Archive of Our Own

~oOo~

As temptations go, Aziraphale talking Crowley into coming back to the bookshop for another drink or two (or twelve) can’t rank as terribly difficult.

If it even ranks at all. Crowley agrees before the proposition has fully left the angel’s mouth, and he has the utter gall to get all blushy about it, which makes Aziraphale blush too, and oh stars, it’s always going to be like this, isn’t it? Crowley is here, wanting him, wanting to be with him, wanting it so automatically that he seizes every little handful offered to him. One has only to look at the lean thing Crowley is to realize that this is not someone who is accustomed to receiving, but that hasn’t ever affected his appetite for it. Indeed, if he were any more starved for touch, he’d be skin and bone, completely translucent.

Luckily, Aziraphale has a similar conundrum.

“It’s all right, darling. More than all right. I can never get enough of you, either,” he leans in and whispers to the demon, whose cheeks blaze even brighter and whose hand squeezes even tighter around his.

“Well then you’d best get us back to your shop, angel,” he manages, his voice a little choked, but rallying more with each word. “Just because we’re doomed to never be satisfied, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.”

Well, now Aziraphale’s cheeks have caught fire. He wouldn’t be surprised if his hair were to start smoking. He tuts at the demon, swats his arm, but he can’t conceal his pleased grin as he prepares to perform the rather frivolous miracle which will deposit them in his cozy reading nook, with two crystal tumblers and a bottle of perfectly-aged single malt Islay scotch already open in front of them.

It’s always going to be like this, and Aziraphale can’t wait.

~oOo~

A memory:

The day Warlock Dowling turned six years old, neither of his parents were there.

A simple scheduling error on the part of assistants with entirely too much to do meant that both Mr. And Mrs. Dowling were sitting at gates in foreign airports when the morning of September 22nd dawned.

As bad luck would have it, neither of them were able to get earlier flights. (It must be said that Harriet Dowling tried much harder than her husband, who was jockeying for a promotion at the time and who actually found it most advantageous that he couldn’t get away. He could think of nothing that would better demonstrate his dedication to his job than dropping less-than-subtle hints that he’d missed his only son’s birthday to attend this particular diplomatic summit.)

But some effort or none, the end result was the same.

And so Crowley donned Nanny Ashtoreth’s long skirt, coat, boots, and lipstick, and took his time up the staircase on his way to wake young Warlock, and had to watch the boy’s young face progress from joy to confusion to understanding to sadness to resignation. At only six, Warlock already didn’t cry anymore when he realized his parents would not be present.

As always, Crowley tried to ignore the squeeze, the stab of pain behind his breastbone. As always, he didn’t quite succeed.

Bless it, this was not just some abandoned boy. This was not just any sentient being reeling from the absence of someone who should have loved him better. This was the Satan-damned Antichrist!

Crowley shouldn’t have cared. He should have capitalized on the boy’s current emotional vulnerability in order to push him further towards the path of Darkness.

It’s what any proper demon would do. No demon worth their sulfur would ever pass up a chance like this.

But instead, Crowley offered him breakfast, and when Warlock shrugged and said he wasn’t hungry, Crowley took the boy for a stroll through the grounds, in the direction of the gardens.

He hummed as they walked. The tune was an ancient reel that, in much older days, had been used to lull children into a calm, happy state. It made them pliant, easier to spirit away. The melody sounded suspiciously like one of the main themes from a certain work by Steven Sondheim. It didn’t tend to work as well on children older than five, but Crowley was rather surprised that it even seemed to work on Warlock at all.

But work it certainly did. He padded placidly along at Crowley’s side, absently tracing leaves of plants they passed, picking petals off others at random.

Not bad, thought Crowley. About half and half.

He kept humming as they followed the wending path through the greenery, swinging the boy’s hand to and fro. The honeysuckle was blooming particularly well this year, as it had every year that Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis had been employed by the Dowlings, because it knew what was good for it. Its scent spread like a fragrant, freshly-laundered blanket, saturating the air of the grounds with sweetness.

It was a good thing that the song still had Warlock in a haze, because quite without meaning to, Crowley had led them in the direction of the little thatch-roof cottage at the edge of the garden, with its charming stone-cobbled wall that demarcated the boundary of the Dowlings’ property. It was a good thing, because as they approached, Crowley spied the telltale lines of a tailored velvet waistcoat instead of a dirt-stained smock; a pale, lovely complexion, rather than ruddy, sun-soaked cheeks.

Of course, he would be out of costume. He’s not expecting a visit.

Aziraphale was seated on a squashy armchair on the cottage’s porch, completely absorbed in the book that rested on his lap, showing no signs of noticing their approach.

Not knowing what else to do, Crowley sent out a low-grade pulse of demonic energy, the lowest possible, only enough to raise the pale gold hairs on the angel’s forearms, which were exposed thanks to his rolled-up shirtsleeves. (That and forsaking his normal jacket were his only concessions to the warm day.)

It worked a charm. Aziraphale startled, immediately casting his gaze about for the origin of the familiar aura. As soon as his eyes found Crowley, he snapped his fingers.

An involuntary grimace took over the demon’s face at the reappearance of Brother Francis. The armchair morphed into a weathered old rocker, its robin’s egg blue paint mostly flaked off, and the angel’s book was quite astonished to find that it was suddenly not a book at all, but a tobacco pipe.

Crowley stopped humming then, and Warlock blinked, taking in the change of scenery. He looked to Crowley for reassurance, and bless it all, Crowley couldn’t help it. He smiled down at that dear little face; he squeezed the boy’s small, soft hand in his. Antichrist or not, a hard day was a hard day, and if refusing to make it harder made Crowley a sorry excuse for a demon, well.

There were worse things to be.

“What’s this, lad? Weren’t yer parents s’posed to be back today?” the angel asked in that hammy, heavy country accent.

Warlock shrugged, looking down at his feet. He twisted them into the gravel path, making a divot in the ground, burying the tips of his boots. As if wishing for the ground to swallow him up.

Aziraphale winced at himself, but Crowley couldn’t really blame him for the tactless question. The angel had ceaseless love for humanity, unflagging faith they’d do the right thing when push came to shove.

(Which isn’t, Crowley reflected, actually an Angel thing. It’s an Aziraphale thing. He’d probably assumed that Warlock’s parents were on their way home right that very moment. In fairness, this was the first time they had actually missed their son’s birthday.

Crowley, on the other hand, did not have that sort of love for mankind. He knew that, realistically, Thaddeus and Harriet would return by midnight, and take Warlock out for a ridiculously, apologetically lavish – and wholly unsatisfactory – lunch tomorrow.

But he didn’t have contempt for them either. Or at least, not as much as a demon should have. No, to be fully honest, he loved them.

Not the way Aziraphale did – not with infinite faith, but some other way. The kind of love that knew they would disappoint him, keep breaking his heart over and over and over. But every once in a while, some of them will sometimes at least try to do the right thing, and some of them will even succeed.

It was rare, but it happened. Crowley had seen it. He’d paid attention all these millennia. He’d marveled at their ingenuity for worsening their own circumstances, even while Aziraphale had despaired of it. But he’d also secretly exalted in the heights of their goodness, right alongside the angel. Just when I think I’ve got them pinned down, they find a way to wriggle free. It never stops taking me by surprise.

Humanity, Crowley had come to believe, was neither good nor evil made flesh. No, they were nothing less than imagination incarnate.

And beliefs like that were exactly what made him such a piss-poor demon.)

“Well, now,” Aziraphale was recovering a bit. “Why don’t you two come visit with me for a while, eh? Come have some tea.”

He ushered them in, smiling like anything, and Crowley barely suppressed an eyeroll as his grin exposed the full effect of those awful fake teeth. He promptly forgot, however, as Aziraphale shooed them on through the entryway into his cozy little kitchen and set about getting the kettle on.

Crowley had never set foot in this cottage by daylight, and he had never been able to get a good look at the kitchen. The overall effect was bucolic almost to the point of embarrassment; pots and pans hung from wall hooks, and the curtains and tablecloths looked like giant doilies. A small hand-painted bread box sat on the counter. Tea towels sporting colorfully embroidered wildflowers were draped over the handles of both the fridge and the oven door. The window was open, and a grass-scented breeze played gently with the curtains. The air smelled of freshly-baked scones, a touch which Crowley barely suppressed a laugh at, because of course it did. Of course.

As Crowley and Warlock took their seats at the table, a plate of still-steaming blueberry scones landed in front of them. This was followed by a small dish of clotted cream with an ornately engraved silver spreading knife, three cups of Earl Grey, and a bowl of sugar cubes with the smallest pair of tongs Crowley had ever seen.

Silently, Warlock took a pastry, spread cream on it, and dropped a sugar cube into his tea. Then, when Crowley made no move to stop him, he took another lump of sugar.

Reaping the benefits of sympathy. Not evil, necessarily, but certainly enterprising, he thought as he passed the sugar bowl and then the cream to Aziraphale, wordlessly. No worse than most humans, though.

Crowley sipped his own tea, leaving the scones.

“This is a wonderful Earl Grey, Brother Francis,” Crowley remarked to break the silence. “You must tell me what brand it is and where you found it, so I can buy some on my next trip into town.”

It was, in fact, a blend that originally came from a brand that had ceased production and closed its shop in the middle of the 19th century, the name of the place long since lost to Crowley’s recollection. Not lost, however, was the recipe for Aziraphale’s favorite tea they’d made.

Hell, I could recite those ingredients in my sleep.

The angel had been all but inconsolable the day the shop closed its doors for the last time. Little did he know that Crowley had spent the better part of the week prior doing some first-class tempting, finessing the closely-guarded recipe out of the proprietor. It had taken an excessive amount of eyelash-batting, but after five days, the old man finally gave up the ghost.

It came under one condition: if Crowley were ever to sell the blend under a different name, he had to pledge to at least modify the amount of one of the ingredients, or add a small measure of a new one, so that the recipe would be ever so slightly different from the original.

Which suited Crowley’s needs just fine. Aziraphale had always said that the tea would be much better balanced, absolutely perfect, with just a touch less bergamot.

From there, the rest had been simple: perfect the recipe, drop it into the head of the first young woman whose husband had it in his mind to start a business, and make sure they had a fortunate windfall at exactly the same time that a prime piece of real estate on London’s busiest high street went up for sale. Within a few months, their shop opened, and their flagship blend hit the market under a new name, with resounding success. It earned a Royal Warrant almost immediately. Crowley had tried to wait for the angel to discover it on his own, but ultimately lost patience and brought a tin of it to his shop.

(“Oh, I appreciate it, Crowley, I do. But to tell the truth, I haven’t been able to enjoy any sort of Earl Grey since…well, I needn’t remind you.”

“But it smells so much like the old stuff did! Just try it. At least a sip, angel.”)

And after much more cajoling, Aziraphale had.

Crowley still had dreams about the way the angel had looked at him that day.

It’s a bit like how he was currently looking at Crowley for evoking the memory: with flushed cheeks (or at least, as flushed as they could look under Brother Francis’ already ruddy complexion); with mouth agape, but slowly slipping into a pleased smile that Aziraphale tried to hide by tilting his chin down toward the table; with warm, corner-crinkled eyes that shifted away, but then looked back again a second later, shy.

And the fake teeth don’t even ruin it. Oh Satan, I’ve got it bad.

Warlock, meanwhile, nibbled at his scone, glancing back and forth between his two primary caretakers. Who, Crowley realized, he had never seen share a room before, let alone sit inches apart, chatting together like they did it every day (they did); a nanny and a gardener, smiling at each other over tea and scones at a tiny kitchen table.

It was a domestic tableau straight out of the kind of story book Crowley actively avoided reading to him, but that Warlock loved anyway.

For a reason he couldn’t name, the lad’s open, innocent scrutiny made the tips of Crowley’s ears go hot. He took a rather unladylike gulp of his tea and tried to ignore it. Whenever Warlock was this quiet for this length of time, it usually meant he was working himself up to uttering something quite shocking, probably what most adults would call an “inappropriate question.”

Most adult humans really hate questions. Crowley loved them, despite, well. Everything. Maybe that meant he still wasn’t an adult.

Ordinarily, Crowley tried to encourage these outbursts, as they often provoked entertaining responses from the other household staff. And from his parents, when they happened to be around to hear them. But now that Warlock’s focus had fallen solidly and square on him and the angel, he found himself dreading whatever was about to come out of this child’s mouth.

They all held a few moments of silence. Then, in a small voice that nonetheless echoed louder than a shout, Warlock spoke.

“If you guys got married, could you adopt me and be my mom and dad instead?”

Aziraphale spluttered into his tea and went red – well – redder. He looked like a mortified beet. Crowley himself cleared his throat daintily and had to imagine as hard as he could that his own blood was not in fact rushing to his cheeks at roughly the same speed that Falling angels plummeted into the Pit.

“Oh, my boy,” Aziraphale murmured, having regrouped a bit, but some of his accent had dropped away, his consonants crisper, his vowels choir-clear. “We’d be so lucky to be your parents, but your mother and father do love you. Very much. They’re just…just…” here, the angel faltered, and Warlock, whose face had just begun to brighten, frowned doubtfully, his brow a heavy storm-cloud, his eyes threatening rain.

Aziraphale couldn’t lie to the boy. Not easily, anyway.

Angels had an automatic falsehood filter. It was the standard factory setting, so to speak – built into the design from jump, difficult to turn off. Crowley remembered well – he’d had one once, too. Angels could lie, technically. It just took more effort. It was akin to forcing a square peg through a round hole – a great deal of shoving and twisting was required to get a dishonest statement past the filter.

Too bad it doesn’t filter out honest questions. Might have saved me quite a bit of trouble, way back when.

As it turned out, though, Crowley couldn’t lie to Warlock either. Or. Wouldn’t. Whatever, same result.

“They’re just very important people,” he said, laying a gentle hand on Warlock’s shoulder, squeezing in a way he hoped was comforting. “They have full schedules, lots of things to do. Too many. And when we have too much to do, sometimes we can make mistakes and overlook even the most important things. But Brother Francis is right, dear. Your parents love you.”

Which was true, every bit of it, and Warlock nodded, but his little face did not un-crease. He was too young to give words to why he didn’t feel any better, even if their reassurances had convinced him of his parent’s affection.

But he was plenty old enough to feel the sting of being loved by halves.

You’re too young to know such a thing.

We all are.

Aziraphale cleared his throat.

“What sort of birthday cake do you think you’d like, young master Warlock?” he asked. Crowley stared at him, but Warlock just took another bite of his scone and chewed that over, his eyes drifting up to the light fixture in the ceiling.

Crowley leaned in, his breath held fast.

He could ask for anything and probably get it in some form or another. He might request something lavish and excessive, just because. He could try to get three different cakes by pretending he couldn’t pick just one.

Choices mean everything.

“Baked Alaska,” Warlock decided, and popped the last bit of pastry into his mouth, chasing it with the dregs of his tea. “Because then you have cake and ice cream, all at once.”

Once again, Crowley wanted to laugh, and this time he couldn’t hold down a titter. One befitting a nanny, of course. Warlock’s choice wasn’t even cake, not properly, and he could see the strain in Aziraphale’s brow, around his eyes and smile, as he fought down every ounce of his clamoring culinary sensibility in order to avoid pointing this out to the boy.

Fussy angel.

“A fine choice,” Crowley told him, meaning it. Not an extravagant choice, but not a restrained or modest one, either. An honest one. A tad difficult, to be sure, and Warlock knew that, but that hadn’t been why he’d picked it.

We might avoid the Apocalypse yet.

“Come to think of it, it is,” Aziraphale agreed, at length. “I’ve not had that particular treat in – quite a long while,” he’d lost his accent again, dropped it on the way home to the end of his sentence, and this time even Warlock looked at him askance. Crowley shook his head minutely and resisted the urge to massage his temples while the angel un-cleared his throat, roughened it once more to the consistency of sun-warmed gravel. “Whoops! Bit of a frog in me throat, there.”

