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The silhouette of Vesuvius loomed against the darkening horizon as Aziraphale and Crowley slowed outside Aziraphale's rented room. The golden patina of sunset was fading, a muted night slipping over the volcano, the rooftops, the sea beyond. Pompeii quieted as the humans made their beds and whispered soft words within them.
Crowley leant against the wall, his features obscured behind his tinted lenses. Even in this growing darkness, Aziraphale could see Crowley was pulled bowstring taut, anticipation or nervousness drawing his spine at stiff angles. Aziraphale desperately hoped it was the former, though he knew it was likely both.
They’d shared oysters again, like in Rome. The afterimage of Crowley’s head tipped back, shell to his lips above the long line of his throat, shimmered behind Aziraphale’s eyelids. Even now the oysters' salty tang still lingered on Aziraphale's tongue. He imagined the same salt of his mouth inside Crowley's, the shared taste in that intimate warmth. A tremor quaked in his lungs.
“You mentioned wine, angel?” Crowley cleared his throat.
“Of course,” Aziraphale said, heart rumbling in his chest. He fumbled open the door.
The volcano, backlit by a greying twilight, cast its shadow long over the city and through the window of Aziraphale's modest room. He and Crowley passed a bottle of wine between them at its single table.
Aziraphale traced a finger along the jagged edge of two names carved into the tabletop, close together and written in the same hand. Traces of love lingered deep in the woodgrain. Perhaps the pair had been lovers, tattooing a dedication to a shared, secret intimacy and hoping the truth might be remembered somewhere, after all.
Crowley's arm fell across the table as he offered the wine again to Aziraphale. Aziraphale took the bottle, a drink, and a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
An odd desire urged them to speak in quiet, intimate tones as they argued amicably about the state of Roman politics. Crowley sat close, so close Aziraphale felt the brush of the other's toga at his knee. The shift of his shoulders beside him. Neither mentioned it.
Aziraphale snuck a glance from the corner of his eye as he drank and found Crowley watching him with bright eyes, golden and shining unnaturally in the candlelight. A fire burned in his gaze. Aziraphale shivered, flushing hot in the cooling night air.
Aziraphale knew it was only a matter of time before the conversation lulled, the silence trembling on a tipping point—before, inevitably, the tension caught flame, and a violent and desperate hunger flooded from fissures split into their chests by the loneliness of existence.
It had been nearly forty years since Aziraphale had spotted Crowley in Rome. Nearly forty years since they left Petronious's, stumbling on alcohol and good conversation. Since Aziraphale had first felt the isolation from Heaven slip away with the slide of Crowley's hand up his thigh in a darkened room. The solitude Aziraphale had quietly and unknowingly suffered melted under the heat of Crowley's thin lips against his own. Crowley's touch seared trails of heat into his skin, healing and simmering and utterly, thrillingly illicit.
He tried not to think too much about why that excited him so.
Aziraphale was, to his dismay, quite easily persuaded. A guiding hand at his lower back as Crowley found him in a busy market. Tangled ankles as they reclined together after dinner. The promise of a wile thwarted simply by occupying Crowley's talents with other, more pressing needs. Each time Aziraphale quivered in the anticipation of scorching, sinful lips against his skin, pressing and biting and licking with no explanation required. Aziraphale was grateful. Though Crowley was a demon, he was a generous lover and never asked for more than Aziraphale was willing to give.
Aziraphale hadn’t yet washed their cups from last night nor the night before. Tonight he had none left at all. He found he didn't mind sharing the bottle, watching Crowley press his thin lips to its rim and wrap his long fingers around its neck.
As Crowley returned the slowly dwindling wine, their fingers brushed. Aziraphale could almost feel Crowley’s desire echoing his own in the fleeting touch. It was time, then.
Deliberately, watching Crowley from under the fan of his lashes, Aziraphale sipped from the same spot Crowley had. A residual warmth of Crowley’s skin lingered on the lip, a touch of moisture left by his tongue.
Crowley had abandoned his sunglasses and now stared openly, unblinkingly at Aziraphale's mouth. Aziraphale ached, his chest prickling with heat. A moment passed in one breath suspended in the sort of quiet that came before a storm. A reckoning.
Aziraphale’s heart crashed thunderously beneath his ribs as they collided. Their lips against the same bottle became lips pressed against each other, against throats, against the shallow canyons between collarbones and beyond. Tipsy limbs stumbled toward the bed, unknotting belts and unpinning tunics as they went.
