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Aziraphale watched while Crowley scrawled on a sheet of antique writing paper, squinting in a spill of tilted light from a table lamp he'd lugged down onto the floor. Every now and again he would mumble back his words, frowning all the while, as though uncertain of a sentence. Sometimes, finding it acceptable, he snorted to himself, others he huffed with frustration, screwed up the page and tossed it away.
The angel was rightfully curious. When he'd asked Crowley what he was doing, he'd been told "work stuff" and "what did it matter?" and "being quiet wasn't he?" and "not bothering anyone, was he?" and "couldn't a demon do his paperwork in peace these days?" and "spell icicles for him, please?"
Aziraphale had, and they'd both been delighted to discover it began with "icy icy". He had since spelled "reindeer", "sleigh" and, with some trepidation, "abominable snowman", though none of those had had the same effect.
The angel saw his chance four balled up paper missiles later. He was crossing the room with an armful of books when it bounced against his ankle, and he kicked it surreptitiously away towards his desk. He continued to shelve and disarrange things to his liking, so as not to draw attention to himself, and then, having declared a need for cocoa to the "mixed miscellaneous hobbies, larks and divertissements" shelf, he hummed a Christmas carol while he made it.
Angel winged excuse in hand, he crossed to his desk and sat with a sigh, stooping to pick up the paper that had rolled beneath his chair. Crowley was sprawled on his belly and elbows, his legs straggling over the floorboards, too busy with scribbling and frowning at his "paperwork" to notice what Aziraphale was up to. Happily, Crowley seemed displeased with what he'd written, and Aziraphale quickly uncrumpled his page while Crowley noisily screwed up another.
Aziraphale read with, at first, a small frown of confusion, and then a small smile of bemusement, and then a small frown of confusion again and a pondering tilt of his head.
"Crowley?" he ventured. "Who's Lacey and why are you telling her ponies are awful and wouldn't she like a vintage motorcar instead?"
Aziraphale sipped on his cocoa. Crowley had gone awfully still and was clenching his bottom, as though in a rigor of mortification. He slapped down his pen, pulled off his glasses, and thrust his scowling face against the bundle of his arms.
"Ughhnnnhhh," he said, quite vehemently, before becoming one with the Axminster rug.
Aziraphale exhaled at his theatrics.
"Whatever have you got yourself into?"
"PssdffHastah."
"Oh dear," intoned Aziraphale. He sipped some more cocoa and flattened Crowley's letter on his thigh. He couldn't quite see how the two things were linked, but it must have been bad if an irate Duke of Hell was involved.
"And your punishment is—?"
Crowley seemed disinclined to answer. He remained, a forlorn dark sprawl, his hair aflame beneath the lamp. Aziraphale, worrying and rather annoyed about it, rose from his chair with a tut.
"Really now, Crowley. It can't be that bad." He creaked across the floorboards till he stood at Crowley's elbow, nudging it politely with his toe. "You've been at it for hours," he coaxed, hoping Crowley might yet rouse himself if tempted to a mope.
The demon revived with a strained little groan, turned his cheek and said, wretchedly, "Ponies are awful."
"What about Merrylegs?"
"No. Nonono—"
"Or old Bill?"
"Angel, no. Just agree with me. Please." Crowley stared up with such heartfelt despair that Aziraphale felt rather rattled.
"Non-fictional ponies are awful," he conceded, and Crowley snuffed wryly, appeased enough.
"They are."
Aziraphale went to his bottom on the handsome old rug and offered his cocoa to Crowley. Crowley took the mug, but only curled his hands around it, thumbing idly up beneath its wings.
"Might I help?" the angel offered, and he patted Crowley's back, between the tension where his wing joints might have been.
Crowley laid his cheek upon his wrist and thought about it. He glanced at the strewn and balled papers around him.
"I'm Satan Claus."
Aziraphale nodded as though that made excellent sense. "I'm afraid I don't follow."
Crowley groped for a jumble of pages of varying colours and poorly judged folds, handing them up to Aziraphale.
"I'm answering these."
Aziraphale studied the letters—for letters they were—with a curious eye. They were, each of them, written in felt pen or crayon, most with a drawing beneath, and all addressed in unanimity: Dear Satan…
"Kids can't spell." Crowley judged by Aziraphale's face that he'd solved that conundrum himself. "I can't spell," he lamented and rolled, with a limp sort of drama and far too much spine, to loll upon his back.