Crowley resisted a fond eye-roll, though it would have been safely invisible from Warlock’s inquisitive gaze behind Nanny Ashtoreth’s elegant frames. Warlock, meanwhile, shrugged off their praise.

“It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“You never know, my dear,” Crowley said before he could stop himself, then he had no choice but to keep going. “We may not be able to manage it today, but I’m sure your parents would take you into town to get one as soon as they’re both back.”

They would, in fact. Crowley did not use the full force of his demonic powers much these days, but making insidious, insinuating suggestions that stuck fast in the brains of anyone who heard them was his strong suit. Warlock would get that Baked Alaska, one way or another.

Next to him, Aziraphale had gone still and dead silent. His considering, calculating look seemed outlandishly out of place on the visage of Brother Francis. Like watching a sunflower trying to hatch a plot. Luckily, Warlock was distracted by a sparrow that had perched and begun to chirp a bright melody on the windowsill, and Crowley elbowed the angel subtly. The blonde jumped in his seat.

“Yes!” he yelped, startling them all, including the sparrow, who ruffled its feathers, but continued to sing its lilting melody, regardless of the rude interruption. “Yes, I’d wager so!”

There was no trace of his accent left. Warlock stared at him with his mouth open.

“Well, best get a move on, I think,” Crowley said, a little loudly. “We’ve imposed on Brother Francis’ hospitality long enough. And we ought to get back to the house before that rain starts up.” It hadn’t looked like rain a few seconds prior, but the situation called for a speedy exit, and now, dark grey rainclouds roiled in the bit of sky visible out of the cottage’s kitchen window.

Crowley ushered Warlock out of his chair and toward the door, hands on small shoulders to steer him. “Thank you very much for the scones. Say thank you to Brother Francis, my dear.”

“Thank-you-Brother-Francis.” Warlock parroted as he bent to tie his shoelaces.

“No trouble at all, lad. You come back anytime. Don’t be a stranger, now,” an American southern accent had slipped in there, somehow. What in Heaven was the angel thinking?

Crowley tossed him an exasperated look over his shoulder on their way out of the cottage, but Aziraphale hardly noticed; he’d lost himself in thought once more. As Crowley closed the door, his counterpart was staring into space and counting on his fingers, mouthing silently. If the train to London leaves at precisely nine in the morning, and the trip takes an hour and a half, and the headwind is blowing at approximately thirty kilometres per hour, how long before an overly indulgent, sentimental angel blows our cover?

Don’t much like the looks of that particular word problem, Crowley thought, with apprehension and no small amount of fondness.

~oOo~

Back at the main house, Crowley let Warlock do whatever he wanted for the rest of the morning. This turned out to be posting up at the dining room table with his handheld gaming console, while Crowley took care of a few household chores the maids had missed. (Which was a tribute to chaos and definitely not an act of charity, Crowley told himself as he put all the dishes away, just in slightly different places than they normally went.)

(Later in the week, he’d bless himself all the way to Heaven and back when he couldn’t find anything in the kitchen.)

He’d just placed the last wineglass in the teacup cabinet when Warlock looked up from the tiny screen in front of him.

“When do you think my parents will be back?”

Crowley had not heard from either of them since being told they likely would not be back until late that night. He’d concealed this information in hopes that they’d secure earlier flights, and he’d be able to deliver this good news without having to break Warlock’s heart first. At this point, he could only assume that they would indeed arrive long after their son had fallen asleep.

No sense in delaying the inevitable. Crowley opened his mouth to tell him, but his voice chose that moment to pull a vanishing trick that would have made Aziraphale’s stage magic act weep bitter, envious tears.

Why? I’ve said worse things than this. I’m sure I have.

Nothing came to mind. He was a demon, for Satan’s sake! He couldn’t tell one boy that his parents let him down?

He never got the answer to that question, because while he stood there with his stupid mouth hanging open, the doorbell rang.

Warlock’s face lit up for all of one second, and he sat all the way forward in his chair, before it dawned on him that his parents wouldn’t bother ringing to announce their arrival. He wilted again, slumped back once more.

He hadn’t cried all morning, not one single sniffle. But now, Crowley saw the tell-tale sheen in his eyes, the rapid blink, the devastation of having allowed himself even the smallest bit of hope.

If that’s a door-to-door salesperson, thought Crowley, they are about to be the regretful owner of the brand-new arsehole I’m going to tear them.

(Usually, when people made that threat, they were speaking figuratively. Crowley wasn’t.)

He didn’t say this. What he did say, mild as meringue, was:

“I wonder who that could be.”

Warlock shrugged. He hadn’t gone back to his video game. He was staring at the table, scoring fresh, deep marks into the expensive mahogany with the tip of a pen.

Crowley clenched one fist, the one hidden from Warlock’s sight, and left to answer the door. As he neared the entryway, he peered through the glass pane alongside the heavy oak panel and spotted a familiar square-fingered hand clutching a white to-go box tied up with a claret ribbon. With a sense of foreboding comparable to the one he’d had exactly six years ago when he’d been handed a basket in a graveyard, Crowley opened the door.

“Yes?”

“Oh, hello there!” said Aziraphale, his voice somehow even plummier than usual. He was about as far from his Brother Francis disguise as he could get. He wore an impeccably-tailored powder blue suit, a matching hat with something small and silver on its band, a pale golden silk bowtie, and shoes so shiny-clean, they looked like they’d never even heard of dirt. “I’m looking for Warlock Dowling, is he home?”

“Well now, that depends who’s asking,” Crowley said, his voice as sweet and quiet as marzipan laced with cyanide. “Who might you be?” And what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?

“Oh!” the angel exclaimed, “Wherever are my manners? My name is Zirah, Phillip A. Zirah. I’m a cousin of his fathers’. Warlock’s parents informed me of, er, the mix-up that happened today, and I happened to be nearby for work, so I thought I’d come see him, and bring him a little something.” Aziraphale indicated the package cradled in his hand, and winked at Crowley.

Crowley did not wink back, but he did bite his lip to conceal the twitching in his cheeks, the automatic grin.

Warlock, who sniffed out presents like a shark did blood in the water, padded up beside his nanny, rubbing his eyes.

“Ah, there he is! Oh, my dear boy, just look at how big you’re getting! Do you remember your Uncle Phil?”

The boy squinted at him, searching for a memory that wasn’t there.

“I think so…” he lied, and Crowley couldn’t help but be a bit proud of him.

“Well, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you didn’t, you were so young the last time I saw you. Just barely out of nappies, if I recall correctly.” Warlock stared up at Aziraphale’s beaming face as he spoke, jaw slack with awe.

Yeah, kid, I know what you mean. The angel radiated love. Even when he didn’t intend to, it always leaked through. Whatever container the angel inhabited, his love took on the shape of it – be it his warm, soft body, his musty, dusty bookshop, or the spotless, shoeless entryway of a huge mansion made even larger by loneliness. He can make anywhere feel like home.

(Crowley had always wondered why such Grace had never scorched him. All it had ever done was make a little shiver roll through him; the same paradoxical reaction that resulted from striding out of an overly air-conditioned office into a sunbeam.)

“Can he come in?” Warlock implored, one small fist tugging on the side of Crowley’s skirt.

“I suppose I don’t see why not,” is what Crowley said, although he could have thought of at least six excellent reasons why not, right off the top of his head. But next to the sparkle he saw in Warlock’s eyes, every one of them shrunk into the small, petty things they truly were, at their cores. “Please do come in, Mr. Zirah.”

“Oh, thank you,” the angel gushed, and promptly hung his smart hat on a hook on the wall, which swore it had not existed a few seconds prior, but no matter, it did now, and it had a job to do. Purely for show, the angel also wiped his feet before stepping past the doormat. “What a lovely home!” He remarked, looking around as if getting the lay of the place, a nice touch for this new character.

Or at least it was, until he ruined it by proceeding straight towards the kitchen, as if he knew where everything was in the house. Which he did.

Luckily, Warlock didn’t seem to notice, focused as he was on the parcel in the angel’s hand, and moreover, on a more pressing mystery:

“Why didn’t my parents tell me you were coming?”

There it is. You’d better have something good, angel.

Aziraphale, however, was unperturbed.

“Well you see, dear boy, they didn’t know! In fact,” he leaned in and murmured in a conspiratorial murmur, “They aren’t allowed to know. I’m with an American intelligence organization – top secret, can’t even tell you which one – and even as an employee of the State, your father can’t be aware of my movements. Same for your mother, since she might accidentally tell him.”

“Does that mean you’re a spy?” Warlock wanted to know, his eyes wide, sparkling even more now. A smile flickered on the corners of his mouth.

“That’s classified, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale demurred, but he also winked in a way that announced I most definitely am. “And so, this is rather important, my boy: you mustn’t tell your parents, or anyone else, that I visited today. There are certain parties that must not get wind of my location, or else my current assignment could be compromised. Can I trust you and your nanny to keep this hush-hush? A secret for just us three?”

Warlock nodded so hard, his cowlick bounced like a cowboy on a bronco, the follicles of it holding onto his head for dear life.

“You can trust me, Mr. Zirah. I won’t tell anyone,” Warlock promised, solemn as only a six-year-old child can be. “Ashtoreth, too. Right, Nanny?”

“Not a soul,” Crowley replied, holding one hand up.

“Oh, excellent! I knew I could count on you,” Aziraphale’s voice was warm. He had known it. Sometimes, Crowley thought, the angel created trustworthiness where none had existed before, merely by believing it was there, never mind the fact that even Heavenly miracles couldn’t accomplish such a feat.

And yet, here they were.

“And…you could…” Aziraphale began to suggest, his tone tentative, as if fearful of crossing some boundary, “…you could call me Uncle Phil. If you’d like.”

“Okay!” Warlock agreed, the smile that had been trying to break through finally succeeding, taking over his face. It made him look his age.

Aziraphale had set the gift box on the kitchen island, and the boy’s eyes kept darting back to it, then back to the angel, then back again. Aziraphale didn’t seem to notice, but Crowley did.

Anticipation and covetousness. Such a fine, fine line. So fine most people can’t even see it. Even I can’t, sometimes.

“What have you got there, Mr. Zirah?” asked Crowley, showing mercy, gesturing to the impeccably-wrapped package on the counter. Aziraphale grinned one of Crowley’s favorite grins, the indulgent one with just a hint of mischief. It was the same one that emerged whenever he allowed himself to be talked into a second round of sushi, or another glass of Margaux, or just one more profiterole, angel, what could it hurt.

“I happened to be right around the corner from the Café Royal when I heard from your parents,” he said, carefully loosening the ribbon, which made Warlock shift from foot to foot, going up on tiptoes to get a better view. “I wasn’t sure what you’d like, and I could hardly ask them, as that would have given away my intent to come see you. But they had this on special this week. I hope it’s to your liking.” He stepped aside, motioning for Warlock to open the box the rest of the way.

Despite himself, Crowley stepped closer for the unveiling. He already knew damn well what was in the box, and yet as Warlock lifted the lid and revealed the Baked Alaska inside, he felt an echo of the boy’s jubilant disbelief, and his jaw dropped open of its own volition.

It was a miracle. Granted, one in a relatively unassuming package, but a miracle all the same. The boy didn’t even know how much so, didn’t realize it was a real, proper miracle, but he felt it. Crowley did too.

How many miracles have I seen? Too many to begin counting. I was there for the birth of stars, of galaxies, of universes. Even built a handful of them myself.

I thought I’d seen it all, but I have never seen anything like this, he thought as he watched Aziraphale transfer the morsel to a plate, with soft hands, the way that certain kind humans handle small, shaky, newborn things.

I have never seen anything like you.

Warlock stood there and just stared at it for the longest time, long enough that Crowley was on the verge of telling him the ice cream inside it would melt if he didn’t hurry, though he knew Aziraphale would let it do no such thing.

But then, Warlock swiped at the corners of his eyes, and asked for a fork with a quiet, watery voice. Rather than taking the time to walk across the kitchen to the silverware drawer, Crowley summoned one straight into his hand and passed it to the boy.

But against all expectations, Warlock didn’t dive in immediately. His eyes traveled from the fork Crowley had handed him, then darted between the two of them, back and forth, as if waiting for one of them to say something else.

“Don’t you guys want – shouldn’t we get a knife?” he asked, and Crowley watched as Aziraphale’s face did that thing it always did when he’d just barely kept himself from bursting into tears – his features crumpled and then smoothed over again in a flash. As facial expressions went, it was the equivalent of a single bubble in a freshly-poured glass of champagne, surging up and vanishing within the space of a single moment. It was the kind of thing you’d be almost guaranteed to miss, if you were anybody other than Crowley.

Crowley had never missed it, not once.

“No, no, my boy. You have at it. I bought it for you. It is your day, after all.” Aziraphale said, his voice still a tad strained, a calm tone forced through a tight throat. Warlock looked to Crowley, for secondary confirmation, and the demon smiled, and nodded, and squeezed the boy’s shoulder.

“Go ahead, my dear.”

Warlock did, devouring it right there at the counter.

He said nothing in between bites, or while he chewed, but at some point, fat tears began rolling down his round cheeks. He made no move to wipe them away, and neither Crowley nor Aziraphale pointed it out.

Crowley did, however, pull out his handkerchief and set it wordlessly next to Warlock’s plate, clearing away the to-go box and the ribbon as he did so.

(The to-go box, he tossed in the bin; the ribbon, he slipped into the pocket of his suit coat, as quiet and discreet and devastating as a list of launch codes for every mass-destroying atomic weapon on earth, or a handwritten recipe for holy water. Sentimental sleight of hand, his downfall in the form of a string of cheapish crimson satin, soft knot come undone, the undoing of a demon. Metaphysical cellular breakdown. His most nuclear of secrets. His soul, such as it was, was made of the same hidden strings as everything, could unravel just like matter, could play entropy’s plaything. Find what you love, then let it kill you. )

Warlock finished eating, and the clatter of his fork on his plate snapped Crowley back to the present moment. More or less. It still wobbled at the edges; a typical side effect of messing with time and space too frequently.

(Or so Crowley had been told. He still remembered the briefings, long ago, when he’d been assigned to Celestial Development. You get your hands into that star-stuff, all that dark matter so much tar, and once it’s on you, you can never get it fully off – time dilation sticks like treacle, or so he’d been warned. Not much of a warning, since treacle hadn’t been invented yet. But he’d seen the poor buggers who’d been saddled with black hole duty. Never quite right again, they were. They moved too slow, like their limbs weighed millions of kilos each – even angels aren’t immune to an event horizon. Crowley never saw the same faces around for long, not on that team. He’s heard they’re still stored somewhere, kept in a special cordoned-off part of Heaven, all standing apparently frozen in a room with a one-way door, any movement discernible only to each other and the Almighty.

So he’d been careful. Careful then, careful now, but it still caught him sometimes. Moments stretched too far, or flashed by in a blink, or both at once, like a streaming video lagging and speeding to catch up with itself, trying to get back on its tracks, confusing the narrative.

He had no idea why he could still bend time. His Dominion days were long behind him, but perhaps it was the kind of thing you couldn’t lose. The kind of thing that was built into you, the kind of thing that couldn’t be taken away unless you yourself were un-made.)

With a loud, wet honk, Warlock blew his nose into Crowley’s handkerchief, who to his credit didn’t so much as wince when the boy handed it back to him. He miracled the sodden scrap of cloth clean and dry behind his back and restored it to its home in his pocket.

“How was that?” Aziraphale asked. “It looked scrumptious.” He said it with only the tiniest trace of envy, which perked Crowley’s ears.

“Really good,” Warlock confirmed, his voice still a little thick, the tip of his nose limned with red. “How long until you have to go back to London?” the boy looked up at Aziraphale with pleading eyes.

“Oh, my mission will keep for a couple of hours, I suspect. In the meantime, how would you like to hear some stories from my time in Moscow?”

“Aren’t they classified?” Warlock wanted to know, his eyes huge.

“Well, naturally! You mustn’t repeat them to anyone. All part of our little secret, right, dear boy?”

