Archive of Our Own ^beta

Shechem, 3072 BCE

"It has to be something you really don't want to tell me," Crowley said, stretching his long lean form over the stone bricks. A snake still, Aziraphale thought, basking and treacherous and dangerous. He should get up and walk away. No good could come of consorting with the Devil, no matter how glossy the devil’s long black curls. Aziraphale settled more comfortably on the low wall and listened.  "No getting away with little half-truths."

"I don't think you should be counselling me about honest dealings. You're the one who would be deceptive and trying to get away with things."

Crowley rolled his yellow eyes to the Heavens. "Oh dear me, wherever did I put it? Forget my own head next."

"What could I possibly have to tell you that I need to be afraid of anyway?" Aziraphale was a little sharper out of annoyance at the impersonation of his voice, which sounded unnecessarily soft and whiny. Aziraphale really didn't sound like that at all. He was a person of some consequence in Babylon; or at least an angel of some consequence, which had a certain gravity in itself, even if he was currently incognito as a scribe. His voice was accordingly firm and dignified. He adjusted his waistband, which was digging in uncomfortably. "I'm an angel. I have absolutely nothing to hide."

"Then you have nothing to be worried about. Look, you need to try something fun.  You’ve been down in the dumps ever since Adam and Eve kicked the bucket."

“They didn’t die from kicking a bucket. They just stopped breathing.” Together. Aziraphale had looked down on them, small and frail looking, so different from the vibrant creatures in Eden, and the way their arms had locked around each other in their final moments, and found himself weeping. They had been together even in death. That, at least, had been a mercy.

“It’s an expression, angel. Look, I miss them too. Been hanging around for nearly a thousand years, ‘course I miss them. At least you can visit them in Heaven. I’m not welcome there these days.”

Aziraphale sighed. “Technically, I suppose I could. But…”

“You’re afraid if you go back there, they won’t send you down again.”

“I’m a Principality. My job is to guide the nations of the Earth.”

“Also, Heaven is bloody boring.”

Aziraphale ignored that. He had known, after all, that after they left Eden, humans’ days were numbered. Nothing really competed with the first shock of Cain and Abel, and most humans seemed to last a few hundred years at most even when they didn’t actually kill each other. But Adam had been first, and Eve soon after, and now the only familiar face that survived from the beginning was the snake. Aziraphale sneaked a glance at him.

Crowley's feathered cloak covered his shoulders but left his torso bare. It was unfashionably lean and serpentine, with bark-dark nipples flat against the skin and a light sprinkling of black hair trailing down from his navel to the waist of his skirt, and there was absolutely no reason for Aziraphale avert his eyes from it, even if it looked like Crowley had oiled his skin until it shone like bronze. Infernal vanity, Aziraphale thought smugly. He would never do such a thing. He folded his carefully pumiced, scented hands.

 "Anyway, if you don't want to tell me the answer to my question, then you have to perform a dare," Crowley continued.

"A dare," Aziraphale said, carefully. "What would that involve, precisely?" He shouldn't be considering this game at all. Bargaining with a demon. But the day was warm, the sun soaking into his skin in a way it never did in the rarified atmosphere of heaven, the scents of bread and roasting meat on the air were rich and heavy and, even if he wouldn’t admit it aloud, Crowley was good company. After all, they'd known each other for hundreds of years. He would never trust a demon but, of course, there was something mutual that wasn't entirely unlike trust either between them, unspoken and unacknowledged but real enough for all that. If he was being entirely honest with himself, it had been there since Eden. And he was always honest with himself, he reminded himself firmly. He was an angel.

"Oh, anything," Crowley said, with elaborate casualness. "Any little thing we think of."

Now that was suspicious. "It can't be anything that would endanger my immortal soul."

"Fair enough. And nothing that would save mine."

"And what happens if we don't carry out the dare? What's the penalty?" if he was going to contract with a demon, he had to be sure of terms. After all, Crowley could ask for… anything...

Crowley smiled, all sharp eye teeth. "Knowing the other one won."

They stared at each other for a long moment, and Aziraphale knew, deep in his soul, that neither of them would ever give in.

Food was strange. Aziraphale wasn’t sure he liked the idea. He enjoyed the smells, of course, but… actually taking matter into his corporation. It was a decidedly odd concept. Would he have to expel it as well?

“”Try the bread, first. Dip it in the oil, it’s good.” Crowley demonstrated, lifting it to his own lips. His jaw moved as he chewed it, and Aziraphale could see his throat move as he swallowed it. He had the sudden, vivid image of a serpent swallowing its prey.

“I don’t think I should allow you to tempt me,” he said, doubtfully. “I know you and your just eat the fruit, what harm could it do? Gluttony is a sin.”

“It’s not a temptation. It’s a dare, and some bread and some fruit is hardly gluttony.  Answer the question if you don’t want to eat it..”

"I know better than to give a demon like you the advantage by answering a question like that," Aziraphale said, glowering at him. Crowley shifted uneasily, as if wondering if he'd gone a little too far. Which he had. Is there anything you'd ever consider Falling for? was not a fair question to lead off with.

Aziraphale lifted the bread to his lips. It smelled golden, if smells could have a colour. A bit like sunshine. And he did so very much like sunshine. He pulled a bit off with his front teeth, like humans did, and took it into his mouth.

It was… extraordinary. A rush of pleasure all through him, centred on his tongue and the roof of his mouth, but there was also feel of it between his back teeth, the texture in his mouth, the thick richness of the oil and the salty sponginess of the bread almost overwhelming him with sheer, carnal pleasure. To think, he had never known. All that time in Heaven, and he had never known what a body could do. God’s work was indeed wondrous. He swallowed, and an immense feeling of satisfaction spread through him as he took the matter into himself.

“Try the pomegranate next,” Crowley said, eagerly. His round, unblinking eyes were centred on Aziraphale’s face, and he looked hungry himself, though he made no move toward the food. Why would staring at Aziraphale’s face make him look hungry? Perhaps Aziraphale had made a terrible mistake.

But he was curious about the pomegranate. He scooped some seeds up, little things shining in their translucent aril on his fingers, and tentatively touched them with the tip of his tongue.

It was like an explosion. Sweet, so sweet and yet so sour he nearly recoiled, and when he took them into his mouth and bit down they almost popped, and his eyes closed.

“Honey, next,” Crowley said, almost breathlessly. Slender fingers, sticky with gold, pressed against Aziraphale’s lips, and he took them in and licked. It was… it was beyond words. The thick clinging sweetness and behind them the faint roughness of the swirls of Crowley’s fingertips as Aziraphale licked it off.

Aziraphale  abruptly came to himself. That, he thought, was quite enough of that. He had never at any point agreed to have a demon’s fingers in his mouth.

“I think I’ve sufficiently carried out the dare.” Aziraphale cast around for a means of... not revenge. Revenge was not an angelic mode of being. He was born of love, and even if he smote, he did so reluctantly and with as little force and as much kindness as possible. He found himself hoping Crowley would not, if they continued this ridiculous game, ask him what he felt about some of his fellow angels who were a bit happy-go-lucky with flaming swords. But it would be nice to wipe that strange hungry expression off Crowley's face. "Truth?"

Crowley seemed to relax. "Yeah, all right, go on. Got no secrets, me. I'm shameless." He wiped his hands on his skirts.

"Did you ever regret Falling?"

There was a moment of silence, and Aziraphale found himself deeply regretting his words. Crowley's proper expressions, the ones that belonged on his face, were amusement, slyness, sleepy pleasure in sun and food and wine. Anxiety, sometimes. It would be hard, Aziraphale supposed, to work for hell without being anxious at times. A stark and hard expression like that, as if Aziraphale had inadvertently smited him to cold hard stone, didn’t suit him at all.

