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When the ash and soot and dust rose from London's roads, and the view over the mud dark Thames was too wide to see the southern banks, Aziraphale's teeth would shine with blood.
It was never her own.
Gentlemen made a fashion of bursting in while actresses were changing dress. In return, Aziraphale made a fashion of luring them into the city's quieter lanes with bawdy promises, tying her blonde curls up with a ribbon and a pin, and ripping out their throats. She would clean her mouth well enough afterwards that Crowley was never quite sure if the red was from carmine or something else until she laughed, and there it was – the watery orange stain of a man's last breath.
Crowley supposed, in the grand scheme of things, that there had been plenty of blood on plenty of battlefields throughout the ages. If the Almighty had never seen fit to interfere in those, there was no reason to think she'd object to men dying a few years early of exsanguination rather than the great pox, dropsy, or whatever else their futures would have held.
“We're doing Merry Wives in a few weeks,” Aziraphale said on a night too bright with moonlight to hide anything darker than warm beer and lewd jokes, “you should come and play Mistress Ford.”
“Merry Wives? Again?”
“Billy hated it,” Aziraphale grinned into her beer, “do you remember? He was pissed the whole time he was writing, and dear Richard went through enough tobacco backstage to choke a donkey.”
“Didn't you play it a couple of years ago though?” Crowley asked, morbidly curious.
“Etherege is over at Duke's with Love in a Tub,” Aziraphale counted on her fingers, “Dryden's hardly suited to the stage, and Killigrew's got everyone's backs up. Bill brings in the punters. If he doesn't, we'll just add fireworks and revolve the platform a few times.”
“There's no breeches in it for you.”
“Any role's a breeches role if I play it wearing breeches.”
“You'd play Desdemona in breeches? Ophelia?”
“Don't be a fool, I'm decades too old for Ophelia. I'm going to play Mistress Page. In a dress, before you say anything smart.”
“You'll suit her.”
Aziraphale dipped two fingers in her cup and flicked them at Crowley, who realised too late that she could have shrieked and pushed. “I'll astound as her. Be my Mistress Ford.”
“Theatre's no place for a respectable woman like me.”
“Dear girl,” Aziraphale said tenderly, wrapping one protective hand around Crowley's wrist and using the other to brush droplets of beer from her chest, “you sit up in the gods and you bring me pears after the last act. The players all think you're my whore.”
“And I'm guessing you've not told them anything to the contrary.”
“Why would I?”
Aziraphale's eyes glittered in the warm light. Crowley thought for a moment she could feel her own pulse beating beneath Aziraphale's thumb, which had started to make small circles over the artery meandering from her heart to her fingertips. Perhaps Aziraphale could feel it too – the blood which was supposed to sing blazing glories and hallelujahs with every beat, but which had quieted into a background chorus centuries ago.
“You don't want me,” Crowley said below the pub's babble.
“I rather think I do,” Aziraphale replied, “and I think you shall. Otherwise I'll be stuck with some fresh bumpkin who has an ample bosom and no idea what city men assume of actresses.”
“What do you reckon Gabriel thinks of theatres?”
“That they're a brilliant opportunity for spreading the good word about the importance of maintaining a healthy marriage.”
Crowley laughed and drew her hand back. “Alright, fine. I'll be your Alice, and you be my Mags.”
Aziraphale flew forward to kiss the corner of her mouth. The heat of it blossomed into a blush across Crowley's cheek. She could feel Aziraphale's gaze on her as she fought to regain control of her capillaries and look less like the sort of oil painting the king might hide behind a map in his private rooms – one where the sitter was open-mouthed and dewy-eyed.
Crowley had red hair and a room in Covent Garden, but the hair was a gift during her creation and the room was convenient for the coffee houses. She had never indulged in anything as theatrical as what Aziraphale was asking for. A few centuries ago, it would've been impossible, but the modern world moved at such a pace that any hit to her reputation could be cured with a couple of contrite years in a different town.
By the time the morning sun glared through the window and Aziraphale cajoled the players into moving up the road, Crowley's mouth felt almost as sticky as her head. Her room was only five minutes away; she could have slipped home at any point to wash, pray and bathe. Home, however, consistently failed to produce a blonde-haired devil who brought to her mouth ale and small kisses.
“The play's the thing,” Aziraphale said, clapping her hands together and meeting each of the players' gazes in turn.
Someone vomited copiously into a chamberpot.
The rest of the morning followed on. The playhouse was empty save for them and the players were glad for it. They mumbled curses at Aziraphale before announcing them aloud as lunch grew nearer.
“What lines do I have? I could start learning them while your players are all busy finding places to hurl.”
