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The last thing that Crowley expects on the day Aziraphale goes to Heaven is to see Aziraphale again that night.
He’s been grappling with the gut-punch possibility that he might not see Aziraphale again, ever. Or, somehow worse: next time, Aziraphale could be leading the charge in Armageddon the sequel. That one’s a real kick in the teeth along with the gut-punching.
So it’s a shock—to put it mildly—when Aziraphale pops up not long after Crowley has turned off the light and gone to bed with half a bottle of whiskey.
First he thinks it’s a trap. Then he thinks Aziraphale must be in some kind of trouble. Already. (Inevitably.) Then, most treacherous of all, he lets himself hope that Aziraphale has come back for good. Chosen their side in the end. Just needed some time to have a proper think about it, and some time being reminded that the other angels were a giant bag of winged dicks.
"Angel?" Crowley is afraid to raise his voice, lest Aziraphale prove to be a dream and vanish like a soap bubble. "That you?"
"Yes," says Aziraphale, as though that settles it. Then he climbs up on Crowley’s bed. He’s untying his bow tie.
Definitely dreaming, then. Crowley’s had loads of dreams that go like this.
Only there’s Aziraphale’s weight settling on his legs. There’s Aziraphale, tugging the bow tie off.
"Erm," tries Crowley.
He opens his mouth to ask more questions, lots of questions, but Aziraphale leans in and presses a finger over his mouth. Crowley loses the thread. If he ever had a thread.
"I think we did quite enough damage today, talking," Aziraphale says. "I’m not interested in talking right now, Crowley. I remain, however, quite interested in the other way you declared yourself."
Aziraphale starts to undo the buttons on his shirt and vest, discovers that they’re really fucking full-up with buttons, and gives an exasperated sigh. A blink of the eye and he’s naked, sat astride Crowley’s thighs.
Crowley doesn’t blink, so he sees the whole thing happen. Can’t seem to make it make sense.
He opens his mouth. Aziraphale’s finger is still pressed there. It’s firm and unyielding, which also happens to be what’s happening to the Effort that Crowley instinctively made upon finding himself with a lapful of lush angel.
Aziraphale, naked (!) and just as hard (!!) and straddling him (!!!), narrows his eyes. Crowley knows this is it, the now-or-never moment, the chance to show he was really listening to Aziraphale this time. And Aziraphale said he didn’t want to talk—but that he was maybe into the kissing part of their disaster day (?!).
Crowley can work with that. Crowley has never wanted to work with anything so much before.
So he opens his mouth, and he doesn’t say anything. He licks the length of Aziraphale’s finger. Aziraphale then sticks said finger into Crowley’s mouth.
Well, then.
Well. Things go upside down after that, in that at some point a while later they’re flipped over. Aziraphale’s soft thighs are anchored around Crowley’s waist, and Crowley is fucking him as though the fate of the universe depends on him making this spectacular.
It might, actually. He’s still not entirely clear on what’s going on, and what it means or what it will ultimately mean. All he knows is he’s being given the chance to be inside Aziraphale after thousands of years of contemplating exactly that.
It feels better than even his most delirious fever-dreams. It’s more carnal than the volumes of poetry he wrote on the subject during the Restoration, which is saying something. It plumbs greater emotional depths than all his years of psychoanalysis with Sigmund. He can’t tell Aziraphale any of that because they aren’t talking. So he just kisses down Aziraphale’s neck and bites him there and sucks bruises that won’t last but Crowley will know they’re there, now, forever.
He makes Aziraphale come again—he’s lost track of how many times it is now—and Aziraphale moans, which makes Crowley come again. There’s been a lot of moaning and coming. That’s pretty much the only point that Crowley is clear on.
Turns out Aziraphale is vocal in bed, along with more than a little pushy, along with desperately needy and also perfectly insatiable, and yeah, Crowley doesn’t need to ever talk to anyone again if that’s the way through it. He’s fine just doing this as his eternity.
But in the morning, Aziraphale gets up to go. Technically he gets off to go, since he’s midway through riding Crowley’s cock for the umpteenth time. Which is just. Great stuff.
"Would you look at the time," Aziraphale says, despite the glaring lack of clocks in Crowley’s bedroom. He miracles his clothes back on and starts to finger-comb his hair. "If I don’t catch the next elevator I’m going to be late to the daily staff meeting."
Crowley works his jaw. Is afraid, for a moment, that he might unhinge the whole thing, revert to full snake. His body doesn’t know what to do now that it’s had Aziraphale all night and was partially through having him again.
"So," Crowley ventures. He props himself on his elbows, kind of like how a snake rears up to scent the air for feedback with its tongue. He bites his tongue and refrains from making any comment on the fact that Aziraphale is headed back to Heaven. "We’re talking?"
"Some other time," says Aziraphale, with the grace to sound a trifle apologetic. He bustles over to the bed, bends down, and—kisses Crowley’s forehead, kind of like how one would say goodbye to a sad Dickensian orphan. "This was—very nice indeed."
Crowley’s brain overheats as he tries to dissect the sentiment there, hoping to be clued in on whatever the fuck is going on. Then he becomes aware that Aziraphale is staring at him. Waiting. Expectant.
Crowley panics. What’s the right thing to say? He has abundant proof that he keeps saying the wrong ones where Aziraphale is concerned. What do you express to the being you’ve adored for millennia, who you were quite sure you’d lost for good, until they popped round unexpectedly for some mind-unraveling, laws-of-physics-defying sex?
Thanks? Let’s do this again? Marry me? Nice catching up? Want to grab coffee? Reconsider Alpha Centauri? Is this it? Do you like me? (Circle yes or no.) Do you know that the only thing I remember from the time I was an angel was that I loved the shape of you streaking across the sky, before we even met? Maybe meet up for a pizza later?
"Yeah," says Crowley. Since Aziraphale has just referenced their nighttime activity, Crowley does the same. "Big fan of that, me."
"Well," says Aziraphale. Does he look relieved? Disappointed? Happy? Conflicted? Why does his blasted beautiful face have to show so many different types of feelings at once? Isn’t fair. "I’d best be going."
"See you, then," says Crowley, all casual-cool.
He wants to add, screaming, Right? Right? I will, right? And then, when Aziraphale is gone, he does scream, loud and long, into his pillows.
He rolls around in bed for a while. The scent of them together is unprecedented in his experience—like woodsmoke and whipped cream—and he wants to wear it on his skin and nothing else.
"Fuck," says Crowley, with feeling. The conversation is catching back up to him, and all of his word choices feel stupid and bitter in his mouth. "‘Big fan’? ‘See you’?"
Yet the last time he’d made what felt like deeply declarative and devastatingly specific statements to Aziraphale about how he felt, everything had gone wrong. Playing it safe again doesn’t feel like the worst possible option, especially if there’s any hope of anything like last night happening again.
He and Aziraphale had actually made—sex. They’d made sex like a Guinness World Record-breaking amount of times. Even if it never happens again, that’s a Guinness World Record-breaking amount more times than Crowley ever anticipated. He’ll be fine, really.
He presses his cheek into the crevice on his pillow where Aziraphale’s head had lain. A shitty little voice in his head pipes up, right on time. You’re a demon, Anthony J. Crowley. You lie.
The tragic fact is this: he’ll wait a hundred thousand years for Aziraphale if he has to. Two hundred, if the waiting’s good.