The wine, forgotten behind them, would keep. It was only an excuse, really, Aziraphale knew. The truth rumbled threateningly beneath the thin, flimsy film of alcohol, arousal, and four thousand years of practiced denial that defined his and Crowley's encounters.
With each scorching kiss and rattling touch, Aziraphale felt himself slipping a little further, falling a little deeper. He wouldn’t look down. He didn't want to know. He kissed Crowley harder and let himself be lost in the heat of his mouth.
Crowley surged over Aziraphale, his body a sinuous curve. Aziraphale thrilled at the press of him against his own chest, the way he could curl his arms entirely around Crowley's slim frame. Aziraphale’s palms slid along his spine, feeling each distinct vertebra beneath his trailing fingers.
How delicate he was, this smoke wisp of a demon.
Crowley shuddered under Aziraphale’s wandering hands, but held himself still to allow further exploration. Aziraphale traced over the slight roundness of his buttocks and under, further, toward the epicenter of his growing heat. Aziraphale's fingertips settled at the crease of Crowley's inner thighs and held him there as he trembled. Crowley groaned, the sound cracked and dry like earth in want of rain.
Teasingly, Aziraphale dug his fingers into the giving, sensitive flesh. Crowley’s hips stuttered forward, smearing a glistening trail of arousal over Aziraphale’s thigh beneath him. Crowley’s breath hitched, before he broke into frantic muttering against Aziraphale’s throat. Aziraphale felt the sounds reverberate down into his chest, igniting a desire deep within himself, something fierce and effusive and soul-shaking.
Crowley always let Aziraphale lead, always let him take what pleasure he desired from his body. He pushed for Aziraphale’s needs and asked for nothing in return. As soon as Aziraphale was sated, Crowley would pull away, something guilty swimming in the molten desire bare in his eyes.
They hadn’t discussed it. Aziraphale wasn’t made to ask questions. And so he hadn’t, even as he burned to awaken the dormant desires Crowley kept clenched behind his teeth. Even as he strained to hear the words Crowley muddled into consonants. Even as he ached to cross this fissure between them.
But Aziraphale was thinking of their meals, the oysters, the wine split between them. The salt on each other’s tongues as they finally came together, the earth-shattering thrill of it. The duality.
Aziraphale grabbed Crowley at the waist and pulled, flipping their positions. Crowley was pinned to the bed with a yelp.
“This time, let me take care of you,” Aziraphale said into Crowley’s flushed ear. He licked along its edge.
“You shouldn’t.” Crowley gasped as Aziraphale nibbled at his earlobe and sucked it between his teeth. “I might—You don’t want—”
Crowley writhed against Aziraphale’s iron grip on his waist. Pressing any harder would leave bruises. Aziraphale gentled his hold to rub circles with his thumb and bent to lick into Crowley’s open, kiss-reddened mouth, smothering his protests. When he pulled back, his lips slipping from Crowley’s own, Crowley strained after him. His dazed eyes quivered with a viscous, liquid heat.
“I’d like to have the satisfaction of your pleasure. Let me taste you,” Aziraphale said. Crowley’s breath stuttered. “If you don’t mind.”
For one tremulous moment, there was only air and the weight of an impending cataclysm between them—a tectonic shift in two unearthly hearts.
And then hesitantly, desperately, as if drawn from the depths—
“Please.”
Aziraphale pushed forward and crushed their mouths together. He felt hot, like magma burning thick and volatile.
Crowley panted as Aziraphale kissed wetly down the column of his throat. Moaned as Aziraphale bit at the dual peaks of his hips. Gasped as he slipped into the valley between them to nose at fiery curls.
Aziraphale’s eyes fluttered shut, inhaling the rich, musky scent at Crowley’s core. He dragged the flat of his tongue against him to find a molten heat and a taste like brine and brimstone. Like dark places hidden beneath the earth.
Crowley moaned his pleasure, base and helpless, only fanning the flame inside Aziraphale’s chest and between his own legs. His cock twitched, trapped between his stomach and the crumpled bedding. Precome dribbled onto the sheet beneath him, tacky and damp. He ignored it.
Licking into Crowley with sudden furiosity, Aziraphale sought that exquisite, intimate flavor. Crowley’s mutterings became frantic, louder, as he sucked his clit.
