When Crowley switches them back, Aziraphale pays attention where he hadn't before. This time, he feels the switch of the atoms, and the tilt of their consciousnesses.

He wants to be angry. They could have died, their vessels could have been melted and burned and they would have to deal with the fallout of trying to play two separate legions of warriors for fools. If things hadn't worked out, they'd be damned, quite literally and quite permanently and—

And. Crowley is looking into his eyes as they switch, and there's something almost pleading there. Aziraphale doesn't know why or what for or even if it matters, but it breaks down any anger he might have felt.

It's over now. He looks away from Crowley and shakes out his body and adjusts his clothes. Everything's passed, and everything worked out. There's no real reason to fuss over white lies, especially not when Aziraphale knows why Crowley did it—as if a mirage could ever fool Beelzebub. Gabriel. He was foolish to ever imagine it could.

Sometimes, Crowley is a lot more wise than he is. Just sometimes.

Aziraphale thinks, briefly, about what he had felt in Hell. Of the little hints of cruelty that had wormed their way in. It makes even more sense that Crowley had truly swapped their bodies with that puzzle piece; the cruel tint to Crowley's chemistry must have given Aziraphale that brief capacity for hate. Yes, that's it. That must be it.

The holy water sizzled a little, after all, and that couldn't have been him.

"I asked them for a rubber duck," he tells Crowley in faux confidence, to distract himself from the thought. "I made the archangel Michael miracle me a towel!" He chuckles, and Crowley laughs, head tilted back.

"They'll leave us alone. For a bit," Crowley says, looking off in the vague direction of the people walking about the park. Then he sucks in a long breath and turns to look at him. "If you ask me, both sides are going to use this as breathing space before the big one."

This gives Aziraphale pause. "I thought that was the big one," he says, looking at Crowley in slow alarm.

"No, for my money, the really big one is all of us against all of them." He jerks his head toward the park at large, and Aziraphale feels his stomach turn at the implication.

"What?" he breathes. "Heaven and Hell against… humanity?" They turn away from each other, and a tendril of dread creeps up into Aziraphale's throat.

It makes a horrible, awful amount of sense. Aziraphale wishes desperately that he didn't agree with Crowley so completely. He does, though. Heaven and Hell are far too similar for their own good, and humanity far too vivid. It's easy to see how, eventually, the human race might cease to be the push-and-pull between Heaven and Hell. It's easy to see it might become a catalyst for their reconciliation, after the fall had separated them, and it's easy to see it might already be happening. Michael had provided the means of his (Crowley's) execution, after all. Maybe she's the start of it.

"Right. Time to leave the garden." Aziraphale is shaken back to the present when Crowley speaks again. "Let me tempt you to a spot of lunch?"

The offer is a relief Aziraphale didn't know how to ask for.

"Temptation accomplished," he concedes, and they stand together. "What about the Ritz? I believe a table for two has just miraculously come free."

Sitting next to him in the Ritz, Aziraphale regards Crowley for a moment and recalls that vibrance he'd caught a glimpse of, down in Hell. For a demon, Crowley isn't as bitter as the rest. He's not filled with so much rage and spite it's like he's melting from the inside out. It's like… well, it's like he hasn't festered quite as long as the rest of them.

And he hasn't, has he? Haven't he and Aziraphale spent over six thousand years on Earth? Crowley isn't like them because he hasn't had the chance to stew. Instead, he's spend the better part of his immortal life among humans, alongside Aziraphale—and isn't he so markedly different from the other angels, too.

That something vibrant that had made the fallen fall is still alive and sparking in Crowley. This comes to Aziraphale plainly, truthfully, and he knows he's right. After all these years puttering about on Earth, spending so much time among humans it's as though he's one of them, that spark of brightness is still strong in everything he does and says.

That vibrance is eerily human. Aziraphale wonders suddenly, hesitantly, if humans were the kind of people that the fallen were always meant to be.

No use dwelling on it, he thinks hastily, the tragedy of the thought filling his gut with the most awful heat. No use at all.

"I like to think none of this would have worked out if you weren't, at heart, just a little bit a good person," he says, looking Crowley in the eyes, and he believes it, wholeheartedly. Crowley is good, and he means to be good, no matter how many times he insists he's a demon and he can't be. He is. He always has been.

"And if you weren't, deep down, just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing." Crowley smirks at him, and he smiles bashfully. Maybe it's true. Maybe it isn't. The feeling behind it, the swelling of adoration that Aziraphale feels emanating from Crowley—has felt from him, for years and years and years now—is truth enough.

"Cheers," Crowley prompts. "To the world."

A fitting toast, really.

"To the world," Aziraphale says, and it means a lot more than that.