A considerably less tragic fact: it’s only been two-and-a-quarter weeks of waiting when Aziraphale stops round the bookshop.
It’s not like Crowley works there or anything. Wouldn’t be caught dead. He just helps out sometimes. Makes sure Muriel hasn’t set the place on fire—still feels touchy about all that. Offers some words of wisdom on occasion to get the wee angel pointed in the right direction.
They’re more than a bit clueless, but endearing in their earnestness. Muriel’s the only angel beside Aziraphale who seems like a good egg, and it tickles Crowley to no end to think that he’s the one advising them. And he remembers, sometimes, what it felt like to be new to the world.
So no, he doesn’t work at the bookshop. He advises there on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and some Sunday afternoons. When the brunch crowd’s in full swing, Muriel’s taken to helping Nina out across the street as a human barista; and, well, someone has to make sure no books are sold.
The bell over the door rings as Crowley’s in the stacks, reshelving. It’s taking bloody forever to fix the utterly batshit system that Jim—Gabriel—had devised.
"Closed for lunch," Crowley calls. "Also dinner."
There’s the tread of worn-in leather shoes that Crowley would recognize blindfolded in outer space, and then Aziraphale peeks his head around the corner.
"Oh, hello," says Aziraphale.
Crowley wishes that he’d thought to keep his glasses on, because the sudden blaze of Aziraphale’s platinum hair is like the fucking sun. He squints and makes out like he’s incredibly concerned about reuniting The Great Gatsby ("In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since") with Tender Is The Night ("On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a proud, rose-colored hotel") after Gabriel had shelved them an absurd distance apart.
Crowley’s in a good mood—bookshop Sundays are nice, though he’ll swallow his own tongue before he ever says as much. And Aziraphale is here, and Aziraphale is giving him a sort of electric, considering look that Crowley wants to set up a tent and live in.
So. He plays it out.
"Help you find something, sir?"
Crowley’s sure he’s chosen the right approach, because Aziraphale’s eyes go wide and a smile twitches his lips. Aziraphale never met a chance to playact he didn’t relish.
"Why yes, thank you." Aziraphale meanders down the aisle, sometimes pausing to run a finger along the spine of a book. "I’m afraid I’m looking for something terribly specific."
Crowley knows the angel feels sentimental about every volume in the place; it’s a bit like his own feelings about the Bentley. He wonders if Aziraphale can sense the bookshop the way he can his car. If Aziraphale knew in advance that Crowley was shelving alone.
"Here at Fell’s, we have the most comprehensive as well as esoteric collection in the United Kingdom," Crowley tells him, playing the dedicated bookshop employee to the hilt. He watches Aziraphale’s eyes dilate at that, the way his lips part.
"How extraordinary," says Aziraphale. He’s sidled close to Crowley now. His voice scales low and secret. "And if one were seeking a volume of a more…sensual persuasion?"
"Well, then," says Crowley. It’s a struggle to stand so near and not reach for him. To not seem as tremulously hopeful as he feels. "Those we keep in a special section. I could—I could show you."
"Could you?" says Aziraphale.
"Right this way," says Crowley, and he leads the way to the back of the shop, to the erotica aisle that Aziraphale keeps politely tucked from view—for the discretion of casual browsers as well as those interested in the shelves’ unique wares. He’s afraid to turn back and find that Aziraphale isn’t following him, that he’s read this all wrong.
But as soon as the shadow of the first shelf falls over them, Aziraphale moves fast. He grabs for the back of Crowley’s neck, gets a double handful of Crowley’s hair, and pulls Crowley into a kiss.
By every conceivable unit of measurement it’s a different and far better sort of kiss than what had transpired here before. That one’s on Crowley. This time, Aziraphale’s hands slide down without hesitation across Crowley’s shoulder blades to hold him closer. This time, Aziraphale’s tongue is definitely in his mouth. This time, Aziraphale leaves no room for doubt that what he wants is to kiss Crowley, and for Crowley to kiss him back.
Fucking Hell does Crowley kiss him back.
"Sir," Crowley murmurs, when Aziraphale moves to nibble along his ear. "This is highly irregular."
Aziraphale laughs. It’s so good to hear Aziraphale laugh; it feels like it’s been years. It’s even better when Aziraphale pushes on, undeterred by Crowley’s teasing.
"I’ve stolen away on lunch break, I’m afraid that I can’t stay long," Aziraphale says. "But I was hoping…"
"What, angel?" Crowley bites the inside of his cheek. He still isn’t sure what’s on the table and what isn’t, or where the table is and why; but he won’t try and mask his own eagerness. That’s a losing game, a game he already lost. "Tell me. It’s yours."
"For a spot of lunch," says Aziraphale, and then he’s on his knees.
Crowley’s internal wiring short-circuits as he witnesses it happen. As he feels it happen. Aziraphale undoes his belt and zip with clever fingers, peels down his jeans.
A flash of those extraordinary blue eyes, enough to read Aziraphale’s intent and see his need—he does in fact appear hungry, starved—
He swallows Crowley’s cock with such skill that some tiny functioning part of Crowley’s brain thinks he should be jealous. But all he can do is silently applaud whoever Aziraphale honed his craft with in the past.
Turns out Aziraphale is an ardent and expert cocksucker. You think you know a guy, know him longer than the age of the Earth, and he can still surprise you. Isn’t that something.
Thankfully, by the evidence presented, the cock Aziraphale wants to suck now is Crowley’s, and he’s doing things with his tongue and the suction of his cheeks that make Crowley forget the spelling of his name. Crowley or Crawly? Crawly or Crowley? An ‘a’ or an—
"Oh," Crowley groans. "Oh, fuck, Aziraphale."
He dares to slip his hands into Aziraphale’s hair; it’s softer than gossamer beneath his fingertips. Aziraphale hums approval at that, then deep-throats him until Crowley thinks that offering up his poor blighted soul might be the only proper response.
Is this some sort of conversion effort? Is Aziraphale’s plan that he deploy one wily, masterful blowjob and Crowley will follow him meekly back to Heaven? If so, it’s a brilliant plan. An exquisite one. He’ll go. There’s no other considerations at the moment beyond wet heat, blue eyes like oceans, pert lips wrapped around his cock. Crowley is perilously close to praising God.
Aziraphale pulls off, and Crowley has to lean back against the sexy books for support. Because Aziraphale’s tongue is slick and wicked along the underside of his cock, and all of Crowley’s screws are loose.
"Come in my mouth," Aziraphale instructs, and, okay, maybe this isn’t a holy intervention. Maybe this is the Aziraphale he tempted with a morsel of meat, who then couldn’t stop, who wouldn’t, until he’d had the whole feast. His voracious, indulgent angel. His exacting angel. "Come twice."
Let the record note that Crowley does his level best not to deny Aziraphale anything.
Aziraphale kisses him again, afterward, somehow even hungrier, and Crowley takes the opportunity to taste himself on Aziraphale’s tongue. He makes an embarrassingly lewd sound and Aziraphale swallows that down, too.
Crowley cups his cheek. He doesn’t care if Aziraphale feels how his hand is shaking, how his whole body feels turned inside out. "Angel. Let me—?"
"I really must get going," says Aziraphale, but he doesn’t move. Except to move his hips against Crowley’s in a manner that presses home the point of his own desire.
