Work Text:
The fairly amazing thing about the Apocalypse not happening is that almost everything goes on as usual. You would expect there to be a more dramatic sense of – what? Newness? Salvation? Freedom?
Well, there’s a bit of that. Certainly, there’s nothing unusual about Crowley and the angel whiling away an evening in the bookshop, drinking expensive single malt (sometimes he brings it), filling in gaps in their history (“that was during the Crusades, I think you were off in Syria somewhere”) and fishing up stories of Celestial politics (“well, actually the reason they picked Gabriel was that voice, I think it was a couple of other seraphim who nicknamed it Gabriel’s Trumpet, and if anything had to be annonce – annincied – “ “Annunciated,” Crowley helps out. “That. Yes. He was the one for it. Swanned around for weeks afterward…”)
The difference is that they don’t even have to think about concealment. They’ve never been as discreet as they should have, probably, they’ve gotten so used to one another over the centuries, but now they can get as arseholed as they like any time, fall fast asleep… asleep?
Aziraphale’s certain that Crowley's sobered himself up – hangovers aren't a part of the mortal experience they care to revisit – but this evening, by the time he’s sorted the bottles and glasses, the demon’s shed his boots and he's fully reclining against the cushions in a precarious odalisque, one leg up on the back of the couch, the other looking ready to slide towards the floor if it receives so much as a single stern glance. He’s hooked the dark glasses in the open collar of his shirt and he’s snoring very faintly, mouth a little open, eyelids faintly bluish in the dim light. Odd how rarely he’s seen Crowley’s closed eyes. It makes him look younger, almost innocent; recalls Eden.
He supposes there's no harm in letting him sleep there. They’re definitively done with Heaven and Hell; there won’t be any surprise visits from Gabriel.
Serpent by nature, the demon habitually complains of the cold. Aziraphale reaches for the afghan that’s always over the back of the couch, starts to open it out, finds himself staring down.
Crowley’s always liked his trousers tight. He’d been in his element in the era of knee breeches and hose; the jeans he's wearing tonight are almost as clinging, and the fabric outlines a generous bulge just in front of the inseam, trapped against the leg that's threatening to drop overboard. Really quite impressive.
Scarcely surprising that Crowley’s sustaining an Effort. He’s a demon, tempting mortals was his original job description, hard to think he wouldn’t leave the entire matter in place. He supposes that when Crowley was off doing what he did all day, all those years, there were plenty of occasions in bars or snugs or entries where that Effort got put to use; he hasn’t really thought about it.
All right, he has thought about it a little.
(Entries?)
(Okay, a lot. At least lately.)
It occurs to him that in all the centuries of the Arrangement, Crowley’s never passed off one of those temptations to him. Well. Logical. He’s a chubby, dithery little bibliophile with an affectation for old clothes that he’s used to wearing. Not much in the incubus line, even if he’s gotten in the habit of keeping his own Effort in place because of his fondness for Turkish baths and massages and things of that sort, where there’s always a chance of someone noticing that something’s, ahem, missing.
What he’s seeing now is just something that human-type corporations do in sleep. He’s familiar, even as rarely as he sleeps. It never bothers him much when it happens to him; quick enough to deal with if you need to. But now he wonders what it would be like to nip that swelling through the tight denim, to palm and squeeze it.
He imagines those yellow eyes blazing open, Crowley asking him what in the Hell he thinks he’s doing.
After a long, thoughtful pause he tucks the afghan around the narrow shoulders, retreats to his reading chair. Crowley shifts from time to time, makes sighing and sniffling and burring noises, turns from one side to the other until his hair’s a moderate wreck (what would it be like to stroke it back into place?), ends up so close to the edge of the couch that his fingers trail the floor. He’s always known that Crowley likes sleeping but had never imagined how thoroughly he would wring the last drop of enjoyment out of it.
Perhaps let’s not use that phrase.
He reads and putters around the shop until the demon wakes up with an alarming noise evenly divided between a roar, a yawn and a splutter, sometime after Aziraphale’s second morning cup of cocoa.
