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It’s dark when Crowley wakes, back stiff and pajamas rucked up uncomfortably around his knees and elbows. Not that darkness is anything more than a polite suggestion for a demon, a gossamer curtain drawn across the hard, ugly corners of the world. He blinks sluggishly at the grey cottage ceiling, groggy and unsure how long he’s slept. It feels like a week at least, or perhaps even a year, but maybe it’s been no more than a few hours.
Granted, all the days lately have felt much the same, muddied and bleeding one into the other even as each one alone lasts for an eternity. A bit like Downstairs, that. A bit too much like Downstairs for his liking.
The mattress on Aziraphale’s side of the bed is cool and undented. He doesn’t remember if the angel laid down with him when he last crawled between the sheets. He’s tried to make a habit of it in their retirement, sitting up with a book or four in the absence of sleep, but lately he’s taken to getting up again to rattle around his study, consulting the oldest, darkest tomes in his collection and filling reams of paper with calculations that he carefully tucks away whenever Crowley comes down for breakfast.
How quickly this most recent brush with Armageddon has returned them to their old habits.
Crowley flips carefully onto his front and presses his face into the angel’s pillow, breathing deeply. Aziraphale’s smell is stale, dusty, but unmistakable. He lets it fill his lungs, calming him even as he squirms ineffectively against the sweat-damp silk bindings of his mussed pajamas.
He closes his eyes. Sleep doesn’t return, but when he opens them again the grey of the room is lighter, cooler against his skin. A drizzle of rain dapples soft against the windows. He slips his tongue across his lips and tastes the first hint of a late morning fog.
His phone is waiting for him on the nightstand, sleek and ever-charged. Crowley reaches for it, teeth clenched tight as the long muscles of his back pull unhappily, vertebrae scraping one against the other. Four news alerts are waiting on his lock screen, each headline ominously capslocked.
(Not his idea, the push-notification, but one he’d happily taken credit for. The fact that he hasn’t been able to deactivate them despite nearly a month digging through the code of his very expensive and frustratingly counter-intuitive operating system must be one of Her little jokes.)
Crowley checks the date. Then the news.
It’s a long while before he works up the willpower to leverage himself out of bed.
**
Downstairs, he finds Aziraphale bent over his desk, frowning at an untidy spread of scrolls and yellow memo pads, chin resting heavily on one hand as he contemplates the problem not easily solved.
Crowley pads unnoticed into the kitchen and puts the kettle on, a battered, hideously vintage thing they found drowning in cobwebs when they moved in, the neon yellow and avocado floral print bleeding garishly into the chipped cream enamel. Crowley’s sleek, matte-black electric model gathers dust in a far cupboard with hyper-modern efficiency.
He pours himself a heavy-handed shot of bourbon while he waits for the water to boil. Rummages aimlessly through the cabinets as the tea steeps. They are out of the blood-red jam Aziraphale likes on his scones. They could not be out with a thought, but what a terribly, terribly exhausting thought.
Probably wouldn’t taste the same, anyway. Why risk the disapointment?
Crowley sets two cups and saucers out on a silver Rococo serving tray gone nearly black with tarnish. Another heavy splash of bourbon finds its way into his teacup. Aziraphale’s he leaves plain, though he sets the decanter on the tray alongside a gold-rimmed plate of biscuits to be polite.
Alerted by the kettle’s whistle, Aziraphale is waiting for him in his armchair by the parlor fire, a book open ostentatiously on his lap. Crowley doesn’t have to peek into the study to know that the desk has been cleared of his night’s work.
“Good morning, dearest,” he says. He smiles, teeth white and irises black where he’s forgotten to contract his pupils. The curls on one side of his head have been tugged all out of shape. “How did you sleep?”
Crowley grunts noncommittedly, blinking a side table free of half-empty mugs to make room for the tray. Aziraphale makes the same soft, practiced ah! of delight he has every morning Crowley has been awake to bring him breakfast these past months and sets aside his novel. A modern paperback, though not too modern, judging by the cover art and the yellowed, curling pages. The Thorn Birds. It’s apparently a phenomenal international best-seller.
The pretense would almost be convincing if Crowley hadn’t seen him looking up from the same book opened to roughly the same place for the past fortnight. A thick white crack now runs full length up the middle of the paperback’s spine where Aziraphale has pressed it open with this thumbs.
An age ago, it seems, Crowley would find Aziraphale here every morning halfway through the day’s papers. He was particularly fond of the local Chronicle, a twice-weekly full-color tabloid with an excellent crossword that landed on their doorstep every Wednesday and Sunday despite ceasing printed circulation sometime late in 2015. Sometimes he would be too engrossed to offer Crowley more than the briefest of greetings as the demon flopped into the opposing chair. Sometimes he would be waiting impatiently, papers rolled into a long tube that he tapped on his bouncing knee, so full of commentary and opinions and my word what do you think about all of this that he could barely contain himself.
If he’s read the papers recently, he hasn’t done it where Crowley can see.
“Oh dear. So sorry to hear it. Was it too cold? The temperature dipped very low in the night.”
“Naw. That new heater keeps it warm enough. Just…” Crowley tries to shrug. His shoulder blades twinge threateningly. He downs half of his tea in a long, scalding gulp. “How’re the birds doing?”
For a far-too-brief moment, Aziraphale’s bright mask fades. “The what?”
Crowley tilts his head towards the discarded paperback.
Aziraphale blinks at it, clearly lost. Then, his eyebrows raise. His pupils contract. “Oh! Yes. They’re, ah…” He gestures vaguely with his teacup. “Full of thorns, you know?”
Crowley nods. Thinks about the little wren that has built a nest in the holly bush by their back gate, her sharp, two-note cry of anger whenever he dares slither too near. “That one out in the yard keeps calling me all sorts of tripe.”
“So I’ve heard.” At last, a bit of the real Aziraphale starts to slip through. “I’ve tried to put a good word in edgewise, but…” He sighs. “Quite a bull-headed little thing.”
Crowley has to concentrate very hard to keep his feet flat on the rug as he reaches for the decanter to pour himself a top-up. He can feel Aziraphale watching him, grey eyes sharp as daggers. Hear the insufferable, unceasing grinding of the gears in his pretty, pretty head. He sloshes the cut crystal in the angel’s direction.