"It’s Sunday," Crowley ventures. "Day off and all that up there, isn’t it?"
"Staff retreat," Aziraphale says, with a frustrated little sigh. "Team-building exercises."
Crowley finds himself grinning. "That was one of Hell’s inventions."
"Yes, well." Aziraphale’s gaze is glassy with arousal. "I suppose I could stay a few minutes longer? There were some things I needed on my desk."
A few timely miracles ensure that when Aziraphale is tipped face-forward across his desk, the myriad scattered objects don’t break on the floor. Another snap and the door locks and the curtains draw and the sign outside reads EXTREMELY CLOSED. That’s about the limit of Crowley’s ability to multitask, though.
Let the record further note that Crowley has wanted to bend Aziraphale over a desk since the invention of desks. He’s wanted to bend Aziraphale over this particular desk since the day Aziraphale first showed it off, his fingers trailing happily over the dark wood.
The desk creaks as Crowley drives into him, hard and fast and bordering on frantic. Aziraphale scrabbles for purchase on the wood, does quite a bit of the knocking over of objects and the scattering of papers himself. Maybe this is a fantasy that Aziraphale entertained, too. Wouldn’t that be fascinating.
Aziraphale tosses his head and moans like he learned moaning from the pornographic movies Crowley helped produce in the 1970s, and he says things like "more, more," and "harder, if you please, my dear," and "Crowley, oh, Crowley."
"Yes, yes, right there," Aziraphale adds, breathless. It’s instantly Crowley’s favorite song.
Crowley pulls out a little trick from the sex demon handbook and he makes his cock even longer and thicker inside Aziraphale, and Aziraphale gasps so loudly that a bar of chocolate on the desk spontaneously melts in sympathy.
"Like that, do you, angel?"
"Oh, my, yes."
But do you, uh. Like me?
Crowley wants desperately to ask, to try and get a grip on what’s going on with them. But he doesn’t want to ask more than he wants to fuck Aziraphale through the desk. More than he wants to make Aziraphale come shudderingly on his cock. (Which he does. Thrice.) More than he wants to leave an indelible memory in this precious pocket of the bookshop that won’t ever be unmade.
They’ve spent so much time here, so painfully far apart. Even when Crowley had begun to feel bold enough to perch on the arm of Aziraphale’s chair, it still seemed like an insurmountable gulf ran between them.
Now—no gulf. At least not a physical one. No discernible gulf as Crowley holds tight to sumptuous angel hips and lets himself spill into Aziraphale. He’s dizzy with the joy of it. He hunches down and kisses the back of Aziraphale’s neck, tastes the salt of sweat on a curl of Aziraphale’s hair.
"All right?" Crowley leaves him slowly, loath to go.
"Mmm. Quite," says Aziraphale, with a little full-body shiver of satisfaction that Crowley’s only seen associated with passionfruit riz au lait mousse cake. Crowley’ll take that as a compliment.
They miracle their way back to a semblance of order and reopen the shop. Not a moment too soon, because the door chimes just as Crowley is gearing up to say some kind of goodbye to Aziraphale. What kind of goodbye he’s still workshopping when Muriel waltzes in and saves him from himself.
"Mr. Fell!" Muriel looks delighted to see him. They remember themselves a half-breath later, and execute a little salute. "I mean. Supreme Archangel, sir."
Crowley staves off a flinch. He’s tried his hardest not to dwell upon Aziraphale’s new title, and Aziraphale hasn’t mentioned it specifically. Only mentions his role in Heaven in passing. Responsibilities he has to attend to, tasks that keep pulling him away just when the getting’s good. When it’s really, really, really good.
"Good afternoon to you, Muriel." Aziraphale has his kindest smile out for the angel. "Just Aziraphale is fine, my dear. May I say you’ve done a wonderful job looking after the shop?"
Muriel radiates happiness at that. "Thank you! Mr. Crowley’s taught me so much. You’d think he was an experienced human bookseller instead of a demon."
Crowley pinches the bridge of his nose. But he can feel when Aziraphale turns that gorgeous smile on him. Then all he can think about is the other shapes Aziraphale’s mouth made today.
"Has Mr. Crowley," says Aziraphale, voice warm. "I can see my establishment is in very good hands. I hate to cut the visit short, but I’m afraid I’m needed elsewhere."
"Come again anytime!" Muriel chirps.
Please, thinks Crowley, fervent. It’s nearly a prayer.
"You’re too kind," Aziraphale tells her. He goes to the door, then pauses with his hand on the knob. He turns around and catches Crowley’s eye. There’s a hint of mischief on his lips that Crowley wants to capture and carve into marble.
"Thanks again for lunch," says Aziraphale.
So it goes. This is Crowley’s life now: he advises at the bookshop Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and some Sundays. Thursdays after shop hours is now a standing pub date with Muriel, Maggie, and Nina.
In his free time he races the Bentley through the streets of London, amusing himself by helping to undo hellish snarls of traffic that he was responsible for in prior decades. He rids the flat of the last signs of Shax, redecorates. Comes home with a new plant almost every time he goes out, until greenery is blooming from every direction.
And Aziraphale visits. And they make—sex.
As far as Crowley can tell, there’s no set pattern or reasoning to when Aziraphale will appear. (He does up a spreadsheet, but the attempt to track Aziraphale’s visits only drives home how random they are.)
Sometimes Aziraphale arrives at night and stays until the morning; that’s Crowley’s default favorite, though he’s not complaining about any of the rest of it. Sometimes Aziraphale finds him at the bookshop, and they investigate new and increasingly elaborate ways to utilize the furniture in their sex-making. A few times, on Crowley’s non-advising days, Aziraphale has stopped by in the early morning before work with breakfast pastries (that gets messy, fast, but also delicious).
There was a golden unforgettable afternoon when Crowley was driving to check on their friends in Tadfield. He came out from paying for petrol and Aziraphale was sitting in the front seat of his car, reading that day's edition of The Guardian and sipping from a travel mug of tea, as though he’d been there from the start of the trip.
Crowley slid into the driver’s side without missing a beat. "Where to?"
"I should think any good bend in the road will do," said Aziraphale, with a hitch of one white-blond eyebrow so suggestive that sometimes Crowley spirals for hours in the dark of night simply contemplating it. An eyebrow.
He drove until he found a turn-off with a sheltering copse of trees. He had Aziraphale in the backseat of the Bentley, such a closely-held wish for so long that it was all he could do not to tear up during the act. Couldn’t go crying while copulating with such dedication that the car rocked on its chassis and the earth rolled underneath them.
The afterglow was just as good; he dozed against Aziraphale’s chest, and the angel let him, ran fingers through his hair. They discovered that the car had turned fire-engine red with red leather seats, and it stubbornly refused to change back until Crowley pulled into his customary spot across from the bookshop, and Aziraphale got out and left.
Aziraphale is always leaving. That’s the part that Crowley struggles with. Not whether it’s going to be days or weeks between the next visit, but that the visit will inevitably end. That, and that they still don’t talk about what any of it means.
They talk plenty now, at least, quite like the way they used to. Crowley says something witty, and Aziraphale says something amusing back, and they volley words like tennis balls over the rare cup of wine when they’re not fucking. (Sometimes they also drink wine while fucking.)
