Archive of Our Own

The thing is—the bloody, pustulent, festering, execrable thing is— it wasn’t like Crowley was never going to make a move. He was just biding his time.

Well: perhaps not exactly. Biding one’s time implied a certain degree of patience, of carefully watching events unfold and choosing the correct moment. Crowley absolutely had been watching events unfold, looking for The Moment, but it certainly hadn’t involved patience. Not much care, either, when it came down to it. Primarily it had involved drinking, and watching Aziraphale eat increasingly elaborate dinners (averting the Apocalypse seemed to have liberated him of even the feeblest efforts to avoid the appearance of gluttony), and occasionally opening his mouth to Say Something before quickly closing it again.

The Something he’d planned to Say had a tendency to change on a daily basis. Sometimes, when Crowley was feeling cool and collected, he imagined a seduction: leaning a casual arm against whatever bookshelf Aziraphale was fiddling with, bringing the long sharp line of his body close to Aziraphale’s softer, slightly shorter one. Smirking as the angel turned, those blue eyes wide with surprise and no small amount of want. Hey, angel. I don’t actually fancy going back to mine tonight. How about we open another bottle of wine and…take this upstairs?

It wouldn’t happen like that, though. Not if Crowley was honest with himself. Six thousand years of pining, of worshiping the ground on which Aziraphale walked, couldn’t be resolved by a silly temptation. In the more realistic version of his fantasy—the one that he, shamefully, tended to think of while lonely, sober, and wanking—he fell to his knees before a seated Aziraphale, taking both of the angel’s hands in his own. I have loved you for six thousand years, he’d say. I have known since the day we met that I’d do anything for you. I don’t belong to Hell anymore, and you don’t belong to Heaven, and I was thinking that maybe we’ve only ever really belonged to each other.

The moment had to be right. It wouldn’t do to blurt something out when Aziraphale was distracted, or hungry, or more than three drinks in, or cold, or irritated, or worried. Crowley needed peace for this. He needed a comfortable, smiling Aziraphale, a quiet night in the back room of the bookshop. He needed—did he need a ring, maybe? No, that was stupid. Rings were for marriage, not for converting one’s erstwhile nemesis/platonic accidental life partner into one’s decidedly non-platonic, non-accidental boyfriend-shaped-entity.

Although…

Nope. Too soon. (Too fast, said the unwelcome echo in Crowley’s head.)

It wasn’t only finding the perfect, non-hungry, non-distracted, non-sober but also non-drunk, perfectly temperate, perfectly relaxed moment that had kept Crowley silent thus far, of course. There had always been barriers between the two of them—or if not between them, exactly, then between Aziraphale-and-Crowley and Something More. The first, obviously, had been that Heaven and Hell would hardly tolerate such a relationship. They’d turned a blind eye, more or less, for the last few millennia, but Crowley had always known there was a line, and he’d reluctantly kept just to his side of it. Now that Above and Below were leaving them to their own devices (for the moment, anyway), that obstacle was gone.

The second had been the question of Aziraphale’s interest—in Crowley, or in anyone. For nearly as long as there had been humans, Crowley had been keeping an eye on Aziraphale’s interactions with them. He’d told himself it wasn’t jealousy, wasn’t possessive, he just wanted to know, to keep him out of trouble, but of course that was rubbish. If he’d found out Aziraphale spent his nights in some human’s bed, he might have done something very, very foolish. Fortunately or unfortunately, though, none of his lurking and spying had ever returned a result. If Aziraphale had shared his divine affections with anyone, he’d done it during the stretches of time when he and Crowley found themselves apart. (It wasn’t as though they’d lived in each other’s pockets for all those centuries. Their casual camaraderie, their daily interactions, had mostly developed thanks to the Antichrist-who-wasn’t. Crowley really should send Warlock Dowling a birthday card, he thought.)

But in the recent months, Crowley had caught glimpses of— something. It was nothing tangible, nothing overt. Just small moments that might, possibly, add up to tip the scale in favor of Aziraphale wanting . When Crowley had shoved him against the wall in the convent, days before the putative Apocalypse, he could have sworn Aziraphale had stared at his mouth; on the bus that didn’t go to Oxford, the first night of the rest of their lives, Aziraphale had sat much closer than necessary, pressing his side silently against Crowley’s. Just two nights ago, Crowley had drunkenly let a sip of wine escape the corner of his mouth, and Aziraphale’s eyes had tracked the rivulet of red as it made its way down Crowley’s throat. When Crowley had made a self-deprecating joke, Aziraphale had taken nearly ten full seconds to react, eyes still fixed somewhere around Crowley’s clavicle.

It wasn’t proof of anything. But Crowley knew a thing or two about lust, and he trusted his instincts in this area. And his gut told him it wasn’t nothing, either.

The third obstacle was the most insurmountable—worse than the wrath of Heaven and Hell, worse than the ambiguity of Aziraphale’s affections, worse than finding the perfect moment, worse than anything at all. It was this: Crowley was a demon. Aziraphale was an angel. Aziraphale was the best angel, the only one worth a damn, the only creation She had ever gotten just right. The worst of it was that Aziraphale was good enough, and kind enough, and loving enough, and self-sacrificing enough that he didn’t really care that Crowley was a demon. Oh, he made his token protests, his get thee behind me, foul fiend s, but that had only ever given Crowley the impression of a puppy growling while wagging its tail. He knew which end to believe.

No, it wasn’t Aziraphale’s judgment that kept Crowley quiet. It was Crowley’s own self-doubt. He’d had millennia to come to grips with his demonhood, and in many ways he’d gotten over it—the smoldering edges of his torn-away Grace barely hurt anymore—but there was one conviction that had hung stubbornly on, as solid and immovable as bedrock: Aziraphale deserved much, much better. He deserved an angel, or would have if any of the Heavenly Host could hold a candle to his own goodness. He deserved an unsullied lover, someone he didn’t even have to pretend to disapprove of. He didn’t deserve a being so legendarily cynical and mouthy that he’d been tossed out of Heaven like a cigarette butt from a car window.

But.

There was a single counterpoint to all of it, and it was this that gave Crowley hope. It was this one fact that had him pacing his flat, rehearsing declarations of love, then terrorizing his plants before they could get any ideas. The fact was that while Aziraphale undoubtedly deserved better than Crowley, there was no one in the entire universe—celestial and infernal spheres included—who loved him as much as Crowley did. No one who would work so hard to make him happy; no one else who knew his every preference, idiosyncrasy, habit, need, hope, and fear. Certainly no one else from Above or Below had stood beside him at the end of the world, ready to endure whatever happened as long as they endured it together. No one else loved him enough to lend him their own skin, to walk into Heaven and stare Gabriel in his smug fucking face to save his life. Given their uniquely long history, Crowley thought it was actually possible that no one had ever loved another being more in all of existence.

He was beginning to think it might be enough, his endless love for Aziraphale. It was the only thing larger and louder than his loathing for himself. He wasn’t fully there yet, he still had miserable days of angst and self-recrimination, but he was getting closer every day. Soon, he’d thought, there would be a tipping point. Soon, he could tell Aziraphale exactly what was in his heart.

And then, everything had gone pear-shaped.

It started with a lunch invitation. Or rather, with the response.

“Oh, my dear, I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said, as Crowley froze awkwardly with one hand on his mobile and one on the door of the Bentley. He’d become so used to Aziraphale accepting his invitations, he’d already been half on his way as he called. “I’d love to, you know I would, but I’m honestly terribly busy today.”

“Busy?” Crowley echoed, brow furrowing. “With what? Not selling books?”

Aziraphale tittered as though this had been a joke, rather than an honest question. “Oh, this and that,” he said. “Actually, I’m late for an appointment, so I really must dash. Could I take a rain check? Tomorrow looks much less booked.”

“Fine by me. Whenever. Wasn’t important.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Aziraphale said, and hung up. Crowley stared at his phone, squinting, as though it would explain what had just happened. Aziraphale had turned down the opportunity to go eat food. It was stupid—Crowley knew people spent time apart, even friends, even best friends—but it felt suspicious to him. Evasive, which Aziraphale hadn’t been since just before all the business with Adam Young and Satan and the airbase. If Aziraphale was hiding something from him, it was never likely to be anything good.

He didn’t really know he was going to climb into the Bentley until he’d already done it. The car had whirred to life, Don’t Try So Hard was blaring from the stereo (Crowley could really do without the car’s editorializing, thank you), and Crowley had started down the familiar route to the bookshop before he could talk himself out of it. It was just concern, he told himself. Just worry that Aziraphale had gotten himself into trouble somehow—Heaven turning back up, Hell deciding to take their shot at him, a potential customer getting overly friendly with him. (It was possible Aziraphale wouldn’t view the latter as trouble, but to Crowley, it was a catastrophe.)

Unlike Aziraphale, who couldn’t pull off a good sneak if his life depended on it (and it had, before! Several times!), Crowley was an expert lurker. In a lesser demon’s hands, a nearly century-old luxury car on the streets of Soho might have been conspicuous, but Crowley simply expected it to go unnoticed, and so it did. He idled across the street from the bookshop, feeling a bit foolish and wondering whether he should get out of the car; what if Aziraphale planned to stay inside all day? But before he managed to formulate the next step of this non-plan, the angel came outside.

He locked the door behind him with an actual key—something that never failed to amuse Crowley, but Aziraphale seemed to get a kick out of roleplaying as Normal Human Bookseller. Crowley noted that he didn’t look at all concerned, setting off down the pavement with his usual pigeonish gait. Not expecting Heaven or Hell on his tail, then. Crowley waited until the angel had a lead of several streets, then threaded his way back into the flow of traffic. For once, he kept the Bentley at a speed appropriate to midday London traffic. The car, unused to this treatment, let out a series of discontented sputters from the general direction of the engine.