“A little early, isn’t it?” says Aziraphale, even as he holds out his own teacup to accept the offering.
“Dunno if you’ve heard, but time s’all relative.”
The corner of Aziraphale’s mouth crinkles in something close to a genuine grin.
“I met Albert Einstein once. Out in Manchester, I believe. We had cigars in a little gentleman’s club near the university. Funny sort of chap. Very complimentary of my German, though I’m afraid we got into a bit of a spat over a dice game.”
“Catch you cheating, did he?” The glass decanter makes an ungodly noise when he drops it back onto the tray.
Aziraphale bobs his head noncommittedly, warming up to the story. He leans back in his chair and crosses his legs, looking very comfortable as the stiff worry of the night before starts to slip off in earnest. Crowley’s back throbs just looking at him.
“Sit down and I’ll tell you all about it. Time may be meaningless, but it’s a bit of a long tale.”
It’s a tempting offer. Crowley eyes the dark green wingback, empty and waiting. Most days standing is a careful exercise in applied kinesiology and imagination. It’s an uncertainty, each time he sits, just how much force he’ll have to use to set himself upright again. Some days, even the rigid support offered by the velvet wingback requires more of one or the other than he’s able to give. Today…
Crowley shakes his head and takes another long swallow of tea. The added bourbon has cooled it significantly, but it burns down his throat all the same.
“Back hurts,” he says by way of explanation. “Gonna shower, try ‘n loosen it up.”
Aziraphale’s coy expression softens. “Would you like a massage when you’re finished?”
Crowley rolls the idea around in his mouth, tasting it. The skin of his back, soft and sticky with heat. The bedcovers slowly dampening underneath as the last of the shower drips off him. Aziraphale’s hands wet with oil, skimming gentle, gentle over the inhuman planes of his back, a ghost of sensation shuddering cold up his spine.
“Or perhaps later,” Aziraphale amends, “If it’s not gotten better.”
Crowley hums into his teacup. Does his best to ignore the way it rattles when he sets it back into its saucer.
**
Most of the cottage is distinctly Aziraphale’s aesthetic, as can only be expected of any place where most of the load-bearing walls seem to have been miraculously replaced by floor to ceiling built-in shelves, but the massive walk-in shower in the master bath is entirely Crowley’s influence. Sleek, black Italian marble tile against a backdrop of brutalist concrete, glass that goes from clear to intriguingly frosted with a touch to the nearly invisible control panel, a dozen spray jets with twice as many pre-programmed pulse settings. When he’s feeling particularly magnanimous, some of his more better-behaved ferns are allowed to linger on the bench and bask in the humidity.
The supernaturally heated spray is hot enough to blister skin, yet still not hot enough for a being rebirthed in the sulfur pits of hell. Crowley folds himself gingerly in two under the punishing drumbeat of water anyway, stretching his serpentine spine as far as his corporation will permit.
After nearly an hour, he feels limber enough to risk getting dressed and doing his hair the human way. This itself is a needless indulgence, a luxury undertaken for no other reason than to take up time. Time is all they have, these days. Time, and a promise to a literal god-child not to meddle.
Crowley considers his reflection in the mirror. His hair is too short for a proper plait and just the right length for his loose curls to make a mess of themselves if left to their own devices. Maybe he should ask Aziraphale to help him cut it short again. Maybe buzz the whole lot off. Hasn’t done that since the early nineties. He’d had several embarrassingly chaste fantasies at the time of Aziraphale asking to touch it, the feel of his soft, plump fingers ghosting over the prickle of his scalp.
“Cliché, much?” scowls his reflection. “Gonna give yourself bangs next?”
Crowley cringes. Gnashes his teeth. Yellow eyes stare back at him, unflinching.
He wonders what Anthony J. Crowley, bona fide human being, would be doing right now.
There’s a pair of sunglasses in his hands. Cheap ones with plain black rims. The kind of glasses the person he pretended to be would pay a hundred quid for and immediately lose if the right brand slapped its name on the price tag.
Crowley puts them on. Immediately takes them off. Scrubs his hands roughly through his updo, shaking his head until all the pins and carefully-sorted waves have come undone in an untidy tangle.
“Fuck this,” he growls. “Fuck you. Fucking prick. Probably think this was a fucking bore.”
He gropes blindly through the top-right drawer of the vanity until his fingers find a wide band of soft cotton cloth. The stretched-out headband has just enough elastic left to keep the hair off his face without pulling uncomfortably at his roots.
When he puts the sunglasses on a second time, the face looking back at him still doesn’t look like his own, but at least it’s no longer the Instagram-perfect image of carefully styled effortlessness.
**
He drifts through the house, idly gathering stray cups and wine glasses with the intent to wash them only to abandon the task halfway through. Two months ago, the sight of their kitchen in such a state would make him want to scream. It makes him want to scream now, of course, but that’s hardly the kitchen’s fault, is it? Not when literally everything makes him want to bury his claws deep into his own face and scream until he can’t scream anymore.
The tides carry Crowley through the parlor. Aziraphale’s chair is empty. The bourbon decanter also isn’t where he left it this morning. He could probably find him—it—if he looked hard enough. There aren’t many places where it could wander.
He knows this from experience.
His head pounds. The half-decent buzz he worked up during breakfast has almost completely faded. His own skin feels too tight against his body, like he’s overdue for a shed.
Crowley’s drifting turns into pacing. The cottage is not a grand house, by any means, and smaller still for all the furniture and art the two of them have managed to cram inside. The only place Crowley can get a good rub against the walls is the upstairs hallway, and that’s narrow and dark enough that it makes him think of the far less pleasant narrow and dark places he used to bump along in a daze. His tongue flits in and out of his mouth as he fights the urge to lick the wallpaper.
Eventually, the half-stumble pattern of his footsteps is interrupted by a heavy, measured tread on the stair. Aziraphale appears at the top of the landing, curls and clothing once more sensibly arranged. Only his hands betray this strange disquiet they’ve found themselves living in, fluttering briefly at his waist before folding themselves behind his back.
“Hullo,” he greets pointlessly. “Restless today?”
The muscles up Crowley’s back wind all the tighter at the forced lightness of his tone. He flaps his hands, reaches the end of the hall, and makes a sharp about face. The trick to days like this is to keep marching, keep his back straight and enough forward momentum going that he doesn’t go arse over tit onto his slinking belly.