Aziraphale started at Crowley's voice. “I thought you'd gone by now.”
“I thought I'd be speaking before the interval.”
“Welcome to theatre.”
Crowley knew the theatre. She knew play acting. She could play the doe-eyed naïve for a gullible audience of one as often as necessary. What she didn't know was how to soak herself in a character's blood. Aziraphale could rip out Margaret's organs and dwell in their vicious hole. Crowley could only pretend.
The other actors, sick as they were, all sat somewhere on the same spectrum. Some of them, apprenticed to the stage since their early years, knew their lines and spoke them trippingly. Others could move their characters without voice. A few stuttered their words as their own mortal selves, trying to commit their rhymes to memory before they'd pledge any sort of soul to them. Meanwhile Aziraphale swam alongside them like a shark in the Red Sea watching humans who might, if the tide turned back towards its natural inclination, become prey.
It was almost a week before they met again outside the stage. A minor noble had become bored of his country estate and had invited all and sundry to party at his St James's town house, where he would be showing off his latest cuttings and bulbs. (He was young. He was stupid. He couldn't see any danger in the city. Crowley spent a minor blessing on making sure he didn't take any back with him.) An actress and a multilingual coffee addict ticked two of his gawking boxes neatly.
The place held enough candles to illuminate every part of lace and paint. Pink cheeks, red mouths and bright woodblock hangings were all obvious from the street, glowing with lacquer and fever. Wine flowed freely and the pages did their best to keep out of the way, appearing only when someone needed another glass or a chamberpot.
Aziraphale was cloaked in bodies by the time Crowley turned up. Her pale face free from any sort of pitted pox, she could tell her rapt attendees which writers were rising in fashion, which coffee shops were spreading sedition, and most importantly had all the playhouse gossip about which prince was pricking which orange girl behind the curtains. It all made her a popular little demon.
Crowley slid in beside her on the chaise longue when a handsy young man went to get something else to drink.
“Dispense with trifles,” Aziraphale quoted with a lazy smile, leaning up against Crowley already, “what is it?”
“If I would but go to Hell for an eternal moment or so, I could be knighted,” Crowley scowled in return.
“Oh darling,” said Aziraphale, putting a close hand around her waist, “I would keep you longer than a moment and it would only be as unpleasant as you liked.”
Aziraphale was hardly a knight; she was too inclined to sloth and gluttony, efficient but unglamorous, for any such promotion. Even if she gained one, there was no sort of moment which would let her share. Still, she held a higher title than Crowley's and the two of them both knew it, though Crowley had done more damage on the battlefield (long range crossbow damage which allowed her to imagine it as delicate, but damage nonetheless). Aziraphale could call in favours and demand lackeys while Crowley was still filling in the paperwork to request a new quiver.
“You're a horror,” Crowley replied. She let herself be held.
“Better than a terror,” Aziraphale replied. “Here, I'll get you a drink.”
Aziraphale never found that sort of thing hard. Whatever she wanted was laid out before her and all she had to do was take without hesitation.
“Are you working?”
“Always,” said Aziraphale after a sip of her wine. “No rest for the wicked. Yourself?”
“Only because you are. I came because Nicholas said there might be a black iris on show.”
“Poor sweet thing,” said Aziraphale, her hand wandering up Crowley's ribcage, “you must know he'd say anything to see you in something fashionably low-cut.”
Crowley turned her head a little to kiss the top of Aziraphale's curls. “He appreciates good clothing and Venetian fashion.”
“He appreciates in the Venetian fashion.”
“Perhaps that's why he invites me to parties.”
“He thinks we're doing things the old-fashioned way, and you're a pretty little apprentice instead of an over-caffeinated harlot?”
“He thinks he sees a friend.”
“Well,” said Aziraphale and started to unfold, “I shan't have the friend of one of my favourites leave disappointed. Even if there's no black iris, I'll still show you a blossom or two.”
Aziraphale led her through the wide doors to a stuffy room where two boys were feeding the ravenous fire. It brought up a sweat on Crowley's chest and a flush on her cheeks as if she'd let an older man buy her drinks a few weeks before. The air hung thick with the scent of the cuttings which stood erect in their pots on every surface. An educated man had been hired to talk the guests through the various flowers and bulbs, effusing on the efforts which had been put in to growing and acquiring them.
Aziraphale took Crowley's hand and led her past a fruit they'd last seen in the Garden. Crowley glanced at it; this version was smaller and petrified. Aziraphale shook her head.
“Here. This one.”