Warlock nodded emphatically, and so Aziraphale launched into a tale about how he once faked his way through tea-time with Mikhail Gorbachev without speaking a word of Russian.

Crowley, who knew for a fact that the most Aziraphale had ever done in Russia was consume impressive amounts of pierogi, excused himself from the room, pleading a need to use the water closet. He snickered to himself once he was sure he was out of Warlock’s earshot.

“Don’t push your luck too much, angel,” he murmured. “This kid’s smart. He’s bound to start poking holes in your stories if you keep stretching them so thin.”

Aziraphale, in the middle of his story, did not answer. He went on about how he managed to compliment the General Secretary on his taste in biscuits without revealing that he was an American agent. He did, however, huff rather pointedly through his nose when he paused for dramatic effect.

Crowley shook his head, all but trembling with suppressed laughter now. He braced himself against a wall, next to a portrait of Thaddeus Dowling II, one hand clamped over his mouth. Down the hall, Warlock was laughing much more openly, as Aziraphale described pretending to be distracted by a handsome butler in order to avoid answering the Secretary’s questions. Crowley’s sides hurt.

Ridiculous. My ridiculous angel.

Oh—

His mirth stuttered in his throat, then died a silent death. He blinked at himself once, twice, three times, then he straightened from his slouch against the wall, assumed Nanny’s impeccable posture once again.

None of that. You know better. He isn’t yours, and you know what would happen if he were. You’re not the sort of demon who needs teaching the same lesson twice, now are you? No, you’re not. Remember what you are. Devil may care, devil may care.

(The Devil did not, in fact, care. But Crowley certainly did. That was the entire problem.)

The universe, never one to let him wallow for long, chose that moment to intervene. His brand-new smart phone dinged in his pocket. He checked its screen, then performed a complex series of gestures in the air in front of himself, alone in the hallway, eyes falling closed behind his sunglasses.

It was only after it was done, after he couldn’t take it back, that it occurred to Crowley that he might have just done the right thing.

~o0o~

‘Uncle Phil’ stayed for two and a half more hours, regaling Warlock with tale after tale of adventure and intrigue, each more unlikely than the last, spanning all corners of the globe. Crowley kept the tea coming and tried not to let the angel see his cheeks twitching.

It was at a fortuitously-placed lull in the conversation that Crowley’s phone chimed, and something about his expression must have clued the angel in, for he did not launch into another story, but instead watched the demon carefully as he checked his device.

“Good news, dear,” Crowley said to Warlock, doing his utmost to keep his smile within acceptable limits. “Your mother’s flight home has landed early – a rather unlikely tailwind, she said,” Crowley did not miss the way Aziraphale’s brows hitched up. “She’ll be home in a little over an hour, and then she’ll take you out for dinner.”

Warlock stared at him. His lip wobbled, a warning.

Oh, Satan, I’m losing my edge. I must be. Because if I watch the Antichrist cry one more time, I’m going to fucking lose it. Then it’ll be all three of us blubbering.

Because Aziraphale’s eyes did look rather misty. But the odd thing was, he wasn’t looking at Warlock.

Not at all.

“Shall I help you pick out something to wear, dear?” He laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, just a tad more forcefully than he probably needed to, but it did the trick. Warlock sat up straight, heaved a breath, and nodded.

Thank Satan.

“I’d best be popping along, then,” said Aziraphale as Crowley and the boy got to their feet, dusting crumbs off his trousers as he stood. “I’ll need to be long gone by the time your mother arrives.”

“I wish you could stay,” Warlock murmured, looking up at him. Manipulation or honesty? Who can say.

Aziraphale swallowed. He wanted to stay, too, Crowley could tell. He could tell how badly the angel wished he had his hat in his hands, so he could fidget with it while he mulled over how best to tell the boy that he couldn’t possibly.

We don’t have the best track record with not indulging him. Case and point, today. But Heaven, we need to draw the line somewhere.

“Now, love. I’m sure Mr. Zirah’s assignment is terribly important, and he needs to get back to it,” Crowley cut in, patting Warlock on the head in the way that hissed, Nanny knows best. “Now, come upstairs and get dressed for dinner.”

“Can we walk Uncle Phil to the door, first?”

“I suppose, dearie.”

So they did. Aziraphale plucked his hat off its hook, and sure enough, began spinning it nervously in his grip.

“Thank you for the Baked Alaska,” Warlock said, because Nanny was giving him A Look. Then, lower, more sincere, “and thank you for coming to see me.”

The angel’s face lit up like the inside of a well-loved house whose family has just returned from a long trip away. He smiled the smile that made Crowley unclench his jaw. The one that promised you are enough and meant it.

Even when it wasn’t true.

“Think nothing of it, my boy.”

Warlock tugged on the side of his coat, and Aziraphale stood there, not understanding. This time, Crowley couldn’t quite quash his small chuckle. A being of pure love, yes, but still a little clueless when it came to how a human child requests physical affection.

(Absentee parents or none, Warlock knew he could always ask to be held. Crowley had made sure of it.)

“I believe young Warlock would like a hug, An – Mr. Zirah.”

“Oh! Indeed! Quite right – ah…” Aziraphale visibly debated a moment, and that was when Crowley realized his mistake.

Warlock, while on the short side for his age, was too heavy to be picked up anymore. Most adults had to bring themselves down to his level to hold him; had to go to one or both knees to be of a height with him.

What angel in their right mind would kneel to the Antichrist? Well done, idiot.

Aziraphale dithered for only a moment longer, then nodded to himself, dropped to both knees, and put his hat aside in favor of wrapping his arms around the boy. Warlock hugged him back unreservedly, and it was a good thing the angel didn’t need to breathe, because Warlock’s arm-lock around his neck didn’t look like it would allow any air to get through.

It went on for a long time. Aziraphale’s eyes closed beatifically, a small smile tugging at his mouth, his grip firmly gentle around the small body in his embrace.

Crowley could feel himself racking up truly staggering levels of Envy. Hell’s accounting department had to have been delighted, but they would have been a lot less so if they had known the reason for the sin-surge. A demon of Crowley’s caliber, longing for a hug. From an angel, no less. Unacceptable, that’s what it is. You’re an unacceptable demon. Just like you were an unacceptable angel. Once a fuck-up, always a fuck-up, eh, Crowley? It’s the only thing you’ve ever been good at. That, and self-flagellation.

“Cr—er, ma’am?” Aziraphale’s voice said, and his vision cleared. Angel and Antichrist were both staring at him. They had pulled apart.

“Yes?”

“Uncle Phil said it was very nice to meet you, Nanny.”

“Oh, yes. Of course he did. A pleasure, Mr. Zirah. Thank you for coming today,” he managed, slapping on one of Nanny’s winning, dark-lipsticked smiles.

“When will you come back?” Warlock asked, nearly a plea.

Aziraphale froze.

Truth be told, Crowley had known this would happen. Had even considered a farce like this, himself, but had decided against it for precisely this reason. But then Aziraphle had gone and done it all on his own. It had been beautiful, while it lasted. Even Crowley had been taken in by the fantasy of it, but now reality was crashing back down, on all three of them.

What will you do now, angel? You’ve given him someone else he’ll lose. Someone else who will leave him. And he’ll blame himself, instead of you, like any child would. He’ll think he must have done something to deserve the loss of you.

Aziraphale knelt down once more. But instead of embracing the boy again, he removed a tiny pin from his hat, which must have been what Crowley had seen glinting on its brim earlier. From this angle, even Crowley’s eyes couldn’t see what the shape of it was. Even straining his vision, all he could observe was a tiny sheen on dark metal, an infinitesimal spark of golden-amber light.

Aziraphale held it out to the boy, and Crowley tried to peer around him to catch a better glimpse of it, but the angel was taking care to keep it hidden. Even as Warlock accepted it, he closed the boy’s small hands around it, obscuring it entirely from view.

“This is something that’s very precious to me,” Aziraphale intoned, and for the first time, Crowley got the distinct sense that he wasn’t meant to be listening.

“I acquired this a long, long time ago,” Aziraphale continued, still kneeling, voice still hushed, as if in prayer. “Longer ago than I care to admit. It caught my eye because it reminded me of…what is most important in my life. Something that no one knows about. But you see, with the line of work that I’m in, it can be very perilous to f – to form attachments. Every time I look at this, I think about all of that. My current assignment is very dangerous. More dangerous than anything I’ve ever done. Anything could go wrong. I could disappear without a trace.

“I wonder…could you keep it safe for me? If I’m able, I’ll come back and see you, and you can give it back to me then.” The angel held both of Warlock’s cupped hands in his own, clasping the boy’s fingers even tighter around the small object. “Don’t let anyone see it, understand? No one.”

Warlock nodded, wordlessly, and pocketed the keepsake, whatever it was. The expression on his face must have been enough to satisfy the angel, because he nodded back, just as seriously, before daring to bestow a kiss upon the Antichrist’s forehead.

“There’s a good lad.”

A long silence descended on them then, going on and on until Crowley cleared his throat pointedly. Aziraphale jolted and stood back up, opening the door.

“Well. I’ve lingered longer than I should have already.” The angel said. He bent at the waist in a deep, formal bow, then took one more moment to dither in the doorway. “I cannot tell you how good it was to see you, my boy. My treasure is in your hands, now; take good care of it. And even more than that, yourself.”

“I will,” Warlock promised. Aziraphale beamed at him, one last time, and then as gently as he could, shut the door behind him.

The click of it closing rang loud to the two remaining in the entryway. Warlock stood rooted to the spot, his stare trained on the door as if it might open and admit the angel once more.

Crowley took his hand, prepared to sing him the reel again, if it came to that, but Warlock came willingly, his eyes glazed over and far away as Crowley led him up the stairs. The hand that the boy still had free rested over his pocket, cradling the angel’s tiny treasure inside it.

Crowley burned, but that was nothing new.

~oOo~

As soon as the taillights of the Dowling’s limousine had faded out of sight down the estate’s long driveway, Crowley made a beeline for the gardener’s cottage.

The sun had just set. The soft, blended yellows and oranges and pinks of its farewell still painted the sky, all the clouds tinged and warm with its memory. Crowley followed the path and drew the scent of the night-blooming phlox deep into himself. (Aziraphale was a touch too nice to the plants on the grounds for Crowley’s taste, but he could hardly argue with the results.) Somewhere far off, a nightingale sang, but he could barely hear it past the shrill ruckus of crickets in the garden. There was a pond on the grounds, Crowley knew, he didn’t know exactly where; but he could hear a chorus of frogs, their voices bouncing off the tree trunks and the walls of the cottage as he approached it.

There was a single room lit inside. As he drew closer, Crowley could see it was the kitchen light, and caught a glimpse of Aziraphale puttering about around the counter. He was out of his blue ‘Uncle Phil’ suit, back in his shirtsleeves and vest. Through the window, Crowley saw him bend to retrieve something out of the tiny icebox.

The demon smirked to himself as he mounted the porch steps, bringing his fist up to rap softly at the door.

So predictable, angel.

“It’s me,” he hissed, and the door swung open to admit him, though Aziraphale stayed where he was at the counter, fussing with what he’d fetched out of the fridge.

“It’s melted a bit, hasn’t it?” Crowley asked, peering over his shoulder. The angel sighed, put-upon in the worst way.

“I’m afraid so. I was a tad distracted. Couldn’t maintain the miracle as well as I could have, had I been able to focus on it.”

Crowley sidled up next to him at the counter, taking in the rather soggy-looking slice of Baked Alaska with a sympathetic grunt. A technicolor puddle had begun to form around the bottom of it.

Those eyes on him. The upward tug of the angel’s pleading eyebrows begging please, for me – it was practically a physical sensation on his skin.

He imagined that the cake crust was still fresh and piping hot, that the ice cream filling was still frigid enough to stick to the tongue upon first bite. And so it was.

Aziraphale smiled at him as if he’d rearranged the stars to better suit the angel’s fancy. (I would. For you, I’d find a way.) That secret smile, those eyes taking him in, shifting away, coming back, the setting and rising of a sun.

Don’t do that to yourself. Even if he loves you, it’s only like how he loves everything.

Per their half-spoken rules, Aziraphale did not say thank you, but he did cut the Baked Alaska in half and push one section of it towards Crowley. Crowley did not generally like sweets, but ice cream was an exception, and now that he thought of it, it had been more or less a month since he’d last eaten.

Nothing special. Anyone would learn that, in six thousand years.

He accepted the offering, putting it onto one of the small plates the angel had set out, and then accompanied him to the small sitting area just off the kitchen. Aziraphale sank into the same armchair he’d occupied on the porch that morning. It was a transplant from the bookshop, upholstered and wing-backed and worn, and Crowley felt a swell of affection – the soft kind with no agenda, the kind that wanted nothing other than to preserve the happiness of its object. The kind that shouldn’t have been possible for someone like him.

It’s a good thing the world is probably ending soon. If I stay up here too much longer, there’s no way someone down there wouldn’t get wise to what I’ve actually been getting up to. There’s no hiding agape.

He settled his spindly body on the threadbare loveseat, the closest position to the angel, short of sitting on the floorboards at his feet, or perched in his lap. If only.

“You know what’s strange,” he began after they’d sat in mutually savoring silence for a few minutes. “I was just at the Café Royal for a minor temptation a couple weeks ago. Rather…extensive dessert menu.”

Aziraphale gave him a Look. The one that said I have no idea what you’re on about, dear boy and also don’t go there.

But, well. Old habits and all that.

“But extensive as it was, distinctly no Baked Alaska. I remember.”

“It’s possible that their head patissiere owed me a favor,” Aziraphale allowed, after half-heartedly scowling at Crowley for not letting it go. “And you can’t tell me the results aren’t worth it.”

Crowley couldn’t. It was the best he’d ever had, and ever would have, in all likelihood. The sponge was perfectly done, the meringue crisp and fluffy, the coordinating flavors of tart cherry, rich chocolate, and delicate pistachio of the three layers of ice cream so well-balanced that even Crowley could level no criticisms against it. The angel himself was going almost cross-eyed with each bite.

And this, of course, was the second biggest reason why Crowley had come here. (The first was just to be here.)

But he knew the angel would have set aside a helping or two of the dessert for himself, for them. Why not, since he had gone to the trouble of trekking all the way to London? Yes, he’d mainly done it for Warlock, but there was nothing wrong with snagging a little something for himself, as an afterthought. Crowley loved that about him.

But afterthought or not, Aziraphale enjoyed it to its fullest, and Crowley enjoyed him enjoying it. He watched raptly, his scrutiny hidden behind his shades, as the angel closed his eyes in bliss with each forkful, moaning softly around each bite, chewing slowly, licking his lips, dragging it out, tasting every last bit of cake, every last drop of again-melting ice cream.

Envy, yes, but of a God-blessed dessert. Get a fucking grip, Crowley.

Instead of getting a grip, though, he ended up pushing the last third of his own helping over to the angel. He wasn’t quite full, but it was worth it to be able to keep soaking in Aziraphale’s gastronomic ecstasy, just to hear a few more of those low hums of pleasure.

Does it still count as an oral fixation if the obsession is with someone else’s mouth?

Crowley didn’t know. All he knew was that watching Aziraphale enjoy good food always had a particularly inconvenient effect on him. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, lower belly clenching, wet against his knickers, watching the angel delicately trace each tine of his fork with his pink tongue to catch every bit of flavor he could.

If pressed, he would have explained it away as demonic appreciation of the cardinal sin of gluttony. But that excuse would not have held up for even a minute, for there was nothing of sin in Aziraphale’s pleasure – not a smidge. That’s what most people don’t realize about Gluttony, or about any other sin. It only becomes a sin if it’s destructive to others. Indulgence that consistently takes food away from hungry mouths and wastes it on an already overfilled table.

But Aziraphale? Every time Aziraphale ate, it was a celebration. Though he could eat a lot in one sitting, Crowley knew he savored each and every bite. He exalted in almost every physical pleasure the world had to offer, poured himself body and soul into pure enjoyment, and did not waste a single bite.