“The rain’s let up,” Aziraphale chirps. He rocks backward onto his heels, forward onto his toes. If he thinks anything about the return of Crowley’s sunglasses, now rarely worn indoors, he wisely doesn’t voice it. “I was thinking it might be nice to go out for a bit. Get a change of scenery.”
“Ngh.” The hallway’s not nearly long enough for his purpose. If he could get his thoughts in order Crowley could make it longer, but as it is it seems to grow shorter and shorter with every lap. “Sure. Knock yourself out.”
He reaches the end of the hall. There’s a little oak table there, a fussy thing with delicate legs and a lace topper. Crowley fights down the urge to kick it and send its collection of gold-framed daguerreotypes flying. When he turns, Aziraphale is looking at him with an unbearably understanding expression.
“I meant, dear boy, that we could go for a walk. Take a bit of an afternoon constitutional.”
“I’m walking!” Crowley snaps. “Look how well I’m walking.”
“Indeed.” Aziraphale’s pink lips button so neatly around the word that the snake inside of him thrashes around the urge to bite. The fact that the angel is standing square in the doorway, blocking the only exit, certainly doesn’t help. “But wouldn’t you like a change of scenery? We could go out for a drive. Perhaps out along the coast?”
Crowley thinks about the winding road to the village, then out into the country and along the coast. Thinks about seeing it empty all around him. Or worse, seeing it full.
“What I’d like,” he hisses. “Is a little sssspace, now and again.”
He expects Aziraphale to draw back. To either bluster and squeak like a mouse in a corner or coil up tight and snap back with his own metaphorical teeth. Instead, his strange, stiff posture relaxes. His head falls to one side, a warm, understanding sound deep in his throat.
“Of course,” he says. Soft, soft. Crowley presses his shoulder harder against the damask. Balls his hands into fists so tight both of his thumbs pop.
The little table vanishes from the end of the hallway. It isn’t Crowley’s doing.
“Do try not to wear a hole in the carpet,” Aziraphale warns. Crowley turns to glower at him over his shoulder, but the space at the top of the stairs is once more dark and empty.
**
“Hard to read with you stamping all over the place,” Crowley mutters, letting the back door close behind him with a bang. “Careful of the carpet. Can’t go out and replace it, times like these. Have to be responsible. Put a good show up for the humans and all.”
(Aziraphale, of course, had said no such thing. Had not even so much as implied it. This knowledge does little to quiet the burning twist in Crowley’s chest.)
It’s a beautiful spring afternoon, the crisp green-golds of the budding garden all the richer after a morning of drizzle. He cranes his head up to scowl at the sky, where the grey clouds have indeed parted to let through thick streams of pale sunshine. “Banished to the garden, for once. Bet You think it’s an absolute riot!”
Crowley knows full well not to wait for an answer. Can’t help but scowl when one doesn’t come.
He stamps around to the front of the house, ready to let loose his ire on the roses lining the sickeningly quaint white picket fence. The front garden is far less spectacular than the paradise he’s wrought behind their little cottage, but its plainness is only evident by direct comparison. The neighborhood counsel’s open and petty jealously over the magnificence of Crowley’s Abraham Darby is normally a source of professional pride, but today the sight of the cabbage-sized blooms only sends a hot prickle of irritation down each of his nerves.
“Oh piss off. What’ve you got to cheer on about?”
The red heart of the closest bloom goes pale. Across the lane, a bare-faced woman walking her dog raises one hand in greeting.
Crowley’s skin prickles despite his thick black cardigan. He beats a hasty retreat to the safety of the back garden.
Here, the weeds know better than to poke their heads above ground, though sometimes he finds a few arrogant root bundles trying to sneak their way through the dirt to freedom. These must be torn up by hand, a task he’s far too stiff to attempt today. He prods warningly at the earth with the tip of his boot.
He wonders what Aziraphale is doing inside. Has he shut himself back up in his private study, safe from Crowley’s ire behind a wall of first editions? Or maybe he’s sprawled out in his chair by the parlor fire, his use-warped copy of Beethoven’s third symphony turning on the gramophone, relaxed and waiting with that damnable ethereal patience of his for Crowley to finish his fit and join him in the opposing chair. Maybe he’s not in the house at all. Maybe his suggestion of a constitutional had been more selfish than Crowley had given him credit for, and he’s taken this opportunity to slip free from Crowley’s notice, not to return to well after dark.
(Maybe not to return at all, whispers the traitorous, twisting burn.)
Crowley pivots mid-step and turns towards the glass and wrought-iron greenhouse lurking just beyond the fenced boundary of the formal garden. The plants beyond are wilder, generally left to their own free will, flourishing and faltering and tangling and blooming in unpredictable patterns. The shadows here are greyer, the boundaries of things less distinct. The few humans they’ve allowed to visit their home have each voiced a preference for this part of the garden, though none of them can quite articulate why.
The wren in the holly bush shows her usual disdain as he passes.
Snake! she chirrups. Snake in the grass!
Crowley shows her a different kind of bird altogether.
The greenhouse at the back of the property is just cramped enough that a casual observer wouldn’t notice that the inside dimensions don’t match the outer boundaries of the glass and iron structure. Crowley keeps most of his tallest tropicals in here, along with a scattering of more troublesome specimens that need more frequent discipline than Aziraphale is comfortable overhearing.
It’s also home to a massive bare wood potting bench that’s just the right height for him to work without stooping. An anniversary present from Azirphale, who’d found it at a French antique market for a price even Crowley had thought unreasonable. Four hundred years ago it the butcher block top had been worn to smooth, gentle curves by a half-dozen pâtissiers in the estate kitchen of some prince du sang. Now it is home to dozens upon dozens of seedlings in round peat pots, the start of his summer garden.
Crowley braces his hips against the edge of the bench and pulls a tray over for inspection. Only half of the seedlings are ready to be repotted. The rest are newcomers, grown from store-bought seed instead of ones he’d germinated himself.
“Pathetic,” he hisses, pinching one of the tiny sprouts cruelly between two fingers. “Just look at you.”
One yellow-green leaf curls slightly, but otherwise the plant shows no response. Behind him, the more seasoned specimens rustle and sway in barely-contained horror.