“Hush, you,” Crowley hissed, and it did. Aziraphale passed by Crowley’s first guess at his destination (the Japanese restaurant he most favored) and his second guess (a bakery with particularly decadent mont blancs) before turning abruptly into a coffee shop. It was one of those painfully hip places staffed by tattooed, bespectacled twentysomethings, where the coffee orders could run several sentences long. Aziraphale, a deeply middle-aged Englishman in temperament if not in actual pedigree, had never set foot in this sort of place without Crowley dragging him along just to annoy him. Crowley wasn’t sure if this was a more or less alarming development than the possibility of Heaven beating down his door.

Crowley squinted through the window, silently thanking humans for having invented polarized lenses somewhere in the mid-1930s. Aziraphale wound temporarily out of sight, then made his way toward a row of tables up against the window. Crowley assumed he would take a seat at the empty one furthest to the right, but just as he reached it, someone stood up at the next table and made an unmistakable gesture of welcome. Aziraphale’s face lit up as he stepped forward to clasp the somebody’s hand, and Crowley unconsciously gripped the steering wheel hard enough to hurt.

The stranger waved toward the empty seat across from him, and they both sat. Without his back to the window, Crowley could see him more clearly: it was a fair-haired man, wearing an immaculate suit in pale gray, with a smile full of blindingly white teeth. He pushed a mug toward Aziraphale—he’d already ordered for him? Did he know Aziraphale’s order?—and leaned forward over his clasped hands, chatting animatedly. Aziraphale’s back was now to Crowley, but he could see enough anyway; the relaxed set of the angel’s shoulders, his occasional laughter. Whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t a stranger to Aziraphale. He acted as though they’d known each other for years.

A flock of pigeons on the sidewalk took off suddenly as a dog lunged at the end of its leash, and the stranger turned to look at them, his face momentarily lit up by a sunbeam. The light did something odd around his eyes, a kind of shimmering effect, and Crowley felt a horrible jolt somewhere behind his corporation’s navel.

Gold. The stranger’s eyelids were winged with gold.

That answered the question of how Aziraphale knew this handsome stranger. He was an angel— and, judging from the casual way he and Aziraphale talked together, he wasn’t one of the terrible ones. The thought ought to have been a relief; maybe this stranger hadn’t been sent to discorporate his angel and drag him back to Heaven. Maybe he was just here to catch up, just a friendly chat. A social call.

Somehow, it felt worse.

Crowley felt suddenly, viciously disgusted with himself. Aziraphale had turned him down—politely, kindly—so he could have coffee with another angel, maybe an old friend. And Crowley, demon through and through, had stalked him there. Had watched him from the shadows like a vulture, had behaved as though he had any claim on Aziraphale’s time or attention at all. He started the car, twisting the key in the ignition hard enough to earn another disgruntled whine from the engine, and raced off at his typical speed without a destination in his head beyond away from here.

(The Bentley’s speakers played approximately the first six notes of Another One Bites the Dust before Crowley shut off the radio with a snarl. Bloody machines. You drive one for a few decades, it starts acting like it knows your life.)

He’d been so mired in his own self-loathing, Crowley forgot he had agreed to lunch with Aziraphale the next day. When the screen of his mobile lit up with the angel’s name, he lunged for it, realized it was quite pathetic to answer on the first ring, and sat with his thumbs awkwardly hovering over the answer button for another two and a half rings. Not pathetic at all, Anthony, really well done, he told himself acidly as he put the phone to his ear.

“Hel-lo?” he drawled, trying to sound as though he hadn’t even bothered glancing at the screen to find out who was calling. It was a voice that said I’m very popular and devil-may-care, and it had worked on hundreds of humans over the years since the ubiquity of the telephone. More than a handful of demons, too.

“Hello, Crowley! It’s me.” Aziraphale was cheerfully immune, as always. Crowley let his head thunk back against the wall of his flat. “We said lunch today, didn’t we?”

“Did we?” Crowley asked, knowing perfectly well they had.

“If you’re not too busy, of course.”

Someone who was as cool and disaffected as Crowley pretended to be would have said that yes, he actually was busy, could they pencil something in for next week, maybe. Unfortunately, Crowley was neither cool nor disaffected, and never had been. “Nah. You pick the place, angel.”

They wound up at a tiny Vietnamese restaurant Aziraphale favored because the proprietor always gave him extra noodles for his pho. Aziraphale was so entirely normal, so smiley and chatty and delightfully critical of his would-be customers, that Crowley nearly convinced himself he’d hallucinated the events of the previous day. The mature thing to do, he thought, watching Aziraphale gather up another mouthful of noodles, would be to forget the whole thing. If Aziraphale felt like talking about it, Crowley would listen. If not, as his friend, Crowley should allow him his privacy. No prying. No fishing. No questions asked.

“So. Your appointment go well?” Crowley asked, because of course he was going to.

“Hm?” Aziraphale mumbled distractedly, chewing in apparent bliss.

“Yesterday. You said you had an appointment. Remember?”

Aziraphale swallowed too quickly, erupting into a series of hacking coughs that drew the attention of every human in the restaurant. He flapped a hand vaguely—the universal sign for I’m fine, it’s fine, let’s all please pretend this isn’t happening— and had turned magenta by the time he managed to get it under control. “Oh, yes,” he said at last, his voice coming out strangled and reedy. “Bit disappointing, really. Just a meeting with another rare book dealer. She thought she had a complete copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, but I had to inform her it was a forgery.”

The story was detailed enough that for a moment, Crowley nearly believed him. Aziraphale was a terrible liar, generally speaking, and tended to keep things as vague as possible in a bad effort to avoid detection. (Somehow, he’d never managed to put it together that the vagueness made the lies more obvious—someone who talked as much as Aziraphale declining to give details was a dead giveaway.) But then Aziraphale tugged once at his collar, straightened his bowtie and glanced across his face at Crowley before tucking back into his noodles, and Crowley knew. Aziraphale was lying to him, and he was keen enough to avoid detection that he’d actually thought about the lie in advance.

It was worse than Crowley had thought.

“And what did you do with your day?” Aziraphale asked brightly, and wonderful, lovely, Crowley now had to come up with a lie of his own. Fortunately, he’d had much, much more practice than Aziraphale. He tossed something out easily about disciplining a rowdy pothos that had decided to invade its neighboring pot, thinking all the while how stupid it was that they were sitting here, smiling and lying through their teeth, secrets rising up between them like the steam from Aziraphale’s pho.

Crowley had been disgusted with himself for spying on Aziraphale, yes. The thing about being a demon, though, was that you eventually got quite used to self-disgust. What he wasn’t used to was being lied to, at least not by the best and most earnest being he’d ever known. The next time Aziraphale turned down his company (“so sorry, Crowley dear, but I’ve got to do my tax filings, yes they do still require the paperwork even if you never sell anything, no, I couldn’t possibly speed it along with a miracle”) Crowley pretended to battle with himself for about thirty full seconds before taking the lift down to his car.

This time, Aziraphale didn’t leave the shop. He didn’t need to: the unknown angel came to visit him. Crowley spotted him crossing the street, wearing a different outfit (a slim-fit cream turtleneck sweater and navy wool trousers; he was better at this blending in lark than most angels, Crowley would give him that) but the same gleaming gold flashing from the corners of his eyes. He let himself into the shop, which Crowley found very irritating despite the fact that the shop was ostensibly open and customers were theoretically allowed. He briefly considered following the angel into the shop himself—if he went as a snake he might be able to slither behind a shelf unnoticed—but decided against it.

Mostly. He stared at the clock on his dashboard, trying to decide what was too long for the angel to stay inside. He found he couldn’t put a definitive timeframe on it, but was confident he would know when the moment came.

Twenty minutes passed, with agonizing slowness. Just as Crowley was really working himself up, finding the edges of his noncorporeal being and starting to stretch himself into a more serpentine format, the angel came back outside. Aziraphale showed him out, but unfortunately he didn’t appear to be throwing him out; he wore what looked to be a totally genuine smile, lingering on the doorstep to chatter with the other angel for a moment. Crowley shifted downward in his seat to make himself less visible. He needn’t have bothered, though. Aziraphale waved goodbye to the angel and retreated back into the shop without ever once looking Crowley’s way. This was a good thing, he knew, objectively. What kind of spy hopes to be spotted while doing his spying?

Well, Crowley could add it to his list of other failures. He was, as his former colleagues had informed him, a terrible demon; he was a bad friend, as evidenced by his current course of action; it only made sense that he’d be a bad spy, too.

“Angel,” he said on the phone that evening, working to make his voice as silky and persuasive as he could. “Don’t ask how, but I’ve got my hands on a bottle of the ‘82 Chateau Latour.”

“Oh, Crowley. How on Earth—”

“What did I just say?” Crowley interrupted, amusement bleeding into his tone. “I have my methods. You know that.”

“And you know I think about that vintage every day, you old serpent. What’s the occasion? Are you trying to butter me up for something?”

The occasion was that Crowley had resolved to try harder, and more importantly, to try faster. He didn’t know for certain whether the visiting angel had designs on Aziraphale, but he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. He had the perfect wine; he had called Aziraphale’s favorite cheesemonger and ordered a magnificent board (with only the lightest demonic influence to have it finished by tonight); he had, if not an actual speech, at least a vague assemblage of words in his head. The conditions were as good as they were going to get. He was a serpent, bless it all, and he wasn’t going to miss his opportunity to strike.

“No buttering, I swear. Just think this has waited long enough—the bottle, I mean. I can bring it by the shop tonight, maybe pick up a nibble or two on my way? If that works for you?”

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s tone, which had shifted from playful to dismayed in the space of one syllable, made Crowley sit up straight in his chair and dig his nails into its arm. “Um. That sounds lovely, my dear, but could we possibly save it for another night?”