But it’s like before—like they’re saying a whole lot and not very much at all. Aziraphale makes vague allusions to the fact that he’s the supreme commander of Heavenly forces these days, and he’s always running late to tri-quarterly employee reviews and running behind on his expense report approvals, but otherwise, he might as well have found employment as a human barista for all that Crowley’s in the know.
So nothing’s changed overmuch from the way they were. Save for a shockingly plentiful and sometimes surprisingly acrobatic amount of wildly enthusiastic sex. They don’t talk about that, either, except for asking for more of it or a different configuration in the moment.
And that’s fine. It’s fucking unbelievably wondrous to touch Aziraphale at all. Crowley isn’t complaining. He’s the happiest he’s ever been, happier than he imagined he would be allowed to be in this world or any other.
If he could only understand his place in things—if he could grasp what Aziraphale wanting him at current meant for them in the end, maybe he could sleep at night.
He seldom sleeps now, because he’s either awake alone and spiraling over the concept of a pale raised eyebrow, or because he’s fucking Aziraphale, or because Aziraphale is resting in his arms and Crowley is counting down the milliseconds until Aziraphale will leave again. It could be the last time, couldn’t it.
But yeah. Otherwise, everything’s great.
"If you ask me, it’s pretty messed up," Nina says at Thursday night drinks. He and Nina are three pints in, while Maggie nurses a seltzer with lime, and Muriel has miracled up their favorite human drink, double vanilla milkshake with extra rainbow sprinkles. "I mean, sorry, Crowley, but red flags are waving. I’d know."
Crowley smiles at her with pointy teeth. "I don’t recall asking, ta."
It’s not like he’s told them what’s going on with Aziraphale, of course. Just that—just that he’s seeing someone, sometimes. And that the sex is fantastic but the communication is possibly a little lacking. And that the other person is tremendously busy and their lives and priorities don’t quite line up, and Crowley doesn’t know how they really feel, where this is headed. If it’s headed anywhere at all, or they’re standing still.
He hasn’t once said "Aziraphale," certainly never "Aziraphale," but there’s an Aziraphale-shaped pall that falls over him whenever Aziraphale isn’t there, and, well. They aren’t stupid. Even Muriel is far from it. Muriel is just fresh and unspoiled by the treacheries of the world. Give them a few more years on Earth and they’ll catch right up.
"We all want what’s best for you," says Maggie, with a gentler approach. Under the table she’s holding Nina’s hand. The two of them have taken it slow, but there’s something lovely in bloom.
Crowley thinks about being able to hold Aziraphale’s hand at the pub. He drinks a good deal more.
"If what you’re doing makes you happy, then really, it’s not on us to judge from afar," Maggie is saying. "It just—sounds a bit unsustainable, from what you’ve told us."
"You shouldn’t be at his beck and call," says Nina flatly. "He’s using you."
"I happen to like being at his beck and call," Crowley says, honest as he’s ever been. "'s my favorite thing, really."
Happen to like being used, too. Being useful. Necessary. Nothing thrilled or pleased him more. They couldn’t understand the dynamic that had been spun like so many threads between him and the angel for longer than human history was recorded.
The problem wasn’t that Aziraphale was using him; he was getting a great deal of delightful use of Aziraphale right back. The problem was that he didn’t know why any of this usage was occurring.
Muriel has listened quietly throughout, their eyes darting from face to face, attentive. Then they take a big gulp of their milkshake, emulating Crowley’s own swallow, as though for liquid courage.
"But I don’t understand," Muriel blurts. "Aren’t you and Mr. Fell in love? Why are you saying you don’t know how he feels?"
A devastating sort of silence descends in the wake of Muriel tossing out grenades. Under the table, Maggie squeezes Nina’s hand in a panic.
Three sets of eyes turn slowly on the blushing angel. Crowley has never been more relieved to be wearing dark glasses. He considers, briefly, sinking through the floorboards and down into Hell in order to exit this conversation. But the uncertainty of whether he’d be able to return keeps him from going that route.
"Muriel," Maggie says, soft. "We shouldn’t presume to know how others—"
"Oh, no. Don’t dream of stopping on my account." Crowley kicks out his feet, becomes a boneless slump in his chair. If he can’t go to Hell he’s going to get the most from being dragged through it. "Do go on, Muriel."
Muriel has another swig of milkshake. They know they’ve put their foot in it, somehow, but they aren’t quite sure how, and so they charge bravely on.
"I’ve learned all about humans being in love," Muriel says. Their eyes flick to the women across the table. "I mean, about people being in love. Normal regular people. And Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell show all the signs, even though they aren’t actually hum—that is, they show all the regular human person love signs. They’re together whenever they can be. They’re always looking at each other like no one else matters. They have little jokes between them that nobody understands. When you mention one to the other, their eyes light up. It’s ever so romantic."
Crowley sits without breathing. Nina polishes off her pint. Maggie gives a polite sort of cough.
"Isn’t it?" Muriel’s brow furrows with confusion as they try and work through it. Then they lift a finger and jab it into the air, like they’ve cracked the case. "And of course there was the grand dramatic gesture after the unfortunate misunderstanding, then reconciliation, and love conquering all! I saw it myself. It happened just like it does in the books. The romance ones."
"You what," says Crowley. He still isn’t breathing. He might be hissing, though.
"Would you look at that, I need another drink," says Nina, standing up.
"Would you look at that, I need to help you get another drink," says Maggie.
They hurry away from the table, which is considerate of them. Not that Crowley is capable of processing anything except Muriel across from him, and he’s struggling badly there.
"You’re angry with me," says Muriel. They cast their eyes down, ashamed. "I swear I wasn’t trying to spy that time! I was just standing watch like The Metatron told me. I didn’t mean to see you and Mr. Fell snogging through the window."
"I promise I’m not angry," Crowley tells them. Loud klaxons and morning alarm clocks are sounding in his head that he’s missed some terrifically important details. Details that maybe it took an angel to witness and parse. "I need your help, Muriel. I need you to tell me exactly what you think you saw when you were standing watch."
"Oh!" Muriel brightens. "Well, I was keeping a close eye on the proceedings like a human police officer would. I saw you and Mr. Fell having a very impassioned conversation. It seemed like you were arguing. Both of you had tears in your eyes! You walked away from him like you were finished with it all. Oh dear, I thought. Oh dear. The argument had ended badly. But then, just at the door, you turned back! And then, how romantic, you went straight to Mr. Fell and kissed him. It was a rather long kiss. He forgave you after that, anyone could see. The grand gesture always works after a misunderstanding! And it did, didn’t it? Just last week I accidentally happened to look through the window and saw you snogging him again. He was smiling the whole time."
"I see," says Crowley, although he really, really doesn’t. He does, however, feel as though his stomach has dropped down somewhere around his ankles. "You were admirably thorough in your duties, and I appreciate that. Can I ask you to do something else for me? It’s a secret mission, and you mustn’t tell anyone else."
Muriel nods, their eyes enormous. Crowley flicks his finger. A young man scribbling in his journal a few tables away tears a blank page out of the book, gets up, and delivers it to Crowley, along with his extra pen.
"Cheers," says Crowley, as the man, blinking, returns to his seat. He scrawls out Need to talk, folds the note three times, and passes it to Muriel.
"I need you to go to Heaven and get that to the Supreme Archangel tonight," Crowley says. "It’s of the utmost importance that you deliver it only to him, and only when he is alone. Do you think you can do that?"