(Aziraphale had once called his potting bench “the rack.” He hadn’t done so again after Crowley had detailed his own personal experiences with the device.)
“You’ll learn soon enough,” he hisses, thrusting two fingerfuls of fertilizer deep into the soil and giving the whole pot a shake. “It’s a sick, cruel world out there, full of things bigger and badder than you. There’s a Plan, oh yes, but it’s not your place to know it. Shit just happens and there’s nothing you can do except hunker in your little patch of dirt and hope you don’t get torn up by the roots.”
A spike of pain flares hot up Crowley’s back, up near the curve where his supernumerary ribs and thoracic vertebrae all crowd together. He braces more of his weight against the potting bench, teeth gritted around a curse that makes a nearby caladium wither in shock. The older palms quiver nervously, fronds spread wide to hide their tender from any prying eyes.
The flare passes reluctantly, leaving Crowley panting and sweating in its wake. A hardy pothos Crowley has ruthlessly used for cuttings for almost half a century slowly wraps a long, brown-pink stem of newly budded leaves around his wrist in concern.
Crowley’s barely been awake for half a day, and already he’s exhausted. He wishes he hadn’t gotten out of bed this morning. Wishes he hadn’t snapped at Aziraphale.
Crowley struggles through three-quarters of an hour’s worth of repotting before deciding to abandon the rest of it for another day.
It’s probably too much to hope that the angel will follow through on his offer of a rub-down even if the demon apologizes. He’ll want to sit down, have a good long talk about everything. Want to know all about how he’s feeling. His specific concerns regarding the mess humanity has found itself in. Whether Crowley has had any ideas about what to do about any of it, lying alone at night in their bed.
No music wafts from the open cottage windows. Aziraphale usually likes to play it just loud enough that Crowley can hear it when he’s out in the garden, but he seems to have taken Crowley’s request for space to include the airwaves themselves. Crowley fumbles with the gate latch. Wonders if his back will let him stay standing long enough to coax Aziraphale into a dance, gramophone or no. Something slow and shuffling, neither of them leading, close enough that Crowley can lean in and let Aziraphale carry most of his weight while pretending that he’s not doing anything of the sort.
There’s no sound from the holly bush as he passes. Crowley turns, smug and fork-tongued, just as his boot crunches something on the path.
The sun burns bright and golden overhead. The wind pushes lazily through the trees, a soft counter-melody against the distant but ever-present crash of the sea against the cliffs. Down the lane, the put-put-put of a petrol edge trimmer.
When Crowley lifts his foot, tiny fragments of freckled shell fall onto the dirt.
There’s no smear of yolk against his sole. He turns back towards the bush, spots the empty half-cup curve of a second eggshell in the dappled shadows.
For half a foolish moment, Crowley hopes.
He reaches into the bush, ignoring the sharp prick of the stiff leaves against his skin. Pushes through the greenery with the same movements Moses used to part the Red Sea until he finds the empty nest tucked deep in the heart of the bush.
Crowley looks around, tongue flickering. His yellow eyes scan the garden for a predator other than himself—a cat, maybe, or a child too young or cruel to care for what it’s done—but whatever dark shadow of death slipped behind his back and into his garden is gone now.
He looks up to the wind-swayed trees, the blue-white sky beyond. The little wren, fussy in her soft brown coat, is nowhere to be seen.
**
(The first night of the lockdown, back toward the end of March, Crowley and Aziraphale had gotten very drunk. And again on the 12th night, then the 27th. And the fortieth, of course, as was traditional.
In its own way, it was a comfort. A routine, even. Crowley had drunk his way through much of the Black Death. And the Plague of Athens before that. And the Spanish Flu afterwards. He was well-practiced in lying low and still and waiting for the shadow of the dark hawk circling overhead to pass on.
Aziraphale had found a Byzantine oil lamp in a box of Victorian erotica and managed to get it burning again with some kitchen oil and a scrap of tightly twisted linen for a wick. That, too, was a comfort in itself—the parlor dimly lit in flickering rose-yellow light, both of them sprawled out on the floor in a haphazard pile of throw cushions, too sloshed to even contemplate standing.
“’S’all just… just nothing, in the grand scheme of things, innit?”
Aziraphale had nodded, head heavy on Crowley’s shoulder, and taken a long pull from their shared bottle of… Crowley wasn’t entirely certain what they were drinking. It might have been a bottle of hundred-year-old cooking sherry pulled from the back of the liquor cabinet in a fit of desperation, but with the taste and the way the letters on the label squirmed when he squinted at them it might just as easily have been pure turpentine.
“The falcon,” Aziraphale mumbled gravely, coming up briefly for air.
“Mmn?”
Aziraphale waved the bottle vaguely at the darkness. “Thhhhings fall apart. Th’ center cannuh… C’nnnn…”
The rest of his thought was lost in the clink of glass against teeth.
They had started with quite a nice 1793 blend of French reds, followed by a less sentimental but by no means inferior 1884 Spanish garnacha. The evening was supposed to be romantic. The oil lamp. A few dusty bottles of wine. Dining from a shared plate stretched out barefoot on the parlor rug the way they had back when Crawley was newly Crowley and Istanbul was Constantinople, sifting through dirty pictures of long-dead people for inspiration.
“The falcon,” Aziraphale repeated. “He’s somewhere in th’ desert.”
Crowley’s eyes slipped shut of their own accord. He felt limbless, disjointed. Something wet and burning passed over his tongue.
“D’you remember ‘em? Out there with… Tha’ first time, witha sticks?” He tried to snap his fingers. The pulsing dark of his eyelids flared briefly red. His nostrils burned with the olive smoke of the lamp. “And now they’ve got, got all thessssse ‘lectric lights. Remote c’ntrols. Little… little bobs that hang off’ve your keys, s’got a little computer pet inside.”
Aziraphale sighed hot and dreamy against the base of his throat. “They’re very clever, aren’t they?”
Crowley started to shake his head but stopped quickly, feeling dangerously unsettled. Like he might float away into nothing any moment. “Nuh. I mean, yeah. They’re all… What I mean is, ‘s what? Only been a c’ntury? Cennury anna half?”
Aziraphale hummed in agreement. He flung one leg over top of Crowley, pinning him to the planet while his hand drifted aimlessly along the openings of his clothes.
“’Ssssss nothing. Alluvit. Relatively speaking. Not even a, a blink.”