“You want to save it?” It was so wholly unlike Aziraphale—denying himself a favorite indulgence for any length of time—that Crowley actually pulled the mobile away from his face to double check the name on the screen.

“Please don’t take me for unenthusiastic. I’m thrilled to have the chance to try it again, only—the shop is a bit of a mess at the moment.”

Crowley had visited Aziraphale’s shop roughly forty-five minutes after the deed was signed, and it had already been a maze of shelves, crates, and cobwebs. Never in the intervening two centuries had it ever not been a mess, which was by design, to make it less welcoming to any wanton miscreants who might actually try to buy one of the angel’s precious books. Crowley knew this, and Aziraphale knew that Crowley knew. “A mess,” he repeated flatly.

“Yes, it’s entirely uninhabitable right now, I’m afraid. But if you’re open to a change of venue, I’d be happy to leave the mess and have a drink elsewhere. We could drink the Latour at yours, or go out somewhere…?”

Crowley was tempted to bring Aziraphale to his own flat, for a long moment. They could still have the wine and the cheese, and Crowley could say the things he needed to say. But, no, it wouldn’t work. Aziraphale didn’t like Crowley’s flat: he found it too sterile, too sparse, and generally much too warm (no matter how many times Crowley reminded him that snakes were cold-blooded). He’d either be politely disapproving or openly complaining, and neither was ideal for the discussion Crowley had in mind.

“Let’s go out, yeah,” Crowley said, trying not to sound as disappointed as he felt. At least, he reminded himself, he wasn’t getting the brush-off entirely; Aziraphale wanted to spend time with him. Maybe he really was doing something catastrophically messy in the shop. “Pick you up at eight?”

“Perfect. I’ll see you then.”

Drinks had been fine. No, not fine, they had been good, Crowley admonished himself. Just because they’d been fingers of scotch rather than glasses of wine, served in a cozy corner sofa in a bar rather than on Aziraphale’s battered Chesterfield, didn’t mean the evening had been a waste. No evening with those blue eyes crinkling at him over the rim of a glass had ever been wasted. The chatter of their fellow patrons had been loud enough to interfere with their conversation, which Crowley had initially been annoyed by, until Aziraphale had made an exasperated face and slid nearly hip-to-hip with him on the sofa to speak directly into his ear. Crowley had equipped his corporation with a penis for centuries out of habit—minus his forays into presenting as Nanny Ashtoreth and other assorted characters over the years—but had to discreetly miracle it away at the feel of Aziraphale’s breath over his ear and neck, Aziraphale’s hand briefly resting on his knee as he steadied himself. Crowley had spent millennia tempting humanity into every sin under the sun, but somehow none of his temptations came anywhere close to this, to the chaste warmth of Aziraphale’s body against his side.

But he couldn’t Say Something here. It wasn’t a Something to be shouted over the din of a Mayfair hotel bar. So he held his tongue, and enjoyed the closeness and the Glenfarclas in his glass, and waited for the next evening.

Only, the next evening hadn’t worked either—the bookshop was in worse shape, if Aziraphale was to be believed, and could they possibly go out for dinner instead? And the next evening, oh, I can’t believe I forgot, my dear, but I’ve actually got tickets to a show, would you care to join me? This went on for days, the hedging and dodging and refusing to tell Crowley what was actually going on, and before Crowley knew it another week had passed. It had at least passed with a lot of drinks in Aziraphale’s company, but still, the knowledge that the angel was hiding something from him left a film of worry over it all. Worse was the absurd but persistent paranoia that Aziraphale somehow knew what Crowley wanted to say, and was actively avoiding any situation in which he might be able to say it. Crowley didn’t see how it could be possible, but angels were occasionally just as ineffable as their creator.

Abruptly, eight days after Crowley had first offered the Chateau Latour, he became entirely fed up with the whole charade. If Aziraphale wouldn’t invite him to the shop, Crowley would just have to drop in. It was rude, yes, but Crowley was a demon, as he frequently had to remind himself these days. He grabbed his keys and the wine, fetched the charcuterie board from his refrigerator (it had kept perfectly over the last week, as Crowley had instructed it to), and got in the car before he could talk himself out of it.

It was nearly dusk, the setting sun painting the gleaming hood of the Bentley in fiery oranges and pinks—uncomfortably reminiscent of the day the world didn’t end, he thought. He spent the entire drive over attempting to coax himself into a softer, more pleasant mood. It wasn’t as though he could storm into the bookshop and demand Aziraphale love him. (If he’d thought it would work, he would have tried it centuries ago.) It helped that Crowley had neither seen, nor heard anything about, the angel in the turtleneck since the sighting a week ago. Maybe he really had just dropped in for a visit, and had since fucked back off to the Choir Invisible. It still didn’t explain Aziraphale’s evasiveness, but Crowley felt better equipped to deal with one dodgy angel than two.

The bookshop came into view. He’d gotten into something approaching good cheer—by demonic standards—and was halfway through his fifteenth mental rundown of the basic points (love you; want you; would be absolutely delighted if you wanted same; etc.) when he was abruptly cut off by a black SUV pulling over in front of him and stopping entirely. Crowley slammed on the brakes, swearing as the bottle of wine flew off the passenger seat and hit the glove box. The compartment in question popped open, sending a cascade of spare sunglasses to the floor. “Ssshit!” he hissed, diving down to rescue the bottle—which was, fortunately, unscathed. He spared a belated thought for the charcuterie, but either by luck or by an unintentional miracle, it had stayed exactly in place on the seat. “Thank Somebody,” he muttered, retrieved his offerings, and got out of the car.

“Oi! Where’d you learn to drive, you fucking donut?” he bellowed, starting toward the driver’s door. He never reached it, though: the back door closest to the pavement opened, and out stepped the guy— the new angel, the blonde with the apparent collection of turtlenecks. He carried something that probably passed for a briefcase among the City-boy crowd, and he made a beeline for the entrance of the bookshop. Crowley stopped where he was, only vaguely noticing when the SUV (an Uber Lux, by the looks of it, and to his great annoyance, a current-year Bentley Bentayga) pulled back into traffic and departed. When he returned his full attention to the angel, he startled so badly he nearly dropped the much-abused wine: Aziraphale had come out onto the doorstep.

He ducked behind his car, quickly but pointlessly, given that Aziraphale would recognize the Bentley anywhere. As with the last angel encounter, though, it didn’t matter; Aziraphale was wholly focused on Turtleneck Guy, beaming at him as though nothing else existed. The interloping twat stepped up beside Aziraphale, leaning in as though he meant to—but of course he wasn’t going to, Aziraphale wouldn’t just let him—

Crowley couldn’t see their faces anymore, not from this angle, but he wasn’t an idiot. Aziraphale and the Other Angel kissed hello. The kind of alarm bells that had previously been reserved for Satan’s arrival were jangling in his brain, driving out every coherent thought. It didn’t last long, only a quick peck, but when they drew back Aziraphale didn’t slap, shove, or otherwise give any reasonable reaction to being kissed by someone with such stupid hair. He went right on smiling as he spoke, holding the door open to let the stranger in.

Crowley unfolded himself from behind the Bentley, feeling a kind of slow-moving horror. It sludged through his veins as thick as honey, but bitter and blackened. Without really intending to, he sat back against the bonnet, wine and charcuterie forgotten in his hands. He seemed to have been paralyzed, every course of action fleeing his mind.

And then, impossibly, it got worse. Crowley’s eye was caught by a light turning on above him, and he looked up. The light shone from one of the windows in the flat above the bookshop. Moments later, two silhouettes crossed in front of the window: one with very stupid floppy hair, and one with a bowtie Crowley had been staring at across dinner tables for decades now. They passed into the next room, turning the light on there as well, and Crowley felt his stupor crack apart into a vicious stab of jealousy.

The angel had been invited into Aziraphale’s flat. In two hundred years, Crowley had almost never been in the flat, and never because he’d been invited. He’d gone looking for Aziraphale once or twice while he wasn’t in the shop; he’d been sick in the toilet there after too much wine; he’d snooped, once, in a drunken moment of weakness, hoping to find some clue to Aziraphale’s romantic and/or sexual inclinations (he hadn’t found any, not even a bed). But here was Turtleneck Guy, following Aziraphale up the stairs as though this sort of thing happened all the time.

It wasn’t the end of the world. Crowley had been to the end of the world, and he knew better. Aziraphale was alive, evidently happy, and still speaking to Crowley; humanity was no closer to total annihilation than usual; there were no Horsemen, or oddly powerful children, or Adversaries bursting through the pavement in front of him. But Crowley’s heart reverberated with an echo of the loss he’d felt back then, when Aziraphale had shouted at him we’re not friends, we’re on opposite sides, it’s over. This time, though, it was squarely Crowley’s fault. They’d had months together without Heaven and Hell looming over them, months when Crowley could have mustered the courage to Say Something, and he hadn’t. Couldn’t blame his angel for moving on, really.

Not your angel, his brain unhelpfully reminded him. Not anymore. Never really was.

“Are you all right?” asked a voice near Crowley’s elbow, and he was so caught up in his own internal monologue, he thought for a moment he was imagining it. He turned to find a slight woman in a knit hat eyeing him, her expression wary.

“‘M fine,” Crowley said.

“Only, you’re blocking traffic,” she said, not unkindly, pointing. Crowley saw that at least a dozen cars had backed up behind the still-running Bentley, complaining in a chorus of honks. Somehow, he hadn’t noticed the din before. “Do you need help?”

Not from you, Crowley thought, and shortened this to, “No.” He pushed himself to standing, straightening his glasses with the hand still holding the wine. As an afterthought, he shoved the charcuterie board into the startled woman’s arms. “You keep that,” he said gruffly, “I don’t need it anymore,” and fled into the car before she could argue with him.