“Oh God—Satan—Angel. Don’t stop, angel. I’m sorry. Thank you, thank you,” he said. Honesty erupted from his lips, vulnerable and raw. “I love it. I love this, I love y—”
Aziraphale clamped a hand over Crowley’s mouth and buried his tongue deeper, ears ringing. He ignored the sudden dread twisting his gut.
Crowley kissed at his palm, all joy and unthinking affection in the bright surge of his arousal. A pang of fear shot through Aziraphale. Worse, a matching affection rose beneath, soft and meaningful and dangerous.
This feeling would destroy them both.
Aziraphale pushed two fingers into Crowley's mouth. Crowley, ever eager and mired in his desire, licked at him sloppily, moaning around his slick knuckles. His muttered endearments were smothered by the intrusion. The heat of Crowley's tongue and the sharp ridge of his teeth were erotic, and nothing more.
It was better this way, Aziraphale told himself. These trysts were only physical, only a solace against the crushing loneliness. Only a vent for the steam within themselves, allowed to shake itself free in each other’s arms. Anything else—anything else couldn’t be.
A violent shudder tore through Crowley. He cried out, muffled around Aziraphale’s silencing hand. Crowley’s thighs squeezed tight as he pulsed against Aziraphale’s tongue. Aziraphale continued to lap at him until Crowley shuddered through an aftershock, silently, his voice entirely shot.
But in the wreckage, a wall fell. A fault in the defenses on Crowley’s heart tore asunder.
Love, pure and blazing, burst into the room and spilled over Aziraphale. He gasped, unable to help himself. The force was a physical thing, warm and encompassing as an embrace. Beneath, cynicism threatened to cut through the joy with heartbreaking sharpness. But a rush of hope, an optimism even Hell had never managed to excise from Crowley, wore into the stone of it, dulling its edges with raw devotion. Overwhelming emotion flowed over Aziraphale, inescapable and devastating.
It was the sun after a desert storm, reminiscent of the first, and scorching hot like the sand outside Eden between Aziraphale's toes as he followed humanity's footsteps—a beginning and an end and all the more terrifying for being both. It was molten, liquid adoration and it hurt. This was a love that burned.
Aziraphale was swept up. Crowley’s love caressed his cheeks and ran down his chest in singing, joyful fire that sought to ignite him, to ache for him, to give and to take and to love him, freely, naturally, endlessly—
Aziraphale came untouched, biting his tongue to prevent spilling his own heart, his own deadly confessions.
Aziraphale’s pulse pounded violently, maddeningly quick and sharp against the slow, hot flow of pleasure diffusing through his body and heavy in the heat of Crowley’s sex, still wet against his lips. Aziraphale pulled back, swiping the evidence of Crowley’s arousal from his chin. His face was a mess, but his heart was worse.
Aziraphale removed his hand from Crowley’s mouth and wiped his spit slick fingers on the bedding. Then there was just the silence, broken only by the slowing sounds of their breathing.
Crowley, of course, was the first to break it.
“Aziraphale—”
“No,” Aziraphale said. Crowley flinched.
“I didn’t mean it,” Crowley offered, looking into the deepening shadows around the room. Moonlight danced at the rim of the abandoned glass on the table and the pale of Crowley’s knuckles fisting anxiously in the linens.
He had, though. He had meant it. With every fibre of his demonic soul, whatever remained of it. Aziraphale had felt the emotion, the inescapable intensity. It was beautiful in the way disasters are—a destructive beauty that could swallow one whole.
Aziraphale knew with complete certainty if he did not take action, the very foundation of what they had would crumble into dust.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aziraphale said.
“You do.” Frustration and hurt scraped into Crowley’s voice.
“I assure you I don’t.” Aziraphale sat back on his heels. Kneeling. If he stood he was sure he would crumble. His hands trembled. He forced his palms together, hiding their honesty between his intertwined fingers.
“Right,” Crowley said. He opened his mouth like he might say more, but instead he closed it again, teeth clicking together and grinding shut. The pulse in his jaw jumped. “Me neither.”
Aziraphale closed his eyes and tried to believe it. Something hopeful and human rattled inside the locked chambers of his heart, so fiercely he was shaking.
He was shaking.
The ground itself was shaking, rocking suddenly and then violently beneath the stone floor of Aziraphale's room and deeper, deeper, a force beyond their control reminding them it was there, always beneath.
The glass bottle on the table trembled, chiming a bright, painful sound as it knocked into the wood. Aziraphale whipped around, in time to witness the bottle tumble over the edge. It shattered into a thousand glimmering pieces, jagged facets sharp and scattering the early moonlight across the room.