Aziraphale took up his mug and rested its bottom on Crowley's chest absently. He leafed through the pages once more.
"And their letters end up—in Hell?"
"Bloke in shorts drops them off. Neh." Crowley flicked a soft shing from a wing of Aziraphale's mug.
"Well. I suppose that's a testament to the veracity of the postal service."
"It's a testament to bloody-mindedness, angel. These letters aren't meant for Hell."
Aziraphale, surveying a crudely drawn angel with sweetie wrapper wings and a glitter glue halo, quietly agreed.
"What, precisely, does Hastur hope to achieve by replying to these children?"
Crowley shrugged.
"Don't reckon he knows, to be honest. Author's choice, I suppose. Encourage their sense of entitlement? Incite them to greed?" Crowley threw up his hands at the ceiling, as though he were summoning dust from the fixtures. "Blow great, gaping holes in their dreams?"
Aziraphale rescued his cocoa and set it a sensible distance aside.
"And 'author's choice' this year would be—?"
Crowley glared at him, glarefully. None of the above, and both of them knew it.
The angel smiled politely. "Anti-pony propaganda notwithstanding."
Crowley made a despairing, drawn out sound, and threw an arm across his face.
"Are you vilifying puppies, as well, dear? Besmirching the good name of kittens, perhaps?"
"You're the worst," Crowley lied. He was smiling.
"Might I—?"
Crowley performed a rude summoning gesture and several, rather startled pages of age-foxed paper flurried up into his hand. He thrust them at the angel, patting them flat to his tummy.
"There," he groused. "Happy? Have a good laugh."
Aziraphale, with pointed understatement, summoned his reading glasses to the pocket of his housecoat. He took them out and placed them on, before retrieving Crowley's letters from beneath his splayed hand.
"Dear Haden," he read aloud, "thank you so much for your letter. I'm afraid we aren't recruiting for elves at the moment. I do, however, expect to have a vacancy in sleigh maintenance the year after next. Perhaps, if you keep doing so well in your technology lessons, you might apply for the job?
You're quite right about the stars at the North Pole. There truly are bazillion trillions. We have so many in fact that, sometimes, the sky just can't hold them all, and they tumble down into the snow. We put them all back up, of course. With a very long ladder and star hanging hooks on the end of broomstick handles. Perhaps you could draw me a picture of that next year? Your reindeers on skis were a masterpiece, and Rudolph has insisted that I stick it on my fridge.
Anyway, look at me, wittering away! Presents to wrap and reindeers to feed! Don't forget to leave a mince pie out on Christmas Eve, will you? I get peckish on long journeys.
Yours most festiviously,
Santa."
Aziraphale's smile gave a quiver. He mastered his features and risked glancing up. As it happened, he needn't have worried.
Satan Claus was hiding in his elbows, like a child. His neck was rather pinker than it had been. His shirt was untucked and a pale peek of tummy betrayed the human truth of him. Aziraphale thought it the most unguarded thing he'd ever seen.
"Misinformation. False promise." He ruffled the letters like feathers in inclement weather. "Lying to children, Crowley. At Christmas, no less."
Somewhere beneath his left elbow, Crowley chewed the upcurl off a smile, as though he couldn't quite be sure if this was ridicule or kindness.
Aziraphale quietly hoped he knew which.
"Not to mention your writing's atrocious."
Aziraphale drew a prim click down from Heaven. A miracle sharpened the air, and Crowley sprang up like a marionette with a suddenly pulled upon string.
"What did you—?"
"Oh!" Crowley snatched at the letters, Aziraphale catching his hand. "Do be careful."
Pliant with confusion, Crowley suffered, first the letters, and then his own hand, half curled atop them, to be tucked against his chest.
Aziraphale gave an inelegant squeeze and missed Crowley's gaze by a falter of courage. Withdrawing, he picked up his mug and took a gulp of tepid cocoa.
Crowley stared for a long while, palpably. He may have blinked, and then he dropped his head. The shift of pages whispered as he studied them, squinting in the dimness away from the lamp, but the words were still his own, every one. Penned, mind you, in a neat angelic cursive more befitting of Santa Claus now, and far more legible besides than Crowley's own haphazard scrawl.
"Do you have many more to reply to?" Aziraphale posed his question early, while Crowley was still just bewildered enough to have not yet begun making noises in earnest.