“I’ve met Einstein, y’know,” Aziraphale rumbled.
“I’ve met people,” Crowley scowled, forcing his eyes back open. “We’ve all met people.”
Aziraphale chuckled. Wormed Crowley’s shirt tight between his fingers. “’As I was going to St. I’ves, I met a man with seven wives.’”
“The heaven were you doin’ in St. Ives?”
“Who knows,” Aziraphale shrugged. “Bugger all, probably.”
Crowley stared owlishly into the lamp, still flickering despite everything, and thought queasily of the risk of it catching the whole cottage ablaze, burning both of them up fever hot and coughing.
“Wish you were doin’ me. Wish we’d gotten an earlier start doin’ all of this.”
Aziraphale had kissed him then, wet and sour. Crowley had done his best to kiss him back, but his body wasn’t keen on cooperating.
“’M sorry,” he slurred, limp as a rag on the parlor floor. “’M sorry, I fucked it, ‘m sorry, ‘m sorry…”
“Don’t,” Aziraphale answered. “Stoppit. You don’t need—”
They’d spent the rest of the night and most of the still-hammered next day whispering to each other, ugly and fearful and naked things, but by the morning after that when they’d remembered they didn’t have to be drunk anymore the specifics of what Crowley didn’t need had vanished into the black.)
**
“Crowley?”
Crowley blinks. His eyes are heavy and dry. His hands are distantly wet. He looks down at them. Finds them clenched around the edge of the kitchen sink, bracing him more or less upright.
The sink is empty. Glistening. The late afternoon sunlight through the window behind it makes it glow a brilliant, blinding white. Like metal pulled fresh from the forge. Like the burning sword in the place where his spine should be.
He looks up. Aziraphale is standing next to him. His pink mouth is smiling. Crowley tries to look up at his eyes and finds that he can’t.
“There you are, dear.” The angel lifts his plump hands up where Crowley can see them, touches soft fingertips to the angles of his clenched jaw, the rumpled lapel of his cardigan. “I was looking for you.”
Crowley blinks again. If he’s not careful, he might make a habit of it.
The kitchen is immaculate, everything gleaming and organized and reeking of bleach. Did Aziraphale clean it while he was out in the garden? Only the mugs have been dried and put away instead of left out on a tea towel and Aziraphale wouldn’t know how to get a hard water stain out of a porcelain sink if each of his bow ties depended upon it so it must have, it must…
“There now, that’s it.” Aziraphale’s voice is soft, measured. His hands slip slow down Crowley’s forearms, smooth out across the bony tops of his hands to pry his fingers one-by-one from their white-knuckle grip on the sink rim. “Thank you for doing the washing up. We did rather let it get away for a while, didn’t we?”
Crowley huffs out a tight breath. Something that might have been a laugh if he had all his wits about him and fewer thorns jammed into his spinal cord.
“I know, I know, dear. Now come this way, if you please.”
“Where?” Crowley croaks. The air around him goes hot as a sun, then abruptly space cold. He shivers, unsteady but unwilling to fall. Ozone fills his nose.
“Here.” A pair of hands settle securely at his waist, pulling him gently forward.
He knows they’re in their bedroom by the soft creak of springs as Aziraphale settles himself on the edge of their bed. Crowley frowns, confused by both the sudden change in location and the supernatural darkness of the room. Where this morning there was the usual uniform film of cold, unshadowed greys that mortal eyes would have seen as near pitch-black now is a dark so thick even Crowley struggles to make out the shapes of the furniture.
“D’j’you miracle us here?” The way his back feels, it’s just as likely that he blacked out climbing the stairs. He can’t remember the last time it was this sharp. This vengeful. “Frivolousssssss, angel…”
“I quite disagree.” Lit by his inner Grace, Aziraphale’s face shines faintly gold in the unreal dark of the room. Crowley’s relieved to find that it doesn’t hurt to look at him.
By soft murmurings and gentle nudges he guides Crowley to rest his hands on his shoulders, leaning him slowly forward until his arms are bearing most of his weight. Crowley shakes as his back snaps at him in anger, but neither Aziraphale’s smile or his damnable stream of faint praises falter even as Crowley’s fingers lengthen to claws and sink deep into the velvet of his waistcoat.
“I’ve got you, love. You’re not going to fall. That’s it. We’ll have you sorted soon…”
Aziraphale’s hands drift down his hips, tugging encouragingly until Crowley has braced one knee, then the other on the edge of the bed, straddling his lap. It’s a precarious position. Crowley’s arms shake as he struggles not to tip them both over on to the floor, but then Aziraphale’s smooth hands slide up to grip him firm under the ribcage and guide him down, down, until the demon is fully seated on his lap.
“There you go, dear.” Crowley heaves out a wet, undignified sound as Aziraphale pulls him flush against his belly. “Let me take it all, it’s hardly a burden. Let me take it from you. That’s it…”
Aziraphale’s grip at his waist, firm as a corset, is the only thing keeping him upright. The last of Crowley’s arm strength gives out, but it doesn’t matter. Aziraphale is already holding his full weight. Their faces mash together, teeth clicking. The novelty of this new pain, small and fleeting like a bird, is just the distraction he needs. Crowley groans into the kiss, uncoordinated as it is, then the next one, and the next.
Crowley pushes himself frantically into the warm sanctuary of Aziraphale’s mouth, but the angel answershim with slow, unhurried movements. Like time has no meaning, here or anywhere, like this is a moment neverending and yet still worthy of being savored.
Neither of them were made for these human bodies, but Crowley has always found his a particularly poor fit. It’s all right enough when he can spread himself most of the way through it, but on days like this, days where the thing that is a snake but not-a-snake contracts and twists and coils in and in and in, it’s nearly unbearable.
In another place, here but not-here, a white-winged presence of countless eyes and flame-bright whispers holds out a hand in offering. Crowley pushes hard with xeir own wings of black, straining to meet xem, but barely manages to flip over to bare the knotted stretch of xeir belly.
Distantly, Crowley realizes his corporation is crying.
Aziraphale wraps both arms tight around him, locking him in place. Crowley thinks, for a wild, pain-giddy moment, of roller coasters, the padded metal shoulder bars meant to keep patrons from flying off into the ether. Then his body tilts forward, or rather Aziraphale tilts himself backward, pulling Crowley with him.