"My dear," Aziraphale said, hardly aware as he said it that he had just called one of Satan's servants an endearment. "You know, if there's ever anything I can—"

"Dare." Crowley spat the word at him like a poison dart.

That was how the children of Sechem came to spend a truly wonderful afternoon adorning an embarrassed looking giant serpent with wreaths of flowers and ripe grapes. Aziraphale squeezed juice from the grapes onto his fingers as a peace offering He fancied that Crowley looked very slightly less enraged as his long tongue flickered over his fingers, tasting it. The snake’s tongue was surprisingly delicate to the touch, and Aziraphale felt it on his fingertips and palm long afterwards.

Babel, 22000 BC

"Look, you don't have to sulk like that. It was your choice." Crowley wasn't scurrying after Aziraphale, because he wasn't the type to scurry, but he was slinking rather rapidly behind Azirapahle's angry strides, trying to keep him in range of quiet conversation.

"How is it my choice? You came up with the dare!"

"You could’ve just answered the question instead, you know." There was a slight conciliatory tone to Crowley's voice which threatened to soften Aziraphale a little, but not quite enough for forgiveness. Not yet, anyway. Aziraphale readjusted his tunic and tweaked his necklaces, trying to restore the sense of dignity that had been lost in an entirely humiliating encounter. The woman had laughed at him.  Nor, Aziraphale felt, was aiming him at a virtuous housewife a fair dare.It was practically telling him to carry out Hell’s work for him, and completely inappropriate for an angel.So was the question  Crowley had asked, about if he was ever tempted to sin.

"I didn't think you did that badly," Crowley said, but there was a flicker of a smile at the corner of his long mouth that Aziraphale didn't quite like. "For a first seduction attempt. It was your first, wasn't it?"

"Of course it was my first! You know what all the fuss with the Nephilim was like. I have no intention of contributing to a second Flood. The first was traumatic enough."

"I told you, you didn't have to go through with it. The temptation is accomplished just by making her form the thought of adultery. After that, it's up to her whether she ends up finding someone to act on it with or not. There's no risk of any monstrous giant babies. I promised not to actually endanger your soul, all right?"

"A promise from a demon!"

Crowley shrugged slender shoulders. "I gave you my word, angel." He opened his golden eyes wider. If it was his idea of making himself look more innocent and appealing, he had not fully calculated the effect of his slotted pupils. "Besides, I take agreements seriously. Part and parcel of the job, contracts."

Aziraphale shouldn't trust him. He didn't trust him. Of course he didn't. "I might have done better with her if you weren't sniggering so hard. It was very distracting."

"I'm sorry." Crowley started to laugh again. It was a peculiar hissing laugh, like steam coming out of... something. Something small. "Am I in heaven or did I just run into an angel? Oh, my sweet Aziraphale. Let me give you some seduction tips someday, all right? You’re not so bad looking, I’m sure you’ll manage."

"Oh, shut up," Aziraphale said, and then felt that was not a properly angelic manner of expressing himself. “Truth or dare?”

“Oh, go on. Truth.”

Aziraphale considered him carefully. Crowley had found the idea of Aziraphale trying to seduce someone highly amusing, obviously. He himself was the famous incarnation of temptation. But Aziraphale had good instincts, and two thousand years of observing humans and their habits of pretending to be confident over just the things they most wanted to hide their weaknesses.

“Have you ever successfully seduced someone yourself?” he asked.

There was bright hot blood under the bronze of Crowley’s complexion. “Dare.”

Aziraphale decided to go easy on him. And, after he had suspected he was carrying out Satan’s work for the demon, it was sufficiently punishing and immediately convenient to pass on the delivery of a divine message to Crowley. Aziraphale had a dinner to attend.

He checked in, all the same, to see if Crowley was doing his job properly. It was rather annoying of Crowley to imitate Aziraphale’s voice but with exaggerated primness while delivering the Be Not Afraid bit, but… Aziraphale had missed seeing Crowley’s wings, shining white and iridescent behind him. He really did look impressive with them out. Perhaps Aziraphale should put more effort into grooming his own.

Either way, he was sure the people of Babel would pay attention to the warning, delivered by such a fetching fallen angel.

Ephyra, 582 BC

Aziraphale had almost forgotten his little game with his Adversary. They hadn’t played since Babel, and all that business with the tower had been a little distracting. And probably Crowley's fault, wicked, clever thing that he was.

He hadn't been thinking about games at all, at least not in that sense. He'd been watching the athletes compete in the games, their healthy bodies coated in olive oil to keep off the dust, not that Aziraphale noticed, any more than he took any particular notice that they competed entirely undressed, or tended to be exceedingly good-looking. Then one of them, the most handsome of them all, fashionably slender and strong, his legs long and hard-packed with muscle, oil gleaming on his sculpted buttocks, had turned and winked at him with yellow eyes

Aziraphale had not blushed. But he had looked aside, and uncharacteristically had a moment of self-consciousness about how unfashionably round and corpulent his own corporation was. As if it mattered in any case whether a beautiful demon found him aesthetically appealing. He was there for the games and sacrifices to honour poor little Melicertes. He adjusted his tunic, self-consciously, over his belly.

Crowley won, of course he did. He cheated, whether from the principle of the thing or not. As Aziraphale, honoured guest of King Sisyphus, crowned the victor with celery leaves, he tried to frown disapprovingly at the demon, and not smile with pleasure at his presence at all. Or look down. He might have noticed that Crowley was fashionably endowed with heavy balls and small graceful prick, as the Greeks favoured, and that they were quite pretty, but he wasn’t going to show any obvious interest, not with Crowley so close to him.

“What are you doing here?” There was a faint, and unjust, note of criticism in his voice.

Crowley just smirked at him. “I like your King. Stubborn old thing. Never knows when to give up. I suspect he might be useful to our cause.”  

“You leave him alone, you old serpent.”

Crowley grinned at him, teeth sharp. He smelled of oil and dust and fresh perspiration, presumably in order to be convincing to the human athletes. His hair and beard were worn in short black clusters, and the celery leaves weren’t quite as soft and pretty as his hair. “Truth or dare,” he hissed.

Aziraphale had no intention of playing any silly game. He had no excuse for his lips forming the word, “Truth.”

Crowley leaned in. His breath, warm and alive and unnecessary, tickled Aziraphale’s ear. “What were you thinking about when you watched me wrestle?”

“Dare.”

Crowley's smile did not falter. "Salute the victor properly, then." He held out his right hand.

Aziraphale reached out and took it. It was a pleasant hand, the fingers as long and slim as the rest of Crowley, and it curled into his own as if, despite the oil and dust of battle, it belonged there, its slenderness and dirt a perfect complement to his own hand's pampered plumpness. Aziraphale clasped it firmly. Crowley arched an eyebrow, as if disappointed in him, and Aziraphale felt sharply that he was about to lose a game with rules he didn’t quite understand. Did Crowley actually expect him to bow over their hands and kiss his? Aziraphale imagined pressing his lips to the brown knuckles, and an unexpected feeling flooded through him, as if warm water was gushing down his spine. But that was impossible. An angel, showing obsequiousness to one of the fallen. How would he ever explain that? He firmly put out of his mind how many other things about Crowley he would find it difficult to explain if questioned.

Aziraphale could kiss his cheek instead. That, too, would suggest inequality, but the other way around. Of course, demons were by nature inferior to angels, that was part of the whole celestial order of things. Somehow, though, Aziraphale didn't feel like treating Crowley as an inferior. He was his counterpart. Almost a friend, in a way.

That left one choice.

Crowley's lips were supple and tasted faintly of olive oil, although there was no real reason he would oil them to wrestle, and they froze against Aziraphale's at first. Aziraphale was about to lean away, somewhat pleased at his small victory, when Crowley's lips parted and clung, just for a moment, to his own. Aziraphale wondered at the strange sensation of their beards touching, before the demon was the one to break the embrace, hand slipping away.