* * *
“Thanks for the covers. Mphfngkkk.” Crowley still doesn’t sound quite awake.
“I know you get chilly. I was afraid you’d end up with a crick in your back.” Crowley seems capable of coiling himself into just about any conformation, but it’s hard to imagine all of them are comfortable.
“Nah. Nice couch. Comfy. Slept like a baby.”
“Well, any time you care to. Always welcome, we don’t have to look out for anyone any more…”
“Might take you up on that, ‘s’good sometimes not to have to wake all the way up. Just to get home.”
“I’m sure your bed’s nicer….” That’s a thought. One which needs to be immediately wrapped in brown paper and tied with string like the rare volume he’s occasionally willing to part with. “What have you got on today?”
“Looking into a few things… tell you later.”
There really isn’t any sense in watching him until he disappears into the foot traffic of Soho. Is there?
* * *
It’s a little surprising that Crowley takes him up on it. But then, it makes sense. Both times he visits in the following week, he swings his feet up on the couch after sobering and sets dark glasses on the end table; by the second time, Aziraphale’s brought a well-stuffed duvet from upstairs (it's not as if he ever sleeps up there, or anywhere else) and has it ready to shake out over the long, sprawling limbs. There’s something simply cosy about looking up from a book and seeing that shock of Hellfire-hair sticking up from the depths of the duvet cover.
He’s careful not to look down at the rest of Crowley’s body when the tossing and turning dislodges the comforter and he goes to rearrange it.
Well, once. All right, twice. All right, the second time he’d started to put his hand out before he realized what he was doing. But he didn’t, so it didn’t count, did it?
* * *
“Want to come along on a little road trip?”
“Where am I to put my corporation in your hands now?” Ouch.
“Sussex. Been nosing around estate agents’.”
“Whatever for?”
“Thinking about buying someplace. Nothing stopping us doing whatever we like now, is there? Thought it’d be good to get out of the Smoke now and then, proper garden where I can yell at loads more plants, little fresh air…”
“It hardly sounds like you.”
“Come along, be a change. Got two or three places to look at.”
“If you promise not to give me palpitations.”
“Never going to promise that, angel. Come on, close up, I’ve got the car outside.”
* * *
The estate agent is a motherly woman with salt-and-pepper hair, sturdy lace-up shoes, and the tact of a blunderbuss. “Glad you’re a bit late, so was I – Oh, you must be Mr. Fell – Anthony said you’d be coming along.” He did? “So good to meet you. Just call me Cerise -- Well, aren’t you right out of the nineteenth century? Is that what they’re doing in London now?”
“Ezra has his own style,” grins Crowley, ignoring the later-for-you stinkeye that Aziraphale is doing his best to project.
“Doesn’t he just. Old fashioned name, dress to it, eh?” And the wretched woman winks. Feeling every second of his six-thousand-plus years, Aziraphale follows her onto the property. Crowley’s going to pay for this.
Two hours later, and down two properties that were obvious wrecks, they give up trying to follow just call me Cerise through a longer hitch to the third and last. Conversation flags, and possibly because the only other thing in his mind involves the estate agent and names he would never call anyone aloud, Aziraphale’s at least as surprised as Crowley to find himself blurting:
“How do you manage the whole temptation thing? I mean, the carnal ones. You do do those, don’t you?”
“Manage?” Crowley swerves just in time to avoid an animal unidentifiable at their current speed.
“I mean, do you just put the ideas in their heads and turn them loose on one another, or do you…?” A bit lost for words, Aziraphale makes a fluttering gesture that more or less indicates direct engagement.
“What brings this on? Planning on taking up a sideline now that Heaven’s not up your arse all day?” Crowley accelerates meteorically, dodging around a slower motorist who seems to be gawking at the scenery, and Aziraphale is too aware of the flush induced by that choice of words to be terrified.
“I – just wondered.”
“They manage most of that themselves, angel. You got one in mind you fancy, go for it. They just fall in headfirst.”