“Steady,” Aziraphale murmurs into his mouth. “Easy, dear boy.” Crowley’s instincts don’t know whether to push away or to cling closer—a moot question, given the spike of pain preventing him from doing either. Aziraphale holds him firm all the way through the unrelenting descent until at last he’s lying flat on the end of the bed, Crowley limp and trembling on top of him.
Gentle as it was, Crowley’s back still screams at the change from vertical to horizontal. Crowley buries his own raw noise in the soft flesh of Aziraphale’s neck.
“I know, I know,” Aziraphale soothes. His hands ghost up and down Crowley’s back, passing over him like a quivering colt.
Eventually, Crowley settles, his bones safely cradled by Aziraphale’s curved peaks and valleys. The angel’s heart beats steadily beneath his ear, interrupted only by the faint tick of his pocket watch, tucked in a velvet pocket somewhere between them. Crowley does his best to match his own heartbeat to its rhythm, to marry the artifice of his hitched, wet breathing to Aziraphale’s.
It takes a few minutes, but finally the last of the wet sounds are wrung out of him in a long, slow sigh. Aziraphale’s hands are under his cardigan, rubbing gently along his ribs, careful of the thorned bundle of electric anger concentrated at the center of him.
“It’s bad, today,” he notes idly.
Crowley scrunches his nose. He wants to snort, to spit—
(It’s bad every day, angel. It’s been bad for longer than there were days to divide it by.)
--but instead he finds himself nuzzling into Aziraphale’s collar. “Yuh-yeah...”
Aziraphale presses a kiss into his hair. Then a second. The fluttering affection is dry and cool, a feathered contrast to the anchoring weight of his arms around his waist.
“I’m going to undress you now,” he whispers.
Crowley shudders, nods. Braces himself for the snap, the sudden coolness of the room against his goose-pricked skin. Instead, Aziraphale slips his cardigan from his shoulders and rolls them carefully over, pressing two more feathered kisses to his forehead before sitting up to straddle his waist.
“Would you like to keep your glasses?”
After a moment’s considering, Crowley tilts his head back, baring his throat in answer.
Aziraphale plucks the cheap plastic frames from his face and folds them with the reverence of a holy artifact. Crowley watches through slitted eyes as Aziraphale rids him of watch, phone, and silver chain with the ease of a professional pickpocket, depositing each on a leather-lined tray that’s suddenly appeared on the nightstand.
“Arms up,” he commands. Crowley obeys. The world goes briefly darker as his Henley and vest are pulled over his head. His nipples harden, then retreat. Before he has a chance to complain of the cold, Aziraphale has wrapped him in the plush, faun-pale throw that usually lives on the back of his study’s sofa.
“Uhf.” The throw smells like the bookshop used to, old paper and dry rot and dust from a century between deep cleanings. “There’s a heater in here, y’know.”
The space heater clicks on. Aziraphale shifts his weight further down Crowley’s thighs and undoes his trousers, rising up on his knees and wordlessly directing him to lift his hips so the tight denim and pants beneath can be wiggled down and off.
Crowley is briefly bare from the waist down, his attention too focused on the tight pain in his back and the still-twisting cramp of his chest to enjoy the flash flush of embarrassment before Aziraphale tugs once at the throw and miraculously finds it long enough to pull down to the demon’s knees.
“You promised me a massage,” Crowley grumbles.
With a smile and a wink, Aziraphale tucks the blanket tighter around him, thoroughly pinning his arms. “I did.”
Crowley scowls down the length of his thoroughly-swaddled torso. “Feels like I’m being put to bed.”
Aziraphale laughs. “Never heard you complain about it before.”
Crowley opens his mouth to respond, but the way the mattress dips as Aziraphale shifts off his thighs to kneel at his side jars the delicate alignment of his vertebrae, leaving him hissing for air.
Aziraphale cups one hand soft over his cheek, thumb brushing mournfully along the deep furrows of his grimace. “I’m afraid this might hurt…”
What might hurt, Crowley thinks, just as Aziraphale grabs the edge of the throw and flips him deftly onto his front. The little air left in him all goes out in a rush.
“Christ!” he gasps once he can breathe again. “Satan almighty!”
“I did warn you.”
Aziraphale strokes him apologetically through the throw. Crowley allows himself a few more spit curses before forcing himself to lie still.
“Tosser.”
It’s hard to talk and not end up with a mouthful of covers. Crowley struggles to get his arms free of the throw and tuck them under his head. The bed is a plush, decadent thing, home to enough goose-down pillows to make the Harrod’s linens department blush and wide enough to allow for some truly adventurous nocturnal positioning. Still, Crowley’s height means bits of him dangle off both edges of the bed, lying sideways across it like this. He’s keenly aware of how ridiculous he must look as Aziraphale loosens the throw and slips it down to his waist.
“Turner,” Aziraphale corrects. His tone is light, but the faint glow of his Grace visibly dims as he brushes his hands tentatively down the full length of his bare back. The celestial gold of his ring burns faintly against his skin. Crowley struggles not to tense further.
“Look at the state of you. You’ve worked yourself all into knots.”
Aziraphale presses experimentally with both hands at the bunched muscle between his shoulder blades. Crowley lets out an embarrassingly sharp yelp of pain.
“Angel,” he groans. “Please…”
“Hush,” Aziraphale scolds.
Crowley tries. He really does. But what comfort is to be found in the angel’s fussing bossiness is difficult to hold on to when each push and prod across the tight clench of his back feels like a knife slipped between his ribs.
Aziraphale had been a doctor, once, back when doctors were more concerned with the proper application of leeches and examining their plague-ridden patients from the far end of a long wooden stick. He’s never lost that faintly objectifying touch when examining a wound, be it to paper or skin. Crowley swallows heavily and presses his face against the mattress edge as Aziraphale traces out the boundaries of his contracted essence, the bony protrusions of his spine where Crowley threatens to burst out of his corporation.
It takes all his willpower not to cry out at the first hard push of ethereal force against his occult core. Aziraphale has never been a Maker, never been tasked with the shaping and ordering of things the way Crowley once was. He does not have the fine skills needed to carefully untangle him, to tease individual firmaments from the knot and guide them lovingly back down individual pathways of mortal-shaped nerve endings. He does, however, have a fair bit of experience now making bread. Aziraphale digs hard into him with his knuckles until the burning mass of thorns lies flat enough to smooth out into the necessary shape.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you so tangled up,” he says as he presses the palms of both hands into the arch of Crowley’s back and sweeps them out along his ribs. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Crowley shrugs mutely, instantly regretting it as the gesture makes both shoulders seize.