"Ahhh—" He cast about a bit. "Just—these two. Three!" He snatched up another and waved it, before smoothing back on himself. "Thuh-ree."
"Hand me the paper, there's a good chap." Crowley did. "And the pen, if you please." Crowley pleased, though he looked like a man who had fallen whilst skating a duck pond about it, blinking round the floor for his proverbial hat.
"Right then." Aziraphale miracled down Mrs. Beeton and settled a fresh page atop her. "You dictate," he urged, "and leave the penmanship to me."
There was, of course, a brief divergence of opinion with regards to this plan, resolved, emphatically, with Crowley dictating: "Dear Aziraphale, no." De-resolved when the angel continued to wait with his pen poised over the page, regardless, and resolved again, more amicably, when Crowley shuffled nearer by a needless half inch, holding out a picture of a stick figure draped in a large red coat, and saying: "This one does look a bit like me."
Haltingly, thereafter, a child named Aisha was spoken a letter aloud. Her drawing was praised for the comical (perfectly accurate, mind you) dart and swoop of Satan Claus's angry eyebrows. The penguin (who resembled a bowling pin) making away with his hat was declared a "waddling fiend" who wouldn't be getting sardines in his stocking this year. She was told that you weren't really meant to keep tigers as pets, in case they nibbled on the postman; informed of the existence of safari parks and encouraged to pester her father about those instead.
Crowley grew beautifully animate as they moved through their letters, reading and relaying things with unselfconscious glee. Aziraphale found himself stealing long glances, which earned him an "oi, do your penman bit, angel" when Crowley eventually noticed, and a mildly bemused "can't you spell it?" a couple of lapses after.
Crowley broke for a languorous stretch while Aziraphale signed their penultimate epistle: "Yours in jingling jollitude, Santa J. Claus."
The last of the children's letters hung, oddly heavy at the bottom, when Crowley held it up. He smiled to himself, with a rarity of slightly crooked canine, and peeled away a taped on two pence piece.
"Tails," called Aziraphale shrewdly, a beat before Crowley flicked the coin through a somersaulting arc. He turned out a cardiganned elbow, to field the flying tuppence, and it lodged itself, upstanding, between two folds of sleeve, its bottom neither up nor down.
Crowley barked an incredulous laugh, Aziraphale beaming back at him delightedly. The moment held them, childlike, by the power of its charm, before they sobered with a grudging sort of duty.
Aziraphale palmed the tuppence, resisting every urge to prestidigitate about it, and tucked it in the pocket of his waistcoat.
"Dear Lucas—"
Aziraphale had scarcely reached the flourish of an 'L' before his pen took a startled diversion. Crowley clapped hold of his knee—"Hang on!"—and it veered up the page like a spiked beat of heart.
I rather think you are, the angel's brain supplied unhelpfully. He feared he might settle his own hand over Crowley's, give it a comforting squeeze and ask whatever was the matter.
Crowley's face passed between several unsteady emotions.
"Dear Soleil."
As Crowley shifted half aside to better catch the light for reading, the lamp's glass shade cast colours in the furrows of his brow. It was not a frown of anger, nor of worry, nor confusion. Crowley frowned—with a gravity, rather. Respectful of a matter that required careful thought.
A flicker of shadow betrayed the faint flinch of his jaw as he read. He gave a scathing snuff and Aziraphale thought, for a horrible moment, he might cast the letter aside. Instead, he stroked over a thinned patch where the sellotape had been, his thumb a shadow through the page, and blinked twice.
"What a delightful name," he murmured, almost to himself, and Aziraphale didn't at first understand that he wanted the words written down. "Thank you—" followed after by a clearing of his throat impelled the angel to his penman bit in earnest. "For trusting me with it. I promise I'll keep it safe."
Crowley spoke at a comforter's lilt and—while this came as no surprise to Aziraphale, who had known him be, at times, unaccountably soft-spoken—it made an angel warm about the heart to hear it.
"Names—" Crowley faltered, unsure quite how to word himself. His frown had grown faintly frustrated. Aziraphale wished he might smooth a thumb over it, loosen the burden of thought from those brows, and lend his words some surety. "Can be—shy creatures."
In dictating his previous letters, Crowley had thrown on a jovial tone, such as all Santas since time immemorial had collectively, ineffably, agreed upon. Without it, his own words seemed suddenly, frightfully bare to him at that moment. Aziraphale saw it by the grimacing shift of his nose
"Of course," Crowley Santaed in earnest by way of compensation, "yours may be braver. But mine," that word betrayed him, "was very shy indeed."