Aziraphale’s fairly sure now that actual heat shimmers are gusting off his cheeks. You don’t keep a shop in Soho without developing a reasonably nuanced understanding of what mortals get up to with their pinker parts. He isn’t interested in mortals, but as to pinker parts, he finds himself shifting in the seat and grateful that, unlike Crowley, he doesn’t apply his clothes with an industrial paint sprayer. He realizes a moment later that he’s side-glancing at the demon’s lap, and he’s grateful that for once Crowley actually seems to be watching the road.
“There, think that’s it up ahead.”
The demon loves new gadgets, and he set up his phone to give them directions after they lost track of their guide, but he's clearly tiring of the mechanical voice rather rapidly. Siri begins to tell them how many yards are between them and the turnoff, and Crowley growls and yells at her to bugger off. Because he's a demon, the phone obediently shuts up.
* * *
“This might be a bit more like it.”
The third property seems like the charm. The back garden's well kept and full of space to work with, it’s set back a comfortable distance from the road, and in general good repair, nothing a little paint (the sea air, unavoidable) and attention can’t fix.
“Room for you when you come down, nice light in the kitchen” (Crowley never actually cooks but loves kitchen gadgets that produce espresso and foam and fizzy water), “looks like that’s a little storage attic through that trapdoor… Can we have a look? Torch anywhere?”
“I think I saw one by the garden door,” says Cerise.
When Aziraphale returns from retrieving it, the demon’s head and shoulders are out of sight above a small opening, whose pull-down door has spawned a slightly wobbly folding stair that doesn’t quite seat on the floorboards.
”Thanks. Hang onto this thing, angel, it rocks. Want to see if there’s any rot or woodworm up here.”
“They said they’d leave the repair records on the kitchen table. I’ll go look.” Just call me Cerise stomps off in her sensible shoes. Aziraphale hasn't considered smiting anyone in a long time, but the idea's growing on him.
Crowley takes the torch and flicks the beam upward, leaving Aziraphale face to face with his fly-buttons. The angel is acutely aware by now that he dresses on the left. And probably doesn’t wear underwear. Dear Heaven, there’s actually a slightly paler line of wear along the inner left leg of the jeans where the thing lives.
“Looks pretty good up here, want to have a roofer get up and make sure about a couple things, might’ve been some mice…”
Crowley swivels himself around awkwardly on the tilting stair, drops the torch with a swear. “Can you get that?”
Aziraphale realizes he isn’t answering when he hears “Earth to Angel?”
“Ah… yes, yes.” Now he’s getting a direct view of that tight, cheeky arse as the demon shifts to play the light over the other end of the attic. He realizes belatedly that a little moan’s escaped him.
“You okay, angel?”
He feigns a yawn as cover. “Maybe it’s all the fresh air. I’m actually a little sleepy.” He isn’t, but it's all he can think of to explain that embarrassing noise he’s just made.
“Maybe we should find someplace to stay. Know you probably want dinner, and then it’ll be late.”
“I’ll be all right – “
“Nah, I dragged you out here, thoughtless of me. My splash.” Crowley thumps down the ladder, hoists it back. "Maybe just walk around and look at things tomorrow, take it easy driving back" (is he feverish?), "no one's got any bloody assignments for us..." His shirt's pulled a little out of his waistband, which means he has to open the top of his fly to get it tucked back in. "Be around green things. Miss that."
This is purgatory, thinks Aziraphale. I Fell at least part way without realizing it and this is purgatory.
But the demon seems so cheered by his find that the ebullience is infectious, it's unthinkable to refuse him anything he wants, and it’s hard to be cross with him even when he goes hailing after the loathsome estate agent, Cerise, my friend here can’t go much longer without tucking in, I know him, and where’s a good place to stay? We’re done up.
It gives him a moment to think of cold hip baths.
* * *
“And the Dunes’re just a mile up the road, they’re the best, hot tubs, individual cottages, the lot, but it’s worth your life to get a booking on the same day – “
“Oh, dunno.”
Crowley steps away with the phone, leaving Aziraphale at her mercy once more.
“Well, Mr. Fell, I must say your friend– ? Fiance – ?…”
“Friend,” says Aziraphale firmly.