Aziraphale tuts softly and shifts his slow, carful kneading up to his trapezoids, digging in hard with his fingertips until the cramped muscles finally release. All Crowley can do is lie there and gurgle.
“I thought as much. You certainly don’t have to.” An unspoken but hangs in the air between them as Aziraphale returns his attention to the twin arches of Crowley’s ribcage. There’s a hot, prickling feeling left in the wake of his hands, faintly painful but far preferable to the numbness that existed there before. Like the buzzing of a limb angry at being woken from a long sleep.
“I’ve not been good at talking about it myself, I’m afraid. It’s a difficult thing, all these different moving parts, and here we are fully out of the loop on it, no one to say, ‘Go here, here’s your place in it,’ or ’Leave it well alone, that’s not for you.’ It’s just…”
Aziraphale trails off into silence. Crowley shuts his eyes tightly in the cradle of his folded arms. Aziraphale’s hands trail up the back of his neck to tangle in his hair, fingertips scratching slow circles all along his scalp. It’s wonderful. It’s nigh unbearable.
“I don’t want you to think that means I’m unwilling to listen, love.”
Crowley still doesn’t have all the feeling back in his hands, but he manages to untangle one just long enough to reach up and grasp Aziraphale by the wrist, squeezing with the little strength he has left. Aziraphale folds his hand into Crowley’s, interlocking their fingers.
“I love you,” Crowley whispers into the black.
Aziraphale squeezes his hand. Presses a kiss to the top of his skull. The twisting in Crowley’s chest at last stills.
Aziraphale works on Crowley’s back for a long time. It’s quiet in their bedroom with the exception of the rasp of skin against skin, the ethereal darkness cutting off sound as well as light from the outside world. Crowley drifts, mind greying as Aziraphale takes the balled, panicked concentration of his essence and pushes it away from his spine, encouraging the occult heat back into more distant parts of his body.
By the time Aziraphale has reached the line of the throw at his waist and dipped one hand teasingly beneath, Crowley feels inside and yet outside of himself completely, full feeling returned to most of his limbs yet his conscious only tethered to his physical form by the strength of Aziraphale’s will.
There’s a faint, thudding warmth low in his belly as Aziraphale folds the throw down to fully expose his buttocks. He should be chilly with his upper half fully exposed like this, space heater or no space heater, but the feelings radiating from Aziraphale’s hovering form warm him to the bones like a long bask on the beach.
Aziraphale bends to press a kiss against the thin skin at the top of his cleft. Crowley snorts out a surprised laugh at the tickle of it. Aziraphale lets out a hot breath of his own and presses a second, firmer kiss to the small of his back.
By the time Aziraphale sucks a faint bruise into the nape of Crowley’s neck, the demon is no longer disconnected from his body.
“Spread your legs,” Aziraphale whispers into his ear. Crowley complies instantly, drawing in a long, shuddering gasp.
“Oh,” he breathes, surprised by the feeling of warm slickness between his legs. “Are you going to--?”
“Hm.” Aziraphale reaches down to cup him briefly, manicured nails raking through short, dark curls. “Maybe later. After your nap.”
Crowley tries to wiggle himself back into the teasing cup of Aziraphale’s palm but finds that despite the thorough massage he’s still a bit too stiff to complete the maneuver. “’M not sleepy.”
“Oh?” Crowley can almost taste the coy curl of the angel’s mouth around the word. Aziraphale shifts his hand, a single finger brushing once over his fiercely aching clit. “Maybe sooner, then.”
Before Crowley can respond, Aziraphale has pushed himself fully upright, both hands braced one on top of the other at the crest of his spine. He pushes down suddenly, hard and fast enough that the bones beneath crack like a whip.
"Hugghk!” It doesn’t hurt, not really, but the force of it leaves Crowley dazed and breathless.
Aziraphale repeats the move twice more down the length of his spine. Crowley sees stars, then the space beyond the stars, the black glittering with distant quarks.
Crowley can do nothing but lie there, limp and boneless, as Aziraphale pulls the throw up over his shoulders and settles himself between Crowley’s spread legs. He rubs his thighs with smug, sure strokes, not that Crowley has the wherewithal to notice or care. By the time he’s come back to himself, Aziraphale has moved on to his calves, bending his legs up at the knee so he has easier access.
Crowley tries to give voice to the thought that had clarified while he was lost on the edge of space, but all that comes out of his mouth is a mush of jumbled syllables.
“What’s that, dear?”
Crowley struggles to remember. The sensation of Aziraphale’s fingers raking through the hair of his leg is very distracting.
“D’you think we pissed 'er off?”
“Her?” Aziraphale’s soft grip slips down to his ankle. His hand is almost big enough to encircle it entirely. “Do you mean… Her her?”
“Nuh. Uck.” Crowley coughs and flops one hand sluggishly beneath the throw, trying to gesture to the world at large.
“Oh.” He can’t see Aziraphale, but he can imagine his frown all too well. “What makes you think that?”
What does make him think it? It’s hard to string it all together like this, his essence so recently and forcefully resettled into this human-shaped body. “Her name was on the original invite, wasn’t it? Didn’t even get to go to the party.”
Aziraphale does not answer for a long while. Crowley starts to feel cold again.
“She’s retired.”
“We’re retired.”
Aziraphale sighs and lets Crowley’s leg flop back down onto the bed. Picks up the other and starts kneading into the meat of his other calf with more force than strictly necessary.
“The boy. He, uh… All of them, I guess. They stopped it then, but—ahhyh!”
“Sorry!” Aziraphale instantly loosens his grip. “I didn’t mean to—”
“S’allright,” Crowley pants through the cramp. Aziraphale has to help him straighten out the leg again, fingers aflutter with regret. As much as it hurts, it brings with it a certain clarity of thought.
“He doesn’t go away,” he continues once the muscle has loosed again under Aziraphale’s more careful tending. “Ev’rybody knows that. Be there at the end of it, won’t he? When all of it snaps ‘n drifts too far apart for, for… Eh. Y’know. The crunch ‘n bang again.”
