted understanding of it.”

“If you think I’m going to f-word you that easily, you’re out of your fucking mind, angel! And what the hell does time have to do with all of this?”

The next page was very dense, and from a glance included some Bible verses. “Oh, throwing the Good Book at me, very All-Holy of you, great job Almighty Archangel.”

“You know, if you want to investigate the biblical prophecies of the End Times, you sort of have to quote the Bible, Mr. Crowley.”

“You ssssaid you hadn’t read this, inspector.” It seemed like Crowley had settled on a nickname for Muriel. Truly an honor, they thought.

“I haven’t. But I’ve helped with said investigations, kind of figured they’d be mentioned.” It would have been a terrible omission if they weren’t. And part of their job, Muriel reasoned, was to make sure there were no major omissions. Though hopefully the analysis wasn’t so long and tedious that Crowley missed the point entirely.

“Thought you ssssaid this was a love letter. Doesn’t feel like it.”

“I never ssssaid that. You asssumed.” After a couple drinks, Muriel felt like hissing right back at the serpent. She was confident that this was a love letter, in a sense, but surely the demon had known Aziraphale long enough to know his love letters wouldn’t be pithy sonnets? “If he hadn’t found it important, His Holiness wouldn’t have included it.” To be fair, there were probably a lot of unnecessary words in there, but Crowley would just have to read those to get to the necessary ones, wouldn’t he?

Crowley went back to the long dense pages, which were indeed a discussion of various verses and what they said about the Second Coming and the End Times and which ones Aziraphale thought were just from a rogue prophet on too many hallucinogenic substances and which were worth paying attention to. It was all very intellectual-sounding, and while of course he admired the angel’s intelligence, he wanted him to get to the point already. About five pages later, at the very bottom, in larger handwriting, was his rather startling conclusion.

“In short, my dear, we’re mortals now, in a sense, and we ought to start acting like it.” Crowley purged all the alcohol from his body; he wanted to be sure he read that correctly.

“Um, Muriel? What’s all this about being mortal? Did the angel take away my…no, it says we’re mortal, does that mean the Metatron did something to both of us?”

“Don’t think so. As far as we know, you aren’t literally mortal. He means figuratively.” Muriel decided to sober up a bit herself. God, that was unpleasant. She summarized-of all the biblical references, the one Aziraphale found most important was Matthew 24:36 “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” (KJV-Aziraphale was a traditionalist). The Metatron had said they’d have seventy times seven years, checking in every seven years, and Aziraphale had instructed the other Archangels to proceed with planning the Second Coming on that timeline. But he found the Bible slightly more trustworthy, even as he knew firsthand that there were omissions and inaccuracies and bits taken wildly out of context. So if the date of their demise was truly unknown, did that not make them mortals with a longer time horizon?

He had decided that trying to stop the true apocalypse, whether it happened tonight or in a few millennia, wasn’t the best use of his time. “After all, even the ruins have come to peace with their own mortality, whatever may come next,” the letter read. “Having lived through centuries as I have, surely you have returned to ruins of places that were once alive, now eroding from stone into sand? Have you ever seen them attempt to resist that fate? Every time I visit Stonehenge, it seems like the stones are surprised they’re still standing. Having seen their counterparts erode, they’re not quite sure what makes them the ones that got preserved this long, and they have accepted this uncertainty.

“Likewise, I am not sure why I have been so blessed as to have gotten the assignment of Guardian of the Eastern Gate, had six thousand years to explore Her creations both delightful and terrible, and of course, to have had the most perfect companion through it all. Sometimes I ponder what would have happened if you hadn’t Fallen. Would I have been stuck with Hastur or Ligur or even Beelzebub?” Crowley shuddered at the thought. “But I wish not to dwell on that now. As it was, I had you, my dear, and I fear that in my attempt to save you, I have lost you forever.

“Presuming for a moment that the Metatron’s timeline is correct, that means we may be closer to the end of our lives than the beginning, but we do have a window of time to reshape these golden years. I find myself returning to the clichés of human deathbed regrets: not showing their love for their loved ones enough, leaving bridges burned that might have had a chance to heal, and focusing on trivial details instead of what was really important. I fear I did all of these in one day, and I am truly sorry I hurt you. I wish to explain my words and actions on that day, but I want to make it clear that I am not trying to make excuses or faulting you for being upset at how it all transpired.” Crowley was choosing to ignore the inclusion of the s-word. For now.

The angel confirmed Muriel and Eric’s story about the threat to erase Crowley from the Book of Life, but there was a bit more. “I had asked if there was a possibility we could both be written out of the Book, so I wouldn’t have to exist without you or vice versa, but the Metatron refused to entertain that. One of us would have to go if I chose not to Ascend, and They didn’t seem to care which of us it was. Either I would be a hollow shell of an angel, never knowing why I felt something was missing, or you would be a demon walking the shades of grey alone for eternity. Neither were tolerable options, so faced with the choice of coffee or death, I chose the coffee. For both of us.” That last metaphor was convoluted, but Crowley was stunned. Did Aziraphale really just write that he’d rather be erased from the Book of Life than live without him? He wasn’t sure how to process that, so he set the letter down and stared up at the ceiling until he somehow fell asleep.