“Oh – well, you seemed to be looking at him so fondly. I’m a sentimental old thing, I know, and as I was about to say, he’s quite the looker.”
“I suppose he is. I hadn’t noticed.”
She winks – again – though he’s at least spared a nudge. “Pull the other one. He keeps calling you ‘angel,’ it’s so sweet. You know, there’s still people who’re old fashioned in all the wrong ways, but I say, live and let live… Oh, honestly!” Because Crowley’s glancing back at them over his shoulder and giving a thumbs-up.
“Late cancellation,” he says as he steps back into closer range, miming a finger-snap where only Aziraphale can see it. “Angel – think you’ve picked up a bit of a wind-burn.”
* * *
“She seemed to think we were some sort of a – couple.”
‘“Ah, can’t blame people for wonderin’. Prob’ly got nothing else to keep their minds occupied down here. Good sort, even if she got hold of the wrong end of the stick.”
“Crowley, you’re being positively – ah, positive. Are you feeling quite the thing?”
“Doing nothing but what I feel like for the first time in sixty centuries? Angel, I am the thing.” The grin is like the sun.
He rocks so precariously far back on his chair that anyone else would crash into the next table. But, of course, he doesn’t.
“Toast. To new things.”
* * *
“She was right. This is nice.”
“Told you we could trust her judgment.”
“In some things.”
“Well, accommodations.”
Though, as with many lodgings in the countryside, there’s not much more than a bed, a bath and, in this case, a wardrobe. But the wardrobe’s admirably antique, the bath actually big enough to turn around in, and the space at least large enough to admit a quiet miracle which makes the bed bigger.
Crowley'd somehow found a place to pick up a bottle of decent whisky, and he co-opts the toothglasses from the bathroom.
“Go get the kinks out, know you like that kind of thing. I’ll sort us.”
Well, it’s been a long day in the car. It isn’t the Turkish baths in Wardour Street, but it does have those bubbly jets that have been popping up everywhere in the last several decades, and some complimentary scented bath salts, and while it isn’t the cold hip plunge he’d been considering earlier, it’s a sensual delight that doesn’t involve completely inappropriate thoughts about the demon who’s gone through thick and thin with him.
Who knocks politely on the door as he’s towelling off and cracks it to pass in a set of blue pyjamas with a drawstring waist and piped top.
“Can't let you wrinkle your suit. Miracled these up, ought to fit.”
Of course, he’s managed something entirely different for himself – black silk, draping over the angles of his corporation like some diabolical plot by Delacroix or Caravaggio. But the whisky’s more than decent, and they recline against heaped pillows – side by side, but not closely, thank Someone – and sip, considering the merits of the cottage. Of the Downs. Of not belonging to masters any more.
“ ‘Bout done,” says Crowley after the second glass. “You?”
“You know I don’t sleep, Crowley. And I haven’t brought a thing to read, I wasn’t expecting – “
“Oh, let me set you up on my phone. Lots of libraries online. You really need to give the twenty-first century a go sometime.”
* * *
It’s fiddly, but still, something to read. A suitable distraction. Only it isn’t.
Crowley’s doing broken-field sleeping again – with all the accompanying noises, fricatives and gutturals mingled with the occasional labial, and please let’s not think of that, but of course that’s exactly what he finds himself doing, and more to the point so does his Effort.
Well, maybe he can take it in hand. Just a little.
The absurdity of the predicament doesn't escape him: he's miles from home, going-blind horny for his best friend of several hundred if not thousands of years, who's snoring obliviously in the bed beside him, and he can't even tell himself any more this can't ever happen, we're on opposite sides, because it's Their Side now, and it's not clear where this will end, but right now he needs this thing to go away.
It’s a brave new world where he can be doing this while the demon coils in moaning slumber beside him, apparently inventing entirely new dimensions of somnolence, and it’s almost sedative for him too, a slow stroke and squeeze, relaxing, just imagine if what you were holding was –
”Ngggkkk,” snuffles Crowley. Aziraphale freezes. “Did you see any blankets in that wardrobe? Still cold.”