With a dreadful fascination, Aziraphale watched as wine flowed between the stones on the floor, wasted.
Crowley always left glass too close to the edge of the table, despite Aziraphale's protests. Crowley, it seemed, could not help but tempt fate.
Moments later, the earth stilled. The tremor passed, but the wine had already stained the floor black in the wash of night. Aziraphale's lips still tasted of the tang of Crowley's essence. Beneath him, in the tight squeeze of Aziraphale's anxious fingers where they had sought out stability, Crowley's thighs twitched.
“Ouch, Aziraphale. What the Heaven was that?”
Aziraphale wrenched his hands away. On either thigh, his white fingerprints morphed to a sudden bright red, like sunburn, like it might bruise, like something that lasted.
Oh, God, what was he doing?
“I—it's the volcano, I believe. Vesuvius.” Aziraphale said, voice faint.
He couldn’t take his eyes from the marks he’d left. The mistaken trail of his lusts, his sins.
“What?”
Crowley pushed himself to sit at the top of the bed. His hair was in complete disarray. A smattering of bites decorated the column of his throat, the hollows of his collarbones.
“Michael sent word just this week. The volcano is to erupt, which will effectively preserve this place for centuries. Millennia.”
Pompeii would be caught at the final moment of its destruction in ash and new earth. All would remain, the joys and the agonies and desperation to survive alike. No escape.
“They're destroying this whole city? Just like that?” Crowley’s mouth curled around a snarl he'd not yet loosed.
“The loss of life is tragic, certainly, but they don't consult me on these decisions. You know that.”
“Every human here is going to die and you knew about it. And you didn't say anything?”
“To my understanding, it is in an effort to—”
“Shut up, angel. Just shut up. Please.” Crowley’s shoulders sagged, all his caustic bite swept away in defeat. Aziraphale cut himself off in surprise. “You never really hear yourself, do you?”
Aziraphale stayed quiet. He couldn’t help who he was. Who he had to be. A blind eye to disaster was a requirement to function under Heaven’s orders. While Heaven remained pure and unsoiled, here on Earth among the rubble and the debris, someone had to pick up the pieces.
And then there was the matter of his own wreckage, his own desolation. Aziraphale took a deep breath and hardened himself to the inevitable.
“I hadn’t meant to leave you in such a state, my dear. You’re, ah, quite sensitive.”
Aziraphale reached forward, touched his fingers gently to the blooming bite at the base of Crowley’s throat. The delicate skin was soft under his touch. A miracle began to gather at his fingertips with a golden and healing light.
Crowley grabbed his wrist, stuttering the magic to a halt.
“Don’t,” Crowley said firmly. His grip was tight.
“No one can know, Crowley. We can’t leave evidence of—of this. Us.”
“Us,” Crowley repeated. “And what are we?”
Aziraphale wasn’t made to ask questions, but there were answers he wasn’t allowed either.
Crowley wrapped a protective hand around his own throat. When he spoke, his voice was fierce.
“These are all I get to keep. When you leave, you’re done with me. We pretend it never happened and none of this means anything. And everything else is so fucking pointless. The humans here will die. They’ll die in the next place Hell drags me. It’s all death and sin and horrible people from here till kingdom come. But this—this thing with you. It’s like I actually feel something. I—”
“Crowley, stop talking.”
“I know you don’t want to hear it, angel, but your actions have fucking consequences. You idiot. Fuck, what have you done to me?”
Aziraphale's pulse was racing, hot and frantic in his veins. He'd already said too much. They both had. The floor was stained blood dark with wine under the moonlight and Vesuvius was churning, surging, roiling beneath the ground, gnashing its teeth and the heat of its breath against the confines of the earth, tearing itself free. The inhabitants slept on, unaware of their impending fate. Aziraphale wished he could say the same.
“Do you think I don’t know?” Aziraphale ripped his wrist from Crowley’s iron hold. A tremor shook in Aziraphale’s voice, rattling him bone deep and deeper still, down in his soul. “That I don’t feel it too?”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Crowley said, but not with his previous conviction. The force of Aziraphale’s distress caught him off guard.
“Well,” Aziraphale said sadly. “Now you know, I suppose.”
Crowley inhaled harshly. His bright eyes, sharp and blazing with that searing devotion, bore into Aziraphale's.