"I’ll go right away," says Muriel. They tuck the note into their pocket. Their face is lit up with excitement. "I’ve seen all of the James Bond human MI6 agent cinematic movie events. No one will catch me."
"Good angel," says Crowley, and means it. He’s immensely grateful. Muriel hightails it out of the pub.
Crowley gets up. His legs feel wobbly; it would be terribly comforting to be a snake right now. He’d like to slither back home in the dark, only feeling the somewhat more limited range of snake-emotions. But he thinks he’s done quite enough dodging and weaving as it is.
"Have something I need to take care of," he stops to tell Maggie and Nina, who are lingering at the bar.
Maggie pats his arm encouragingly.
Nina says, "Speak your mind, Crowley. Don’t leave it open to misinterpretation or doubt. Anything else is wasted time."
Crowley nods. He goes.
Back at the flat, he sets the stage so that he has something to do other than convince himself not to do this. His head is swarming with thoughts like a kicked-over anthill. Not many of the thoughts are stringing together into coherent conclusions.
He puts a clean black tablecloth over the small table in the kitchen and gets out the best wine glasses. He hems and haws over his wine collection for a while before choosing a favorite Chilean red of Aziraphale’s. All of the wines in his collection are Aziraphale’s favorites, but this is as good a starting place as any. He uncorks it and leaves it to breathe.
He’d been in too much of a state to think of buying flowers, and he doesn’t really go in for flowers, home gardening-wise. But he has an Anthurium proudly gleaming with ruby-red leaves, and he supposes that will do. He fetches the plant and puts it on the table near the wine.
Then he waits. He doesn’t know how long he’ll have to. He hasn’t seen Aziraphale since last week, when Aziraphale, in a exceptional bit of reversal, had been the one to fuck Crowley in the very hallway where he’s currently pacing.
Aziraphale had held him hitched up against the wall, his mouth open on Crowley’s neck as he moved inside him. It was so overwhelming while it happened that Crowley hadn’t been able to say much of anything at all; he just held on for his own dear accursed life, and when they came, they came together. Crowley kissed him for a long time after that, to make up for the whole stunned silence thing.
The hallway suddenly feels too chaotically charged. Crowley goes back into the kitchen and contemplates starting on the wine.
He hears the door open, Aziraphale’s quick step over the threshold. He checks his watch. Only half an hour since he sent Muriel to take the message all the way to Heaven. James Bond has nothing on his favorite secret agent angel. He’s going to buy Muriel cufflinks that are also lasers.
"Crowley?" Aziraphale’s voice is loudly pitched.
"In the kitchen, angel."
Aziraphale comes in hot. He’s left Heaven without his suit jacket, the buttons of his vest done up to mismatched buttonholes. His hair is in disarray, windblown, like maybe he flew the distance from Whickber Street.
Crowley starts to feel a sort of soaring feeling himself, a fluttering in his chest. But countless millennia of hard-earned pessimism tries to stamp it out. He’s spent so long being at war with the world’s injustices and with God’s self-righteousness and Hell’s stupidity, and he doesn’t know how to stop. He’s at war with himself.
"Is something the matter? I got your note. I was afraid—" Aziraphale pauses as he takes in the set table, the wine, the glasses, the pretty plant. "Ah. I see."
"Didn’t mean to worry you," Crowley says. He takes Aziraphale’s arm and steers him to a seat. "Probably should’ve thought that one through a bit more."
The relief on Aziraphale’s face speaks volumes that Crowley is desperate to hear. Crowley plunges on, filling their glasses nearly to the brim.
"Well, you’ve sprung me from having to attend a dreadfully dull meeting of the Heavenly board," says Aziraphale, his whole worried manner transformed into a sparkly-eyed one. He clinks their glasses together after Crowley slips into his chair. Takes an exploratory swallow of the wine and gives a happy exhale. "Vina Almaviva. How marvelous. What’s the occasion?"
"Us," says Crowley, going for broke.
Aziraphale doesn’t blink. As in, he doesn’t look thrown for any kind of a loop. He lofts his wine higher. "To us, then." He drinks deep after that.
Crowley stares down into the red heart of his glass. "I think there’s been a wee bit of a misunderstanding."
Now Aziraphale does blink. Uncertainty chases its way across his face before he masters it. Fuck. Fuck. Crowley is fucking this up already, before it’s even begun.
He blows out a breath. Speak your mind, Nina had said.
"Aziraphale," he says. "You know I—you know I want to be with you. That it’s what I want, more than anything."
Slowly, Aziraphale nods. Good. Great. No confusion on that front.
Crowley gathers up every dogged bit of courage he’s ever had and goes for even more broke. "And you…want to be with me?"
Aziraphale smiles, the unfair smile-thing he does that’s like being shot through with sunshine. "I should think that was fairly obvious by now, my dear. That reminds me, I have some good news—"
"No," says Crowley, rocketed back into one of the worst days of his life, then later absolutely the best night ever when Aziraphale climbed into his bed. It’s all a messy jumble that still takes up too much aching space in his head. "No, we have to do this first. Please."
This time, Aziraphale closes his mouth. He nods again.
"That day in the bookshop," Crowley starts, and he doesn’t have to specify which day, even though there have been countless days in the bookshop, and as of late, some rollickingly obscene ones. "We argued. Said some things we maybe shouldn’t have, and some things that needed saying. I went to leave. Then what happened?"
Aziraphale cants his head, like he can’t understand the game that Crowley’s playing at, but he can see that it’s important. He plays along.
"You came back instead. You kissed me in the human way. I was surprised at first, but in that moment I could feel the depth of your sentiment. I am a being of love, after all. It was quite transformative. You were so bold, so certain. I forgave you any ill-will that had been voiced, and you responded that I didn’t have to bother with all that, and so I considered our disagreement to be settled. After that—well. You know the rest."
Crowley’s pathetic heart is an over-beaten drum in his chest. He’s tilted so far over the table toward Aziraphale that he’s in danger of upsetting the glasses. He’s all but horizontal. "Pretend like I don’t."
"What are you on about," Aziraphale says. He has another sip of wine. "Now you’re teasing me."
"Angel," says Crowley with greater urgency. The greatest. "Pretend like I don’t."
Aziraphale meets his gaze head-on. His eyebrows fly up. "We chose our own side, of course," he says. "The only side there really was for us, wasn’t it, the one we’d always shared. The human side. Your kiss pointed the way. I wasn’t going to run away from humanity with you, and you didn’t really want that; you could never give them up, just as I couldn’t give up on Heaven. But you indicated at the last that we could also share ourselves as humans do. So I took the job to do what good I could up there, and I’ve done my best to keep you out of it, because I know you didn’t approve. Ever since, you’ve been quite understanding on that front, which I do appreciate. I wish I wasn’t so abominably busy, but I do get away whenever I can to be with you, and, well, the human side of things has its own rather delightful perks, doesn’t it?"
Aziraphale gives him another winning smile after this extraordinary monologue is delivered, but it falters on his lips at Crowley’s expression. Crowley thinks he must resemble a gasping landed fish who’s suddenly thrown back into water.
"Are you—" Aziraphale casts around for clarity, suddenly alarmed. "Are you trying to say that you really didn’t know?"
Crowley shakes his head.
"Which part?"