Aziraphale crawls out from between Crowley’s legs to lie along side him, one hand drifting in slow circles across his shoulders. Crowley turns his head and peaks at him from the fold of his arms. The angel smiles faintly and brings one hand up to brush gently through his hair.
“The heat death of the universe is a long way off, dear boy.”
“Yeah,” Crowley sighs. “I know. ‘S’just…”
Aziraphale’s tucks an unruly curl behind the flushed shell of Crowley’s ear.
“The others. The three. They’ll come back. Always do. They’ll rebrand, or expand, or… They don’t go away, either. Not fully. Not forever.”
“Oh Crowley…” Aziraphale looks like he wants to pull him close but is afraid he’ll break if he does. The not-snake inside him, freshly unknotted, shivers with uncertainty.
“Azirphale, what are we going to do?”
Aziraphale’s grip on his hair tightens, but not enough to hurt. Crowley lets his eyes slip shut as Aziraphale shifts his weight to lie half on top of him, both of them breathing together while the planet below them continues its oblivious journy around its sun.
Eventually, Aziraphale pulls away. “Turn over. I’m going to work on your front.”
Crowley tries to push himself up and over on watery limbs, but Aziraphale ends up doing most of the work. The throw slips free during the maneuver, leaving Crowley fully exposed. The shock of it reminds him of the baths in Rome, the unpleasant plunge into the icy pool of the frigidarium after a long heady bask in the steam of the caldarium. Good for the skin, supposedly. Crowley had always been skeptical but endured it for the final pleasure of a strigil scraping the last of the dirt from his freshly oiled scales.
Aziraphale expertly reswaddles him before he can get too lost in the memory and starts rubbing him through the soft fabric. Briskly at first, plump fingers pushing warmth into his arms and upper torso, then slow, slow, matching the deep, unhurried passes he’d used at the beginning of the massage. The tendrils of Crowley’s essence that had contracted back into his core at the change of position are gradually encouraged out again, leaving him warm and drifting traitorously on the edge of sleep.
“Don’t,” he mumbles when the angel’s strong hands eventually pull away. “S’nice…”
Aziraphale carefully untucks a corner of the blanket, exposing the limp drape of Crowley’s hand. Lifts it to his lips for the gentlest of kisses before pressing his thumb hard against the base of Crowley’s own. Crowley sighs in contentment as the massage works its way across his palm, down his fingers, then up his wrist and the long sinew stretch of his arm.
“Humans made them,” Aziraphale says eventually. His voice is soft and low, so low that Crowley feels it more than hears it. “They can un-make them if they want. If they put in the work.”
Crowley’s brow furrows as his hand is tucked back into the blanket’s folds low along his belly. “An’ if they don’?”
Aziraphale frees his other hand and laces their fingers together. Their rings, silver and gold and mortal-forged, cling faintly together.
“They will. I have faith in them.”
Crowley tries to cluck dismissively, but his thick tongue doesn’t want to cooperate. Aziraphale squeezes his hand once more then sets back to work.
Slowly, the last of the day’s tensions seeps out of Crowley. Lulled by the rhythm of Aziraphale’s stroking, he dozes, warm and numb and safe. Loved.
He barely feels the tender attentions the angel pays to his legs. Aziraphale’s soft hands, the sword callouses at last lost after six thousand years of human indulgences, rasp faintly as they rake over his heels and press into the faintly-scaled balls of his feet.
Crowley does not remember much of his time in Heaven. Enough, of course, for the absence of Her to burn in him still, the constant reminder of what he is, the sin of curiosity that made him what he is. Enough for his mouth to sour with distant regret each time he looks up at the stars, for him to nod his head in sympathy whenever Aziraphale is drunk enough to mourn the way things are compared to the way things used to be. Enough to know, deep in his deepest self, that he would never go back, that Aziraphale’s memories are as cloudy as his own, that he would still ask Her, given a second chance, the same questions that had first set his steps meandering towards the long hot drop of his Fall.
Crowley knows that the answers to those questions—the way things are, the way things could be—are too big for him to have ever fully comprehended, that they’re too big for him still, and probably always will be. But he also knows this:
Lying in the small, dark universe of their bedroom, surrounded on all sides by soft, human things, Aziraphale pressing his hot face into his arched soles, is better than any celestial paradise.
The bed dips as Aziraphale crawls back overtop of him. Crowley moans as the throw parts a final time, exposing the slick, plump folds of his sex. He tries to arch his hips to meet the heat of Aziraphale’s mouth as it presses into the quivering hollow of one hip but finds he cannot move, thoroughly pinned by his swaddling and Aziraphale’s weight and the buzzing feeling of self the angel has pressed into every inch of his body.
His clit throbs. The sound he makes when Aziraphale briefly nips his teeth into the soft fat covering his pubic bone can’t be heard on this plane of existence.
They are well-practiced at this. Aziraphale parts his damp curls with clever fingers and finally, finally, wraps lips and tongue around the place Crowley burns for him the most. He suckles gently, tongue teasing with almost unbearable sweetness as he pushes Crowley’s legs open with his shoulders and slips two curling fingers deep inside. Crowley’s eyes flutter futilely, mouth slack as he’s pulled slowly but steadily away from the dark and into a space that’s super-nova bright.
Afterwards, he drifts, warm and weightless. The only thing that would make this better, make this complete, would be for Aziraphale to line himself atop him and press himself slow and deep until Crowley aches with fullness. His forgotten heartbeat trips in hope as the angel rights himself from his kneeling position, but instead of hot flesh there is the cool pass of a damp cloth across his groin, wiping him clean.
Aziraphale at least has enough bastard left in him to chuckle softly at Crowley’s wined, needy protest.
“Later,” he says firmly. Crowley’s legs are straightened for him and re-wrapped, the now miraculously even-longer throw tucked loose around his feet where they dangle off the edge of the bed.
Later. The promise settles over Crowley like a thick duvet, followed shortly by Aziraphale’s own solid, wide weight, pushing him deep into the mattress.
Sleep opens her arms, and Crowley eagerly returns her embrace, knowing this time, when he wakes up, he will not be alone.
Somewhere on the nightstand, his phone buzzes faintly with the latest news. Crowley doesn’t hear it.