That infernal smirk was back, as if Crowley had been the one to win after all.  "Full of surprises, angel."

Aziraphale couldn't help it. His eyes darted down and, well. Crowley had seemed not entirely uninterested in the kiss, despite, or perhaps because of, the audience. Aziraphale was smugly satisfied that, while his own equipment was purely human-passable, he had never made an effort to access certain hormonal responses. "So are you."

Crowley narrowed his gleaming eyes. "Lust's part of the job. Don't flatter yourself; it wasn't that good a kiss." He turned away, somewhat huffily, and stepped away in a display of dignity which would have been far more effective if his sweaty, oiled foot hadn’t slipped. "Ow."

Aziraphale looked at the demon, on his hands and knees, his really quite pleasingly formed buttocks turned to the sky, and chuckled. Rather unfair, considering the amusement from the King and other humans must also be uncomfortable for Crowley, but he couldn't help it. There was a warmth under his ribcage. "Quite a good kiss after all, then?"

"You bastard," said Crowley, without much heat, and apparently addressing the ground "Meet me for drinks after all this fuss? There's a rather wonderful little taverna near here, does a good dry wine and you'll enjoy the snacks. Indulge in a bit of gluttony and inebriation to balance out my licentiousness."

"Why not?" Aziraphale reached down and grasped his hand, hauling him to his feet. "I think we have a lot to catch up on."

 They didn't talk again about Crowley's response to the kiss, too busy talking about all the things they had experienced in this wonderful world since they last met. There was no real reason for Aziraphale to remember for a very long time afterward the feel of their lips meeting. Bodily passions had nothing to do with an angel.

Crowley's kiss had still been very sweet. For a demon’s kiss.

Bythinia, 80 BCE

"Truth or dare?" Crowley said, drowsily.

His head was pillowed on Aziraphale's lap, and Aziraphale had thought he was asleep, despite his golden eyes being open, the pupils slitted. Something had changed since that first kiss in Ancient Greece, a certain careful difference between them, as befitted Adversaries, had dwindled further and further away. Crowley had seemed to take the kiss as a signal that the need for such unfriendliness was over; he'd spent that evening, as they drank, draped over Aziraphale's shoulder. Fully dressed, this time, although his skin gleamed in the flickering light. The next time they met, Crowley had unhesitatingly taken Aziraphale's hand and left a friendly kiss on his lips, and from then on they had greeted each other however dictated by current customs.

Aziraphale sometimes wondered just how Heaven, or indeed Hell, would react to him regularly embracing a demon. He put it out of his mind. No one Up There paid all that much attention to him, so long as he carried out his duties, and after all, he and Crowley had to share the same planet, and often ended up in the same place. It would be silly to be discourteous, just cause unnecessary fuss for everyone. He had a glimmer of compunction the first time Crowley had kissed his eyelids one after the other in greeting, the demon's lips like a whisper on the sensitive skin, sending shivers through him. But, he told himself comfortingly, he was not a creature of sin and lust, and it was a perfectly respectable place to kiss him. Human men greeted each other that way all the time.

The current fashion in Nicodemes's court was for quite a lot of demonstration of affection between men, and it would be churlish to push Crowley away when he companionably tangled their legs together, or perched on Aziraphale's lap. After all, Aziraphale supposed, his broad thighs made a tempting perch, and Crowley, for all his sculpted, was hardly a heavy burden. It was convenient, too, their heads close together being useful to exchange information. Not that Crowley's head was on his shoulder or close to his now. The rich, heavy wine had apparently made him sleepy, and he had slipped down on the couch they shared and, Aziraphale had thought, gone to sleep. The dear thing did like to sleep.

Always fashionable, Crowley had adopted Rome's passion for Gaulish golden hair, although only Aziraphale guessed that the glossy curls owed less to wood ash, urine and sunshine and more to judicious application of miracles. The gold dust glimmering in it was probably real. Crowley was anything if not ostentatiously rich. But his skin was the same bronze of Eden, and Aziraphale wondered if Crowley had somehow managed to keep the same corporation intact all this time, or if vanity demanded he make few changes. He was very beautiful, the crafty serpent. And no one would notice if Aziraphale had absent-mindedly been tangling his fingers in the soft golden hair and massaging his scalp to help him sleep peacefully. He guiltily removed his hand.

Aziraphale himself had stuck to the same corporation. It was comfortable. Crowley certainly seemed to think so. And the apparent age, tiny as it was compared to his actual age, made it easier for humans to respect him.

"Hellhound got your tongue? It's not that difficult a decision, surely."

"I'm dealing with a devil; it's always dangerous. Oh, truth, I suppose."

"Ever think about that?" Crowley waved a languid hand towards Nicodemes, who was devouring the mouth of the young Roman ambassador, hand lost to view in his toga.

"What? Oh, of course. I'm supposed to be ensuring the success of the fund raising, and it's not helping that he keeps getting distracted by the King." Aziraphale had initially thought that Nicodemus's fondness for Gaius Julius Caesar's bright grey eyes would act in his favour, but Caesar wasn't the only one being distracted.  He couldn't help, either, not being too cut up about it. For reasons of their own, Heaven had decided Rome's empire should be expanded, but Aziraphale never liked seeing War walking the horizon, Plague and Famine in her wake.

"No, I mean." Crowley waved his hand again. "Kissing."

"I kiss people all the time. I kissed you just a couple of hours ago."

Crowley hissed. "Lust. Physical desire. Kissing and wanting more."

"My dear fellow, you know that lust doesn't happen unless I make an effort, and really I don't know why you'd think I'd want to. Seems to add unnecessary complications."

"Huh."  Crowley frowned. "I'm not sure that's an answer. Look, they're clearly having fun. Have you ever wanted to make the effort?"

"Why would I?" His hands clenched and unclenched, but there was no need at all for sweat to be forming in his palms, or for his unnecessary heart to beat so hard it seemed to hurt his chest.

Crowley pushed himself up on one elbow and turned to look more directly up at him, a manoeuvre that human spines would normally struggle to accomplish, but looked fluid on him. His cheeks were flushed, and he looked eager and, strangely, scared. Aziraphale was almost sure he was trembling.

"That's a question, not an answer."

Aziraphale looked at him, the parted lips, the silken bronze of his skin, the golden curls. Remembered how his lips had tasted when they had greeted each other, fragrant with wine and herbs, and his brief moment of wondering about Crowley's tongue, the lithe drape of him. He turned and looked at Gaius Julius and Nicodemes again, the complete focus on each other, the way even in this crowded room there seemed nothing in all the world to them but each other and their need, and wondered what it would be like to feel like that with anybody. There was only one person he could even imagine feeling that way with, and he was an absolutely impossible choice.        

"Dare."

Crowley's eyes flashed with something like anger, but he just said, "All right. I dare you to drink three jugs of that wine and not sober up with magic."

They finished their evening drunk and trading rambling stories about horses and elephants and unreasonable middle managers who expected them to provide unnecessary amounts of paperwork for the most piffling of missions, and the subject of kissing didn't come up again; nor, Aziraphale realised, had he remembered to ask for a truth from Crowley. He suspected Crowley would not have given him a truthful answer anyway, and Aziraphale would have had to think up some ridiculous dare.

Still, heading home in the dim dawn, Aziraphale looked at the flakes of gold dust that had somehow come off on his hand, and wished he could ask why Crowley had brought the subject up.

England, 1482

Aziraphale found Crowley at last in a village in Tilgate Forest in the High Weald. He'd spent some time following rumours of a strange yellow-eyed monster that shut himself in a room and demanded wine and ale in strange hissing accents, throwing coin at the unfortunate staff. They took the money, of course, despite fear for their immortal souls. No human could be expected to starve for fear of the future that would come after death. Aziraphale had resigned himself to that long ago.