The tulip was larger than any Crowley had seen before. Deep red and pink, its petals were furled over themselves, hiding away its central bud. Crowley wanted more than anything to reach out and touch, to slide her fingers in between its velvet folds, but she had the impression the educated gentlemen and the boys in the fireplace would have something to say about that. Imagination would have to do instead; there she could tell herself a story where she stroked the tulip angelically until its colours grew deeper and it opened to some pollen which would never come.
While Crowley watched the dying flower, Aziraphale took a handful of berries from one of the serving girls and crushed them in her mouth until their scarlet juice coated her lips and a drop ran down her chin. Her hand in Crowley's was perfectly still and the only thing Crowley could feel between them was their shared warmth. She had no handkerchief to offer Aziraphale's stained face. It would have to stay scarlet until Aziraphale herself noticed.
Just as the guests had wanted to hear all the gossip from the theatre, the players wanted to hear all the gossip from the party. Aziraphale provided; her experience of the rest of the evening had either been more interesting or even more imaginative than Crowley's. They listened to her demurely refusing to name names but including enough details that anyone with half a mind could figure out which writer and which duchess she was talking about.
“Gentlemen,” Crowley interrupted, “while we still have light?”
The play was due the following afternoon. They knew their lines, but as Aziraphale sweetly said when she ran them again and again as they clutched their heads and regretted their eighth drinks, there was no harm in perfection. It was perhaps the most dangerous notion she'd kept from her previous job – the idea that perfection could be reached if men simply tried a little harder, gave up a little more, or sacrificed something else. Gabriel was an utter tit who thought such an idea would lead people closer to the Almighty. Aziraphale was a cunning fiend who thought it would be inviting to show people an easier way to get there.
“Let's take it from the start of act three,” Aziraphale allowed.
It let their Doctor Caius practise his French accent, which sounded at the best of times like nobody in the cast had ever met a Frenchman. At one point Crowley had tried introducing him to a couple of Huguenot refugees. Considering their stance on alcohol, it had gone surprisingly well, but Charlie came away from it still sounding like he'd only ever read about the language. After Aziraphale declared it close enough, Crowley had given up on attempting to get it any closer.
“Do you know who'll be there?” Crowley asked as the players ran their lines.
With no writer around, Aziraphale had taken over bossing the company about. It helped that she knew whose ears to whisper into to get things done.
“The Earl of Rochester's just returned from Europe. He's not showed his face at court yet, but he's interested in coming along.”
“I don't think I know him.”
“You will. He's going to be a friend of mine.”
“Anyone else?”
“A few jealous writers and wits,” Aziraphale shrugged, “enough to make sure the play's known. Nicholas! Christ's teeth, you should be courteous to Hugo, not looking at him like you're asking to bugger him.”
“He's an attractive man,” Crowley pointed out once the players had gone back to their scene. “Half the audience will want him in one way or another.”
“Yet only one woman's won him, and I doubt very much she'd approve of him being passed around.”
“Fuck me,” Crowley grinned, “Aziraphale, is my work here done? We may be merry, and yet be honest too?”
Aziraphale chattered a growl and turned her attention back to the stage.
The next morning, Crowley woke. She washed. She prayed. She dressed, bought a cup of coffee and sat reading the papers until she saw her colleagues drifting in, each of them looking uncharacteristically sober and healthy.
“Aziraphale,” she said at the demon's shoulder, “why do they all look like young shepherds who've never even heard of gin, let alone drowned themselves in it?”
“Do you know,” Aziraphale replied, her pupils wide enough to look almost guiltless, “I couldn't possibly say. I do know Charles persuaded them to come to St Paul's with him yesterday evening instead of to the Fox and Hounds. Perhaps old Patrick inspired them with his sermon on free will.”
“Perhaps he bored them to sleep,” Crowley countered uncharitably.
“Hush, you holy thing. Go and help Tessa powder her face.”
The ticket takers and the fruit sellers positioned themselves. The audience sloped in, filling the seats with struggle, crawling over each other in a way the architects could never have intended. The musicians, who had been missed out of the previous night's inspiring sermon, squirrelled themselves away under the stage.
The curtain rose.
“Watch out for those bastards,” Nicholas said as he brushed past Crowley in the wing, sweaty and red-faced with the effort of his performance. He pointed to a group of men who were enjoying some oranges and laughing raucously at the antics on stage.
“Have they been heckling?”
Nicholas's face softened. “Get Mistress Aziraphale to walk you home after the play's over. She'll know what I mean. Now go on, it's almost your cue.”
The audience talked and whooped and gamed. The audience were unimportant. There was Aziraphale in one of her best dresses, shining and laughing in the sun, her blonde curls half a halo behind her.
“How now, Mistress Ford,” she said, and the rest fell into place.