"I chose my name as well, you see." Something hung from Crowley's words, like an under-robe shadow. "Tens upon tens of centuries ago."
No lie to that. An ancient afternoon of shaken faith and slow, misshapen grief recalled itself to Aziraphale's mind. A night of doubting questions, made braver by the dark, rebuffed with angered panic—and a dawn as pale as opal, in defiance of it all.
"It was my name for several centuries, before I told a soul."
Was I the first you told? Aziraphale both hoped and feared, in almost equal measure, that he had been. The honour was undeserved, he knew, for all he longed to own it. He had answered in poor taste, hadn't he? When Crowley had told him. He had made some thoughtless jest, as was his tendency to do. Crowley had seemed somehow different that day, and yet—still exactly the same.
"It was my name inside my head then, as yours is now, Soleil. I won't say 'only' as you have, mind, for I am old enough to know that some things in your head are as real as the moon or your granny's favourite cardigan. And when, some day, a friend looks up and smiles and says 'Soleil!' – you won't think twice, because it's always been your name."
That choked off voice was Crowley's. That fretful, stuttered hum and swallowed heart beneath a futile grimace all belonged to—
"Crowley—"
Aziraphale caught his own voice back from the teetering brink of who knew what. He anchored himself by his pocket watch chain, curling it, cold to his palm. In the upspill of light from the lampshade, Crowley was all taut lines and shadow—then his jaw softened into his throat as he lowered his eyes to the letter once more.
"Wants a cape," he murmured, rising on dark, coltish limbs. "Shiny green. S'what the elves wear. Chief elves. Not a problem." Crowley tripped where he stood, pulling down his hitched Henley. "Thanks for—" His eyes caught the foot of the page, and he turned from it, sneering. Soleil's letter fluttered from his trailing hand. "Best of luck saving the world."
He made off at a swaggering stride, and Aziraphale feared he was running away, but—
"What you got that's half drinkable, angel?"
"There's some, ah—" Soleil's letter topped its tail midair and settled gently on Aziraphale's knee. The sound of a cork being popped from the back room rendered his answer moot.
Unwilling to lose the exact wording of it, Aziraphale hastened instead to set down what Crowley had said. —you won't think twice, because it's always been your name. The rest could wait. He took up Soleil's letter and read the last sentences, quietly, under his breath.
"I have stuck on a two pence for you. It's a lucky one where, if you flip it and wish, it gives you what you want. It only works sometimes though.
I hope you have a good Christmas and the sleigh works good. You're really nice and kind, and I like you a lot. I hope you get a hug."
Aziraphale fingered the coin in his pocket through the fabric of his waistcoat and wondered what Crowley had wished for. He wondered, as he shifted to his knees, when Crowley had last known a hug, and whether the thought of one pulled at him, only sometimes, like a string knotted round his last but lowest rib on the right.
He could make Crowley out, obliquely, through the railing of the stairs. He heard the glug of poured wine and the bottle being placed down, and then—only silence. When he stood, he could see Crowley properly, braced at the counter, with his palms either side of the glass he'd just filled. Not drinking from it. Not doing anything. Simply standing there, impossibly apart.
Aziraphale straightened his waistcoat. He worried his cuffs as he rounded the stairs and the table they'd shared drinks and beggar your neighbour, Cluedo and bickering over innumerable times. He kept a brisk half-step ahead of his thoughts and fell upon Crowley a breath short of asking, knocking him breathless and catching him clumsily round in the press of his arms.
And he held, though his heart thumped ferociously, thrust at his startled adversary's back. Although Crowley stood rigid and trembling like a struck chord, with his weight braced away on his hands. He held till a strained sound eked out and a deep breath surrendered Crowley bodily against his chest and belly. Then he held for all the world as though the fear had been wrung out of him as well.
Time slid by, and he held with his eyes fallen closed and his nose near the comfort of Crowley's tall shoulder. He held until their heartbeats kept time with the clock, and their breathing grew even and sleepily slow. Still he held, though he thought he heard birdsong and bins, till the letterbox creaked and an envelope, whispering through, brought the world in with it.
And he smiled, as he felt Crowley's hands leave the counter to curl on his cardiganned arms, holding him back for a sun-risen moment—before they stepped gently apart.
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