He'd visited the village before, or at least travelled through it on his way to Worth. In those days, it had been called Crow's Leah. Now, it was called Crawley, and Aziraphale hoped that was a sign that some traces of Crowley's sense of humour remained. Or perhaps, even Crowley would have had some hope that Aziraphale would recognise the name and seek him out here.

The innkeeper had been horrified and alarmed that this nice, well-dressed man from London was seeking out the terrible drunken monster who had taken the one private room for himself. Aziraphale had to employ all his carefully kind firmness to make sure they made him up a tray of bread, soup and water, and promise to leave him alone with the strange guest.

"Chuck the drinks in here and fuck off," snarled familiar tones, in response to Aziraphale’s polite knock.

"I'd prefer to bring them in myself. It's not good to drink alone when a friend is here to drink with you. And eat. I'm sure you haven't been taking proper care of yourself."

There was a long silence. "Go away, Aziraphale." The angel could barely hear it through the door. The listless sound that had replaced the aggression worried him more than it would have been to be sworn at, because at least fury was understandable in a demon, not that Wrath was one of Crowley's more obvious vices. This suggested it had just been bluster for the humans. Whatever was wrong was very wrong indeed.

"I don't think I will leave. Let me in, dear boy."

There was no answer, and when he raised his hand to the door, it was warded against him. "Very well. I have nothing in particular to do. I'll wait here until you stop sulking." Aziraphale sat down and leaned his back against the door, and waited as the night crept on.

Some time after dawn, Aziraphale felt the demonic presence in the wood relax, and he stood up, very carefully, for fear of disturbing the fragile truce. Crowley was likely to be in a very bad mood indeed if he thought opening the door was some kind of letting Aziraphale win, and would have to be handled tactfully. Aziraphale often worried that tact was not one of his strong points. God had equipped him with intelligence and curiosity and benevolence, but not nearly as much tact and patience as would have been useful in his job sometimes.

He opened the door, and went inside, trying not to wince at the vinegary stench of alcohol sweated through the pores of an almost human corporation. Crowley drank heavily and often, but he was usually too conscious of his carefully presented human identity to do anything as uncool as smell bad. Oh, Crowley. The demon hadn't relented, it seemed, but passed out, lying half off his cot, his long black waves of hair falling into a pool of spilled wine and, Aziraphale was afraid, vomit.

He risked a miracle enough to clean up the dark room a little, but he wasn't certain that it was safe to clean Crowley himself that way. The human way was called for, it seemed. Aziraphale sent for bowls of water and clean clothes. Crowley would hate them, of course, nothing the terrified innkeeper could come up with was anything like Crowley's spiderweb fine hose and slashed sleeves, and the garb certainly wasn't black enough to suit him. Anything had, however, to be better than this. Aziraphale methodically stripped him, trying not to fret too much over how loose-limbed and unresisting Crowley was, even as his chest was exposed to the cold, the nipples hardening at the chill. Aziraphale had distinctly asked for warm water, but Crowley shivered in his sleep as Aziraphale sponged him clean.

"It's all right, my dear, we'll soon get you to rights again," Aziraphale murmured soothingly, not sure if he was soothing himself or Crowley. He rinsed Crowley's hair as well as he could and dried it with eth cleanest corner of Crowley's clothes he could find, then pulled a shirt over Crowley, hiding the lean, beautiful line of his chest. Not that there was any reason too.

Aziraphale hesitated for a moment over the triangle of cloth buttoned over Crowley's breeches for extra modesty, where his hose did not cover. There was no reason to be prudish. A cock and scrotum were no more to an angel than... than a thumb. Not even if Crowley had adjusted his size to more current fashions and seemed considerably better endowed than the last time Aziraphale had seen him naked. He couldn't leave Crowley, his fastidious, elegant Crowley, in sweat-soaked hose and breeches. The thought was all wrong, somehow.  He averted his eyes, determined not to notice whether Crowley was in any kind of priapic state. Those things did happen sometimes, he was told. He dressed him again with his eyes half-closed, paying no notice to where his hands might brush.

That was better. The bed, not being part of Crowley, had been easily cleaned with magic, and it was easy enough to sit down and pull Crowley half into his lap, face pointing to Aziraphale's plump knees, of course, not towards, well, and busy himself brushing the rest of the mess out of Crowley's locks, restoring them to their properly silky waves. The regular motion helped. No more worrying himself with what had driven Crowley to that state, to the terrible knowledge of just what Hell might do if Crowley had annoyed them enough. After all, Crowley had done plenty to annoy them, and a lot of that had been Aziraphale's fault, to be honest. The Arrangement had seemed so sensible, just an extension of the many little things they had dared each other to do across the centuries, and now it seemed like he had subjected Crowley to terrible risk.

Don't think about it, he instructed himself. Get his hair clean. You know how Crowley hates to be at a disadvantage, more like a cat than a snake, sometimes. Restore him to a state where when he wakes, he can say something snarky and unpleasant but without barbs, and you can get him back to normal. That's the best thing to do if you truly—that's the best thing you could possibly do for him.

Aziraphale felt relief when Crowley stirred at last, and turned over, staring at him with great, unseeing eyes. At least, Aziraphale thought he was unseeing, until he spoke.

“¿Qué cosa asquerosamente buena habré hecho para que me despierte el más hermoso de los ángeles?" [^1]

“Very funny,” Aziraphale said, a little hurt. His corporation had been designed, with heaven's forethought, to be used for comfort, not seduction like Crowley's, and he was all right with that. He was sure. But he didn't want to be teased about his appearance, not by Crowley.

"Mi gordo y bonito ángelito," Crowley insisted. His hands snaked up and he twisted, mouth coming up and Aziraphale realised he was going to be kissed again. He wouldn't pull away. He wouldn't. Crowley was sensitive, and they had kissed in greeting and parting many times, although not recently, and there was no reason to feel a flutter of panic and heat, as if this kiss would somehow mean more, be more significant than the others, that it would be a border that could not be uncrossed. Crowley reached up, lips parting, while Aziraphale sat frozen, neither encouraging nor resisting, until Crowley overbalanced and rolled off his lap, onto the floor.

"Ouch." Crowley stared around, like a snake checking for prey, tongue flickering out to taste the air. "This is a lot cleaner than I remembered. Oh, you missed a spot, under the bed."

"Surely not." Aziraphale blinked and fixed it. "Why the Spanish?"

"Oh, angel, I've learned a lot of useful Spanish recently. Like auto-da-fé. Garrucha, that's useful. Interrogatorio mejorado del agua, that's a good one, it's improved, you see from ordinary old water interrogation, because they put a cloth in your mouth so it's so much safer. Well, safer until you're burned alive. Why did I ever complain the fourteenth century was boring?"

So that was it. Aziraphale reached down, unthinkingly, and Crowley clung to his upper arms like he was the one who thought he was drowning, and Aziraphale was his only source of support. Aziraphale hauled him up and, protocol be damned along with all the humans who were determined to do evil, and held him close, stroking his hair.

"Why did this time bother you so much?" he asked, when Crowley's trembling had subsided a little. "We've seen torture and executions and religious expulsions together many times before. Why, we were at Nero's court together, and the courts here make use of the most dreadful interrogation techniques."

"Don't know, really. It's just... they were so fucking righteous about it. Like angels smiting, fucking bastards taking pleasure in it."

"I don't—"

"Not you." Crowley pressed his face closer against Aziraphale's chest, fisting his shirt, as if the angel was trying to move away. "Raphael and all those bastards."

"Please, Crowley. I refrain from calling your colleagues names. In any case," Aziraphale said, "isn't that your job, in a way? Inspire humans to evil and then punish them for it."