Back in his flat, the door locked and warded behind him, Crowley devoted himself to avoiding his thoughts at all costs. He was fortunately very accomplished in the art of self-distraction, and he started with the wine: wrenching the cork gracelessly out of the bottle, then drinking the entire thing in one go. (It deserved better treatment, really, but Crowley felt there was something obscurely symbolic about wasting it in this way.) Second and third bottles of something much less exceptional followed shortly behind, and before long Crowley found himself swaying through his plant room, fingers wrapped around the neck of a fourth.

“I TOLD YOU NOT TO GET ANY FUCKING IDEAS,” he bellowed at a trembling schefflera, wine spattering the concrete floor as he gestured wildly. “NOW LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENED.” A Monstera adansonii in the corner, a more recent acquisition, actually rolled up its leaves and shrank back into its pot. He scoffed at its cowardice, taking another slug from the bottle that mostly landed on his clothes and floor. It was, perhaps, not entirely reasonable to hold the plants responsible for the situation, but Crowley felt decidedly un reasonable and needed someone or something to blame. He just wanted to stop feeling things. He’d been feeling them for so very, very long, whole millennia of feelings, enough feelings to crush him beneath their weight like poor old Giles Corey. His body wasn’t made to handle all these feelings, it was just human skin and a human heart and—

Crowley had an idea. He shifted into his snake form, the wine bottle smashing on the floor as his hands retracted into his spine. It was different as a snake; his feelings weren’t gone, but they were—blurry, maybe. A bit fuzzy around the edges, incompatible with his current body. It gave everything a small amount of much-needed distance, a little reprieve from the repeated mental images of just what Aziraphale and Turtleneck Guy might be getting up to in the flat above the bookshop.

He’d never shifted forms while quite this drunk, though, and he found he couldn’t entirely get the hang of the sinuous wiggle it took to move himself from place to place. He flailed around fruitlessly in place for a few minutes, hissing at nothing, before giving it up. The plant room was warm; the door was locked to humans and ethereal beings alike; he was as comfortable as he wanted to be, and so he curled up against the base of the schefflera’s pot and went to sleep.

(The schefflera felt an odd rush of something like protective tenderness, and didn’t understand why. Being a plant, it had never had the opportunity to read about Stockholm syndrome. But it wisely kept its thoughts to itself, lest the terrified M. adansonii think it was a few leaves short of a shrubbery.)

“Muhhhh,” Crowley said.

He had gone to sleep as a snake, he knew he had, but at some point his body had apparently decided to revert on its own. He hadn’t yet summoned the strength to open his eyes, but he could tell he had hips and a human-shaped head again, because both were hurting. He felt oddly sticky and crusty, as though something had dried all over his skin, and there was a horrible ringing in his ears.

The ringing cut off with an odd mechanical click, and he heard his own voice echoing oddly from the other room. Ah: the ringing had been from the telephone, not from his ears. That was a relief, at least. He moved his legs experimentally, wondering if it might be worth getting up; the resulting protest from his joints made him rethink the whole venture, and he went still again. His ansaphone message finished, the tone sounded, and then Aziraphale’s frantic voice filled the flat.

“Crowley, whatever’s happened, please just tell me, I—I’ve checked with Anathema and young Newton, I’ve even asked Adam, and no one has heard from you, I came to your flat but it wouldn’t let me in so I know you must be keeping me out, and if you’re angry with me we can talk about it, but—oh, I can’t bear to think what else could have happened, so please call me. I’m so—” and here the ansaphone clicked off, a cheery voice announcing that the tape was full.

“Shit,” Crowley ground out, feeling even worse than before. He must have slept more than just the one night, if Aziraphale was this worried. There was nothing for it: he was going to have to open his eyes. He could feel sunlight on his skin, and he braced himself for the assault on his eyeballs, but when he finally wrenched them open he found there was an odd little patch of shade over his face. Glancing up, he saw that the schefflera had extended a branch between his face and the sunny window, sparing him the worst of it. He scratched a hand through his hair, squinting.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly, and the plant trembled but didn’t retract the branch. “I. Um. Don’t let it go to your trunk,” he warned, unconvincingly.

He completed a brief inventory of his body parts, making sure his unconscious self had brought them all back correctly (it had, even the penis, which Crowley hadn’t bothered replacing since the night at the hotel bar). The sticky crust turned out to be from the wine he had sloshed all over the floor, which had dried on his skin and clothing and glued a few slivers of broken glass to his exposed ankles. He peeled himself off the floor, balefully miracled away as much of the mess as he could in his hungover state, and headed for his desk.

There had been a brief consideration, when he’d first woken up, of giving Aziraphale the silent treatment. It was childish and stupid, but Crowley felt just petty enough to try it for a while. When he reached the ansaphone, he saw a glowing red “29” on the new messages display.

“Oh, no,” he murmured, taking his mobile out of his pocket. It displayed so many missed calls from Aziraphale that they overflowed the screen. It also displayed what was presumably the current date—a full two weeks after Crowley’s binge. 

(The fact that it displayed anything at all should have been strange to Crowley after two weeks without a charge, but Crowley didn’t actually know that phones needed to be charged, and so he had never bothered.)

Feeling foreboding and resignation in equal measure, he pressed the play button on his ansaphone and flopped back into his throne.

“Hello, Crowley! …Crowley? …Oh, it’s your silly answer phone again, isn’t it. I really do prefer it when you answer, my dear. Are you at home? I thought we might go for a bite this evening. Ring me back at your earliest convenience.”

“Crowley? I suppose I’ve caught you at a bad time. I tried the new Korean restaurant the next street over. It was inspired, really, but I’d have liked your company. Shall we try it together soon?”

“Crowley, I know I’m being foolish, but I can’t help feeling a little concerned. We do tend to speak most days as of late, and I’ve…grown accustomed, I suppose. I really would appreciate a call. Just to let me know you’re all right.”

The polite inquiries kept going for several more days’ worth of messages, and then Crowley noticed a shift in tone.

“Crowley. This is becoming absurd. I know you keep your mobile with you, and if you’re at home I’m sure you can hear these, so I can’t understand why you’re choosing to ignore me. Ring back. Please.”

“Crowley! It has been ten days since you last spoke to me. Whatever childish game you’re playing, stop it at once. Pick up or I’m coming over, do you hear me?”

The anger made Crowley feel guilty, but it was nothing compared to the naked fear in the last handful of messages. He forced himself to listen, though hearing Aziraphale’s voice wobble turned his stomach.

“Crowley, I’m so very sorry. I don’t know what I’ve done, but it must have been something awful to drive you away. After all our time together, can’t you tell me where I’ve misstepped? I’m—I’d be so grateful for a chance to make amends.”

“My dear Crowley, I’m so worried. I can’t shake the thought that Hell has come back for you, or perhaps Heaven. I’d give anything to know you’re safe.” Here, the recorded Aziraphale took a shuddering breath, and his voice turned thick and halting. “Even if you’re angry with me, even if you—you never want to see me again, would you please do me the favor of letting me know that you’re well? I won’t push you to explain, I promise. I only need…Please tell me you’re all right.”

“Crowley—” said the second-to-last message, and Crowley heard a few harsh, damp-sounding breaths before Aziraphale hung up.

The machine moved on to the last message, the one Crowley had heard from the other room, and Crowley felt sick with guilt. He’d been upset, jealous, miserable, but he hadn’t wanted to make Aziraphale suffer. He’d never wanted that, not for a single second of his existence. He was already dialing his mobile as the ansaphone finished spooling out its tape, and the phone hadn’t even completed a full ring before Aziraphale answered.

“Crowley?”

“Angel—” he said hurriedly, trying to reassure him as quickly as possible, but Aziraphale let out a shocked-sounding noise and cut him off.

“Crowley, are you all right? Where are you? Do you need help?”

“I’m fine, everything’s fine. I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m sorry.”

Aziraphale let out a breath that sounded as though he’d been holding it for two weeks. “Where the Hell have you been?” he demanded, voice shaking. So much for I won’t push you to explain. “Why did you barricade your door? I thought you’d been discorporated, or worse!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” Crowley repeated stupidly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I…truth is, uh, I fell asleep.” The word hung in the air between them, Aziraphale falling silent for a few long moments.

“Asleep,” he repeated, in a low and dangerous tone. It sent prickles up the back of Crowley’s neck.

“Yeah. The night when—” when that angel went up to your flat, he nearly said, just catching himself in time, “—the night after I last saw you, I had a bit much to drink, maybe more than a bit, and I went to sleep. Didn’t mean to be out this long.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Aziraphale began, “that I have been worried sick, absolutely losing my mind with concern for days now, and you simply forgot to set an alarm?”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“We’re traitors, Crowley! Enemies of Heaven and Hell! They could have murdered you, either one of them!”

“I know that—”

“Do not,” Aziraphale said raggedly, “ever do this to me again. Do you understand? If you need to—to hibernate, or whatever it is you do, you tell me first. I can’t—I can’t,” he trailed off, his voice petering out.

“It’s brumation for snakes, not hibernation,” Crowley muttered. His guilt was transforming under Aziraphale’s outrage, like coal turning into a diamond. The pressure of Aziraphale’s anger, on top of everything else he’d felt lately, was alchemizing Crowley’s remorse into indignation.

“I don’t care what it’s called, you have to—”

“Look, I said I’m sorry!” Crowley snapped. “It was a mistake, and I feel bad about it, and I didn’t mean to make you worry. It’s done. All right?”

Aziraphale was quiet for a moment, while Crowley simmered in his frustration. “You said you had too much to drink. Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine. I like drinking. Demon, remember? Vices are my thing.”

“You’re sure you aren’t…keeping anything from me?”

