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It was around 2:00 when Crowley appeared in the middle of the bookshop office, wearing an impressive gown and hair in an elaborate updo, or what would have been one, had she not been drenched from head to toe and shivering angrily.
“Oh, fucking shit on a sstick, fuck, fuck, fuck—”
“Language,” Aziraphale interceded mildly, and she looked surprised to see him.
“Why am I here,” she hissed, trying to sweep the curls out of her face with one hand and take off her heels with the other.
“I don’t have the faintest, dear lady,” Aziraphale replied, setting down his annotations. “Are you alright?”
She tried to miracle herself dry, or change the clothes, but neither worked, and she collapsed onto Aziraphale’s sofa in her usual luxurious sprawl. “Fine.”
“…Would you like me to find you something warm to wear? Or drive you home?” He inquired, taking off his glasses.
Rather than responding, she gestured to him, asking, “Why do you wear those things; isn’t your vision ssupposssed to be, fucking—Heavenly, or sssomething?”
“I think they’re neat,” was his reply. “Are you drunk?”
“Jusst a little.”
“How come?” He stood to find a blanket; her arms were trembling.
“Wass on a boat. Big boat. Suppossed to be unsinkable. Big party on the big boat, lots of champagne and pretentiouss businessmen. Great tempting opportunities, then… Well. It wassn’t actually unsinkable, in the end.”
“You-what?” He placed the blanket over her shoulders, a tartan fleecy thing that in her sober mind she had always detested on principle of it not being fashionable, but for now she gladly accepted the warmth.
“The RMS Titanic, angel,” she said simply. “Real pity. Naturally I can sstill take credit for the sinking, fog it up as ssome big evil. Real issue is, killing a bunch of rich people has a generally positive effect! That’ss why I have to go around tempting so many blassted individuals, because you usually kill just as many arseholes as kind people if you go about snuffin’ lives out willy-nilly.” She took off her glasses, and Aziraphale could see her pupils had grown so large that they almost looked round. Her eyes glimmered in an unusual way.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, trying to sound reasonable. “You need to sober up. You could have die— been discorporated if you weren’t more careful, and I can’t properly impress on you how bad that could have been because you won’t absorb a word of it!”
“Can’t,” she said, clumsily. She held up a finger and it wobbled around. “See, I just. Think. So fucking much, when I’m in my right mind. All the bloody time. S’too much. The world and humanity, life and death and the wine and the end of the world: it comes so much closer to fitting together when my brain’s all topsy turvy, like I can almost understand what I need to do. Understand the point of it all. And then, then, lot’s of it’ss about you, too. So confusing. If my brain’s all fucked, then I don’t think of you nearly as much, b’cause when ‘m ssober it’s about you all the time, you and all your bullshit rules and morals and nonsense, and if everything’ss reversed then you are too, so it’s all much easssier.
“Especially nice because when I’m sssober I know what my thoughts ‘n feelings are on everything. Horribly simple, then I have to worry about what that meanss, because I already know where m’mind’s at. But being drunk? It’s-it’s just perfect. I can forget everything I usually know, and the amount of time I sspend piecing my brain back together like a fucking jigssaw to gain any amount of awarenesss — is a much better use than trying to make sense of the actual ssense when I’m not wassted. And it makess it so much easier to understand things I usually can’t begin to com-comp-compre-pre— get. Like my brain’ss really just a bag of marbless getting sshaken and reorganized. Sometimes it comes up red, sometimes it comes up blue.”
Aziraphale looked at her, not understanding. Her snake lisp, which he usually found mildly endearing, was so strong that her words didn’t reach him, and whatever she was trying to say was twisted and unraveled around however many bottles of alcohol were in her system until what arrived at his ears was a singular thread of whatever tapestry she’d woven in her mind.
“I’m going to take you to the bedroom,” he decided, “And you are going to sleep, and then in the morning, you will sober up, or else face the horror of actually experiencing a hangover, and then we will talk.”