They’ve miracled the temperature of the room to something just this side of tropical, and the angel’s close to perspiring, but it’s apparently not warm enough for Crowley, who hoists himself out of bed a split second after the angel’s hand returns to a decorous location, and uses the light on the phone thingamajig to poke in the wardrobe cupboard, inches from Aziraphale’s face – stretching up to the top shelf to show skin above the pyjamas hanging off his hipbones, bending down to strike gold on the cupboard’s bottom, and confront the angel with the silk-outlined spectacle of his own bottom.
“I could make it warmer in here,” Aziraphale manages on his second attempt at speaking, the first having come out as a dry-mouthed squeak.
“Nah. Know you don’t feel it like I do.”
And he leans over the angel to toss the extra blanket to his side of the cricket-pitch-sized bed. Dear Someone, thank you very much if he did not feel what I have got in these pyjamas, praise eternal.
Crowley goes back to gymnastic sleeping.
He snuffles. He snorts. He flings up an arm that just misses whapping the angel in the face as he sifts through an actually intriguing website that drains attention away for the moment from the ideas generating compound interest inside the blue poplin pyjama pants.
He snores, and groans, and oh, Hell, let’s just get down to business here and see if we can reach a finish line that will guarantee peace for the rest of the night, the evidence won’t last, what’s one more miracle, and –
Oh. Crowley’s tossed in his sleep again, wrecking the covers, and the flung hand ends up this time on the angel’s thigh.
Way up inside his thigh. Four fingertips filter an ungodly heat into the tender skin there, inches from the painful strain of oh Heaven there has to be some way to release this, he thinks, the warmth of Crowley’s hand is going to push him over, and –
The demon utters a sharp, snorting snore and wakes again. Aziraphale scoots up and props the phone in what amounts to his lap, hoping the damp spot that just started forming on the pyjama bottoms doesn’t show in the faint light from the screen.
“Reading anything good?” Crowley asks. “Mphngk. Can’t settle down, sorry.”
“It’s this Project Gutenberg thing. Old and out of print, quite interesting.”
“Lemme see.” Crowley reaches for the phone. Oh dear Someone, he’s going to feel it. But even though the demon’s knuckles brush the pyjamas enough to send a riffle of sensation through his aching Effort, making him suck in an involuntary breath, he either doesn’t notice or feigns not to. Aziraphale wonders if Crowley has it in him to be simply polite.
“Mmmph. Just your sort of thing. Books that were boring even when they were printed.”
There’s something affectionate in the tone as he passes the phone back.
Crowley stretches out full length on his back, the covers forgotten for the moment, and that tasty shape is visible through the silk pyjama bottoms in the moonbeams and the faint light from the screen – thick and toothsome looking even in a, well, neutral state. Aziraphale realizes he’s gazing with naked longing.
Crowley subsides, snugging the blankets over himself again. Aziraphale quits pretending to read. If he can just get himself over this edge – quietly –
The phone beeps. Hell. What now?
Low battery, the screen tells him helpfully.
It beeps again. He stabs frantically at the screen for something to make it shut up.
“Ngk??? Oh. Didn’t you connect it to the charger? I left it plugged in on your side.”
“Why not use a miracle?”
“They don’t seem to last as long,” says Crowley as he fuck my life reaches across Aziraphale to notch the cable into the phone, which is now out of comfortable reach for reading. He supposes he could try using the miracle to instead make the cable longer, but he’s had bad experiences mixing miracles and electronics. The time he tried to link up a pair of Bluetooth speakers with his gramophone, they'd turned into hedgehogs.
“Give it half an hour,” says Crowley, rolling to his side, facing away, wrapped around surplus pillows and folds of blanket with which Aziraphale imagines exchanging places.
This is definitely Purgatory. There’s nothing left to do now except try to solve his problem, which is stubbornly not going away. As soon as he hears a light snore he gets on with it, trying to keep his breathing soft as it quickens, this is going to work –
“Everything okay, angel?"