"Well, yeah. That and gathering souls to bring our Master his final victory and all that stuff. But we don't tell ourselves we're the good guys for it. It's just a job."

"Quite so," said Aziraphale, repressing a flicker of doubt. Just a job. Everything they did was just a job. That was why it didn't seem to matter so much when he took on Crowley's tasks; they would get done anyway, and that was all a part of the Greater Good and Ineffable Plan and not really his place to worry about.

"It doesn't feel worth it anymore. They make themselves more miserable than we could, and then they come to us, or they come to you, and we just wait until the Final Trumpet to sort it all out. I don't feel like I'm making much difference one way or the other anymore, or you, either. I mean what's the point, really, when you get right down to it?"

Aziraphale repressed a shudder. It was never a good sign when people started going I mean what's the point, really, when you get right down to it? Next Crowley would be saying Things just happen, what the hell. Aziraphale wasn't really sure what happened when an occult being became apathetic and nihilistic. Nothing good, he was sure. Crowley might even retreat back to Hell, and while the world was an interesting and exciting place with lovely things like food  and music and books in it, without Crowley it would feel...

Lesser. Dull. Flavourless. Wrong.

Crowley had been by his side in the beginning, and he should be there when it all came to a screaming halt. It was the way things should be.

"Come outside," he said.

"I can't come outside, the light hurts."

"You should have sobered up, then," Aziraphale said, unsympathetically.

"Didn't want to."

"Come on. We must find a way to shade your eyes. Like the amber Nero used to look through." Aziraphale hauled him to his feet, and they made it out somehow, Crowley leaning on him surprisingly heavily for someone so slender. Humans peeped at them out of various doors. and retreated, apparently wondering what power this mild-mannered scholar had over the demonic beast to make him comply so well. "It would help, too, with getting people to trust you. Useful for your wicked work. Close your eyes. You can trust me."

Crowley stiffened for a moment, and Aziraphale wondered why, but then he relaxed. "Yeah. Suppose so."

They made it down the narrow, dark stairways somehow, Aziraphale pulling him close, and out into the yard, with the stink of animals and travel. Crowley protested wordlessly as the sun hit his squeezed-tight eyes.

"Keep them closed for now. Just a little way." Crowley stumbled, and Aziraphale caught his waist. "There. Not much further. Now open your eyes."

Crowley blinked his eyes open. "What?" And then, "Oh."

The bluebells were massed in a carpet of purple in green, the leaves of the hazel trees above green-yellow. The sky, where it could be seen, was the mild blue-grey of a cloudy early morning. The air smelled of dirt and rain and rotting leaves and wet flowers. Birds sang, reacting joyfully to Aziraphale's angelic presence. There was a rustle in the bushes somewhere. Could be a squirrel, or a deer, or perhaps a wild boar. Aziraphale had been living in London too long to be precisely sure of their exact relative dimensions anymore.

"I don't think, blasphemous though it might be to say, that there's anything quite as lovely as this in Heaven. There are horrors here, too, but I look at this, and I think: how lucky I was to be assigned here. How very, very lucky. And maybe the horrors just bring it more into relief. Truth or dare?"

"Truth."

"Is there nothing on this Earth that makes it more worthwhile to you to be here than to leave? Nothing you would miss?"

"There is something," Crowley said. "There's—" He broke off. "Can't get a decent drink in Hell."

"You've had quite enough to drink. But I assume you're right."

"Can't imagine you could in Heaven, either."

Aziraphale sighed, letting Crowley take that as an answer. "Come back to London with me."

Crowley was silent for long heartbeats, and Aziraphale wondered if he'd said something wrong. "I got a commendation for the Inquisition. Nice shiny gold one."

"I'm so sorry."

"Nah. It's all right. Raises my stock." He turned and wrapped his arms around Aziraphale, as if he was a normal human turning for comfort.

Aziraphale hugged him back. "It will be good to have a friend near my side once more."

Crowley breathed something against his cheek before pressing a kiss there, as if they had never stopped kissing as friends. "Might as well come back. I'm not riding a bloody horse, though." He dropped the embrace as swiftly as he'd started it and adjusted himself into a lazy slouch.

"I'm sure we'll manage," Aziraphale said, pleased. The trip back would be painful, but all the better for good company. Wicked company. Whatever Crowley was.

He could wonder what Crowley had said later. He'd never been very good at Spanish, and he couldn't really ask Crowley what he'd said, especially as he'd already asked truth of him and Crowley might remember he hadn't had his own turn in the game. And Aziraphale didn't want to reveal how embarrassingly he had misheard.

There was no way Crowley had whispered “Preferiría ser tu marido.”

London 1832

Aziraphale opened the door with a somewhat unnecessary bang. "I thought you were asleep. A nice little nap, you said, oh, three decades ago."

"I needed to piss." Crowley was looking curiously at the greenery hung in the bookshop windows, and not at Aziraphale, let alone showing any signs of compunction, which was particularly irritating. His hair was longer than it had been in a while, tumbling over his shoulders in dark curls. Perhaps it had grown in his sleep.

"Delightful."

"Are you going to let me in? It's freezing out here. Trust me to wake up in the middle of winter." Aziraphale sniffed. "Oh, come on. I know you'll have a nice fire in there. And I can't be seen in public wearing clothes thirty years out of date. Not that you'll be much help in figuring that out. Are you wearing a corset, angel?" Aziraphale sniffed again. "I don't like it. It doesn't suit you at all. You're not supposed to have a waist. Oh, I... I dare you to let me in."

"Truth."

"Don't be like that. But if you insist..." Crowley smiled, teeth glinting in the lamplight. "Did you miss me?"

"Yes." It was dragged out of him by their agreement, but he didn't have to say it graciously. He could be forgiven a bit of pettishness when, after all, they had moved to London to be... Not together. Conveniently within reach for the Arrangement. Which, Aziraphale reminded himself crossly, he'd been carrying out all by himself for the last thirty years.

Crowley smiled wider, smug and unfashionably willowy and oh, yes, it was good to see that smile again, despite Aziraphale's resentment. He touched a bough hung with apples on the door. "You have to let me in now. Is it Advent?"

"Christmas Eve."

"Not a good time for a demon to be about. Offer me succour?"

"You never minded Christmas before." Aziraphale opened the door further and stepped back, anyway. "You complained terribly when the Puritans cancelled it. Used to drink all the cider and fall out of the trees."

"Always did like a good Wassail." Crowley looked over his smoked-glass spectacles, and winked.

There was no need, Aziraphale felt, to sound quite so suggestive about it. On the other hand, there was cider, warming in the kitchen behind the bookshop.  Mugs and glasses that had become, through custom, things he thought of as Crowley's. Mince pies. Crowley always did like pies. A seat that hadn't been sat on for a long time. He sighed and let Crowley in.

Crowley flickered a tongue out, tasting the cider and firs and spices, the meat and pastry. "This smells surprisingly agreeable for your bookshop. Aren't you afraid customers might actually come in and buy something?"

"Oh, it smells quite different to them. Try not to disturb the books."

"I don't see how I can, they're underfoot everywhere. Apples on the ceiling, really?"

"It's a Kissing Bough," Aziraphale said, and immediately regretted it.

"Who have you been kissing, angel?" Crowley's voice was low, and there was a note to it Aziraphale didn't understand, or at least told himself he didn't.

"No one, really. It's quite fallen out of fashion for friends and acquaintances. But it's expected at Christmas these days. Things are changing faster than they used to. Gifts on Christmas Eve instead of on St Nicholas's day. The winters are colder."

"I noticed."

"The—" He noticed Crowley wasn't paying attention anymore, moving his sleek black head around from side to side, as if listening.