There are no holes in his soul. He has everything he needs, but he accepts all gifts with grace.

And what else might he devour with so much gusto?

Aziraphale moaned from deep in his belly as he wrapped his lips around the last bite, and Crowley pressed his thighs together beneath Nanny’s long skirt, commanding his rushing blood not to stain his cheeks, commanding other parts not to stain his underclothes.

Like always. Like he has every other time they’ve shared a meal over the last six millennia. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. You’d be wrong.

The clap of Aziraphale’s hands as he dusted them of crumbs brought Crowley back from those hundreds of moments, and he looked at his old friend across the tiny kitchen table. The angel was daubing the corners of his mouth demurely, licking the borders of his lips.

You enjoy things to their fullest because you love yourself. Because you know when things are worthy of being loved. That’s just the way things are. That’s why I’m doomed.

Probably.

“Got any wine, angel?” he asked, a little too abruptly. If there was one thing he’d learned, it was how to break all but the worst of falls, and it was best to jump off that speeding train of thought right then and there, rather than stay on it as it plunged over a cliff.

(Not that Hell’s accounting department got any memos when a demon hoped. Why have a memo for an impossibility? No.

It just hurt.)

So, when Aziraphale poured him a glass of the good Malbec he’d picked up on one his sojourns into the neighboring town, he gulped the first two thirds of it down in a matter of seconds. Aziraphale tutted at him.

“Now, really. It’s no Altamira, but that’s hardly called for.” Crowley smirked a little into his glass at that. Admonishments were never quite as effective when the warmth of a barely-contained smile still clung to them.

All the same, Crowley slowed down, sipping the garnet-dark liquid at a less desperate pace. Aziraphale, satisfied that the wine was being savored as it ought, began touting the high points of what they’d just eaten.

While Aziraphale expounded upon the lovely flavor profile of the ice cream selections, Crowley’s mind wandered. By the time the angel was remarking that the dessert’s only shortcoming was that the meringue had been just a tad underdone, unnoticeable except to the most discerning, experienced palate, Crowley’s eyes must have glazed over.

He didn’t remember taking off his shades, but at some point he must have done, because there they sat on the table, and there sat Aziraphale, with that miffed expression he got when he could tell Crowley’s attention was divided.

“Do you think it was good?” Crowley blurted, before he could think better of it.

“Crowley, for Heaven’s sake, I’ve just spent the last few minutes saying that it was. Apart from the meringue, as I--”

“Not the bloody dessert, angel. That was clearly good,” Crowley sighed. “I meant ‘Uncle Phil.’ D’you think it helped?” he asked, stretching out a gangly arm for the bottle and topping up his glass.

“Well, I suppose that depends what you mean by ‘helped.’” Aziraphale hedged, avoiding Crowley’s eyes when the demon stared at him, waiting for more of an answer.

“I mean,” Crowley said when it became clear none was forthcoming, “what if you didn’t nudge him the way you meant to? What if it didn’t contribute toward making him good? You might have just made him more spoiled. ‘Character is founded through adversity’ and all that, isn’t that the rhetoric that Heaven’s always pushing?”

Aziraphale’s lips pressed into a thin line, and he huffed.

“Adversity, Crowley, not neglect or loneliness. No one ever became a better person because they thought no one cared about them. Rather the opposite tends to happen, in fact. And anyway, I wasn’t thinking in those terms. Of influencing him toward the light, I mean. That isn’t why I did it.”

Crowley stared at him some more, and this time, the angel accepted that as his cue to keep talking.

“Six is too young to begin believing that the anniversary of one’s birth is of no consequence. Children are meant to believe in magic, Crowley – for as long as they can. It forms their imaginations, and makes them better adults. One’s birthday is supposed to be a special day, and I’ll be damned if I let that little boy stop believing in magic this early, or at all. He has to know that someone thinks today is important, because that means that he is important. Because he is. Antichrist or not, he is.”

Crowley couldn’t argue with that. He swirled his wine, feeling put out for too many reasons to name. Peevish. He sort of wanted to cry. There was a burning question poised on the tip of his tongue, the kind that might have actually made him burst into flames if he asked it.

He did not.

“Will you come back for what you left with him?” he finally settled on asking instead, because he could tell Aziraphale was waiting for him to press further, and the one thing he could never, ever do was deny the angel anything.

Unaccountably, the blonde lit up like a pile of dry kindling kissed by a torch, his blush reaching all the way to his collar.

And probably well beyond it, too.

Stop. It.

“I will,” he told Crowley, voice so quiet and level that the demon might have missed it, if not for the hard-struck note of steel in it. “Even if this body is destroyed. Even if everything is destroyed. I’ll find a way.”

Aziraphale held his gaze, all certainty. He wasn’t making a lick of sense, but his expression brooked neither question nor argument.

A weighty silence laid between them, and Crowley let it gain mass until he couldn’t stand it to hold it anymore.

“Anyway,” he began, “you’re just lucky that Warlock doesn’t have any of his real powers yet. Omniscience and the like. If he had, he’d have laughed you out the door when you claimed to be a spy.” Crowley said, trying not to grin. The angel gasped in indignation.

“Excuse me! I am quite capable of – of subterfuge when righteousness requires it!”

“Are you. See, I seem to remember having to save your angelic arse after you got duped by a bunch of Nazis in 1941.”

“One cannot extrapolate from one minor lapse that someone isn’t suited to espionage!” Aziraphale protested.

“‘Minor lapse?’ You were nearly discorporated!”

“Yes, but I wasn’t actually in much danger. I knew that you – I – well.” The angel cut himself off, hesitated, his eyes shifting from Crowley’s and then back again. “My point stands, though. After all, I’ve been able to keep meeting up with you all these centuries, with Heaven none the wiser! Isn’t that something?”

Aziraphale sounded as if he was trying just as hard to convince himself, but Crowley had to concede that point, so he did.

“True…and I s’pose I do like the modern spy disguise a lot better than I do the country gardener.”

“I – I do beg your pardon? What’s wrong with Brother Francis?” Aziraphale sputtered, daring to be affronted.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s quaint!” the angel insisted.

“He’s mortifying.” Crowley said, meaning it, but unable to keep his smirk from edging toward being a smile. “’S’been a year and I still can’t see you in that getup without cringing. It’s too much, angel. There’s a point of diminishing returns on country charm, and you passed it by a few kilometres.”

Aziraphale, who had somehow caught up to Crowley in wine consumption, thumped his hand on the table, rattling the flatware on their empty plates.

“Oh, come now! It can’t be that bad.”

“It is though!” Crowley pressed, half-laughing. “The last time I was this embarrassed for you was at the Mollergarden in 1876.”

Aziraphale’s blush, having receded just that past minute, returned full-force at the unwelcome memory.

“Oh, Heavens, not that again. I’ve told you a thousand times, it was a perfectly normal response! Grieg did not provide adequate warning about the intensity of ‘In The Hall of the Mountain King.’ I was simply overcome. And may I remind you, I was certainly not the only person in the audience who fainted that evening.”

“Whatever you say, angel.” Was that undisguised affection his voice? Maybe it was. But no matter, it would go unnoticed.

If you haven’t by now, after all this time, observed how captivated I am by the way you shape your vowels and consonants. If you haven’t seen how I lean forward for a better view when you wrap your lips around choice morsels. If you don’t know the lengths I’d go to for just one smile.

If you haven’t noticed any of it in six thousand years, why would you notice it now? And why would I ruin a perfectly pleasant evening by bringing it to your attention?

So he let the moment go, even knowing they didn’t have that many of them left.

~oOo~

About a month later, when Crowley and Aziraphale realized that Warlock would soon be getting to the age when it would no longer be tenable to sing him demonic lullabies or to tell him the deeds of the saints over the flowerbeds, Crowley donned Nanny’s lipstick and coat and skirt and boots, one last time.

When Aziraphale joined him at the Dowlings’ doorstep, he was also in his disguise. Brother Francis’ cheeks were looking a little less ruddy, his smile pasted on, rather than lit from within. Scarecrow, not jack-o-lantern.

For no reason other than his continual commitment to being a glutton for punishment, Crowley reached across the grounds with one long astral arm, and felt the angelic presence already bleeding away in a decisive, fatal hemorrhage from the cottage and the gardens, now that their ethereal caretaker and occupant had packed up and left. Crowley knew that if he were to stroll over and look upon them, they’d appear just as they had before, but they’d never be the same.

They both hugged Warlock, and promised they’d see him again, using every ounce of willpower between them to not be too grim about it.

As they pulled away down the estate’s long drive, Crowley watched the boy’s face in his rearview mirror. Warlock did not cry, or scream, or tug at his mother’s sleeve to tell her to bring them back. He only stared, blank-faced and unsurprised, until Crowley drove far enough away that he could no longer make out his features.

Crowley drove them in no hurry back to London, the Bentley meandering along bumpy country roads that sent loose rocks skittering up into its undercarriage, turning sedately onto the highway they emerged onto. For the first time since he’d ever gotten behind the wheel, Crowley drove under the speed limit. He did not turn on the radio, or put in any CDs, and Aziraphale refrained from comment on this – and on everything else – for the duration of their trip.

His hands shook the whole way. They shook as small villages turned into towns and then slow-morphed into the outer peripheries of London. They shook as the buildings he drove past turned more familiar, passing the cafes and clubs and novelty stores and colorful crowds of Soho. They shook while he pulled up next to the bookshop. They shook in their grip on the steering column when Aziraphale reached over and gripped his wrist as if to say nothing is over, yet, you know, and they shook as the angel got out of his car and he gave a numb, wordless nod, waved, and pulled away from the kerb. They shook as he parked in his usual illegal spot in front of his flat, as he miracled the lift to take him straight up, and as he locked the flat door behind him.

They shook as he searched for a pair of scissors in the junk drawer in his kitchen, and when he found none, it took a few tries to miracle them into existence.

They shook as he took the scissors to his hair in front of his bathroom mirror, long tendrils of curling fire falling, limp and abandoned, into his sink, and Crowley cried, and cried, and cried.

~oOo~

“It’s been a while since you’ve worn your hair long,” Aziraphale says to him over their third glass of scotch, apropos of nothing.

They’re seated next to one another on the long, deep sofa, tucked safe in the back room of the bookshop, digesting their celebratory first meal as free men-shaped beings.

Before the angel had spoken up, neither of them had said anything for quite some time, instead sharing the room with each other wordlessly, doing nothing other than sipping the smoky amber liquid in their tumblers. He’s nowhere near drunk, but Crowley buzzes pleasantly behind his eyes, the drink making him aware of the blood in his hands and cheeks, the warm flush of it. Crowley is a sucker for warmth, for warm things.

Scotch. Summer. Sunlight. A good hearth-fire. Body heat.

Aziraphale.

“It has, come to think of it,” he murmurs into his drink, after a few more moments slip by.

“Why is that?” the angel asks him, his tone light. So light that Crowley can tell it’s been on his mind for a while and he really wants to know the answer.

“Hasn’t felt right, I s’pose.” He says. It’s almost the truth. He grazes his fingers through the shorter strands at his temples, self-conscious. “Why?”

“Oh,” Aziraphale half-sighs. “I always thought you looked so fetching with it long. Those gorgeous red waves.” The angel’s eyes glaze over with nostalgia, and not a little longing.

“Is that your way of telling me you hate it short, angel?” Crowley smirks.

“What? N-no, of course n—” Aziraphale’s cheeks flame. “You look stunning no matter what, you know that.”

Crowley doesn’t, but he flashes his eyebrows all the same, his smirk widening.

“Oh, you wicked old serpent. Fishing for compliments with that clever tongue of yours,” he chides half-heartedly, unable to resist a grin of his own.

“Funny, you didn’t seem to mind it at all, last night.”

The pink tint riding high on those cherubic cheeks shifts pure crimson, but Aziraphale skips the embarrassment and slides right on through to arousal. Crowley can tell, because the pulse of lust punches him square in his stomach – he’s so turned on, so quickly, that the sudden ache between his hips nearly folds him in half in his seat. As it is, he does have to lean forward a little bit, just to hold in an obscene moan.

When he manages to look back up, he watches the angel’s pupils blooming wide, his lips parting. That tongue. The one he’d had nearly down his throat, not twenty-four hours ago. That wet, dark pink tongue.

Oh, Somebody.

He bites his lip, grits his teeth, and that suppressed moan gets away from him after all, except he’d been wrong – it isn’t a moan. It’s a thin, high-pitched keen.

Aziraphale’s hungry eyes go impossibly darker at the sound.

“Oh, darling,” he intones, and Crowley freezes in place, stuck in the desire dripping from his voice – it’s warm honey, hot wax on his skin, a sensation so strong it waltzes right up to the edge of pain, and teeters a little before regaining its balance.

It is, without question, one of the best things he’s ever felt.

He couldn’t have wanted me this way before. I’d have known. There’s no way I could have missed this.

Because this is Aziraphale’s hand cupping the side of his face, the fleshy curve of palm at the base of his thumb slotting like a puzzle piece into the concave space below Crowley’s cheekbone. This is the heat of the angel’s other hand soaking through his jeans where it lights on top of his thigh. This is untold, unimaginable amounts of Heavenly strength honed into a gentleness that surely no living thing, let alone Crowley, can truly deserve, now used to pull him in closer. This is the angel’s scent that he tastes in the air, raingrey and paperyellow and nourished earth, filling his lungs. This is Aziraphale’s oceanslate gaze, raking over his face, drawn like magnetic pull to his mouth.

This is Crowley, surprised to find that he has clambered into the angel’s lap, or maybe Aziraphale has pulled him astride his plush, ample thighs. In any case, here he is.

Aziraphale himself wears a taken-aback expression that mirrors the demon’s – Crowley knows they match, because he can see his own reflection in those blown pupils.

He might be new to this kind of desire, but what’s my excuse? After six thousand years, I should know what to expect.

And yet, he isn’t the least bit prepared for what Aziraphale says next.

“You made me feel so wonderful last night…I want to give you pleasure now, Crowley. How can I make you feel good?”

The question sends a frisson of heat tingling up his spine, and without thinking, Crowley splays his thighs out even wider, wriggles his hips, settles down even lower onto the soft give of his partner’s lap – just a little further, and the angel will be able to feel the warmth of his –

Fuck.

Crowley stiffens and bites back a gasp, blessing himself to Heaven and back. Went and manifested your cunt without even realizing it, you bloody moron. You can’t ask him for this. You can’t. It’s too much. Too fast. Get rid of it.

He does, in the space of just a second, trading it out for the cock that had pleased the angel so well last night, the one he’s no doubt expecting to see again.

But while the pause has only lasted a handful of moments, it has been more than long enough to make it all go to shit. Crowley registers that Aziraphale’s hands have halted dead, the caress and pressure of them just a ghostly whisper at his sides. It’s like he’s –

Like he’s about to stop touching me. Oh, please no.

“Are you quite all right, my dear?” Aziraphale leans him back a bit, enough to take stock of his expression. “Do you…do you not want this again?”

The soft, sad tremor in his voice makes Crowley want to curl up in a ball, to slither under a rock and never come back out. It makes him wish, just for a brief second, never to have been created, created only to ruin this already.

Did you honestly expect anything different? If you did, you’re an even bigger idiot than you knew. Well. Say something, try to fix it. Won’t work, but do it anyway. Isn’t that what you always do?

Crowley’s tongue has turned to lead in his mouth, but he somehow forces it to obey him.

“No, I,” he rasps, “I mean, yes, angel, I do. Always. It’s just. It’s just there’s – there’s so much.”

Some of the worried creases in Aziraphale’s brow soften, but not all of them, not to the extent that they disappear altogether.

“And so…you aren’t sure what you want most, right now?”

Fuck. Right. He always catches you. Always asks the question that pins you down.

Crowley falters, chokes on the answer that wants to surge up. It’s not a pretty sound.

“Crowley,” the angel pleads, desperation tightening his voice. Crowley knows how he feels.