Crowley performs another half-revolution and hikes up on one elbow. “You had sort of a panic attack after we got back from Tadfield, you’re not having another one, are you? You were breathing like that and you went all cold and sweaty, put the wind up me for a moment, let me feel…” There’s a light touch on his face, and he is perspiring a little; maybe it’s the miracled–up warmth in the room. He’s crept his hand out of his pyjamas as surreptitiously as possible, but the ties are still unlaced and the damned things are threatening to fall away from his desperate Effort if he moves a single millimetre.
Crowley drops a hand on his rounded belly.
“Deep breathe, angel. Slow count of four, all the way down to here. Yeah, know we don’t need to breathe, but it’ll calm you down.”
If he wasn’t having a panic attack before, he might be now; he can hear the shake in his own breath as he tries to follow Crowley’s directions, and that deep heave into his belly isn’t helping anything, the surprising warmth of that Demonic hand just an inch or two from – oh, no, he realizes mortifyingly, a split second before exactly what he’s been wanting to make happen for the past half hour chooses the precise wrong moment and happens, up his stomach and onto Crowley’s soothing hand and possibly, from the shattering feel of it, as far as the headboard.
His eyes are tight shut. He might go through Eternity this way. He could get a white cane and learn Braille. As long as it means never having to see the look that he’s already imagining on Crowley’s face.
“Oh… “ says the demon – not moving his hand at all – “sorry if I interrupted something personal.”
Does he sound amused? Is it possible to discorporate by an act of will? “No – ” Aziraphale manages. “Wait – I mean – “
“OK. Waiting here, angel.”
Still not moving that damned hand.
Fuck it.
He reaches blindly and mostly gets hold of Crowley’s head, pulls him in for a kiss, amazingly feeling his cock already stir again. Die like an angel and a man, even if that means dying in pyjamas in a bed-and-breakfast in rural Sussex with come all over your stomach.
It’s an absolute disaster of a kiss, because he has no idea what he’s doing (the pervasive low-grade currents of lust around Soho don’t teach you anything about this), and he knocks teeth with the demon and splits the inside of his own lip a tiny bit, a taste of iron startling him, and he’s sure he’s supposed to be doing something with his tongue but he’s not sure exactly what. The demon tastes faintly of malt whisky and smells pleasantly herbal, like a bitter Amaro, maybe it’s the brimstone. His heart’s hammering, and he realizes he’s already tenting out the drenched pyjama bottoms again.
“Well, that was unexpected,” says Crowley when he draws back, expecting to be told to hitch-hike back to London (it might be worth it). “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
But there’s a purr in that voice, the sound remembered from all the times when one of Crowley’s devious schemes actually paid off. A light begins to dawn.
“A little more like this, angel,” says Crowley, and dips his head to fasten his lips just behind the angel’s ear – tonguing gently, working slowly along a cheek which feels as if it’s probably radiating enough light to read by, until their mouths lock together again and he can tell he’s being shown: slow, like this, not too much at first, a little bite is nice, deep like this makes you think about what else I could fit into you. His breath is shivering when the demon lifts his head.
Die like an entire battalion of the Heavenly Host in fearless formation, he decides, closing the space between them. The demon’s silk pyjamas are conducting the heat of something the approximate shape and hardness of a knobkerry.
“You’ve been doing it to me, haven’t you?” he says accusingly. “The temptation thing.”
“Got to find a way to stay in practice, don’t I? Shame to waste sixty centuries of experience.”
“You complete and absolute – “
“Yes…?”
Crowley’s actually licking his own hand -- which is more or less covered in Aziraphale -- with that forked tongue, eyes half-lidded as if he's considering the bouquet, and it’s the most obscene and overwhelming thing he’s ever seen.
“Ah well – right then – perhaps we could make it an... essential feature of the Arrangement? Since most of the other clauses have…ah --- dropped out.”
“I tempt you, you bless me?”
“What sort of blessings did you have in mind?” Though the question may be already answered, because now he’s sucking the last drops off those long jet-nailed fingers and the yellow eyes have a sly glint in the moonlight.
“Oh, I’ve got a list. We’ll start at the top.”
finis