"They still sing Wait songs," Crowley said.

"Christmas carols, they call them now. They’re rather pleasant, some of them." The singing was somewhere further down the road, faint and lovely.

"Huh." Crowley seemed upset about something. Aziraphale strained his ears.

Man being bless'd in this estate
And blessed sure was he,
Having all things at his command,
But the forbidden tree;
But then the serpent soon appeared
To have beguiled Eve,
And said if she should eat thereof,
Then she should surely live.

Crowley's shoulders were tense under his out of date coat, and Aziraphale stepped closer, and slipped his arm through his. Crowley was shivering, but then, it had been very cold outside.

 "Do you regret it?" the angel asked. He wondered for a moment if he should have specified the question wasn’t part of their game, but surely Crowley could tell when a question came out of a sharp pang of compassion rather than a challenge.

"Nah. Even if it was the right thing to do after all. Don’t see how I could have done anything else, really; or them either." They stood there, together, arm in arm, the ancient serpent who had inspired the first mortal sin and the ancient angel who had failed to prevent it, and listened to the song raised in the voices of the humans who they had caused to fall. They sounded happy, Aziraphale thought. Their lives were so hard, with poverty and war, starvation and disease and sin, and yet now, singing of their expulsion from Paradise, their voices were radiant with sheer joy and delight. And alcohol, of course.

The serpent then hath Eve beguil'd
That she should thereof eat,
And likewise gave unto the man,
As Scripture doth repeat.
And so they both broke God's command,
Committing of this thing,
Likewise the heavy wrath of God,
Upon them both did bring.

"Still think it was an overreaction. I mean, a bit of fruit. We like fruit. Always enjoy a good apple."

"It's the principle of the thing. They were told not to, and—" Aziraphale bit down on the lecture for once. Crowley's shivering had subsided.  "It was their choice, dear. Surpassingly good, definitively wicked. And I think, somehow, it all worked out for the best. For them, and for us."

"I never was one for following orders myself. Ironic, really, given what..." Crowley bit his lip and tilted his head meaningfully downwards. "What He is like now he's found himself in charge. Very keen on orders these days." He pulled away, and Aziraphale felt a stab of regret. But then he set his glasses down, carefully, on a teetering stack of the Biblioteca universale sacro-profana, which Aziraphale had intended to take over and finish some day and never got around to starting on. "A Kissing Bough. With apples on it."

"Yes. Apples. And mistletoe. Wards away evil, they say," Aziraphale said desperately. He stepped back, and realised he was stepping further under the wreath.

"Doesn't seem to be working very well right now. But mistletoe has other meanings." Crowley didn't so much step forward as slink towards him. "Friendship, for instance."

Aziraphale softened a little. "Yes."

"And love." It sounded strange from Crowley's lips. Aziraphale was the being of love, not the demon. But, after all, they came from the same stock, and there had to be a name for this feeling that had started in Eden and endured throughout millennia, being deeper and stronger and harder to ignore. There was no sin in an angel feeling love, Aziraphale told himself with increasing desperation. Even Crowley was one of His Creations, and so it was proper to love him, and this plunging, watery feeling in his stomach and the hammering in his heart were just signs of how happy he was that Crowley was showing signs of higher feelings, that there was some hope for him after all, demon or not, and after all Heaven was hot on forgiveness these days.  Hot. The bookshop was far too hot; he shouldn't have built the fire up so high.

"Dare."

"I already—oh. Your turn." He stepped back again, and Crowley followed so close their chests were nearly pressed together.

"Yes. You missed me. So, what's my dare?"

He should make him spread some Christmas cheer, Aziraphale thought. A good deed. Something Crowley would find highly embarrassing, add some joy and virtue to the world and give Aziraphale something to tick off in his books, because Heaven only knew he'd been doing the job of two eternal beings since Crowley started his long nap. He just had to think of something. Shouldn't be too hard. Thinking up good deeds was part of his very nature. There were thousands of wholesome dares he could think of... dozens... Why was Crowley's breath on his lips so very distracting? That was Crowley all over. Distracting, deceptive, frustrating, never straightforward with what he thought, what he felt, leaving Aziraphale constantly at a disadvantage and hopping on one foot, trying to fret out the clues of an unsolvable puzzle.

“Let me know what you’re really after for once in your existence," Aziraphale said, frustrated.

“Dare accepted.” Crowley's lips crashed down on his, and slim arms went around his neck. They had kissed before, so many times, but not like this, not lips pulling at his with fierce hunger, as if Crowley was trying to pull Aziraphale into himself with the force of the kiss. He gasped, and a tongue followed the opportunity he granted, pressing deep inside with a velvet slithering touch that surely was not human.

So this, then, was the solution to the puzzle that was Crowley, this devouring hunger and Aziraphale's own wave of wanting that crashed over the angel as if it had been waiting banked up somewhere he wasn't even aware of, his heart forgetting to beat and then starting again with a painful jolt. It was as if his corporation had finally noticed all the careful compartmentalised feelings Aziraphale had locked away, and responded with a blaze of physicality that it took everything Aziraphale had to control, to make himself stand still and unresponsive.

Crowley made a half-angry noise against Aziraphale's mouth, pushing their tongues together as if willing Aziraphale's to respond, and he wanted to, oh how he wanted to. It was all he could do to hold still against the onslaught. Crowley's hands had grasped the small of his back, apparently became enraged with the perfectly respectable figure aids Aziraphale wore, and slid down further, over the curve of the seat of his trousers, squeezing, and then lower, fingers digging into the soft flesh under Aziraphale's buttocks, pressing and massaging, as if Crowley was trying to bury his fingertips in Aziraphale's thighs. The demon pressed closer and raked pin-sharp yet delicate teeth over Aziraphale's lower lip, and thrust his own lean thigh between  Aziraphale's more capacious ones. He was unmistakably hard against Aziraphale's stomach, and it took all of Aziraphale's will, all of Aziraphale's effort and fading control over his corporation, to ensure that Crowley's questing thigh met only quiescence in return.

Crowley yanked his mouth away and hissed, and the sound went right through Aziraphale. He knew Crowley was damned, of course he did, it wasn't something he could ever not know, but the desolation and fury in this noise seemed to open the gates to Hell and all the bitterness and suffering within.

"Angel." There was pain in his voice and, worse, resignation. It didn't sound like a pet-name, or a taunt, just a recognition of Aziraphale's essential being. Good, then. He had been convincing.

"Yes. I am. And you’re the Enemy." Aziraphale’s voice broke. He wanted to add: my oldest enemy, my dearest enemy, my beloved enemy. But, after all, they could never be more than friends of a kind. They'd been pushing the boundaries of fraternisation for a very long time as it was. "And I'm an angel," Aziraphale added, trying to communicate that it meant he could never want, never desire, never long to take a beautiful snake of a demon into his arms and kiss the life out of him, rake his fingers through black hair, strip the human clothes from his body and and let these newly acknowledged bodily sensations take him where they would

It wasn't a lie, he told himself, if he only said true words. The rest could remain his secret.

"Our essential natures are at odds," Crowley said, his voice hard and brittle. "No free will for immortals. And no sin for angels."

"Exactly. I'm sorry, Crowley—"

"Don't sssay ssssorry!" Crowley shook his head sharply, and then his voice was back to its perfectly cultivated, human-like tones. "It's just the way things are." He reached down and picked up his glasses, setting them firmly over his eyes again. "Good to set things straight between enemies."

"My dear—"

"Perhaps hold back on the my dears for a while, yeah?" Crowley’s voice was like sandpaper. “Don’t want to give the wrong impression.”

Aziraphale started to apologise again, and stopped. It wasn't befitting to either of their dignity, no matter how much he ached to somehow make it better.