“Not yet,” he begs, the please hanging unsaid but heavy at the end of his entreaty. A piece of fruit so close to ripeness, full of juice, waiting for a plucking hand, for lips and teeth and tongue to break its skin, to break it open. “I’ll tell you soon. I will,” he promises before he fully realizes he’s going to. “Let’s just – Start small. Go slow. Oh Somebody, the irony. “I want you to – please, Aziraphale, keep going. Please don’t stop.”

This last is unequivocal, said with gravity, the same that Crowley lets pull him down all the way onto the angel’s lap. There is solid, round muscle under all the plushness of those thighs, and Crowley tucks his face into the hollow of Aziraphale’s shoulder. Those powerful legs flex beneath him, and his cock twitches, filling steadily. He rubs it against Aziraphale’s hip, sighing with the stimulation.

See? This is good. Better than good.

It’s enough. The angel tilts him back again, but it’s only to pull him into another kiss, one that’s filthy right away, all tongue, Crowley’s high whine swallowed into that talented, savoring mouth.

Could it be true? Were you born to devour me?

This should be impossible, all of it. Every twist of Aziraphale’s tongue past his lips is nothing less than a miracle, in and of itself, and the fact that it keeps happening defies everything Crowley had thought he’d known. It’s beyond all belief, beyond Crowley’s sweetest, most fervent imaginings.

Those sturdy, square-fingered hands resume their roving. They’re under his shirt, now, moving slowly enough that Crowley thinks they might be counting every rib they find, each ridge and protuberance of bone in this collection of sharp edges and acute angles that Crowley claims to call a body.

You must have hated being in it, angel. All elbows, and no cushioning at all. No velvet, no down, no filling.

Aziraphale chooses that moment to pull his shirt over his head, then dives back in and fills Crowley’s mouth with his tongue. He can’t help himself – the demon whimpers and sucks on it, and Aziraphale lets him, and Crowley could weep with the gratitude.

Then, mortifyingly, he actually does sob when Aziraphale brings both of his hands to his chest to thumb at his nipples. He breaks their kiss, needing to bite his lip, needing to keep it in.

Don’t. Don’t beg. Don’t do it. If he sees how much you need it, he’ll realize how unworthy you are of it. Oh, Somebody, it’s no use.

“That, angel, please. More of that.” A slow smirk curls Aziraphale’s lips.

“What, this?” he asks, and pinches one of the nubs lightly, much too lightly. It aches and tightens anyway, the pleasure of it directly wired to his cock. “You like it when I tease your nipples, darling?” Crowley nods, but Aziraphale’s hands stop, and he nearly sobs again. “Use your words, dearest. Ask me.”

“Aziraphale, please--”

“Please, what? Tell me exactly what you want. Tell me what you want me to do to you.”

Where the fuck is this coming from? Is this same shy angel who’d mewled and cried out below him last night, who’d spread his legs, who he’d stretched open so sweetly? Crowley has no idea what’s happening.

He’s desperate for it not to stop.

“Please – please touch my nipples, angel. Pinch them, flick them, bite them, lick them, anything, everything. Please, please, pleasssse.” He hides his face against Aziraphale’s neck as his need spills out, an unstoppable torrent.

“Oh, well done, darling. You’re so good for me.”

The praise throbs straight through him, his arousal so strong that he can feel his pulse in the tip of his cock. And before the last of that wave of pleasure has ebbed away, another swells as Aziraphale rolls both of his nipples between his fingertips, with much more pressure and intent this time. Said intent seems to be to make them as stiff as possible, and to keep them that way.

Crowley isn’t sure at first which of them vanishes the rest of their clothes save their undergarments, then he decides it must have been Aziraphale, since he doubts he could have focused enough to perform even that minor of a miracle.

In any case. That done, Aziraphale redoubles his efforts at Crowley’s chest, toying each of the hard pink nubs with the very tip of his tongue, before latching on to the right one and sucking, hard. His thumb rubs back and forth over the other, and Crowley thrusts his pelvis, automatic, mindless, grinding down into the sublime marriage of softness and spun steel that Aziraphale embodies. Those soft, thick thighs, that hard, thick cock.

“Angel, angel, oh,” is that his voice? That broken, shivery, plaintive thing? Is that Aziraphale’s answering rumble that goes all the way to the weak, spinespindle bones of him, that shakes his foundations, not down, but into place? Is that Aziraphale’s divine mouth at his profane throat, sucking a mark to lay a claim there, as if every inch of Crowley, body and soul, doesn’t already belong solely to him?

“Yes, Crowley,” the angel groans, “yes. You’re so beautiful like this. Let me see you, let me hear you. Show me how good you feel. Tell me.”

“S-sssso good, angel,” he says into Aziraphale’s hair, barely able to catch his breath long enough to say it.

“Yes, that’s right, darling. So good. How can I make it better?”

“Naked, get us naked,” Crowley tells him, and they’re both bare before he fully gets the words out. “Your fingerssssss, angel. Want your fingers.”

“Here?” The angel’s hand hovers just over, just around him, the fingers curling until they’re almost caressing his cock, which flexes, drips, aches to be touched.

Crowley shakes his head.

“Not yet. I’ll come. In – inssside me.”

“Ahh, I see,” Aziraphale murmurs, reaches his right hand around to where Crowley’s cheeks are spread over him. With one warm, already-slicked fingertip, he rubs at the tight, twitching hole between them, rolls one knuckle lightly over the tender space behind his balls. Crowley keens and rocks his whole body down into the touch. “I know, darling. Don’t worry, I won’t make you wait.”

And he doesn’t. He kneads at Crowley’s opening purposefully, tender but firm, a few moments more, distributing the slick. Then – yes oh fuck yes – he adds more pressure, sinking his finger in, all the way, in one stroke.

Crowley cries out, and his body spasms hungrily around the intrusion, trying to pull the angel’s hand deeper. Aziraphale gives a dark, thick chuckle, and Crowley physically feels the sound in his gut, a fresh bloom of hot, clenching pleasure. Or maybe that’s actually due to Aziraphale beginning to slowly work his digit in and out of him, going at it with a bit more speed and force as soon as he makes sure it’s not hurting Crowley. As if anything that has me making noises this embarrassing could hurt. The demon moves with the push and pull of it, and soon, it’s nowhere near enough.

“More, pleassse,” he hisses, and without delay, Aziraphale fucks another finger up into him, twirls it in alongside the first, letting Crowley really feel the wide squareness of his knuckles and fingertips against his walls, rubbing inside him, teasing and satisfying, both in equal measure. “Yes, angel, yesssss, just like that, now just - fuck!”

Aziraphale smirks, a little bit wicked and entirely perfect, just like the angle he now has on Crowley’s sweet spot, curling his fingers into it, rubbing mercilessly, all hints of teasing gone. Crowley’s cock throbs with each nudge, leaking and leaking, the stream increasing with each press of those gloriously thick fingers stretching his rim. He’s still untouched between them, but so close to coming that he’s all but hyperventilating with it, whining, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.

“That’s it, dearest, yes. You love this, don’t you? Being filled. Like this.” Aziraphale, blessed bastard that he is, drives his point home, drives a third finger into him, thrusts all three hard and deep into the wet, wanting clench of Crowley’s body.

“Ah! How – in the name of fuckyes– of everything do you know how to do this? I thought you said – you’d never--”

“And I hadn’t. But if you think that in sixty centuries I haven’t read about exactly how to do this –” the angel answers him, voice grown rough as he tries different angles, seeing what makes Crowley writhe for him (hint: it all does). “—While imagining the kinds of sounds you’d make if I did it to you, how tight you’d be around me, whether I could make you cry tears of pleasure and bring you to climax with just my fingers inside you? Well. You’d be very, very wrong, darling.”

As things turn out, he definitely could, because Crowley sobs, needs a literal miracle to keep from coming.

“Fuck me, angel, please, please, please,” Crowley gasps, only half-aware that he’s speaking out loud, begging again. “I’m so close, Aziraphale, I need you inside me. Need to come on your cock. Fill me up. Aziraphale, please.”

At least he knows he’s not the only one at his limit – the angel unleashes a broken, stuttering groan, and as far gone as Crowley is, he’d have to be dead passed out not to notice the way that Aziraphale’s arousal surges against his hip, growing harder seemingly in defiance of every law of physics.

“Who could deny such a polite request? Oh, my dearest, you’re so good for me, aren’t you?” Crowley whimpers and can do nothing but nod weakly, his face going hot at the sound that the angel’s fingers make as he pulls them slowly from his arse, hooking them on their way out to pass over his prostate one last time. “Just like this, my love?”

Crowley nods again, and so the angel reaches between them. Crowley can’t help but glance down to take in the sight of those sturdy fingers coating the girth of him, flushed red and curved in toward his stomach in an extremely promising way, gleaming with shiny slick. The image and the scent of the sweet almond oil combined with the musky tang of Aziraphale’s precum makes his head spin, makes him thrust downward involuntarily.

Oh, Somebody, I’ll be lucky if I survive this, let alone last for five thrusts.

Once he’s applied the lube, Aziraphale tugs Crowley’s chin back up to look at him; the other hand, he braces at Crowley’s waist.

“Now, remember, darling. I’m well-read, but I’ve never actually done this before. You must tell me if it’s too rough, too deep, too much. All right? Can you do that for me?” Crowley wants to nod again, but Aziraphale’s tone leaves no doubt that he wants verbal acknowledgement, and the demon tries to recall how to make his mouth shape actual words and not just incoherent moans.

“Yesssss, angel,” he rasps, voice raw and shuddery from how much he’s been crying out. He’s rewarded with the crinkly-eyed, red-cheeked smile he loves so much. As Aziraphale gets his hands on Crowley’s hips to position him, he hiccups out a grateful sound, which the angel thankfully takes as the encouragement that it is.

Then the tip of him rubs wide and blood-warm against Crowley’s entrance, and the demon’s still-untouched cock pulses out a large droplet of precum that smears against Aziraphale’s soft, hair-downed stomach.

He grips the angel’s broad shoulders, pushes on them for leverage just as the principality pulls down on his hips, the head of his cock breaching Crowley – oh God, oh fuck, finally – in the most devastating, wonderful stretch that has him gasping, panting pleas and prayers, prayers which should taste like ash but instead savor like wine, into Aziraphale’s ear.

(Here is the thing: Crowley is no stranger to this. Of all the acts humans have come up with over the centuries, he has sampled most of them, and this is one of his favorites. But in all that time, he’s never been able to decide whether he likes giving or receiving better, and certainly not for lack of research.

But now, as he sinks all the way down on Aziraphale, inch by inch of that thick cock splitting him open in the best way, he re-evaluates that.

He’d happily live in this moment for the rest of his Earthly existence, entwined with, impaled on Aziraphale until the world’s true end, until the hosts of Heaven and the hordes of Hell would converge upon them.)

No one else could ever give me this. No one has ever felt like my angel does.

He feels as much as hears Aziraphale’s breath catch, the stout chest below his hands expanding with the sudden inhale. When he looks up, the angel’s eyes shine with unshed tears.

Oh fuck – what’s wrong? What did I do?

“My darling,” Aziraphale husks out, voice rough with emotion. “Oh, my dearest. I love you, too.”

The angel covers his face with kisses, and it’s only when his lips come away wet that Crowley realizes that he’s crying, too.

“Aziraphale, I…” he says, trying to regain himself, gasps deep and hitching and quick, trying to pull his composure back in. He can’t finish, hides his face in the hollow of the angel’s shoulder.

“It’s all right. You’re all right,” Aziraphale tells him, petting the soft, shorn hairs along the back of his head, one thumb gentling against the skin at the base of his skull. “I know, Crowley.” Strong arms encircle him, gather the pieces of him together, and despite the tightness of the embrace, Crowley can breathe a little easier. The shock and sour of the panic lacing his blood ebbs away with each bass thrum of the angel’s powerful heart.

“That’s it, my dear. Oh, well done. There you are,” Aziraphale soothes as Crowley sits up a bit, hands skimming up and down his still-shuddering sides. The little creases at the corners of his eyes contain all the love in the world when they’re face to face again and the angel smiles at him.

How can I drown in eyes the color of the Arctic Ocean and yet be so warm?

He watches a flush stain the angel’s already-red cheeks an even more vibrant crimson, watches those lush lips fall open in pleasure as he gives his hips an experimental wiggle, watches those eyes roll back and flutter and close as the movement makes his inner muscles clench around the wonderful girth inside him.

Broad hands anchor themselves around his waist, but they don’t exert any force beyond the slight pressure of Aziraphale’s controlled, just-right grip. Not yet.

“Oh, do take your time, darling. You feel – there is no word for how you feel.” Aziraphale murmurs into his collarbone. “So hot. So tight. So perfect around me.”

But Crowley does not feel inclined to take his time, and he keeps moving in accord with that sentiment. He rises, and the angel breathes in; he lets himself fall, and it punches a low, pleasured sound out of the body below him, triggers an involuntary flex of the hands on his flanks.

The preparation of Aziraphale’s fingers has ensured that there is no pain, even though the angel’s cock has to be one of the thickest things he’s ever taken. On his next upstroke, he comes up high enough that Aziraphale is nearly all the way out of him, but at the last second he plunges back down, hard.

This earns him a shout, which he has all of two seconds to feel smug about before Aziraphale fucking growls – a sound he has never heard the angel make, not in six thousand years – and finally uses his leverage.

The fingers around his waist grip hard enough to bruise, and with angelic strength that almost never sees the light of day, Aziraphale manhandles him, beginning to move him up and down on his cock as though he weighs less than anything.

Crowley can only whimper and go ragdoll-limp against him, his balls tightening and a familiar, fateful sensation building in his core. The underside of his cock rubs against the angel’s plush stomach, the fine, soft blonde hairs leading from his bellybutton getting darkened and matted down by a thick, slippery trail of precum. Aziraphale shifts his grip to the demon’s arse cheeks, holds them apart, letting him fuck him even deeper.

That spreading, gravity, and the auspicious curve of the angelic cock inside him all dovetail together to make sure that Aziraphale’s next push hits his prostate dead-on, and it’s only the fact that the angel is still holding back his full strength that keeps Crowley from shooting off right then and there.

Aziraphale – either scared to go too rough and hurt Crowley, or having another moment of pure bastardry – keeps his pace and pressure precisely as it is, still hitting his sweet spot, but holding Crowley in the most delicious, torturous limbo; hanging at the very edge of coming but needing more to send him over the brink. He tries to move more vigorously, but he’s helpless against Aziraphale’s inexorable, merciless strength, which keeps him from increasing the speed or the force of his own movements.

“Please, angel, ohhhh…fuck, I need…! I’m so…Don’t hold back anymore, fuck me hard! I want to come, I need to come, Aziraphale, please let me come, please make me come.” Pleasure has made him lose all control over his tongue, but instead of making him go nonverbal like it usually does, now he can’t seem to shut up.

Aziraphale, on the other hand…

“Yes. Yes,” he breathes, then fastens his hands around Crowley’s hips, lifts him up, and slams him back down, bringing his own hips into the mix by thrusting up on the downstroke. And then he doesn’t stop, pounding into him with abandon, the backs of Crowley’s legs smacking down on the skin of his generous thighs so hard that each impact stings.

Crowley is full-on sobbing by the second thrust, screaming by the third, and by the sixth he’s shaking his way through one of the strongest, deepest, longest orgasms he’s ever had with a cock, gushing out a frankly embarrassing amount of come all over their stomachs and chests, a bit even landing up on the angel’s chin. He can feel his inner muscles clenching, rhythmic and tight, around the still-thrusting length within him, milking it. The angel swells impossibly thicker inside him as he begins to come, and Crowley’s spent cock gives a weak twitch in response to the sound of Aziraphale’s ecstatic cry, the sensation of the angel flooding his insides with heat.

Aziraphale takes a huge breath, whimpers on the exhale, lying all the way back on the couch and taking the lax demon with him. His cock is still pulsing out the last of his orgasm inside Crowley, who whines, stomach clenching with brand-new arousal at the very thought that the angel has come inside him.