And oh, that was fucking rich, coming from Mr. Oh-Dear-Me-The-Shop-Is-A-Mess himself. Crowley gritted his teeth, trying to rein in his anger before responding. “Dunno,” he said tightly. “Are you? I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

“If I—what?” Aziraphale let out a breathy little laugh, the worst acting in his six thousand years of am-dram level performances. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right. That’s fine, then.”

“Crowley—”

Crowley hung up. Mobiles were so unsatisfying for that, he thought bitterly. He wished he’d called Aziraphale from his landline, so he could have slammed it dramatically into the receiver. Instead, he just had to content himself with mashing his thumb into the screen harder than usual. Needing somewhere to channel his frustrated energy, he ejected the tape from the ansaphone, picked it up, and flung it at the wall. It exploded in a burst of shattered plastic and unspooling ribbon, all of Aziraphale’s concern and anger and fear tumbling into a squiggly heap.

In the shower, Crowley turned the heat up to scalding and stood with his palms flat against the wall, back hunched. There was something about hot water that always made him feel cleaner, even if he was perfectly capable of cleaning up the mess miraculously. He let it beat down on him until it began to run cold, and then he snarled at the shower head until it went hot again. He needed to think, and the water heater was damn well going to give him as much time as it took.

Something had to give. He could see that now. They were nearing a point of no return, a point where they might hurt each other badly enough to corrode their friendship beyond repair. Aziraphale wasn’t innocent in this—he could just come out with it, tell Crowley what was going on with the other angel, tell him why he wasn’t allowed in the shop anymore—but Crowley had been no better, stalking and spying and refusing to talk to Aziraphale about how he really felt. A memory came back to him, Aziraphale’s voice from a different mouth while Crowley stared at the burning wreckage of the Bentley: I’m the nice one. You can’t expect me to do the dirty work. If Aziraphale was committed to keeping secrets, Crowley would have to be the one to put cards on the table first. Own up to his snooping, ask about the other angel outright. He could do it. Had to do it, because if the alternative was watching his only genuine friendship wither and die, there really wasn’t a choice to be made.

Crowley felt a sense of déja vu as he sped toward the bookshop yet again. Last time, he’d at least come armed with wine and cheese (he spared a moment to think guiltily about the wine, which had been real and valuable and not miracled in any way, but oh well). This time, he brought nothing with him except a ferocious hangover, hope, and apprehension. The déja vu intensified, ratcheting up the pounding in his temples, when he saw that the stranger in the turtleneck was at Aziraphale’s door again. “Does he fucking live here?” Crowley snarled, to no one in particular. 

Unlike last time, though, he seemed to be leaving rather than arriving. He stood on the pavement below the doorstep, saying something to Aziraphale in the doorway. Aziraphale still smiled at him, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes; he looked tired, Crowley thought, through a fresh wave of guilt. Crowley parked the car a little further back than he normally would, hoping to avoid detection until the little scene had played out.

Turtleneck Guy bent down and reached into a carrier bag, then straightened and held something out to Aziraphale. With the item between their bodies, Crowley couldn’t see what it was, but he could see the effect it had on Aziraphale: the angel went misty-eyed, tilting his head the way he did when confronted with babies, or puppies, or a particularly impressive dessert trolley. He leaned in to hug the other angel for a lingering moment, during which Crowley tried desperately to hold on to his earlier determination. When they finally released each other, they didn’t go far, clasping hands and exchanging cheek kisses as though they couldn’t bear to separate.

But separate they did: Turtleneck Guy released Aziraphale’s hand and walked away, tossing a wave over his shoulder. And without the obstacle of his torso in the way, Crowley saw what the item had been.

A potted orchid.

Aziraphale raised the plant to eye level, smiling in his soppy way, and said something—presumably to the plant, since there was no one else in earshot. He turned and carried it into the shop, and Crowley felt the closing of the door reverberate into his bones.

He stared after Aziraphale, pulse pounding in his ears, and thought he genuinely might discorporate from shock. He…the stranger had…He couldn’t assemble a coherent thought. The stranger had been invited up to Aziraphale’s flat—fine. He had kissed him—all right, it wasn’t fine , but it was—he could live with it. But this. He was moving his houseplants into the bookshop???

It was not to be borne. Crowley sat absolutely motionless for an untrackable stretch of time, the unfairness of it all a bottomless void inside him. They had saved the world. They had gotten rid of their Heavenly and Hellish duties, at least for now. They had begun spending time together without Aziraphale glancing over his shoulder, had forged something genuinely comfortable and liberating and real. And now—now that they’d finally arrived at the place Crowley had wanted them to be for six thousand years— now another angel had to turn up and snatch it all out of Crowley’s reach?

Crowley wanted to scream. He wanted to burn something. He wanted to storm after the stranger and demand to know how he’d won Aziraphale’s affections so easily. He wanted to miracle himself into his bed and drink and cry until he stopped caring . He wanted to—to go home, he’d thought, but the accompanying image hadn’t been his flat. Home was the same place it had been for over two hundred years now: the back room of the bookshop, laughing into a wine glass with Aziraphale beside him.

He realized, with a fresh wave of tearing grief, that he’d lost that, too. If Aziraphale’s lover was moving in with him, if that lone plant had been just the start of their cohabitation, the cozy nights over a bottle of red were almost certainly at an end. The happy couple wouldn’t want him there, intruding on their nesting, and Crowley himself could not possibly sit and smile and joke while Aziraphale snuggled up to a blessed idiot in a turtleneck. Even if he managed to get Aziraphale to himself for a few hours, the other angel’s— things, his fucking orchids— would be everywhere, reminding him silently that he no longer belonged there.

The worst of it was that Crowley couldn’t blame Aziraphale, not if he was genuinely falling (not Falling) for this mysterious angel. Crowley had loved him for so long, and so desperately, and if six millennia of wearing his heart on his sleeve had failed to win the angel over, then he couldn’t fault Aziraphale for that. His shock burned out all at once into a sort of miserable resignation. He wanted what was best for Aziraphale; he wanted him to be happy, knew he deserved to be happy. And if he was, what right did Crowley have to interfere? He knew the decent move here: he should back away, give the angel some space. Not retreat entirely—he didn’t need twenty-nine phone messages to know Aziraphale cared for him, even if he didn’t lo—well. No point thinking the words now. But they could be the kind of friends who saw each other once every few weeks, who only called when there was something major to update the other about. Crowley could ask after Turtleneck Guy, plaster a smile on his face and make all the right approving noises. He could do it. He should do it. He was going to do it, he told himself sternly. He looked back at the bookshop door, willing himself to pack away his feelings and leave Aziraphale alone. For now, anyway.

But…

But.

The thing was.

That was the decent thing to do, yes. But Crowley wasn’t decent. He was, more or less by definition as a demon, indecent. He was greedy, covetous; he had spent millennia snatching up every scrap of attention Aziraphale threw his way and always wanting more, more, more. Yes, he had tried in every action to make Aziraphale understand how he felt, but he hadn’t told him, had he? He’d never laid it out in so many words: Angel, I love you, I need you, I want you, in every way you can imagine. He’d never Said Something. And after all they’d been through, after the world’s longest game of will-they-won’t-they, was he really going to pack it in and go home without ever once having made an honest play for the angel’s heart?

Another memory surfaced, unbidden: Adam Young standing on the tarmac before Satan Himself, angrily shouting that his real father was the one who had been there. The car door slammed behind Crowley before the thought had even taken full shape in his head. He stalked across the street, heedless of traffic, his entire being focused on the point of ethereal energy behind the bookshop door. Maybe he could make you happy, he thought, feet pounding the pavement, but I can do it better. I’m the one who’s been there all these years; he’s just a fucking opportunist. Where had Turtleneck Guy been when Crowley and Aziraphale had faced the end of the world together? Where had he been when Heaven and Hell had come for them, had ordered Aziraphale into a column of hellfire? Crowley didn’t know, but he knew where the idiot hadn’t been, which was at Aziraphale’s side. Where anyone who claimed to love Aziraphale belonged.

His long legs and righteous fury carried him onto the doorstep and through the door (away from a cacophony of indignant car horns) before he’d really thought through his script. “All right, angel,” Crowley called, snapping his fingers to slam the door shut behind him. Aziraphale jumped a mile, nearly dropping the orchid as he whirled around. “Cards on the table. Who is that guy? What is it about him?”

“I’m—hello, by the way,” Aziraphale said, confusion and indignation warring on his face. “Or are we skipping all the pleasantries today?”

“We’ve been dancing around this for weeks,” Crowley ground out. “Tell me. Please. No more games.”

“Dancing around what?” Aziraphale demanded. Crowley made a wild, pointless gesture with his arms, trying to somehow encompass that guy and that plant and you and us in a single maneuver.

“Him! That— guy, the one in the fucking turtleneck who’s been hanging around here! What’s he have that I don’t?”

Aziraphale blinked at him very rapidly, looking as though someone had bludgeoned him over the head with a first-edition Gutenberg Bible. Crowley saw his lips begin to form a question, but then he glanced down at the orchid in his hands, and seemed to realize who Crowley was talking about. “He has…a successful interior design firm?” he said, half a question. “But I don’t really see what that has to do with…”

Crowley had stopped listening. For a long, exceptionally stupid moment, he thought that Aziraphale was confessing that his feelings for the fair-haired stranger stemmed from his choice of profession. I could learn interior design, he thought, and then his higher thought processes reengaged. Wait. No. That doesn’t actually make any sense.

“It’s not because he’s an angel?” Crowley let slip, without really meaning to. It wasn’t the real question, of course; the real question was not why him, but rather, why not me. He hadn’t quite worked up the nerve for that one yet.