"Most of it," Crowley admits. He’s done prevaricating. Done enough damage to them both that way, hasn’t he. "Truth is that after you left the shop with The Metatron, I thought we were finished. Then you came back that night, and I’ve never been happier to be wrong. But I’ve been bumbling around in the dark ever since."
"But I—I said that I forgave you, Crowley!"
"Words mean different things to different people," says Crowley, who has gone from total euphoria at Aziraphale’s assertion that they have a side to a creeping misery that he won’t be welcomed there any longer. "We don’t always hear the same thing." He swallows; it feels like there are glass shards in his mouth. "The way I saw it was you rejecting me. Us. And then you left, so."
"But," says Aziraphale, eyes so wide that Crowley can see the golden wheels spinning in his head. "You waited outside to see me off!"
"Jesus H. Christ," swears Crowley, not caring who hears him. Not that the poor guy needs to be dragged into this.
"And we—we—" Aziraphale glances away. He’s turned white as a sheet. "We’ve made love dozens of times since then." (The number is actually in the mid-hundreds, but maybe only Crowley’s counting.) "We’ve been together, a group of the two of us, just as you said you wanted."
"Look, angel, I’ve been a damned fool about this," Crowley says. He feels sick with the enormity of his stupidity and self-loathing, and how that had clouded his ability to see anything else. "Everything we’ve done has been exceptional. Grade-A. Wouldn’t trade a minute of it. Best minutes since they started keeping track of them. I just couldn’t read the room. Or imagine you thought to share it. The room, I mean."
Aziraphale shakes his head, like he’s too shocked to speak.
Crowley gets more of his backbone up (difficult, snake-wise), and he makes himself say: "Again, not complaining. Won’t. But since we started all that, hasn’t that been pretty much all we’ve done? How was I supposed to know what you were in it for?"
"In it for?" Now Aziraphale’s eyes are wet, which is just about the most awful sight Crowley’s seen, and he’s spent a fair amount of time in Hell's torture pits. "An intimate country drive in our car. Afternoons uniquely repurposing the bookshop. Lazy late-night tête-à-têtes. Staying in your arms until morning. Stopping by to see you in the morning so that I could face the rest of the day."
Crowley stares. Blinks. Stares. When you put it like that—
Aziraphale appears more stunned with every passing breath. He presses a hand to his mouth. "If you didn’t know that I’d also chosen our side, then all this time—every time I came to be with you—what must you have thought? That I was just taking whatever I pleased, then flitting away again? That’s—monstrous. I would have seemed monstrous."
"No," says Crowley. All the panic buttons are being pushed in his head. Jammed, really. The warning system is blaring that he’s closer to losing Aziraphale than he’s ever been, and this time, there’ll be no nocturnal return. "I could never—not about you. Whenever you came by made me the happiest I’ve ever been since the time before that. The things we’ve done—I’d stay in bed with you and never leave, don’t you see? I chose you. I’ll always choose you over anything else."
"Yet you didn’t think I could arrive at the same decision," Aziraphale says. There’s a new blaze in his eyes that Crowley hasn’t seen before, an icy, neon sort of blue. The fact of Aziraphale’s being the Supreme Archangel of Heaven is suddenly with them in the room.
"You didn’t," snaps Crowley, flung entirely into his miseries. All of his pleading and speaking-his-minding isn’t getting them anywhere except someplace bad. He’s been wrong about almost everything, hasn’t he. He should’ve known he’d get this wrong. He’ll say his piece, he’ll finally say it all, and if Aziraphale is in a smiting mood, well, he can’t imagine a better way to go.
"You chose Heaven also, and all that goes with it. Not only me. I didn’t think you could have both, but turns out I was fucking wrong about that too, all right? Turns out you're fabulous at multitasking. If anyone can make things better there, can make it what it’s supposed to be, it’s you, Aziraphale. They’re more lucky to have you than they can possibly comprehend. I know how lucky I am to have you at all, how staggeringly lucky I am that you’d even glance in my direction. So yeah, I was glad to take what you were willing to give me and not push too hard or ask why. Because the last time I tried—"
His throat closes around the words, convulsive. He fights to get them out.
"The last time I tried to tell you that I loved you, I couldn’t do it, and I thought that ruined everything. I should have told you. I should’ve told you that I love even the first memory of you. It’s the only one I have from the time before. They tried to take it from me, but they couldn’t. Not that one. You, the brightest star in a sky of stars that I’d made, outshining my work. I loved you then. I’ve loved you since. It’s the core of who I am. Angels, demons, humans, Earth, Heaven, Hell—all of that’s secondary. I’m a thing that loves you. If you could only know how much—"
"Crowley." At some point in this recitation Aziraphale has dragged his chair around to Crowley’s side of the table. Now he takes Crowley’s hands, one in each of his own; Crowley is afraid he’s been flailing them about, or maybe wringing them.
Aziraphale’s hold is centering and sure. The unsettling light is gone from his eyes, leaving them their customary gold-flecked blue. "I do know, my dear. I told you. I felt it when you kissed me. Felt all of it. And that gave me the courage to embrace this other side for us, and to choose it in addition to Heaven’s. I’m sorry for not saying so more clearly. I assumed my actions spoke for me. Much of this disconnect was my fault—I can struggle in the telling. I’m afraid that what I say will fall short of what you expect from me."
Crowley gulps down air, wishing that it were wine. His own eyes feel round as marbles.
"The way in which you love me is immensely flattering," Aziraphale goes on. "But it can be intimidating. I’m so very far from perfect. It’s taken me a long time to learn many lessons you seemed to know instinctively from the start. I’m—rather a mess, aren't I? Charitably, a work in progress. At times I’m quite selfish. Self-indulgent. Wishy-washy and stubborn. Stuck in my ways. I like old books and cups of tea and a night at the theater. I never shaped nebulas."
"I," Crowley tries, shaking his head. "You—"
"It’s always been you cutting the dashing figure," Aziraphale says. He has the stage, and he’s standing firm upon it, not giving Crowley the chance to turn away from the last act. "You damning tradition and divining what’s really right from wrong, you swooping in to save me, you rushing toward the future. But it wasn’t the flashy gestures that drew me to you. From the very first, it’s been your kindness and your curiosity."
It’s taking every ounce of Crowley’s willpower not to keep protesting this series of outrageous pronouncements. But Aziraphale's voice also wraps around him, around and around, truthful and clear. There isn't a hint of dishonesty to be found.
"And therein, I think, has been a great source of our miscommunications," says Aziraphale. "You think to love me like a star, imagining I’m somehow untarnished and unreachable, and I love what’s most human in you." He squeezes Crowley’s hands. "I don’t want you to change. But I ask that you try to meet me here. Choose this side if you’ve felt what I have these last few months. If loving like people do is enough."
Crowley closes his eyes. The curtain falls, and thunderous applause is ringing in his ears. Roses are being tossed, the air thick with flying flowers. "Will you—will you say it again?"
Aziraphale doesn’t have to ask him what. "I love you. Never more than since I’ve had the chance to touch you and tell you in a way that’s only ours."