They rest there, Aziraphale against the sofa and Crowley against Aziraphale, warm and damp and panting, shivering with the last of their pleasure.

Crowley basks in the afterglow, lets himself go fully lax against Aziraphale, like a snake sunning itself on a rock. He can feel the angel softening slowly, slipping out of him by degrees until he gives his hips an intentional tilt, sliding out all the way and causing Crowley to hiss in protest; a drawn-out, keening, pitiful sound.

“Nnnnnooooooooo.”

“I know, love, but we have to clean you up,” Aziraphale murmurs, but Crowley just burrows further into the hollow of his throat, licks up the salty sweat there. “My dear…”

He knows. He knows how pathetic he’s being. But it’s so good, so good, the best thing he’s ever – he cannot possibly be allowed to – just a bit longer. A bit longer, while it lasts.

“Dearest, we’re going to get stuck together…” the angel tells him, managing a small measure of distress, but Crowley can hear the curl of a smile in his voice. With a small grunt of effort, he pushes himself up, and licks away what he can reach with his tongue, cleaning Aziraphale’s chin, the small fold of flesh beneath it, his neck. The rest, he sends into oblivion with a snap.

“There,” he says, but before he can snuggle back down into the cushiony warmth of the angel’s body, Aziraphale stops him with one broad hand across his chest. There’s an apology on his tongue before he even knows what he’ll apologize for (probably would have gone with my body, this blessed old uncomfortable bag of bones, no one wants this on top of them), but he doesn’t get a chance to spit it out.

“What about you?” the angel asks him, still holding him at bay, careful, firm.

“Ng – what – what about me?”

“What about…the rest of--” Aziraphale’s cheeks color, as if he hadn’t been the one fucking Crowley senseless only a couple minutes ago. “What about what’s still inside you?”

“Ah – that – I left it.” Blond eyebrows go up, quizzical, and it’s Crowley’s turn to blush.

“On purpose?” Crowley hesitates, nods. “Whatever for?”

“Sometimes it’s nice to – well – to keep it for a bit.” He wants to hide again, but Aziraphale’s eyes darken, and his hand holds strong against him, and—

No, wait, it’s moving. Both hands are. Both of the angel’s hands are on him, cradling him in his lap again as he sits up, but he doesn’t stop there. He rises to his feet and turns them around, lowers Crowley onto his back on the sofa.

“Well, in that case, may I return the favor? Clean you up, on the outside at least?” Aziraphale asks him, his eyes beseeching in that way that Crowley’s always known the angel knows he can’t resist.

“Sure, but you didn’t need to move me for th--nnnngk.”

Crowley had expected a quick miracle, but that is not what he gets.

What he gets is Aziraphale hoisting one of his long legs over the back of the sofa, pushing the other to the side so that his foot rests on the floor, sliding his hands beneath Crowley’s arse cheeks, and lifting, and oh, God, he can’t be about to--

He is. Aziraphale leans in, close enough that the demon can feel the heat of his breath on his stretched, still-twitching hole.

“Ange—!”

Too late. A warm, wet tongue swipes between Crowley’s cheeks, from tailbone to taint, barely grazing his entrance. He has less than a second to gather his wits before it’s back, licking flush against him, so deep that it almost dips inside. Crowley hears himself making a high, strangled whine, feels his fingers seize on the couch cushions, sees nothing behind his tightly-shut eyelids. Arousal comes roaring back, his orgasm of a few minutes ago nothing but a distant memory. His body starves for more, more, more, as much as it can get.

The angel, bless him a thousand times, is thorough to the point of pain. He laps all around his opening, presses at the sensitive strip of skin above his hole, gathering every drop of spend he finds, greedy enough that he ventures in, against even his own word, seeking the taste of their combined pleasure, moaning his first-bite moan all the while.

And Crowley loves him, loves him, wants him again, needs him again, wants to spend forever with the angel’s head between his legs, savoring him almost exactly this way, just a little farther, just a little more…

Aziraphale withdraws and Crowley actually cries out at the sudden lack of warmth and touch, but he doesn’t miss the quick intake of breath, the pause, that snaps him back from the overwhelmed reverie triggered by the angel’s mouth on him.

It takes him all of two seconds to register that in the absence of the warmth of Aziraphale’s face, the movement of the cool air in the bookshop’s back room flows differently in the space between his legs. Something has changed, too suddenly, what –

Oh.

Oh, shit.

A few more silent moments crawl by, in which Crowley stares at the ceiling, his eyes now wide and unblinking, and he can feel Aziraphale staring at his slick, insistent, newly-manifested cunt.

The angel neither breathes nor moves; Crowley suspects he might have forgotten to keep his heart beating.

“Crowley--”

That’s as far as he gets. Without fully meaning to, Crowley snaps his fingers, and his friend’s voice cuts off as he crystallizes like a prehistoric insect trapped in amber.

Crowley gasps, sits up, and chokes back a sob at the stricken expression frozen on Aziraphale’s lovely face.

What did you expect? No, really, what did you expect? Why are you even capable of this kind of surprise anymore?

He has to tear his gaze away, before the sight of it tears him all the way apart. He scrambles out from underneath the angel’s statue-like hold and casts about for his clothes, but the principality has sent them off Somebody knows where, so he miracles a new set straight onto his body and stumbles through the shop, knocking over a few book stacks as he forces his numb, clumsy legs to carry him toward the exit. On another plane, he can feel great gusts of wind from huge white wings flapping with all their might, Aziraphale’s divine strength surging against the infernal energy Crowley had used to manipulate the flow of time inside the back room. He’ll be able to get out of it, of course, but not for at least thirty more seconds.

More than enough time to run.

The Bentley is out on the street in front of the bookshop because Crowley expects her to be, and as he throws himself into her front seat, her engine snarls to life without the demon even touching the ignition, though the sound of it sounds alarmed, protesting, and her gas pedal fights him when he tries to floor it.

“Please,” he begs his car, gripping her steering wheel like a lifeline. “Please.”

A few seconds lapse, and then she relents, reluctantly allowing him to pull away from the kerb just as he feels Aziraphale break free of his hold on time.

(When Crowley Fell, he did not do it in the style of a graceful high dive. No. His footing disappeared from under him, and he plummeted, still facing Heaven, his eyes fixed on the only home he’d ever known.

This is why he glances in the rearview mirror. Force of bloody habit.)

And of course he does it just in time to see Aziraphale burst out the door, his clothes hastily miracled back on, noticeably askew even from this distance. The same expression Crowley had left him with lingers on his features. He yells something, but the demon cannot hear it, and he’s speeding enough that he’s already too far away to read his lips.

I go too fast for you, angel. Always.

~oOo~

After that, things go how Crowley expects, at least at first.

He doesn’t really remember arriving home, or miracling himself into his favorite set of black silk pyjamas, or opening the bottle of absinthe.

But he must have done, because now the sweet-bitter shock and burn of the bright green liqueur curls on his tongue, before he cuts it with a bit of sugar and a large ice cube. He turns on his television and flips through the channels without really paying attention to any of the programming, his eyes glazed over, his vision swimming within ten minutes. Don’t think, he tells himself, and then thinks furious, endlessly spiraling thoughts despite the absinthe muddling his head, each one blending into the next with no reprieve, no mercy.

His phone rings off the hook for the next day and a half. Each time, Aziraphale hangs up without leaving a message, save for a few times where he lets the call actually go to voicemail, and Crowley can hear him take a breath, almost begin to speak, falter at the last second, and then comes the resounding click of the handset reuniting with its cradle.

Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, it stops. His flat falls silent; the kind of silence of the moment of impact, the long one before the shockwave hits. The Doppler effect of loss.

Then, a few hours later, just as Crowley allows himself to think Aziraphale has given up, his mobile turns into a hive of angry bees in his pocket, buzzing so constantly that the skin on the side of his leg goes numb.

He checks the screen. It’s an unfamiliar number, but it’s not an unknown caller.

Crowley turns off his mobile, doesn’t allow himself to think too hard about the implications, and instead miracles the absinthe bottle full again when he hits bottom. He tries not to think about how Aziraphale never drinks miracled liquor, never ingests miracled anything if he can help it, because it’s just not the same. I know you taste it, too, Crowley. The flavor is always too perfect. It’s so unsatisfying…so empty.

He tries not to think about how Aziraphale is right.

Aziraphale is right with frankly annoying frequency but he is not, Crowley reflects, perfect. Not in the sense that he’d been intended to be, anyway.

Crowley had known it from the outset, of course. Could see it in the strong but sloping shoulders beneath the white robe he’d worn in Eden. Serving Heaven had been a burden on Aziraphale, though getting him to own up to that over the centuries has been like pulling teeth. No, that’s an understatement. It’s been like performing root canals on thousands of consecutive Great White sharks, none of whom are sufficiently sedated.

Even in the last few years, the angel has only been able to look at it sideways, never straight on, at least up until a few days ago.

(Aziraphale had told him, over champagne at the Ritz when all the dust had settled, about the moment he’d snapped; how he’d told the Quartermaster that yes, he was indeed a pathetic excuse for an angel, with not even an ounce of shame in his voice. Crowley wishes he’d been there to see it – hundreds of years, maybe thousands, are liable to pass before Aziraphale can make another breakthrough like that.)

And even after all this time, Crowley cannot bring himself to blame him. Expectations can be sly things, worming themselves back into your life like insidious little parasites, and before you know it, you’re doing it again: lying to yourself to please others. Crowley had Fallen, not because he’d been evil, but because he’d refused to let the parasite in, because he could not keep forcing himself to be something he is not. He is an Asker. A Troublemaker. A Mover, a Shaker. A Changer.

And whenever he’s fought that, it’s never gone well. Try as he might to keep himself in check, he always finds his way out, like the slippery thing he is.

Speaking of which. Night has begun to darken the sky outside, and the walls, floor and ceiling have begun crushing in toward him, so Crowley takes his absinthe and wends his slippery self out to the balcony.

He’d fully intended to give Aziraphale the grand tour last night, before they’d gotten sidetracked. He’s not sure he’d have shown him this part of the flat, though, not yet.

For one thing, the balcony looks nothing like the rest of his décor. There is no concrete here; only natural colors and textures. It has sturdy, modern wicker furniture with comfortable cushions, a retractable awning, soft yellow-white string lights winding around every available hanging space. It is climate-controlled, warm and humid without feeling oppressive, a sustained miracle insulating it from even the coldest rains and sleets and snows of London winters. There’s only one way to access it, a little door off the kitchen that’s not even visible most of the time. When Crowley is in his flat, he’s usually out here.

It is full to bursting with plants. Every couple of months, Crowley must give time-space a little nudge; he must smooth-talk the laws of physics into allowing room for a few more green, leafy residents.

Though, they are not as leafy nor as green as their brethren indoors. To put it mildly. Some have yellowing around their edges. There are hanging pothos plants that are leggier than Crowley himself. Birds of Paradise with more spots than a leopard. Majesty palms who possess such sad, droopy fronds you want to offer them condolences. Split-leaf philodendrons with rebelliously asymmetrical splits, or no splits at all, whose leaves insist on a recalcitrant curl at their edges instead of lying flat. A weeping ficus in the corner whose foliage grows in so uneven and spotty and insubordinate that it never fails to make Crowley shake his head when he looks at it, and which despite its name always seems to be laughing at him.

It isn’t afraid of him, and neither are any of the others out here. Not anymore.

(Natural consequence of giving up on trying to please him. They let their flaws show, and expect to meet their ends: death-by-pulping in the flat’s highly-efficient, state-of-the-art garbage disposal. But then instead, they find themselves carried out to this miniature misfit paradise, carefully re-potted, and settled amongst their wayward, reject fellows, and all the while the garbage disposal runs loudly in the background.

It’s hard to put the fear of God into anyone when they’ve already realized what you really are: all bark and no shred. A soft-hearted, pathetic excuse for a demon who has never directly killed anything, not even a mutinous houseplant.)

They all seem to sigh collectively as Crowley drops his weight onto the roomy wicker couch and sets down his cargo on the table beneath the awning. His glass and the absinthe bottle wobble dangerously, before he glares at them and they apologetically steady themselves. The string lights, sensing his mood, turn on at only a fraction of their brightness. The pothos vine hanging just behind him seems to be doing its best to pat him on the shoulder.

Crowley sits and stares, taking slow sips from his drink, letting the colors of the darkening sky and the green plants and the dim yellow lights and the warm, rich wood of the patio blend together in his unfocused gaze.

This is where Aziraphale finds him, however many minutes or hours later, emerging through the door as if he’s been here a thousand times.

The redhead regards him, half-drunk, with his mouth open. Never, not once in six thousand years, has Aziraphale ever, ever --

Outwardly, Crowley does not move. Inwardly, his traitorous corporation dumps what must be a full litre of adrenalin directly into his bloodstream, and for a few frantic seconds, he gives serious thought to scaling the wall and winging it off his balcony.

But while he’s busy debating it, the angel, who had been wide-eyedly taking in the surroundings of this brand-new and yet so familiar place, suddenly turns and pins him in place with his gaze.

Well. That’s that sorted. He’s not going anywhere.

Aziraphale draws in a breath, but instead of saying anything, he sighs and makes his way over to where Crowley is poised on the edge of the cushion of the wicker couch. He sits down, cautious, the way one crouches next to a frightened animal that’s about to bolt, nearby but giving Crowley plenty of space.

Fair enough.

“I’m so sorry to intrude like this,” he begins. “But you weren’t answering either of your phones, and I’m afraid that what with the recent attempts on our lives by our former employers, I do admit I panicked.”

Shit. How could Crowley have forgotten? Of course the angel would barge in. He’d have done the same. He’d have been beside himself.

“Don’t – don’t apologize, angel. I’m the one who should be sorry. For freezing you like that, and running away, and, and making you worry. It’s all my fault.” He tells Aziraphale, his voice quiet and only growing quieter, until by the end of his statement, he’s all but whispering. He can’t look at his friend.

“Oh, Crowley. Oh, my darling. That just isn’t true. I owe you more of an apology than I can ever give.” Crowley makes an incredulous noise about that, a strangled thing of confusion and disbelief. “It’s true, Crowley. Can you look at me, dearest? I swear that I just need to tell you – show you – this one thing, and if you still want to be alone afterwards, I will of course respect your wishes, but I need you to look at me. And sober up. Please.”

Crowley, of course, does. He purges the alcohol from his bloodstream with a wish and a shudder. That’s easy. The eye contact, though, that’s harder – his eyes fight his brain the whole way, but he drags them up nonetheless.

“Thank you, my dear.”

The demon’s voice lodges quite firmly in his throat. No amount of shoving will force it free, so he nods, looks down at his knees, remembers he’s supposed to be looking at Aziraphale, does so, and nods just one more time, for good measure.

By everything that exists, I am a fucking mess.

“There you are. Now, ah. Where to begin. At the beginning, I suppose. Well. Not the Beginning beginning…”

Crowley still cannot coax his mouth to form anything resembling a word, so he makes a groaning, whiny noise of entreaty.

“Quite right. It’s something of a long story but I’ll attempt to be as brief as possible.” Crowley, overwhelmed as he is, still manages a snort at that, and the angel rolls his eyes at him fondly. “Yes, yes. It was sometime early in the Third Millenium. I cannot remember the exact year; it was before they started reliably keeping track, you know. Humanity was in the midst of learning the finer points of metallurgy.” Aziraphale checks that Crowley is still with him, still looking at him, and the demon makes a small noise of assent.

“I was browsing a market in Sumer when I ran across the most beautiful object. The instant I laid eyes on it, I immediately knew it was meant to be mine. It was like it was created just for me,” Aziraphale murmurs, his voice so thick it feels like a tangible weight in Crowley’s chest, and for the immortal life of him, he can’t guess why. “It was the first time I ever miracled money for myself. I hadn’t enough on me to buy it, you see.