“I could protect us.”
Oh, Crowley. Brave, reckless Crowley.
“You can’t, my dear. This is all there is.” Aziraphale looked down, unable to take Crowley's certainty directly. He might be tempted to believe it. He rubbed his thumb over Crowley’s bare thigh, pale and vulnerable and marred with his own fingerprints. “If we’re caught, if Heaven or Hell discovers us, well. There would be nothing left to have. This place cannot remember us. Not as we are. This is all I can give you, Crowley.”
A dreadful, agonizing silence descended.
“Fine.”
Crowley lifted his chin, exposing his neck. His thighs parted slightly, still damp with his arousal and Aziraphale's saliva.
“Miracle them away, angel.”
Aziraphale did. Reminders of Aziraphale's touch were everywhere. His kisses faded with the brush of his thumb, his bites with a caress of his palm. He let power flow through his fingertips as he ran them over the geography of Crowley's body. Slowly, painstakingly, he erased the charted map of his affection.
As Aziraphale performed his work, Crowley's gaze sunk into Aziraphale and carved guilt into his skin. Aziraphale felt very raw, and far too exposed. Crowley breathed hard through his nose but was otherwise quiet. His silence felt unnatural when Crowley was usually so vocal under Aziraphale's hands. But if Crowley was choking back tears, Aziraphale would rather not know.
“We'll still know they're there. Underneath,” Aziraphale said finally. The last red bite faded against Crowley's collarbone. Aziraphale's hand settled against his warm chest, feeling the rapid beat of Crowley's human heart.
“Thank you.” Aziraphale was unsure of what else to say.
“Don't,” Crowley said miserably.
Perhaps he should leave now. Even though Aziraphale was heaven-bound to ensure the ruination of Pompeii tomorrow, he found he didn't want to leave Crowley's presence. Not yet. The air still weighed heavy with the smell of sex and the flamelick of Crowley's love. It was as enticing as it was dangerous.
“C'mere,” Crowley said, frustration and resignation plain in his tone. It was as if he could read Aziraphale's desire clear as day. Maybe he could. He tugged Aziraphale forward and down into the bedding.
Crowley shoved his head under Aziraphale's chin, tucking his nose almost violently into Aziraphale's throat. His cold feet tangled between Aziraphale's, bony ankles jutting into his own. With a familiar annoyed sigh, Crowley balled his fists against the bare expanse of Aziraphale's chest. “You owe me at least this.”
Aziraphale settled a woolen blanket over the two of them and ensured with a thought that no one would seek them here. The only witness to their mutual weakness for each other's company, each other's touch, would be the moon peeking through the window. Its pale gaze softly alighted on the sharp planes of Crowley's face, finally gentling in sleep. Aziraphale watched shadow dance across the landscape of his features as Pompeii's final night unfurled around him.
Before dawn, in the grey, uncertain light limning the horizon, Aziraphale felt Crowley stir. The bed shifted and a shaky breath spilled over his neck.
“I love you,” a voice whispered. Tucked the words quietly against his skin for safekeeping.
Aziraphale pretended to sleep, afraid of the thunder in his own terrible heart.
By morning Crowley was gone. Not a single red hair hid beneath his pillow. Every used glass was clean. The wine filled its bottle again as if it had never shattered across the floor. Nothing remained of them here.
Crowley had been careful—it was a good thing, the right thing. Aziraphale should be thankful Crowley had listened for once. But gratitude felt distant when he hated every glimmering inch of glass and envied each name carved lovingly into the wooden table. The deepest, most cynical part of himself knew the right thing was often the most painful, and Aziraphale hated that too.
Between one moment and the next, Aziraphale was dressed and slipping outside into the lightless morning. He couldn't remain anymore in this anonymous, doomed place. He didn't bother to lock up.
Before him was Vesuvius, dark and terrible and angry. A tumultuous volcanic plume roiled in thick, cinder-lit clouds toward Pompeii.
In a burst of celestial energy, sharp with the scent of ozone, Aziraphale fled on white wings against the poisoned sky. If any human gawking at the deadly clouds caught sight of his cowardly escape, it hardly mattered. He didn't look back.
Far below Aziraphale's feet, deep in the raging sea of molten rock, two great slabs of earth battled. Whether the two forces met or separated, inevitably only devastation would follow. He and Crowley were no different.
Aziraphale feared, after the tremors quieted and the lava cooled, only ash would remain of this scorched love.