Crowley dwells for a while in the world created by those three words. So yearned for, so unfathomable, long thought to be an impossibility so far from his grasp he’d tried to stop grasping. They don’t land like an earthquake, though, aren’t carried on a shockwave, because Aziraphale has been saying them to him for months, through glances and kisses and gasps, has been writing them out with his fingertips. The wink of his eye as he thanked Crowley for lunch. The run of his hands through Crowley’s hair as they rested in the red-leather backseat of the Bentley. The press of his mouth on Crowley’s neck as he held him in the hallway. Crowley just wasn’t listening for them then. He didn’t know they were his words to have.
Let it be said that Crowley is quick to get with an updated program. He opens his eyes. Leans in close, his pulse an ecstatic thrum, and brushes his lips across Aziraphale’s. "Like this?"
"Just so." Aziraphale touches their foreheads together, another human sign of tenderness that would be meaningless to Heaven and Hell alike. Then he pulls an abashed smile. "We do, however, need to keep saying as many things out loud as we say with their bodies. And then we need to talk about them some more to make sure we’re on the same page. I promise to try, though it hasn’t come easily to me."
"Good deal," says Crowley. "I choose it, then. I’m all for it. Our human side. You and me and seven billion of our closest friends."
"I was so hoping you’d say that," says Aziraphale. He’s lit up from within, shining with happiness, like a—like a human who’s relieved to have worked through a messy knot of assumptions with their partner and come out stronger on the other end. Happens all the time with people, doesn’t, is part and parcel of who they are.
Crowley gets to his feet. Aziraphale is still holding his hands, and Crowley draws him up too. He kisses Aziraphale, tries not to focus on the celestial greatness radiating from him and instead thinking only of how full Aziraphale’s lower lip is, how he tastes of an after-dinner mint taken from one of their favorite Italian restaurants and stashed in his vest pocket, how he can slip his tongue into Aziraphale’s mouth and be made at home there.
"I’d like to take you to bed," Crowley says against his cheek, "the human way, tonight."
"There’s nothing I want more," says Aziraphale.
They stumble kissing into the bedroom, struggling with buttons and clasps and zippers. No instant miracles of nudity. But doing it like this means that he gets to unwrap Aziraphale like a present, that he can kiss each new-found inch of skin. It’s purposeful and more intimate than anything having to do with zippers has the right to be.
Aziraphale appears to be having similar thoughts. He’s breathing fast with excitement, like a person who needs air would. When he pushes Crowley’s open shirt from his shoulders, Aziraphale’s gaze rakes him over.
"Did you know, my darling, that many other reasons for loving you aside…" Aziraphale trails kisses down his neck, goes lower. He tongues at Crowley’s nipple and sets his teeth there. Applies just enough pressure to suggest he might bite a good deal harder. Then he says, "I find you utterly irresistible. You’re stunning. Gorgeous. As the young people would say, smoking hot."
"I don’t think anyone actually says that," Crowley mutters, but he’s…blushing? Flushed red. Maybe a little inconsolable about it. Still also stuck on the 'my darling' part. Could stay there awhile, could live in those words too. He attempts to deflect, gesturing at his body. "What, this old thing?"
"Sometimes I think you designed it to tempt me specifically," Aziraphale says. He pushes Crowley down on the bed and follows after.
Crowley rolls them (snake rules, good at being twisty), settling over Aziraphale. He kisses the hinge of Aziraphale’s jaw. "How do you know that I didn’t?"
"Well," says Aziraphale. "Temptation accomplished. Now if you would kindly—"
He readies Aziraphale in the human way. It's easier, the otherworldly ways they’ve done this before, simply ordering their bodies to do what they wanted, to obey a mutual urge to be united. Instant readiness, zero preparation, it certainly has its benefits, but so does this.
Crowley takes his time. He opens Aziraphale first with his tongue, learning that there is a whole new range of moans that can be wrung out of him and Aziraphale both. He discovers that being tongue-deep inside Aziraphale, with Aziraphale’s quivering thighs thrown over his shoulders, is one of the best possible ways to pass time on this spinning blue planet.
The only miracle he permits himself is a small one, the summoning of a tube of slick stuff purpose-made for what Crowley intends to do next. It vanishes from a shelf at the Boots drug store around the corner and reappears in his hand.
Aziraphale doesn’t say anything about that, only spreads his legs wider in invitation. He laughs when Crowley struggles with the cap and foil, then laughs again when Crowley asks if he can record this with his phone, because the sound of Aziraphale’s laughter is something he wants to keep within reach at all times. Aziraphale derails him for a while with kissing after that.
(Also would be keen on having video of Aziraphale and the tongue thing from earlier, but he'll save that request for another night.)
Crowley gets his fingers good and wet. He unlocks Aziraphale slowly, fitting in each finger once he’s taken the time to see that it’s wanted. Aziraphale’s eyelashes flutter against his cheek, and he doesn’t stop smiling or rocking his hips. It’s wanted, to say the least. And Aziraphale keeps saying so, straightforward and unswerving.
"Like that, yes. Oh, your fingers—you really have the finest fingers, I’ve always thought as much. They feel so good. Yes, yes, another—"
Crowley is realizing just how much Aziraphale likes to be grounded in his body. To focus on feeling only what it feels in the moment, no outside considerations. It isn’t dissimilar to how Aziraphale approaches the experience of an opera cake or an opera.
Maybe Crowley was the first to let himself imagine carnal pleasures for them and to write a nine-book epic poetry cycle on the subject when he was hanging out at Charles II’s court. But as much as he’d wanted to explore carnal pleasures with Aziraphale—and he had—the sexual acts were long secondary to what they represented to him.
For Aziraphale to let him into bed (then the stuff of mere alcohol-soaked dreams) would mean that Aziraphale accepted him as he was even though he was a demon. Trusted him, desired him, might even be capable of loving him one day. Truly unhinged stuff, he’d figured back then, but he hadn’t been able to let go of that pesky hope.
It's Aziraphale who adores the sensations that come with being human. Who has done for untold centuries, starting perhaps from the day Crowley succeeded in introducing him to a choice bit of red meat. It's why he doesn't bother much with updating his wardrobe; all of that is external, unimportant. (Crowley disagrees, but fashion sense isn't a gift doled out to everyone.)
What thrills Aziraphale are the sights, sounds, tastes, and emotions that Earth provides its inhabitants. No one in history savored savory things more, or wept as easily at an Ibsen opening night.
It's no wonder, then, that it was Crowley's appeal to the human side of companionship that had swayed Aziraphale to him at the moment of crisis. He should have seen it sooner.
Aziraphale was revealed to have already dabbled in the human side of desire, long enough to become an adept at cocksucking in some era or another, but perhaps he hadn't figured on Crowley going in for that sort of thing. Crowley's kiss had changed that. Shown that he was up for all of it. That this could be the way for them when all other paths were closing.
Tonight Aziraphale is free and unfettered in a way he hasn't been before, even during their most acrobatic bouts. His breath hitches and his lip is bitten red; he moves restlessly against the sheets, against Crowley's fingers inside him, seeking, feeling, encouraging. Loving.
They're making love, aren't they. Crowley hasn't been able to bring himself to think it before, but there's no other descriptives for what they're doing.
He has by now taken the length of Aziraphale’s delectable cock into his mouth while he works his fingers, the better to push Aziraphale to the very edge of human bodily endurance. It works, because soon Aziraphale’s hands are buried in his hair, tugging insistently.
"Please," gasps Aziraphale, about as beautiful a noise as Crowley can reckon with. "By tonight’s rules I can only come once, or—" a faint whine as Crowley sucks harder. "—twice, if we rest in between. I want to come with you inside me, Crowley, please. I need you."