“I held on to it for the next few millennia. It was my treasure, one that absolutely no one knew I kept. I even grew anxious about storing it in the physical plane, and eventually learned how to create a small interdimensional bolt-hole in order to hide it better.”

A puzzle piece, one of the remaining few that surround the angel after six thousand years, slides into place. Crowley remembers teaching him how to do that, shortly after the establishment of the bookshop, after Aziraphale had almost been recalled back to Heaven. Finding those pocket-sized spaces in the fabric of creation hadn’t been an easy skill for him to acquire – Principalities usually have little cause to dabble in space and time, and aren’t really made for it. But Aziraphale had pursued it with dogged determination. Crowley hadn’t understood it then.

He still doesn’t, to be honest. He’s never hidden his other possessions this way, not even his Wilde first editions. What could possibly be so precious that he’d go that far to protect it? He burns, and holds his breath. Aziraphale isn’t done.

“And there I kept it for the next two-hundred odd years. Then, five years ago, I…well, I suppose there’s no other way to put it. I gave it away.”

Crowley gapes at him. It all feels very déjà vu. Something struggles in the depths of the demon’s memory – maybe Crowley himself. A lone diver, sightless and lost in a dark and daunting sea, he flounders towards what he hopes is the surface. From a great distance, or perhaps far underwater, he hears himself ask.

“Why?”

“Even now, I’m not completely sure. But if I had to guess, I’d venture to say it was because I was ready to share it with the world, with the hope that I would be allowed to keep it. Ah. The humans say that – that you should set free the things you love. At least I think they do.”

The angel has begun rambling, and also rummaging in his coat pocket. Whatever he has in there, Crowley can see he already has a handle on it, but is delaying actually bringing it out.

“I went to inquire about it today, to retrieve it. In order to keep a promise.”

The memory disturbs the face of the water. I know this. Something, Crowley thinks, is about to emerge, gasping for breath. The angel finally draws his hand from his pocket, fingers clasped around whatever the object is.

Without having to think about it, Crowley holds out his hand, so that Aziraphale can pass it to him surreptitiously. This is how they have always accepted things from each other. Furtive, illicit, eyes shifting. Like a crime.

But Aziraphale. Aziraphale turns his hand over. Uncloses his fingers, one-by-one. Opens his palm and exposes the tiny, twisting thing held in it to the sky.

And oh. Oh.

Before he’s even fully registered what he’s looking at, Crowley’s gut swoops. Like breaking a fall, like taking flight.

It’s such a strange thing. So strange to see such a familiar, susurrating shape, one he sees winding along the side of his face every time he looks into a mirror, an almost exact image of it, picked out in aged, blackened silver, so small that it fits perfectly in the hollow of Aziraphale’s open, outstretched hand.

“Yes, the resemblance is indeed uncanny. I think the artist must have met you at some point, my dear, and been quite captivated. One can hardly blame her.” The angel murmurs, still holding out his offering.

Instead of taking it from him, Crowley extends one shaking hand and cradles the angel’s, tracing the side of his palm with his thumb, unable to take his eyes off the exquisitely-molded snake. It’s so ornate, so lifelike. It looks liable to start slithering around Aziraphale’s fingers any second.

Its eyes are two tiny inset gemstones; polished citrine quartz, or possibly even deep yellow diamonds.

One more puzzle piece finds its home.

(We fill each other’s empty spaces, like an answer fills a question; we grow with each other, as questions follow answers.)

“Did he…is he doing well? Warlock?” This is the first thing Crowley thinks to ask.

“You know, I think he is,” Aziraphale tells him without missing a beat, the inquiry not catching him off guard in the slightest. “He was certainly surprised to see me. He’s becoming quite an enterprising young man – he made me promise to visit again before he agreed to give this back. With the added condition that I bring his old Nanny to visit him, as well.”

“Not Francis?”

“Ah…as to that…he very pointedly did not mention Francis. Makes one wonder whether he…what he knows. Best not to speculate, I suppose.”

Crowley makes a non-committal noise.

“It’s not…the metal looks darker than I remember. And didn't it used to be a pin?”

“Oh, yes. It changes. Always has done. I miracled it when I first acquired it, so that time and handling would not erode the metal, but even so, it goes through cycles. It’s acquired a life of its own, it seems, as all long-loved things tend to. The silver will darken and lighten according to its own whims; it’s quite extraordinary. Just like a real snake shedding its skin.” Aziraphale says with a smile in his voice, the corners of his eyes crinkling as his gaze shifts from the little snake to Crowley. Then, quietly:

“The eyes always stay the same, though.”

Crowley opens his mouth, but nothing comes out except for a choked sound, which only vaguely resembles the word “angel.”

“And that brings me to what I came here to say.” Aziraphale says, tucking the small snake safely back into his pocket, no hesitation at all left in his voice. “I am so sorry, Crowley. Yes, you ran, but you ran because things I have said and done in the past made you feel like you had to. Because you thought I wouldn’t be able to handle your truth. Because I had been so afraid for so long, I wasn’t honest with you – or with myself. I hid, I defended, I deflected. I made you accommodate me, so many times. So many times, Crowley.”

The angel’s eyes swim with tears, and Crowley’s spare hand immediately comes up in anticipation of wiping them away. But Aziraphale has a spare hand too, and he uses it to stop the gesture, not unkindly, and makes a wet, thick-sounding half-chuckle of a sound.

“I did it out of fear. Fear of losing you, fear of losing Heaven, the place I thought I was meant to belong. I was so afraid. I was so afraid to face the fact that how you love me is exactly how I want to be loved. I was afraid of how I want you for exactly who and what you are, because angels are only supposed to want to love Her. I thought that you, your love, wasn’t what I was supposed to want. But no amount of denial ever changed how I felt. I have always wanted your love, Crowley. I have always loved you.

“I’ve always loved your hair, the way you grow it out or chop it off on a whim, because no matter how you wear it, it suits you. I’ve always loved the way the fashions of the day, whatever they may be, hang on that lovely frame of yours. I’ve always loved the way your hips swivel a little differently depending on which effort you’re making, the subtle shifts in the way you carry yourself, or the way you speak. I have loved the rhythms you keep, the way you live out the cycles and the desires of your body, how you honor the truths it tells. I have loved the mischief and the kindness in you, how you let them both have free reign. You owe neither apology nor explanation for it, Crowley, for any of it. Not to me. Not to anyone.”

“But you didn’t – you never…”

“Let on that I knew? No. No, I didn’t. How could I, coward that I was – that I still am?” The angel smiles, rueful, and nestles Crowley’s jaw in his hand, his smile turning warm when the demon automatically rests into the touch. “Especially after…after what I said to you in 1967.” Recalling the memory, the lines near Aziraphale’s eyes crease the way they do when he wants to cry, but even so he presses on.

“But I’m ready now, Crowley, whenever you are. Take as long as you need. Take thousands of years, if you wish; I will gladly and gratefully wait, as you did for me.” Aziraphale leans in, rests his forehead against Crowley’s, holding his gaze. “But I must confess, I am selfish; I dearly hope you do not take as long as I did.”

“What about--” Crowley begins, the words rasping past a dry throat. There’s a voice inside him, an old one, screaming at him to stop picking this apart before he ruins the moment, but he ignores it. He has to know. “When it happened – before I ran – you looked…upset.” He finishes lamely, cringing at his own terrible understatement.

Aziraphale’s cheeks burn scarlet, which is…not the reaction Crowley had expected. It’s shame, yes, but mixed with something else.

“Yes – as to that – as I said, I’ve been aware of your...would ‘fluidity’ be an acceptable term?” Crowley nods, numbly. “I’ve been aware of it for almost as long as I’ve known you. You’ve never exactly hidden it, dearest. But regardless, we need to discuss what you’re comfortable with in different – forms, as it were. And yet I…oh, Crowley, I almost flouted that entirely.” Now it is the angel whose eyes cannot seem to meet his.

“Angel, I still don’t – what do you mean?”

“I mean that – darling, you didn’t intend to shift when you did, correct?”

Crowley nods, flushing anew at the memory.

“No, angel, sorry if it surprised you. My body can have a mind of its--”

“You misunderstand. Yes, it took me off guard, but not in a bad way. My first instinct was to – to…” Aziraphale’s cheeks blaze. “To dive in.”

At first, nothing happens, but then the stone that Aziraphale has lobbed into their conversation hits, causing a huge splash and ripples that reach every corner of the pond, flooding the banks.

Which is an apt, if overly polite, way of describing what it also does to Crowley, the space between his legs suddenly pulsing, warm and liquid, reminding him he’d never snapped away the cause of this whole conversation.

“Angel,” he breathes, but Aziraphale must mistake his tone, for his face crumples.

“I know, my dear, I’m so sorry, I was horrified with myself…that I almost – without asking--”

“Angel.” Crowley says again, more insistent. “You can. Er. I always wanted – I’ll almost always – just ask anytime you want to, I mean. I have…” he takes a deep breath, tries to just string a few coherent words together. “I have wanted your mouth between my legs since the first time I saw you eat.”

A becoming, incandescent blush lights Aziraphale from within, his eyes wide. His pink wet tongue darts out over lush lips, and a high, thin whine breaks free from Crowley’s throat. To see it. To think he might be imagining it, might be wanting it, the things that Crowley has rarely ever let himself imagine, let alone want. Oh, fuck.

Crowley squeezes his thighs together, the pressure only heightening his awareness of how soaked he is. He can’t stop the images; the floodgates that always used to hold them back for his own sanity are now wide open:

How if Aziraphale were to kneel and peel his trousers off, there would be a visible wet spot on his knickers; how if he removed those, too, a string of slick would stick to them, how it would stretch and break before the angel’s eyes. How the angel would gently part his knees, spread him, breathe him, lean in, lean in--

Crowley watches his lover’s pupils dilate, can see and hear his breath catch, before he moans like he’s been gutted, and only then realizes that his thoughts might have an audience.

“Angel…can you…?”

“Yes, darling,” he admits. “I can hear you right now. I’m not positive, but I think it only happens when we both – open up, I suppose. Forget to be afraid. Let ourselves be honest.”

And sure enough, if Crowley focuses he can find the parts of the thought that are not his – the longing to know how he smells, how he tastes, how he feels under the angel’s epicurean mouth. The need to savor his pleasure.

All his breath rushes from him in a high keen, his head falling back against the couch cushion, his legs spreading of their own accord, the phantoms of sensations – breath, lips, tongue – making him roll his hips.

“Aziraphale - fuck--”

“Oh, Crowley, please, let me,” the angel is all but begging. “Let me take care of you. If this is what you want, what you need, please let me give it to you.”

“Ngk – yes, angel. Yes.”

At some times, one’s imagination will suffice to envision what certain things will be like when actually experienced.

This is not one of those times.

This is not one of those times, because when Aziraphale’s knees hit the floor, the events that follow make Crowley’s imaginings look like pale imitations, like faded half-dreams.

When Aziraphale removes his trousers and his pants, he does it even more gently than Crowley had thought possible; when Aziraphale nudges his legs apart and the cool evening air hits him, he knows he’s even wetter than he thought he’d be, wetter than he’s ever been; he’s probably dripping with it, glistening with it in the soft light.

And when Aziraphale looks up at Crowley, he holds eye contact while he takes a deep breath in through his nose, and licks his lips, and makes one of those sounds. One of those first sip of ’82 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, best bite of Wagyu filet mignon, last lick of crème brulee sounds, and oh sweet unholy fuck , Crowley is not going to survive this. He is going to burst into flames any second.

But he does not combust, at least not literally. What he does do is whine helplessly as Aziraphale shifts his attention back down, strokes up and down along the inside of his thighs, then brings his hands in to part his outer labia and spread him even wider. The angel exhales onto him, which makes him abruptly realize his clit is throbbing, probably has been for a while now.

It’s twitching, too, if the hitch in Azirapahle’s breath and his ensuing groan is any indication.

“You are so gorgeous, my dearest,” Aziraphale tells him on a murmur, one thumb brushing softly through his short, fiery curls. “I must admit, I’ve wanted to taste you like this for quite some time. I may have some…difficulty holding back.”

“S’okay, angel. I’ll let you know. Two taps for slow down, three for stop?” Crowley asks, knowing full well he will not need it.

“Wonderful, my dear.”

And then, Aziraphale closes the distance between them, the first touch a gentle, reverent kiss right at the crest of Crowley’s seam, his bottom lip just barely grazing the stem of Crowley’s clit.

When Crowley whines and rolls his hips restlessly, the angel makes a low noise of amusement against him, one Crowley has never heard him make before. His tone is so deep, the sound of it blatantly lustful, and the rumble of it carries straight into the demon’s core.

“Don’t make me beg, angel,” he tells him, but his voice is so breathy, so pleading that it probably counts as begging already.

“No, love. Not this time,” Aziraphale tells him, and then licks downward, soft tongue gently following the ridge of his clit until he finds the very tip of it, then giving light flicks to coax it further out of its hood.

The angel is barely using any pressure – even in his urgency, he’s mindful to not go too hard at first – but even so, Crowley’s thighs jump, his stomach muscles tense. Aziraphale pauses, but before Crowley can begin to worry, the angel’s strong hands brace against his thighs, pushing them back to their prior position, perhaps even a bit wider, and keep them there.

Which turns out to be a good move, because when the angel puts his tongue to Crowley again, it is not a gentle brush but a slow, full, deep lick, and his whole body arches up towards the pleasurable ache of it. Even with his eyes squeezed shut, Crowley can chart Aziraphale’s exact path: from the end of his seam, over his hole, gathering up a good amount of slick, then at last, bringing all the way back up to his clit. Having reached his destination, the angel begins running circles around it, only barely skimming the pinpoint of Crowley’s pleasure.

Crowley hears his own voice keening, high and needy, watches his hands wind into Aziraphale’s corn-silk curls, feels his hips rolling toward the strokes of the angel’s wonderful, terrible, bastard tongue. None of this happens with his permission. Every muscle, every nerve, every bit of him insists on telegraphing his desperation, and Crowley tosses his head back, biting off a helpless shout.

Aziraphale moans into him and nods minutely to signal that the hair-pulling is very much welcome, and when Crowley lets his fingers tighten, the blond rewards him. He swirls his tongue again, but this time directly on top of his clit, and doesn’t stop. It’s as if he’s trying to discern the exact shape of it using his mouth alone. Crowley’s lower stomach clenches up, and his cunt squeezes with that familiar, slow-growing heat, angelic lips and tongue caressing him toward something enormous, something earth-shattering.

He goes on like that, laving at the little nub until Crowley is all but sobbing, ramping him up and up and up,up--

Then he pulls back, eliciting a pathetic cry from the demon.

Angels don’t need to breathe, let alone catch their breath, but Aziraphale takes a minute to do this very thing. Crowley cracks open his eyes and the panting sight of him, his slick shining on the angel’s mouth and across his cheeks, makes him bite his lip against a fresh rush of pleasure.

“Goodness, you’re soaked,” Aziraphale tells him, kissing his inner thigh, “And you taste incredible. Even better than I imagined. And your clit feels so good under my tongue, so swollen and firm. Does it feel good for you, darling?”

“Y-you know damn well it does, you right bastard,” Crowley gasps. “What happened to not making me beg?”

“Ah. A little fib, that,” The angel has the grace to look at least a little sheepish. “It’s just that I love giving you what you want. Won’t you tell me? Ask me, Crowley, please.”

Crowley whines and arches his back, trying to close the distance get the angel to put his mouth back on him. Mere centimeters away, however, he finds himself thwarted by stalwart, unyielding divine strength.

“No, love, with words. Come on now. I know you can, I’ve seen it.”

“Bastard,” Crowley hisses again, and is met with only a patient smile and another lingering kiss against his mons, teasing flutters of the tongue grazing so close, so close to where he needs them.

Right. Two can play at this game.

Crowley takes a deep breath, lets it out.

“Aziraphale.”

The angel’s eyes dart up, expectant, but Crowley says nothing. He holds eye contact with that soft, steadfast gaze, and the longer he looks, the more the inside of his head goes silent.