“What is not because—wait. An angel?” Aziraphale echoed incredulously. “Guillaume’s not an angel! He’s French! Why on Earth—”

“But! The gold!” Crowley jabbed a finger toward his own bespectacled eye so hard he put a smudge on his lens. “The, the—on his face, he had—”

“It’s called makeup, Crowley!” Aziraphale cut in, now jabbing at his own face. “Eyeliner! I know you’ve heard of it; I’ve seen you wear it!”

Crowley’s mind went entirely, unhelpfully blank. He was beginning to suspect he’d acted wholly ridiculous, but he still couldn’t assemble the pieces into a picture that made sense. The turtlenecked man—Guillaume?—was not an angel; he was, evidently, a French interior designer. But none of this explained why Aziraphale had lied to Crowley, had thrown him over in favor of spending time with Guillaume. Why they’d been so casually intimate (oh, shit, wait, French people kissed in greeting sometimes, didn’t they?). Why he was bringing his plants into Aziraphale’s flat.

“I thought…” Crowley cleared his throat, wishing he could rewind the last ninety seconds and re-enter the bookshop with a little more composure. (Stopping time, he could occasionally manage; reversing it was another matter entirely.) When he spoke again, to his intense embarrassment, his voice had shrunk down to a quarter of its normal volume. “You’ve been spending so much time with him. You told me—the rare book dealer, you said, but really you were with him, and…”

“You’ve been spying on me? Crowley!”

“I was worried! You were acting weird! I thought maybe Heaven, or—Hell, could have been, I didn’t know—”

“So you saw us together,” Aziraphale said, with poorly veiled impatience, “and decided Guillaume was an angel based on his eyeliner choices—”

“He had really nice teeth, too, like your lot—”

“Oh, excuse me, based on his eyeliner choices and his dentistry, and then you…what. Just continued monitoring the situation? For my own good, is that it?”

Crowley couldn’t believe how badly he’d fucked this up. He’d come in here ready to pour his heart out, to take Aziraphale’s hand and explain everything he felt, and instead he’d jumped straight to demands and accusations. He made a feeble gesture, his hands dropping limply at his sides. “It seemed like. Ngk. I could tell you liked him, so. I just wanted to make sure you were…”

“Safe?” Aziraphale asked mockingly.

“Happy.” Aziraphale looked taken aback, and Crowley swallowed hard, around a painful lump in his throat. “I want you to be happy, angel. It’s—you know that, don’t you? That’s all I want.” He couldn’t reverse time, and he wasn’t going to get a better opening—it was now or never. “In fact, I…”

Fuck, why was it so difficult? His heart screamed at him JUST TELL HIM, YOU ABSOLUTE DOORKNOB, while his brain hissed ridiculous, pointless, unworthy, what makes you think you could even begin to deserve him. He shook himself as though he could fling both voices out of his ears if he tried hard enough, screwing his eyes shut and exhaling sharply. Maybe it would be easier if he didn’t look at the angel, couldn’t see his expression softening into something that might be pity. “Aziraphale. Here’s the thing.”

“I think you’d better come upstairs,” Aziraphale said, knocking Crowley even further off kilter.

“But—”

“I think you had better come now,” he said firmly. Crowley opened his eyes in time to see him turning away, the potted orchid bobbing gracefully over his shoulder. He watched the angel round the corner, rooted stupidly to the spot, until he heard a “Crowley?” from up the stairs. He hurried to catch up, cursing himself every step of the way.

At the top of the stairs, Aziraphale paused, seeming to collect himself. Crowley hovered awkwardly two steps below him, wondering if he ought to say something. The angel turned, drawing a breath, and caught Crowley’s eye, and Crowley prepared himself for whatever world-ending pronouncement Aziraphale was about to make. But then he let the breath back out, climbed the final step, and stood aside to let Crowley up.

“Angel,” Crowley said slowly, gazing around him, “what…?”

“You wanted to know why I’d been spending time with Guillaume,” Aziraphale said, his voice coming out oddly nervous. “This is it.”

Crowley hadn’t spent much time in Aziraphale’s flat over the years—primarily because neither had Aziraphale. The angel didn’t often sleep, and he much preferred to eat at restaurants than to cook for himself. With a kettle in the bookshop’s back room, the upstairs flat had been relegated mostly to storage for overflow books and various tartan articles of clothing. He had been there, though, and remembered it as more or less an afterthought to the shop itself: a miniscule sitting room and attached kitchenette, what should have been a bedroom but contained only an armoire, and something that nominally passed for a bathroom through another door.

Where Crowley stood now was decidedly not the angel’s flat. The room at the top of the stairs was cozy but not cramped, with walls in a dusky blue-gray and large windows. A velvety-looking sofa and squashy leather armchair surrounded a lit brick fireplace, with a surprisingly modern floor lamp arching gracefully overhead. There were books, of course, but they’d been corralled to a set of built-in shelves along one wall, rather than allowed the run of the place. There were about a dozen more throw pillows on the couch than Crowley would have chosen for himself, and a good percentage of them were at least tartan-adjacent, but he had to admit that the overall look was…nice. Better than nice, really. It conformed to neither Crowley’s minimalist sensibilities nor Aziraphale’s tendency toward the outdated and cluttered, landing somewhere squarely in between.

Crowley realized Aziraphale was watching him, an expectant look on his face. “It’s, um,” Crowley said, feeling even further away from understanding than he’d been before. If Aziraphale had just wanted to renovate his flat, why had he been so bloody weird about it? Why the lying, and avoiding, and…fraternizing with Frenchmen? “It’s good?” Crowley said at last, and Aziraphale’s face took on a pained look. “No, it’s really nice. It is. I like the,” and here he gestured vaguely to the room at large, unsure how to finish the sentence. Complimenting specific pieces of Aziraphale’s décor was such a tectonic shift from the conversation downstairs that Crowley felt he’d ended up on another continent.

“I’m glad,” Aziraphale said, with more relief than Crowley thought was warranted. “This way, please. After you.” He gestured through a doorway, and Crowley stepped through, understanding that they were going to have to finish Aziraphale’s little tour before they could return to the subject at hand. Did he think Crowley would approve more of Guillaume if he saw the kind of work he did…? At any rate, the next room was a bedroom. An actual bedroom, one with a very large, very plush-looking bed in it. (He ordered himself firmly not to think about what a being who didn’t sleep would be doing with a very large bed, and promptly failed.) Crowley gave himself a moment to take it all in: the skylight set into the dormer ceiling just above the bed, giving a view of whatever stars once could see above London’s light pollution; the thick, soft rug underfoot (clearly antique, but much less stuffy and ornate than the Persian monstrosities downstairs); the chaise angled in one corner, strewn artfully with a wooly blanket; the open French doors leading to—

“Holy Hell, angel,” Crowley said, with a low whistle. He remembered Aziraphale’s previous bathroom, mostly because he had been sick in there once or twice over the centuries after an inadvisable amount of wine. It had been a grim, depressing little hole in the wall with a toilet, a tiny shower stall, and an ancient pedestal sink. Now, the French doors opened onto a bright, airy space with the requisite toilet and sink, but more importantly, a clawfoot tub easily large enough to hold two full-grown men. (Or occult beings. Or one of each, Crowley supposed bitterly.) A truly astounding number of little bottles were arranged on a low stool beside the tub—bath products, from what Crowley could tell.

“It’s not too much, is it?” came Aziraphale’s anxious voice from somewhere near the doorway. Crowley straightened, setting down a bottle of some kind of bubble concoction.

“For you? Honestly, I’m sort of shocked it took you this long to get really, really into baths. Seems right up your street.” He turned to smile at Aziraphale, but found him biting his lip, that pained look in place again. “Angel, it’s great. Why are you so—”

Nervous, he’d planned to say, but Aziraphale abruptly left the room. Crowley blinked, wondering when he was going to understand what the Heaven was going on, and followed. 

Aziraphale had retreated to the living room, oscillating in a second, wider doorway like a fan that couldn’t decide which direction to blow. “It’s just through here,” he said, though what it was, he didn’t elaborate upon.

“Hey,” Crowley prompted, as gently as he could. “Not that I’m not enjoying the tour, but could we…There were some things I wanted to talk about, before—”

“There’s just one more,” Aziraphale interrupted again, making Crowley grit his teeth in frustration. “One more thing I’d like to show you. Please.”

The wait was killing him, but what was he going to say? Absolutely not, I refuse to look at one more inch of parquet flooring before you let me tell you I love you? He nodded, trying not to look as put out as he felt, and Aziraphale hurried through the doorway. It led to a kitchen—spacious, modern, Crowley got an overall impression of gleaming stainless and marble—and a cozy little dining area, more of a nook than a room, with a table and two chairs set up in a large window overlooking the street. But before he’d had a chance to comment on it, or even really examine it, Aziraphale was opening a plain wooden door on the other side of the room.

“Through here, if you would,” he said, disappearing through the door. Crowley cast a longing glance at the little table. An image came to mind, as beautiful as it was painful: the two of them in the morning light, sat close enough together that their feet and ankles rested in a comfortable tangle; Aziraphale sipping his tea and looking through those preposterous reading glasses at whatever book he currently couldn’t put down; Crowley drinking coffee and prodding at his mobile. He could see it so clearly, and he ached.

He couldn’t dwell on it. Aziraphale had something apparently important to show him, and Crowley still didn’t understand why he was here. He banished the little morning vignette from his mind and turned resolutely away from the table, following Aziraphale through the door.

The moment he’d stepped through, he stopped dead in his tracks.

It was…a greenhouse, maybe? No, that wasn’t the right word. A conservatory, Crowley thought, that was what it was. A high-ceilinged octagonal room, made mostly of glass and iron. Apart from some unoccupied stands and a worktop against one wall, it was entirely empty. Aziraphale stood in the center of the room, cradling the potted orchid with both hands and looking unaccountably terrified.