Crowley wants to tease or boast that he can get them well past twice, should Aziraphale want it, but such a request doesn’t need to be met with bragging at the moment. Not when Aziraphale sounds so plaintive and earnest, and so gorgeously ready. When Aziraphale needs him like this.
He draws off Aziraphale’s cock after one more moment to admire the fullness of it on his tongue, the way he fits in Crowley’s throat like maybe God had designed them to fuck all along. (Had She? Kinky if so.) He doesn’t think the Almighty has anything to do with it, though. More like their Efforts were made for each other, made to align.
"Yeah," Crowley says, with a scrape of his teeth along the too-tempting stretch of Aziraphale’s inner thigh. "Yeah, we can do that."
It’s different this way, so different. He eases free his fingers and lines up his cock; Aziraphale reaches down to grip him, help him. The human course of things is trickier and imperfect, and there are moments of adjustment and negotiation they haven’t experienced before. Haven’t tried before now.
But the payback is exponential. He guides himself into Aziraphale, gets to feel every inch as he sinks deeper. Aziraphale is tight and slick around him—not otherworldly in sensation. Worldly. It’s just them, just these selves pressing together.
Aziraphale’s eyes are open and so, so blue, and he’s watching Crowley and taking Crowley, and Crowley doesn’t know how he missed the depth of affection in Aziraphale’s eyes. Wouldn’t let himself see it before, wouldn’t let himself believe it was for him.
He doesn’t want to call Aziraphale "angel" just then. He’s been using it as a term of affection for a long time, but tonight isn’t about reminders that they’re anything other than this—on their human side, together.
So Crowley says, his heart beating fast, his heart heart too big for his rib cage, "Good, love?"
Aziraphale reels him closer. Wraps his legs around to hook at Crowley’s lower back, rests his hands on Crowley’s shoulders and pulls him down and in. Then Aziraphale is kissing him for an answer, messily urgent slides of Aziraphale’s tongue against his tongue.
Technically, Crowley fucks him. The mechanics are all there, textbook: he pulls out and thrusts back in. He thrusts seeking his own release, but primarily to plumb for the place within Aziraphale that makes Aziraphale shudder in his arms. Finding it, he builds to a rhythm, hips snapping hard as his cock goes deep. He’s got the basics down pat.
The more advanced work on the human side of things boils down to little details. How their hands catch above Aziraphale’s head on bed and hold there. How Crowley kisses Aziraphale’s collarbone, his throat, the soft part of his ear, his mouth meandering because there’s so much going on, and all he knows is that he needs even more. How their eyes are open throughout, except when it’s too much, and then there’s the understanding that closed eyes are a compliment instead of a distancing.
So yeah, it’s fucking, a whole lot of it, and they’re both technically very good. But it also feels like a first time, wondrous and new, overwhelming in intensity, every drawn breath a discovery. They haven’t ever done this before. Not like this.
When Crowley wraps fingers around Aziraphale’s cock and tries to speed him to the quick, when Aziraphale clenches on his cock, his head thrown back and his voice a tangle of pleas and praise, when Crowley can’t hold off and spills inside him, half a second behind—there isn’t anything metaphysical about it.
They aren’t unifying on the celestial plane, aren’t beating unseen wings, aren’t anything beyond the bounds of their mattress. They’re two bodies that have chosen to seek and share pleasure, and the only element that’s bigger than they are, that’s uncontainable and unstoppable, is this:
"I love you," Crowley tells Aziraphale, face pressed to his neck, "so much."
And Aziraphale says, "As I love you. Oh, well done, us."
Crowley laughs and kisses Aziraphale again and rolls over to sprawl beside him on the bed. He feels blissful, without bones, not because of the snakey part of him but because having sex like a human takes a lot out of you when you aren’t drawing on demonic energy reserves.
He likes the way his body feels, the twinges and the tingles and even the slick mess they’ve made. Aziraphale’s hand finds his and holds, and they stay like that a while.
Then Crowley makes the prudent point that since they’re eschewing miracles tonight they’d better find another way to tidy up, and then he spends a long time cleaning Aziraphale off with his tongue. Aziraphale giggles and squirms and at one point moans "Crowley, oh, Crowley," his favorite song, loud enough to be heard by the neighbors. That’s when they test the coming-twice-after-a-slight-period-of-rest hypothesis and win.
They lie facing each other after, keeping their promise to speak to aloud as much as they’ve declared with their bodies.
Aziraphale cards his fingers through Crowley’s hair, which is the messiest it’s been in three thousand years but that’s okay because Aziraphale says he looks charmingly debauched, and Crowley will take it.
"What prompted you to send the note this evening?" asks Aziraphale.
Crowley isn’t inclined to bring the subject of Muriel into their pillow talk, but. "Let’s just say I had a little help getting some insight into your perspective."
"That I forgave you." Aziraphale worries his lower lip between his teeth. "I should have asked for your forgiveness also. If I had, maybe—"
"Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten to spend the last hour with my head between your legs," says Crowley. "And I wouldn’t give that up for anything. So really, I think we just call it even at this point, angel."
"Yes. I think you’re quite right." Aziraphale’s lip-biting morphs slowly into a grin. "Oh! I didn’t get to tell you my good news."
Crowley focuses on bathing in the afterglow and the buzzing sensation of being loved by the object of his millions-year-long affection.
He tries to ignore the knee-jerk fear that Aziraphale is going to say something that will disrupt their idyll:
Have you heard the good news? God’s judgment is imminent and Armageddon’s scheduled for next Tuesday! Have you heard the good news? War’s back on with Heaven and Hell and the battlefield’s set to be south London, maybe Greenwich, it’s so atmospheric there. Have you heard—
"I have some vacation time coming up, and I mean to take it," says Aziraphale. "I think I can swing three weeks, perhaps a month if I fudge the paperwork. I can, because I’m the one who approves it. I was thinking that you and I might—go off together. Just the two of us."
Crowley realizes that he isn’t breathing. He breathes. "What?"
Aziraphale is studying his face. "I know a month isn’t long in the scheme of things. But I would like that very much."
"I—" Crowley’s Earthly form isn’t used to handling this much of a good thing. He feels blurred around the edges. Don’t turn into a fucking snake, Anthony J., this isn’t the moment. "I think—yeah, I think I could squeeze you in. Bit busy at the moment, you know. Have a bookshop to help look after. But the junior staff needs to step up at some point. Can’t coddle them."
"Wonderful," says Aziraphale. His eyes are gleaming, and he says the word like it’s about Crowley rather than about vacation.
Crowley kisses him. He kisses him and kisses him and—
This is Crowley’s life now. He helps mind a bookshop where no book will ever be shopped on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Thursday nights are reserved for the pub with Nina, Maggie, and Muriel. Whenever Aziraphale is able to stop by, he sits next to Crowley, holding his hand both under the table and on top of it. Aziraphale tries to mark out every Monday and Friday night for them, telling Heaven that he’s collating personnel reports. Bookshop Sundays are theirs alone. Muriel has been warned away from glancing through the window.
And when they go away together for the glorious, sun-drenched, sweat-soaked (in the good way) days of Aziraphale’s vacation, it isn’t to a distant star system. They don’t go too far off the map. This has always been where they belong.