She looked at him through glossy eyes, and he sighed, standing again.
“Come on, dear girl, this way.”
Despite the removal of her heels, her general swaying walk was simply too difficult to balance in her present condition, so eventually Aziraphale opted to carry her down the hall, bundled in his arms. She wouldn’t remember in the morning, regardless.
She pressed her face into his neck quite agreeably, and he tried not to feel pleased about it, or disappointed when he reached the bedroom, miracled the books off the bed and the dust into an ether dimension, and disentangled her carefully from his arms once more.
He tucked her in carefully, miracling her skin dry and a set of silk pyjamas onto her that she’d probably approve of, had she still been conscious. She never enjoyed knowing he spent his miracles on her, but again, she wouldn’t remember in the morning, and it wasn’t as if it would hurt her if Aziraphale showed a little kindness.
“You do sleep an awful lot,” he mumbled to her slumbering form.
He’d made it to the door of the room when he looked back and realized he hadn’t closed the blinds. Quietly, he crossed the floor again to do so. It wouldn’t really make a difference, considering Crowley’s impressive habit of sleeping through just about anything, but he sort of felt like it was what he was supposed to do. He turned to check on her one last time before leaving, and noticed her skin was still covered in goosebumps, and her breath came shakily.
He darted out again to fetch a hot-water bottle and adjust the furnacing system. As that was taking too long, he spent another miracle raising the bedroom’s temperature to a level past that of the heater’s capacities, but the chills spreading across her body hadn’t gone down yet.
Aziraphale sighed, retrieved his book from earlier in the night, and crawled into the bed as well. He hadn’t been in it in several decades, and was surprised at how comfortable it had remained. He lowered the room’s temperature again and pulled the covers up around himself before allowing angelic warmth to beam out around him in a loose sort of aura.
[Technically speaking, this sort of aura, if strong enough, should pulverize a demon, but Aziraphale was a quite low-rank angel even before he’d been on Earth for thousands of years, and he was sure he could keep it weak enough.]
As the hours passed, Aziraphale was surprised to see Crowley’s form shift back and forth several times. Her snake form fit much better alongside him in the technically-one-person bed, and she curled around his wrists and shoulders several times to be as close to the source of heat as possible, all the while not stirring.
He winced imagining how Heaven would react if they saw him, and this was partly what motivated him to leave Crowley’s side as dawn arrived, instead opening the blinds again. He was sure that the warmth of the newly-dawned April morning would keep her comfortable until she woke up. The other reason he left was because if she learned they’d spend the night in the same bed they would have to talk about it, and she would likely become all prickly and uncomfortable for the next decade while she wrestled with the concept of human closeness, and Aziraphale would have to pretend she meant nothing to him after Crowley came to the same conclusion about him, all of which would be horribly messy and frustrating, and he, quite honestly, just didn’t want to think about it.
So when Crowley sauntered downstairs several hours later in a conjured-up sweeping black robe with frills and fluff at every hemline, Aziraphale looked up easily from the morning crossword as though he hadn’t moved all night.
“Lovely gown,” he commented, trying not to stare for too long at the sweeping lines of her legs or the dip of her waist.
“Thanks,” she said, grinning. “The look I’m going for is the scheming ex-wife character who would murder you for your inheritance. Thoughts?”
“Are you my ex-wife, or planning to kill me specifically, or both?” he asked, playing along.
“Neither,” she said, twisting her hands around to paint an unseeable picture in the air with less grace than usual. Probably residual effects of the night before. “Just, y’know, the general ‘you’ of the audience.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Well, it’s very convincing. Tea?” He nodded to the remarkably warm kettle (considering there was no stovetop) on the counter to his left.
She declined, as he knew she would, and sat opposite him, posture more vertical than usual.
“Are you feeling alright?” Aziraphale inquired. “You were quite drunk when you appeared here last night.”
She pulled a face. “I didn’t— I dunno— say anything out of pocket, or rather, weird, or— well, odd?”
He shrugged. “Nothing more so than usual.”