"Well, time to get back to sleep,” Crowley said, a kind of manic brightness suddenly infusing his manner. “Still due some napping."

"You can sleep here." The words came out high-pitched, weak, because Aziraphale hadn't been intending to say it aloud in the first place. "You'd be safer here. No one Above ever checks on me here, and I worry about you, sleeping and vulnerable no-one knows where. I'll keep you safe. Please stay."

"Sure, why not? Angel, you really are beyond a joke sometimes."

The door of the bookshop slammed, and Aziraphale moved blindly to the back room and collapsed on a chair. Crowley's chair.

He didn’t see, really, how he could have acted in any other way, and still remained true to himself as an angel. Certain indiscretions might be winked at from long-term Earth agents, and no one was as long-term as Aziraphale, but taking a demon as a lover was something not even the most lenient performance review would overlook. Crowley was unreasonable, just like he always had been, to expect anything else.

The singing still came faintly to him:

..a number of Angels that stood in the Sky,
They joyfully talked and sweetly did sing,
To God be all glory our Heavenly King.
Aye, and therefore be you merry,
Rejoice and be you merry;
Set sorrows aside.

Aziraphale sat long and silently. He had never been a particularly sweet singer. “Choir” in his case had referred only to his designation and not his ability to open up with praise.It was to be doubted if he was not entirely successful in putting sorrows aside, and he was not particularly merry. He did not weep, but he did not answer the door to the carollers, and eventually he left and went upstairs. If he didn't sleep, well, then he never had a need for sleep. It was no one's business if he didn't turn the pages of the book he'd taken up with him.

The next morning Aziraphale came down as usual, determined to be of proper good cheer. Set an example. He couldn't remember if he had been intending to open the shop or not. Rules about what you could do on Christmas day varied so much from century to century. But he had to do something, he decided. Keep his mind off things. Be sensible.  Maybe work on that Encyclopaedia a bit like he had intended to. Do some miracles to keep Gabriel and the others happy. Aziraphale’s place was to do his duty, and not bother with any personal longings.

If Crowley had finally been pushed away entirely, then rationally it was all to the good, quite literally. The world without him wouldn’t be so very different. The world was full of interest and pleasure and quiet thrills and chances to do good, and he really didn’t need a constant thorn in his side, arguing and teasing and tempting him to small wickednesses. Especially now Aziraphale was aware of his own desire, everything that had been clamped down, especially when everything in him told him to chase his Enemy down and say and do all kinds of stupid, disastrous things. Anything rather than lose Crowley entirely. Surely it had not been all or nothing, surely if Aziraphale had found a way to react properly, manage the situation, he could have kept Crowley’s friendship while refusing the things he couldn’t have.

Aziraphale realised he had paused on the stairs, standing still while painful awareness of everything he had lost crashed over him in waves, leaving him dizzied with pain. Never again to see the mocking twist of Crowley’s lips, the quirk of his eyebrow, hear that strange hissing lisp when he was excited or tired. Never again to have someone who nearly understood, the one constant in his existence of Earth. No Crowley. No Crowley ever again.

A world without shadows, stark and bright and charmless.

Eventually he pulled himself together and went downstairs. The fire was blazing in the backroom, an almost tropical heat. Warmer than he usually liked it. That was odd. And so was the shape under a blanket on the couch by the fire, long black hair spilling out from under it.

Aziraphale stood watching the gentle rise and fall of the blankert for a long time, not breathing himself, for fear of disturbing anything. Eventually, he said crisply, "Looks like you're shying off your duties again. Slothful creature of Hell. You'll owe me a lot of miracles in return when you wake."

There was a faint sound from under the blanket that might have been a hiss or chuckle, but Crowley didn't stir otherwise. He certainly didn't give any assurances of catching up on his side of the Arrangement.

Aziraphale made himself a cup of tea, and sat and drank it. Only when his cup was empty of everything but a few stray tea leaves did he cross to the couch and straighten the blanket, letting his fingers linger just for a moment on a forehead that was smooth even after millennia.

"Sleep well, dear boy," he said, and went back to his work.

London, 1990

The summer was drawing to an end as Aziraphale and Crowley, fuzzily golden with good food and good wine and good cheer, meandered  towards inner Mayfair. They weren't arm-in-arm, because that was out of fashion but, Aziraphale thought, they could be. If they wanted. They could be anything. As far as he could tell, they were retired. Adam had been firm on the subject of "messin' around with people," and also that they were going to be all right. Aziraphale felt that he could trust the boy. Trusting the Antichrist. An odd thought, but really, after trusting a demon for six thousand years, was it so strange at all? And now, in a world where they no longer had to mess around with the humans or just do their jobs, the world was so full of possibility that he didn't know where to start.

He didn’t know where Crowley intended to start, if it came to that. Whatever decision the demon had made, when he was absent on that Christmas Eve, he’d stuck to. Since then, their friendship had been casual and comfortable, and they never touched. Aziraphale hadn’t lost him entirely, though. He had thought he had, on that night; he’d thought again he was losing him, as the end of the world came.

He’d been a fool to think Heaven would make some kind of exception for Crowley. He would never convince them that Crowley was, deep down, as fundamentally good as he had been as an angel, which perhaps was not very good at all, but… He’d stayed. To protect the humans, and by Aziraphale’s side.

Aziraphale looked up to the sky. It wasn’t entirely blue, it rarely was in London, but it was quite a nice day. The first day of the rest of their lives, as Aziraphale and Crowley, not as agents of Good and Evil.

"What're you intending to do?" Crowley seemed to have been reading his mind.

Aziraphale thought of a world of infinite possibilities, of the friend who had stood by his side at the end of things. They looked an unlikely pair, he thought. A fat second-hand book dealer in a cozy jumper and a stylish young man in a sharp suit and dark glasses. Almost as strange a pair as an angel and a demon getting along. Perhaps they would not, now they didn't have their twinned fates keeping them together. But perhaps they would.

"Well, I need to stock-take, I suppose. I need to catalogue and price all my new acquisitions. Children's literature is an entirely new realm of interest to me, and I'm not sorry. I'm quite done with prophecies for the, ah, foreseeable future." Aziraphale chuckled a little at his own joke.

"Make sure to price them high enough that no one will be tempted to buy them." Crowley kicked a non-existent rock. "That’s all you are hoping for? The quiet life of an immortal book hoarder?"

"I suppose so.” The rest of the words, everything he was hoping for, didn’t come out. How could he say: I knew I  liked you in Eden, I knew I loved you by the fifteenth century and I knew I desired you by that Christmas, so now the world has failed to end, will you be mine? Ridiculously melodramatic. Impossibly so.  Instead he asked the salient question. “What are you intending?"

"Don't know. Free will’s a bit of a bugger, isn’t it?  Money isn't a problem, got tons of investments. Go touring in the Bentley, get to know her again, perhaps. I keep expecting her to feel different, but she doesn’t. Reassure myself this old planet is still spinning, look for any remaining signs of the Apocalypse."

So Crowley was leaving London, perhaps leaving England, and it was all too late. Perhaps just a mistake on a Christmas evening in the first place. Aziraphale summoned his courage in any case. "Is there nothing else you really want?"

"What is this, truth or dare?" Crowley seemed amused, the corner of his mouth tilting, but Aziraphale couldn't see his eyes through his dark glasses.

"Perhaps.” Funny the way his heart beat faster, as if he needed it at all. “If you like."

“The world being here and me not getting punished for it is too much of a gift horse to look in the teeth. Anyway, It's clear enough to me that I'll never have what I really want. I'll settle for what I can get. Just like most humans do."

Aziraphale wasn't misinterpreting the half-smile, half grimace at the corner of Crowley's mouth, he knew he wasn't. He reached out and took Crowley's forearm, turning them in towards each other, so they stood close. Crowley looked down at him, a quizzical expression on his face.