Think of it, angel.

The smallest gasp from Aziraphale is enough to tell the demon he’s coming through loud and clear.

Think of what it’ll be like, to make me come like this, for the first time. I’ll sing for you. I’ll moan so sweet for you, angel. I’ll scream your name. I’ll spread my legs as wide as they can go, or wrap them around your head if you want. Think of it.

Aziraphale’s eyes go large, his eyebrows shoot up, his lips part. There’s crimson in his cheeks, his ears, probably all along his neck, and Crowley can feel him panting – hot, quickening gusts of breath hitting his cunt, making him squirm. His globe-round pupils have all but eclipsed his pale-moon irises. Crowley sees his throat work around a hard swallow.

Yes, that’s it. It’d be so easy, you’re so close. I’m so close. Just a bit more, a bit longer. You can slide your fingers in my cunt, curl them just right, wring the pleasure out of me. I’ll come on your tongue, gush all down your chin. Think of it. I’ll come so hard for you, Aziraphale. I’ll be so good. Don’t you want to make me feel so good?

“Oh, you fiend,” accuses Aziraphale on a growl. Crowley has rarely heard him sound happier. “Foul tempter.” A pleased, triumphant smirk curves along Crowley’s mouth.

“My win, angel,” he says, but instead of conceding, Aziraphale smiles beatifically right back, only the glint in his eyes betraying him.

“You’re a bit premature in declaring victory, dearest,” the angel tells him, then one-handedly tugs Crowley’s arse right to the very edge of his seat. By the time the demon realizes he should throw his legs over those broad shoulders to catch himself, Aziraphale has already caught him, keeping his lower half supported with no evident exertion. “I may have a comeback yet.”

“Wait, was that a -- fuck!”

Aziraphale has brought his lips back to Crowley’s clit, only this time, he wraps them around it, and with one last sly glance up at the demon’s face, he sucks.

Now, Crowley couldn’t keep his legs from locking around the angel’s head if he tried, his voice immediately high and wailing and loud, and the tiny part of his brain that’s still coherent spares a thanks to his past self for sound-proofing the balcony.

The angel, thrice-blessed thing that he is, alternates between suction and light, teasing licks, switching every time he feels the demon’s thighs begin to tense up against his ears. He keeps Crowley suspended like this, teetering on the brink of orgasm, for what could be seconds or minutes or hours. Who can say.

“Angel, inside, put your – oh, fuck, yes!” Crowley gasps in response to a particularly fervent suck, the heat lancing through him. Without any contact at all, his nipples pebble against the fabric of his shirt, tightening in sympathy with the stimulation on his clit, the pressure of the pleasure inside him so strong that his skin feels tight. “Your fingers, Aziraphale, I’m almost – I need--”

“You want my fingers inside you? You know how to get them, love,” Aziraphale rasps against his clit. His voice drags out as a raw, ragged thing, the way it does when he’s overwhelmed. He’s panting to give Crowley a run for his money.

Fine. But we’re calling it a no-score draw.

“Whatever you say, my dear.”

“For sssssomeone’s sssake, Aziraphale! Please,” Crowley sobs, and oh yes, there are tears, hot and honest and mortifying, gathering behind his eyes. “Please, I need it, I need you, angel, please.”

“Yes, love, yes,” Aziraphale hums, so near that Crowley can feel the vibrations. “Oh, I knew you could do it. You’re so good.”

Then, at last, yes, as promised, there are Aziraphale’s wide fingertips teasing at his entrance, and they don’t tease for long. He’s relaxed, he’s wet; two fingers slip right in, slide home, and he squeezes warm and snug around them to let them know how very welcome they are.

“Oh, you wondrous thing. You’re so tight. Show me, Crowley, show me how you come like this. Let me feel it. I want it.”

I will. You can have it, all of it, my greedy angel.

Aziraphale lowers his lips once more, draws in Crowley’s needy, swollen clit, and the angel pulses his curved digits in time with deep, rhythmic sucks on the sensitive bud. How it’s possible, Crowley has no idea, but the angel seems to know instinctively where to aim the presses of his perfectly-manicured fingertips, and his walls clench in response to every pass over that spot inside him, every thrust that makes his head go blank. He’s dripping around the girth of Aziraphale’s knuckles, and he knows the angel can feel it, because the angel moans around his mouthful.

And that, well, that does it. Crowley arches into Aziraphale’s unfailing grip, screaming, his insides uncoiling, searing climax pulling him spectacularly undone. But his angel has him, accepts it all, everything that spills, so Crowley gives it over to his keeping.

There’s a rushing in his ears, but through it he can hear the angel groaning desperate, wordless sounds of delighted praise as his tongue strokes Crowley through his orgasm. The aftershocks of it are so strong, Crowley could almost believe he’s tipping from his first peak right into a second. His voice keeps his promise; Aziraphale’s name rings against the soundproofed walls, an exultation.

As the echo of that fades, as the last waves of ecstasy wash over him, the demon relaxes his thigh muscles away from where they’ve been squeezing Aziraphale’s ears. The wonderful, warm languor of post-climactic calm spreads in the arteries and veins of his body, and he melts into those willing, waiting hands. The angel’s tongue finally retreats from his oversensitive clit and trails down to lap at his entrance and lick him clean, low hums of satisfaction making Crowley’s limbs go loose.

In a daze, Crowley imagines his brain as a network of interconnected stars; sees the nodes in his limbic system dimming, their lights flowing bit by bit, one by one, back into his frontal lobe. He pulls air into his lungs to the rhythm of Aziraphale’s own breaths, which are still quick but slowing down as the seconds pass. In, out, in, out. In. Out.

“Holy fuck,” he whispers to the sky, then tilts his head to look down at the angel.

When their eyes meet, it’s like a dam breaks. Crowley would feel self-conscious about the uncontrollable laughter that’s suddenly bubbling from his throat, except Aziraphale is doing it too, tears of mirth in his eyes, his shoulders shaking underneath Crowley’s legs. It goes on for so long that Crowley’s cheeks start to hurt, and no wonder – he can’t remember the last time he laughed like this.

Fighting it only makes him giggle more hysterically, so he lets it run its course, whole body bouncing as Aziraphale does the same. An eternity seems to pass before they can get a hold of themselves.

“That was – that was…” Crowley manages between the last few chuckles, grasping for the word but coming up empty-handed. “Aziraphale.”

“Quite,” the angel agrees, finally catching his own breath and gently maneuvering Crowley back onto the bench seat, snapping his pants and trousers back on for good measure. He stays down where he is, though, kneeling at Crowley’s feet. His face glows with that blinding smile, that smile he has whenever Crowley has given him something.

Wait--

“Oh – I need to – you haven’t—ngk!” Crowley scrambles against the bench, but meets resistance as Aziraphale braces his hips. The angel bites his lip. If Crowley didn’t know better, he’d say he looks…

“No need, my dear,” he tells him, and before Crowley can protest, he gets to his feet. A sizeable wet stain seeps through the front of his trousers, and Crowley can’t help but stare at it, slack-jawed. The angel clears his throat and blushes.

The gall of you, Crowley thinks, a hedonist to the core, coming just from eating pussy, and you blush like some dainty thing. The audacity.

If Aziraphale can’t hear the thought itself, he can at least sense the intention of it, because his color only rises more.

“Oh, hush. It was unavoidable,” he says, seating himself next to the demon. “Once you opened your mind to me, I could feel – well, everything.”

Crowley gawps at him.

“What do you mean, everything?”

“Everything, Crowley,” the blonde tells him, tetchiness and amusement holding hands in his tone. “As it happens, when you’re psychically linked with someone and they reach climax…er, it’s rather like a chain reaction.”

Crowley had thought he was done laughing, but that seems not to be the case. He breaks out in guffaws and Aziraphale clucks his tongue at him, but cannot seem to suppress his own grin.

“Crowley, really.”

“M’sorry, angel, but it’s funny,” he gets out between giggles. He may be a touch delirious, but who can blame him? It’s been an eventful week. “You came in your pants.”

“Yes, well. As I said, unavoidable. After all, I was essentially pleasuring myself.”

“Ngk!”

“There, now you’re blushing, too.”

“Shut it.”

“Ah, but since we’re speaking of it, would you…?”

Crowley rolls his eyes, but nonetheless snaps his fingers, and the stain evaporates. He notes with vindictive glee that this is probably the third such miracle within forty-eight hours; Hell’s administrative office can have no possible doubt left what he’s been getting up to, and Hastur has to review and sign off on those reports.

Suck on that, you great warty slimeball.

“Oh, thank you,” Aziraphale sighs, and takes advantage of his newly-dry trousers to settle on the bench. Not any distance away, but right up next to the demon, his ample thigh pressed against Crowley’s lean one.

Wordlessly, he reaches his hand out for Crowley’s, and Crowley takes it, easy as anything. The soft, well-manicured warmth of the angel’s palm meets his skin, those sturdy fingers lacing with his, a seamless fit. He could hold this hand forever with no friction, he’s sure of it.

“Angel,” he says. It’s out before he realizes he’s even talking – but that’s all right. This isn’t something he needs to think about. Not at all. “Can I see that little snake of yours one more time?”

“My dear, it’s hardly – oh. Oh, you mean this,” the angel’s ears go pink as he produces the trinket and hands it over.

Crowley inspects it with his physical eyes first, turning it this way and that in his fingers. Then, closing one set of eyes and opening another, he prods it with tiny, curious tendrils of his astral body, caressing with countless infinitesimal hands. Right away, he finds what he’s seeking: the bright ribbons of Aziraphale’s essence that have woven themselves into the metal, which are now part of its very existence.

He runs over the strands, testing, asking. In answer, they hum at his touch like they’ve been expecting him, like violin strings kissed by a bow. Like a bell that has been waiting, waiting, waiting to be rung, and the note it sings is yes.

Next to him, Aziraphale gasps and then stops breathing entirely. Crowley knows the angel can feel what he’s doing, because he can feel it too: the delicate brush along the very edge of where his physical body meets his astral one, so the mind cannot discern which one is actually being touched. It’s like light fingertips trailing down his neck, his chest, his arm, his spine – all over his body.

When he opens his corporeal body’s eyes again, Aziraphale is gazing at him with unabashed wonder – eyes wide and dewy, mouth open.

“Do you trust me, angel?”

“With – with anything. With everything,” Aziraphale tells him. “Everything I have.”

“Give me your hand?” Crowley asks.

Aziraphale does.

“Er, no, your – um. The other one.”

Aziraphale extends his left hand this time, his lower lip wobbly. He’s trembling. Or maybe that’s Crowley. Very well could be.

With a shaky exhale, he rests his forehead against Aziraphale’s, but does not close his eyes. He needs to be close, because the first time he says this out loud, it will be the quietest of whispers. He’ll get louder with practice. But it is true, the truest thing he knows, whether it is screamed or murmured, and so he’ll spend the rest of his existence finding every way there is to say it.

“Aziraphale. I love you.”

As the words leave his mouth, the tiny object in his hand shimmers once, and then shivers to life.

The two of them look down to watch as it forges a cool path over his palm, gathering body heat as it slithers from his hand onto Aziraphale’s, winding between his fingers one by one, searching. As it settles its coils, strands of Crowley weave in alongside the angel’s inside the structure of the metal, and there’s that resonance again, harmonic and deep, and every cell in his body hums along as it finds its home.

The note melts slowly into the silence, fading until the only sound left is their breathing. The polished eyes of the serpent give one last glint, and then it falls still, looped there around Aziraphale’s ring finger.

“I’m yours, Aziraphale. Body, mind, heart, bloody ragged scrap of a soul – all of me, yours. Always have been, since that first garden.”

“Crowley,” breathes Aziraphale, the wetness in his eyes turning from dew into full tears. “Oh, Crowley.”

“Be with me, angel. Will you?”

“Yes, oh, a thousand times yes, Crowley. I will, always. I belong to you just the same,” the angel blinks, and the tears fall over Crowley’s hands where they have come up to cup his cheeks.

“Love you, angel,” he says again, like a broken record, like a broken dam. “Love you, love you, love you.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale huffs. “If you make me ruin this coat with tears, I shall be very cross.”

This surprises a laugh out of Crowley.

“Bastard,” he declares, still smiling as he kisses said bastard. “My beautiful fussy angel. I know better than to put your wardrobe at risk.”

“Indeed. There’s one part of it you could keep safe for me, though.” Aziraphale pulls away from their grinning kiss with that certain multifaceted sparkle in his eyes, warmth and what Crowley now knows for sure is love. Warmth, love, and mischief.

“What’s that?”

The angel palms something gold out of thin air, the smoothest sleight of hand the demon has ever seen him perform.

“Now, I had this made to fit my little finger, but as it happens, it’s the same size as your ring finger. Lovely coincidence, that,” he tells the astonished demon as he slides the signet ring onto his hand. “I’ve come to think of it as my crest. Will you wear it?”

“Ngk,” Crowley croaked, followed by more sounds that weren’t words, or even the beginnings of them. He tries again, his heart making a valiant effort to dash itself against his sternum. “’Course I will, angel. Every day.”

They sit. All four hands folded together.

They breathe.

~o0o~

“Well then,” Aziraphale says. Crowley opens eyes he hadn’t realized had fallen closed, and when he does, the light around them has become that of dawn. Just over Aziraphale’s shoulder, the moon inches lower toward the horizon, and not far off, the morning star shines, bright silver-white and steady.

“Oh.”

“What are you in the mood for, love? I’ve a mind to go ‘round the shops today,” Aziraphale tells him, rubbing one thumb where it still rests on the back of Crowley’s hand.

“Thinking of returning that mobile phone you bought, Aziraphale?” Crowley smirks. “Forget it. Much like myself, you’re stuck with it now.”

The angel purses his lips and heaves a great sigh.

“Oh, if you insist.”

“I do. Even you’ve got to change every now and then, angel.”

“Indeed. On that note, actually, I’ve been thinking…” Aziraphale trails off, considering. Or dithering, more like. Crowley chuckles.

“Out with it, angel.”

“It’s just that…well, these poor dears seem quite short on space, is the thing,” says the angel as he gestures expansively to all the plants around them, who all rustle faintly in agreement, the traitors. “Look, they’re practically elbowing each other for room. And I couldn’t help but notice, you can’t even see the stars from here, darling. It simply will not do.”

Crowley stares at him, but the angel goes on, heroically ignoring his burning gaze. “And wouldn’t you know it, I just don’t have enough space at the shop for all my books anymore. No, Crowley, we really have no choice but to find somewhere to bring them, somewhere with a bit more sprawl. Somewhere we can see the stars.”

Crowley’s mouth moves, but nothing comes out but air and random phonemes.

“Sounds like you’ve already got somewhere in mind.” He gets out. The angel swells with pride.

“Now you mention, there is this unspeakably darling little cottage in the South Downs. Just got listed this morning, in fact.”

“You sure a little cottage will have enough ‘sprawl’ to hold all your books and all my plants, angel?”

“Oh, never you fret, it’ll have plenty. And a greenhouse, and plenty of yard for gardens,” Aziraphale sighs, his gaze going far-off, as if he can see it from Crowley’s balcony. “And a pebbled path for us to walk down to the beach on sunny days, and the most splendid picture window we can sit in to watch the rain fall. Doesn’t that sound lovely, Crowley?”

It does, more lovely than words can possibly say.

Crowley says it anyway.

~o0o~

If you want to imagine the future, imagine it like this:

There are days of sunshine and meandering walks along the waves, and there are days of rain pattering against the glass. There are arguments, interspersed with smiles, over the kitchen table. Sometimes, there are tears. There are entire days of pillows and cotton sheets, laughter and gasps and hands and skin and kisses and pleasure. There are slow, dimly-lit nights with glasses of wine, a fire in the hearth, and a paperback to read aloud.

There are stars, the cycling rhythm of them, and the story of each one; so clear in the quiet dark you could reach out and feel its flickering warmth, the beating heart of it at the moment of its birth.

And there is a garden.