“This wasn’t how I’d planned to give this tour,” he said, voice trembling a little, though he tried to smile through it. “I had thought…hoped…perhaps we’d go to dinner first, when it was all finished, and I could invite you back for a nightcap, and then I could show you. What I’d been working on.”

Crowley still didn’t understand, but his heart had kicked into high gear the moment he’d entered the room, even if he didn’t know why. There was a thought fluttering around just outside his field of view, like a moth batting against a window, but he was afraid to look directly at it. “Why?” he asked, mortified to hear the croak that emerged from his mouth. He cleared his throat, tried again. “What is it you wanted me to see, angel?”

“I know we don’t share many of the same tastes,” Aziraphale said, gazing down at the plant in his hands. “You prefer a more…minimalist approach to your surroundings. And of course, there’s the matter of sleep, which I know you enjoy. I knew that I would need to make some changes, here, if I wanted…”

“Wanted,” Crowley echoed, from very far away. Aziraphale looked up then, finally meeting his eye.

“If I wanted you to live here,” he said, the waver gone from his voice. “To—to share a home with me. To stay, if you will.”

Corporations were a strange business. Crowley couldn’t see how a pounding heart, suddenly rubbery knees, or a dizzying lightness in his head could possibly be effective survival mechanisms, but he was as powerless as any human to stop them. He pulled off his sunglasses, suddenly needing Aziraphale to see his eyes. “I,” he said pointlessly, his throat making a horrible dry clicking sound. What he meant to say was yes, thank Satan, I thought you were abandoning me for a blonde in a turtleneck and I’d never have survived it. What came out instead was, “You didn’t have to—angel, you don’t think I’d actually turn you down over your décor, do you? Because I—”

“No, Crowley,” Aziraphale interrupted, so gently it made Crowley’s chest ache. “I know you better than that. But I also know—we both know—that I haven’t always been forthcoming about your place in my life. Please, don’t deny it. You’ve been so brave, my dear, you’ve never shied away from our—from… us, no matter what we were, and I have been too cowardly to extend you the same courtesy.” He swallowed hard; Crowley could see his throat working. “I intend to change that. At once, before one more day passes us by. And I—it’s a bit silly, all this cloak and dagger for a bit of redecorating, I know, but. I wanted it to be absolutely clear that as far as I’m concerned, your place is here. Beside me.”

The dizziness increased tenfold. The only way Crowley could see to anchor himself was to step forward and reach out for Aziraphale. He meant to take the angel’s hands, but there was a pot in the way; in his agitated state, Crowley had forgotten all about stupid Guillaume and his stupid orchid.

(Actually, it was a lovely orchid— Peristeria elata, the Holy Ghost orchid. Crowley found himself wondering if Guillaume subconsciously had an inkling what Aziraphale was.)

He touched a delicate blossom, tracing the edge of a petal with his fingertip. “I thought Guillaume was moving his own plants into the shop,” he confessed, feeling extremely silly. “Saw him giving this to you and nearly burst a vein. Why’s he bringing you flowers, anyway?”

Aziraphale laughed, but it was gentle, not mocking. “I wouldn’t let him bring in any plants to decorate with,” he said. “Told him those were well in hand, hence the conservatory. He brought this as a sort of parting gift, said he couldn’t possibly sign off on the project without a single plant in here.”

“Ah,” Crowley said, a knot loosening in his chest. He had a feeling Guillaume fancied Aziraphale—why wouldn’t he—but the angel seemed to regard him with the same indulgent, nonspecific fondness he gave all humans. He extracted the orchid gently from Aziraphale’s hands, setting it aside on one of the empty stands. “I’m surprised he trusted you to keep this one alive. Not exactly a beginner’s plant.”

“Oh, I told him all about you. Well. Not all,” he added, glancing down at his feet with a small smile. “But about your lovely plants, certainly.” Here he put on a French accent atrocious enough to get him sent to the guillotine a second time. “He said ‘she is a temperamental one, but it sounds like your boyfriend can handle her.’”

“Boyfriend?” Crowley repeated, entirely derailed. Aziraphale flushed scarlet, the most brilliant flood of color Crowley had ever seen in his face. He felt his own face doing something very stupid, something delighted and astounded and not at all demonlike, in response.

“It was the word he used,” Aziraphale stammered defensively. “Not me. I—we haven’t—we’re not boys, at any rate.”

In the face of Aziraphale’s obvious fluster, Crowley felt some of his own panic ebb away. This was familiar ground, Crowley teasing while Aziraphale fussed, and he’d never been more grateful to find his footing there. “So that’s a ‘no’ on being your boyfriend, then. What would you like better, angel? Flatmate?”

“No.”

“Partner in crime? Brother in arms? Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy?”

Aziraphale was recovering now, making a face that he almost certainly thought of as a scowl, but which Crowley had only ever been able to see as a pout. “Well, I had thought we might work on the terminology together, once we’d established the more pressing matter of whether you actually wanted to be my—my—something!”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, “I want to be your everything.”

In the end, it was that easy. Crowley had dodged and joked and obfuscated and hidden for so long he expected to feel terrifyingly exposed, but what he really felt was free. Lighter, stronger; unburdened; known. He took Aziraphale’s hands in his, marveling at the softness of his skin. Aziraphale was staring at him with those blue eyes, round and shining, and he looked how Crowley felt, and wasn’t that a miracle?

“Everything?” Aziraphale repeated, barely above a whisper.

“Yeah. Yes.”

“My friend—my best friend?”

“Always.”

“My cohabitant?”

“Absolutely.”

“My…” Aziraphale broke off, tongue darting out to wet his lips. He seemed to be watching Crowley’s mouth very intently. “My lover?”

They were so close now. When had Aziraphale come so close? Crowley released one of his hands, trailing fingers up the side of his neck. Aziraphale shivered in an extremely promising way, and Crowley felt…not bold, exactly, not brave, more like… welcome . His fingers curved along Aziraphale’s jaw, tips just resting in the downy curls at the nape of his neck. He leaned his forehead against Aziraphale’s, breathing him in, hypnotized by the way the angel’s lashes fanned against his cheek.

“Yes,” Crowley whispered. “If you want. Yes.”

Aziraphale met Crowley’s gaze without pulling away, his free hand coming to rest against Crowley’s lapel. “Mine?” he murmured.

“Always have been, angel,” Crowley replied, and kissed him.

Crowley had kissed humans before. He’d wanted to know exactly why lust was such an easy temptation, why physical intimacy held such an irresistible appeal for them. In the end, it hadn’t taught him much. Kissing was pleasant enough, provided the kissee had good hygiene and half-decent skill, but the only reason it had been anything to write home about was because Crowley had to submit mandatory reports about his activities on Earth. Nearly every time, he’d found himself thinking of Aziraphale as he did it. He’d wondered how it would feel, if it might burn him, if an angel’s body was more or less consecrated ground. Deep down, he’d thought that if Aziraphale’s touch burnt him like holy water, he couldn’t imagine a more pleasant way to die.

And now he was finding out. It was different, though so far it wasn’t like holy water after all (which was fortunate, because now that they’d gotten past the tricky bit Crowley was very motivated to stick around for a long, long time). It was electrifying in its own way: Aziraphale made a soft, stunned sound, the precise noise he made when he saw a waiter carrying a particularly exquisite dish and realized it was headed toward him. His long eyelashes fluttered closed, and he inhaled deeply through his nose, radiating contentment. When Crowley pulled him closer, arm around his waist, Aziraphale’s lips parted in a sigh; Crowley licked into his mouth, tongues moving against each other for the first time, and was delighted to find it did feel different. It wasn’t a burn, exactly, but there was a light champagne-like fizzing sensation he’d never encountered in a human, something pleasant and unexpected and uniquely angelic.

“Oh,” Aziraphale breathed, eyes opening in surprise. He glanced down at Crowley’s lips as though expecting to see something there, and Crowley realized Aziraphale felt it too.

“‘S it all right?” Crowley asked, stroking a thumb over Aziraphale’s cheekbone, and when Aziraphale met his eyes again, there was something dark and hungry in them.

“I’m afraid I might never get enough of that,” Aziraphale said, ever the glutton, his mouth turning up at one corner. Crowley had seen him smirk before, and it had always done things to him, and finally he could do something in return.

“Let’s give it our best shot, eh?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale kissed him in agreement. It was like champagne in other ways, too: Crowley felt absolutely drunk on it, lightheaded and joyful, and he tasted—well, divine. He felt he couldn’t get close enough, even with his arm around Aziraphale’s waist and his tongue in his mouth, and so he wrapped his other arm around the angel’s shoulders and pulled him as flush as he could. Aziraphale, evidently not finished surprising him for the day, backed him up insistently until his hips came up against the edge of the worktop, and then pushed his thigh between Crowley’s legs.

“Satan’s sake, angel,” he gasped, breaking away from the kiss. “It’s—this isn’t—”

“Isn’t what?” Aziraphale prompted, pausing his ministrations for a moment. Crowley was torn between having what felt like a necessary conversation and having what felt like an equally necessary grind against Aziraphale’s plush thigh.

“It’s not too fast?” he managed, panting. He didn’t know what he would do if Aziraphale wanted to stop now—fly into a million pieces, probably—but he needed to know he wasn’t just the tempter here, wasn’t the Serpent of Eden, wasn’t pushing the person he most adored into something he’d regret. Crowley could hardly stand to stop him, but he absolutely couldn’t stand to lose Aziraphale after the fact.

Aziraphale’s face went very, very soft, and maybe just a little sad. “It’s not nearly fast enough,” he said. “Which is entirely my fault. We could have been doing this eighty years ago if I’d managed to pull my head out of my arse. I don’t intend to waste another moment.”