"Dare," said Aziraphale.

The corner  of Crowley’s lips turned up. "Hang on, give me a minute to think of something first."

"I was talking to myself," Aziraphale said, and kissed him.

Crowley gave a small shocked noise, and Aziraphale kissed him harder. Clumsily, probably, he lacked experience, but Crowley didn't seem in a critical mood for once. He wrapped his arms around Aziraphale's back and pulled him close, kissing gently this time, and sweetly. Too gently and too sweetly. Aziraphale pulled away and said, crossly, "You can kiss me more, if you like. Are you afraid of being scandalous? What kind of demon are you?"

"One who betrayed my own side. Look, you don’t have to do this. I missed kissing you though, would be nice to do that more, bloody prudish modern English." Crowley wrapped him closer in his arms and kissed his temple in a tender and irritatingly chaste way. "I dealt a long time ago with the fact that you can't feel that way about me. Never expected you to, really, should never have chanced my hand."

"I bloody well can," said Aziraphale, who felt he was getting the hang of swearing. And kissing, if Crowley would only begin again. He'd been thinking about that snake tongue for nearly seventy years, and he wanted it in his mouth again. “I can feel any way I want, if I put in the effort.”

"Angel, it's not something you can dare yourself into." Only Crowley would be irritatingly superior during a heart-felt and possibly blasphemous confession from an angel.

"If you won’t accept my dare, then ask me for the truth instead."

Crowley bit his lip. "Truth."

"You asked me if there was anything that I would consider falling for." He hadn’t thought there was an answer, not really, back when Crowley had asked him. He had just been irritated by the question. Now he knew. “I would fall, if it was the only way to have you in my life.”

"Angel," Crowley said, looking rather like he’d been slapped in the face by some damp knickers, all his cool self-possession gone.

He could feel Crowley's heart, thudding against his own where their chests were pressed together. There were people laughing at them, and someone called out something insulting, but the sounds came from very far away. Aziraphale’s own heart was far too loud, but he didn’t feel like turning it off. "Your turn to give me truth," he said.

Crowley’s mouth twisted. Aziraphale didn’t think he’d ever seen him look vulnerable like that, even when facing Satan. The demon raised a hand to his stylishly unkempt hair, and managed to make unstylishly unkempt, one lock falling haphazardly over his forehead. Aziraphale wanted to brush it away, and kiss the skin it had touched.

"All right, then. The only times I regretted falling were when I thought you might have liked me better as an angel."

"Oh, dear heart. I couldn't like you better. I…” It was hard to say, still.

For a demon, Crowley could be merciful. “Guess it’s my turn, then. Truth? You never told me if you’d ever been tempted to sin.”

“Naturally.. I’m around you quite often, aren’t I?” Crowley’s expression softened, and Aziraphale added, “Wrath is a constant temptation. Truth?”

“No.”

Aziraphale blinked in confusion, trying to guess which among many questions he had asked over the centuries Crowley might decide to answer right now.

“No, I haven’t seduced anyone. I just… I get embarrassed, all right? Don’t want humans to see me at a disadvantage. Seems seriously uncool, all that emotion and mess. ” He was snarling with embarrassment. Aziraphale had a completely sinful rush of covetousness and pride. “Besides, it’s more effective if they sin with other humans. Two for the price of one. Always efficient, me.”

Aziraphale granted him a truth as a reward for the justification. “Back in Greece, I was thinking you were by far the most attractive of the wrestlers.”

Crowley’s embarrassment was wiped away and replaced with smugness. “Too blessed right. Putting thoughts in someone's head, that’s the essence of temptation.  Why did you think I turned up all oiled and naked like that? Wait, no, that’s not my next question. Truth? Did you ever think about being with...” His bravado frayed a little around the edges. “Anyone.”

“I tried very hard not to think about it. Especially in terms of you. I thought that kind of thing would be forbidden to me, especially with a demon.”

“But you think of it now?”

Aziraphale decided the most effective and least humiliating answer was to kiss him again.

This time there was no courteous restraint; Crowley’s mouth parted on his with a hungry desperation. Desire flowed like lava as it had under the kissing bough, and this time Aziraphale let it flood into him, through him. It felt like his corporation melted with the relief of it, with the heat of Crowley’s tongue in his mouth and hands on his thankfully uncorseted waist, sliding under his jumper and finding the flesh there, stroking as if he couldn’t get enough of the softness.

“My fat, pretty angel,” he whispered against Aziraphale’s cheek, and this time he wasn’t sad or drunk or speaking Italian, it was said out under the sunlight, in English, which was significant for some reason Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure of, for all the world to hear. Aziraphale was dimly aware there was a world to hear, and that it wasn’t Heaven above or Hell below that mattered, but all the humans bustling around, his beloved humans. They were making a spectacle of themselves, and he didn’t care. If any of his beloved humans interfered, he’d smite them. With malice.

“My dearest, beautiful boy,” he said, and Crowley replied with  something strained and incoherent and grabbed his elbow, hauling him down the street.

“Where are we going?” Aziraphale asked hopefully.

“My flat,” Crowley said, which was a satisfactory answer.

“Any idea what we’re going to do when we get there?”

“I’m sure two intelligent beings can work it out. We’re not all that incompetent, after all.”

If Aziraphale had let himself think about this at all, he imagined a bed with black sheets and no doubt exotic and complicated acts, but as it happened they fell in a tangle of arms and legs against a white wall, suddenly too starving for kisses to wait, hands fumbling for belts and braces and flies. He didn’t even have the chance to see if Crowley’s prick had been adjusted for fashion again before his hand was closing around velvet heat, realising that yes, Crowley was hard and dripping and oh, Crowley was releasing him and bringing them together in his long fingered hand.

Then all he could think of was kissing and rubbing and thrusting, until the pleasure was too sharp even to have the breath for kissing. So ungraceful, so human, so desperately primal, this need to rub genitals together, and yet it was consuming him.

He wrapped his arms around Crowley’s back, yes, mine, my demon, my dearest, and gasped against his cheek. He barely had enough control to reach up and wrench Crowley’s glasses off, so he could see wild yellow eyes, glazed with pleasure, see that Crowley was as lost to it as he was. The thought sent a thrill of ownership through him that was too much, all of a sudden, and he was pulsing messily. His first thought was a kind of horror that he was making a mess of Crowley’s immaculate red shirt, followed swiftly by the knowledge he was also ejaculating on Crowley’s cock, dear Heavens, getting the evidence of lust all over him. That sent another helpless spurt.

Crowley gasped against his cheek and then bit him, sharp snake-teeth grabbing possessively into the join between neck and shoulder, and not all the warmth and wetness over Aziraphale was Aziraphale’s any longer..

They clung together wordlessly, stunned by the significance of what had just happened. In a way it was terribly trivial, two beings holding each other in a mess, trousers only half pulled down, too impatient to reach a bed. But Aziraphale couldn’t help thinking the world had changed, nonetheless, as a demon and angel held each other as if desperate not to be separated.

That thought emerged from his mouth as, “Where were you planning for your motoring tour?”

“Thought I’d head South-West at first.” Crowley paused. “Lots of book shops and antique shops. Crashingly boring, unless you’re into that kind of thing. Don’t know anyone who would be interested, do you?”

“I can probably think of someone. Shame to waste all those shops.”

Crowley kissed his cheek. Aziraphale had missed the press of Crowley’s lips on his cheek, and he tried to wrap his mind around all the delightful places they could press now, especially if they made it to a bed next time. “Truth, Aziraphale?” He was audibly trying to sound unaffected, the darling, ridiculous snake.

“With all my heart, my dearest.”

“Yeah. Me too.” Crowley tightened his grip even further, and Aziraphale settled into it. “Me too, angel.”

~end~