“Good. Fine, then.”
“I mean it, Crowley, are you alright?” He folded the paper back over to show her the front headline: TITANIC SUNK, 1500 DEAD stretched across the page in a brutal black typeface.
She winced.
“It’s not a big thing. Same as any other job. People die all the time.”
“That’s not true,” he said, gently. “You were too drunk to transport yourself properly— I’m sure you were trying to get to your own flat and ended up here instead. Which of course isn’t a problem— if anything it’s a blessing, you were shaking with cold like anything— but if you’d ended up anywhere else you could have been in real danger! You were miles from shore, your body could have simply drowned.”
“I’d just get a new one, like always,” said Crowley. “Might take a while, but I’m always fine in the end.”
Aziraphale pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “How do I say this. It would be… upsetting for you to die preventably while we continue having our Arrangement.”
She waited for an explanation.
“I rely on you, you prat.” Rats. He’d been planning on avoiding talking about anything serious.
“Oh,” she said, looking confused. Her brows scrunched together in that way they did when she was trying to hide something overwhelming.
“Sorry. Erm. Let me rephrase. I’m not trying to be, ah, controlling.” He uncuffed and rerolled the ends of his sleeves before speaking. “I wish you would— should you find yourself in another near-death situation— feel comfortable coming to me for help. You used to save me quite a lot, in the old days, and I never was able to return the favor because you insist on keeping to yourself whenever you’re in trouble.”
“As in, how I went to you last night?”
He nodded.
She looked away. “I… don’t know if I can do that.”
He waited for an explanation, but she didn’t give one.
“I apologize,” he said eventually. “I don’t want to overstep… it just makes sense to me that we could, well, look out for each other. You don’t have any problem with protecting me, so why should you feel ashamed if I do the same for you?”
She didn’t reply, ripping brusquely through her hair and looking around her person as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “Where did I leave my glasses,” she muttered to herself.
“They’re in the office,” Aziraphale responded, disappointed. He watched her back as she stalked up the stairs, and thought.
He supposed her not wanting to be protected stemmed from the same things as her revulsion to being shown kindness, and her insistence that he not use his miracles on her. Which would have been perfectly understandable, if not for the previous night’s evidence that she was actually very comfortable with him, if her guard was down.
It must have been something she learned from Hell—
[or maybe from Heaven, as he had]
—the fear that if the knowledge of their mutual support was out in the open, something terrible would happen to her.
Which didn’t really make any sense to Aziraphale, considering they’d been considerably more involved with each other than intended for dozens of hundreds of years, even close friends for the past thousand. And neither Up nor Down was keen on actually paying attention to the goings-on of Earth, so long as they got their reports. Even though he was sure that it was well within the scope of heavenly abilities to spy on him or Crowley without their noticing, he judged that the pair of them were relatively irrelevant to current projects until the end of the world, and so not worth watching closely at all.
When Crowley returned, the glasses had resumed guard over her eyes, which, as frustrating as it was when she wore them, he had to admit tied the aesthetics of her outfit together quite nicely.
“I’m not…” She seemed to choose her words carefully. “Not ready to talk about that. Or just not ready in general, I suppose. For…..” She scrunched up her mouth. “Never mind.”
Aziraphale translated that to mean she didn’t want to talk about the specific emotional exchange of their arrangement any more than he did. Which would be fine, except that this meant she’d still keep a distance between them that with each passing year seemed less and less necessary.
He nodded anyway, and offered to walk her home, even though he didn’t actually know where that was, and she had never once said yes. She declined and he nodded, barely hearing her over his own fears that, as usual, this time might be the last. All part of the routine.
As always, he indulged in private speculation regarding what the hell his neighbors must think whenever they saw Crowley leave his place at all hours of day and night. Today he guessed the first thought would be an heiress, the second thought would be an actress, and the third thought would be a supermodel or a prostitute, depending on how much she allowed the gown to fall open over her chest, and how swishy her pace was on this particular morning.