They took their bows and curtseys at the end. Crowley watched Aziraphale glow as the applause washed over them. She knew it was pride or something else demonic but it rested comfortably on Aziraphale's shoulders and she looked radiant with it about her.
“Let's go get changed, then we can go to one of your little houses for a coffee and a cocoa,” Aziraphale murmured to her on the stage.
It was easy to agree.
Sweet young Tessa who'd been playing Aziraphale's daughter chattered the whole time she was changing and washing her face. She was being courted by a French cloth merchant's son who was a good friend of Nicholas (Crowley raised an eyebrow; Aziraphale smiled and shrugged) and who had supplied all the fabrics for her costumes. He was polite and respectful and hadn't asked for anything beyond kisses, but would come and watch her at least one a week. They were getting married at the end of the season and her mother was ever so pleased.
Nicholas put his head round the door without as much as a knock. Crowley glared at him. He apologised nonchalantly and explained he was there to walk Tessa home.
“Mistress Aziraphale, you should walk Crowley home too. They're still drinking in the pit at the moment, but you know where they're coming after that.”
“Then I shall have to be quick,” Aziraphale answered quietly after he and Tessa had left.
Crowley put her hands on Aziraphale's waist and pulled her forward to kiss. She felt Aziraphale's sharp teeth pressing at her lips without bite. They were a predator's teeth, ready to capture and tear and all those other things she knew Aziraphale would never do to her without permission. Aziraphale kissed with reverence.
When they broke apart, Crowley found her breath had quickened and her pulse had started thrumming with devotion. She shivered under her linen petticoat. Aziraphale had stayed fully clothed while Tessa and Crowley had been undoing each other's lacing.
She ran her hands down Crowley's ribs and her waist, stopping at her hips and pressing a necklace of kisses along her neck that Crowley could feel all the way to her core. Her thumbs pressed tight into the points of Crowley's hips.
“Darling,” she said, “dearest, my sweet pet, may I?”
It took Crowley a moment to realise what was being asked. Aziraphale kissed her again while she was catching up. They had done it a few times before, most of them far away and long ago. None of them were regrettable. This one would be worth it, Crowley was sure. Aziraphale knew how to hunt.
“Yeah,” she said, “yes. Go on.”
Aziraphale sank to her knees, a heretical demon at prayer, her pink lips parted and ready for the sacrament, her blonde hair messed from a broken halo to a full one. (Crowley would never admit how much she enjoyed the picture – to do so would be quite against the spirit of the game.) What they were doing would be obvious to even the least imaginative gentleman, one of the ones who thought the girls in Covent Garden avoided pregnancy through luck and prayer.
Crowley pulled her skirt and the fabric brushing against her shins made her shiver. Aziraphale, always courteous in these situations, took over, pulling it up until the shine on Crowley's thighs above her stockings reflected the candlelight.
“Gorgeous,” she said, and pressed her mouth to it. “Beautiful.”
She nipped once to make Crowley yelp and then surged forward. Her hands brushed up Crowley's thighs, strong against the delicate silk, letting Crowley's petticoat fall over her like the curtain on a confessional. She went as though it was a prayer rather than a sin.
Crowley reached down to tangle a hand in Aziraphale's hair. It was difficult enough to stand against nothing while Aziraphale worshipped; it would be more difficult still to finish with nothing to hold onto. She made a noise to try and convey as much, which Aziraphale interpreted correctly and moved her to the dressing room table.
With her pulse singing in her mouth and her chest and her cunt, Crowley made a wordless noise, shaking against Aziraphale's mouth as she finished.
“Dear thing,” Aziraphale said fondly, “how excellent at play you are.”
Crowley patted her hair again as she panted. Her petticoat was wet and she was glad for the clean one on the rail.
The noise outside their room had Crowley reaching for her coat and Aziraphale on her feet, perfectly still and waiting for what came next. It turned out to be a group of men laughing and pushing each other into the room. Two of their wigs were askew enough to show their balding heads, one from age and the other from pox. They were noisy, well-dressed, and stank of alcohol. One of the younger ones reached out and laughed when Crowley slapped his hand away.
“Ladies,” said one of them, “ladies, my friends and I are looking forward to some further entertainment this evening.”
“Ah, Mr Pepys,” Aziraphale smiled, her teeth shining sharp, “so glad to see you and your entourage. Crowley, darling, I'm just going to make sure these gentlemen are well pleased. I'll meet you again after.”
She kissed Crowley goodbye softly and sweetly, then led the men out of the theatre and into the bleeding London dusk which swallowed players and plays alike. Coffee would adequately disguise the taste when she and Crowley met later on to play once more.