Eighty years, Crowley wanted to ask, what happened eighty years ago? But the thought was driven out of his head by Aziraphale’s mouth on his, lips and tongue and the tiniest hint of teeth. Crowley’s hands roamed over Aziraphale’s back, his shoulders, his neck. He couldn’t decide where to focus his attention; he wanted to be wearing fewer clothes; he definitely wanted Aziraphale to be wearing fewer clothes. He reached for Aziraphale’s tie, intending to remove it, and then remembered where they were: making out in a glass box before God, the citizens of Soho, and any other interested parties. Reluctantly, he put his hands on the angel’s shoulders, putting the tiniest amount of distance between them.

“Not too fast for me, I swear,” he said quickly, forestalling the question he could see on Aziraphale’s lips. “But. You’ve got that new bed, and it’s got walls around it. Might be a better venue, if we’re planning to take this any further.”

“I plan to take it any way you’ll let me,” Aziraphale said, a trifle smugly, as Crowley felt his own jaw drop. “The bed will do nicely, though. Shall we relocate?”

The moment he pulled away, Crowley regretted even asking. So what if a few bystanders saw him drop to his knees before Aziraphale? Or maybe more than a few; the conservatory looked out onto the busy Soho street from every angle, which, hang on.

“This…isn’t on your roof,” Crowley said slowly. Aziraphale flashed him a sly little smile, rocking back on his heels.

“It is…more or less. It’s just not exactly visible on my roof.”

“Wait.” Crowley turned on the spot, glancing around. “None of this flat actually fits above your shop. How many miracles did you use, angel? Guillaume didn’t wonder how the floor plan up here worked?”

“You know, it was the strangest thing,” Aziraphale said, in tones of barely repressed glee. It was the voice that had once said I asked for a rubber duck. “Every time the poor chap came upstairs, he seemed to simply forget how physics and geometry functioned. Never questioned it at all.”

Crowley let out a bark of laughter, echoing in the empty room. “My angel,” he sighed. “I’d expect nothing less from you, you devious bastard.” He straightened up, taking Aziraphale’s hand and relishing the way the angel’s fingers instantly threaded through his own. “Come on, then. Take me to this bed of yours.”

The trip back through the apartment was much more pleasant. Crowley could appreciate it now, knowing it was all for him, that he would get to share it with Aziraphale, that his little morning idyll in the breakfast nook might actually materialize. He also appreciated that they stopped every six feet to push one or the other against the nearest vertical surface, unable to give up kissing even for the short trip to the bed. When they finally, finally stepped onto the plush bedroom rug, Aziraphale paused, taking Crowley’s face in his hands.

“You’ll tell me,” he began, stroking Crowley’s hair back, “if there’s something you don’t like. Won’t you? I’ve had—some experience in this, and enjoyed most, er, activities, but I only want what you want.” He leaned in closer, breathing in Crowley’s ear like he had that night in the hotel bar. It sent a shiver down Crowley’s spine. “If there’s something you’ve thought of, something in particular you’ve wanted…”

“You,” Crowley blurted, all his silk and smoothness left in a heap somewhere downstairs. “I’ve thought about you, angel. Nothing else.”

This seemed to surprise Aziraphale, and he drew back enough to look Crowley in the eye. Crowley put his hands on the angel’s hips so he wouldn’t get any ideas about moving further away. “Are you…do you mean to say you haven’t, ever…”

“I’ve done—things,” Crowley said. “Bunch of things. Had to see what I was tempting people to, didn’t I? But I—it never—ngk.”

“It’s all right, darling.” Aziraphale smiled up at him, and the endearment shook something loose in Crowley’s blocked throat.

“Never meant anything, before,” he managed, finally. “I always wanted it to be you.”

Aziraphale’s eyes shone with unshed tears; he looked radiant, literally, as though the light in the room was all coming from him. “When you say always—”

Crowley was done with talking. If he had to give a reckoning of every moment he’d spent wanting Aziraphale, they were never going to make it to bed. “Six thousand years, give or take, and don’t you dare pretend that’s a surprise. Nobody’s been more pathetically obvious in the history of the world. And I really don’t want to make it to six thousand and one before I get my hands on you, so if we could please just—”

Without seeing exactly how it happened, he found himself flat on his back on the bed, Aziraphale a warm, heavy, delectable weight between his thighs, Satan help him. He gasped like a fish, hands flying to the back of Aziraphale’s head, when the angel found a sensitive spot just north of his clavicle and bit.

“Six thousand years,” Aziraphale repeated, in a tone of wonderment, between kisses up Crowley’s neck. “No, I didn’t know, not for that long. We’re going to return to that later.” He traced his tongue over the shell of Crowley’s ear, and Somebody, why in the world did that feel so good? Ears? “But in the meantime, I’ll admit I’ve been quite desperate to—ahhhh…”

Crowley had hooked a heel over the backs of Aziraphale’s thighs and arched up against him, apparently derailing Aziraphale’s train of thought. He’d have to remember that trick. “Desperate to what, angel?” he asked, his mouth under Aziraphale’s jaw.

“Quite desperate to—to feel you. Inside me,” he managed, breathing as though he’d run a marathon. Crowley understood very well; those last two words had sent such a rush of heat through his body, he had to open his eyes to make sure he hadn’t somehow been engulfed in hellfire again. “Only if that would suit you, of course.” Crowley let out a sort of wordless wheeze, and he felt Aziraphale smile against his skin before that angelic mouth resumed its exploration.

“Does it suit me to put my cock in you? In—” He seized two handfuls of Aziraphale’s heavenly arse, growling a little at the trousers in the way. “Yes, I think it might.”

“Oh, lovely,” Aziraphale said, gratifyingly hoarse, and sat back obligingly to get to work on his clothes. He raised his fingers as if to miracle them away, but Crowley covered his hand, shaking his head.

“I’ve been fantasizing about undoing these damned buttons for two centuries. Not going to take a shortcut now, sssweetheart.” Aziraphale went all melty and pink at that, and Crowley took advantage of his momentary distraction to roll them over, straddling the angel’s hips.

The tie was the first to go. Crowley removed it with a few quick tugs, setting it aside on the bedside table (Aziraphale was particular about it, he knew, and he didn’t want to risk interrupting the proceedings for a lecture about respecting his wardrobe.) With that out of the way, he could open Aziraphale’s shirt down to his sternum, and did, tasting every inch of newly revealed angel.

“I miss Rome, sometimes,” Crowley murmured. “Such easy clothes to take off. All that exposed skin.”

“Speak for yourself.” Aziraphale’s hands were in Crowley’s hair, and Crowley never wanted them to leave again. Maybe he’d grow it back out, make it easier to grip. “It was the longest I ever went without, ah, making an Effort. Could never get the knack of draping everything over my Lord, Crowley,” he gasped, fingers tightening abruptly, as Crowley found a nipple with his mouth. “Do that again.”

Crowley was only too happy to oblige. This wasn’t how he’d expected things to go. Aziraphale loved all manner of earthly pleasures, and it had never been a stretch for Crowley to imagine he would love this one, but he’d always anticipated having to ease him into it. Aziraphale would oh no I couldn’t possibly, and Crowley would apply the lightest, silkiest pressure, but why would we even be made for this if we weren’t supposed to, and somehow or another the angel would wind up with his cock in Crowley’s mouth. Crowley had never really minded the role of Aziraphale’s chief tempter; he’d always known he was only giving Aziraphale permission to want the things he already wanted. Plausible deniability, if Upstairs asked any questions. But this, this eager, unabashed desire—it was better than anything Crowley had dreamt of in six millennia.

Once he had the waistcoat’s row of tiny buttons undone, and the shirt underneath it given the same treatment, he spread it all open and greedily drank in the sight of Aziraphale’s soft, perfect skin. He ran his hands from waist to clavicle, circled nipples with his thumbs, stroked the patch of downy hair on his chest. Aziraphale squirmed a little beneath him, looking, for the first time in the proceedings, unsure.

“Something you don’t like? Tell me, angel. I’ll do anything.”

“No, darling, it feels wonderful. I just thought perhaps you’d like to—move on,” Aziraphale said, not meeting his eye. “You’re so—you’ve the loveliest shape, you’re so beautiful, and I’ve gone a bit. Soft. Around the middle.”

Crowley squinted at him, suspicion dawning. Aziraphale had never, not once, been self-conscious. He ate with a near-religious fanaticism and spent the rest of the time reading, drinking, or cultivating other leisurely pursuits (the magic act, Satan help him). Crowley had been witness to this hedonism for millennia, loving every minute of it, and had never heard Aziraphale voice a concern about his corporation before. “Did someone say something to you?”

“Oh, that’s not imp—”

“Aziraphale.”

The angel lifted one shoulder in a diffident sort of shrug. “During all the hullabaloo around Armageddon, Gabriel may have…encouraged me to ‘lose the gut.’”

“Oh, Gabriel can absolutely get fucked,” Crowley snarled, hands tightening possessively on Aziraphale’s waist. “Actually, I hope he never gets fucked. Hope he spontaneously combusts from sexual frustration while we’re down here going at it ten times a day.”

Aziraphale seemed to be overcoming his momentary shyness, the start of a smile playing over his lips. “Ten times a day? That’s rather ambitious.”

“Just a starting point. We’ll have to work up to twenty from there.” Crowley ducked down, kissing the smile off Aziraphale’s face. “Angel, you are the most unspeakably gorgeous creature I’ve ever laid eyes on, and if anyone ever makes you question that again, I’ll fucking disembowel them.”

“Such a romantic,” Aziraphale cooed, and that was that, crisis averted. Crowley applied himself to something even more pleasant than plotting Gabriel’s demise: kissing down the center of Aziraphale’s chest, over his stomach, down to his waistband. Crowley took the button between his teeth, glancing up at Aziraphale silently for permission. “Oh, my dearest, yes,” the angel breathed, chest heaving, “only—can you—”

He was tugging at the back of Crowley’s shirt, the demon realized. He sat up and stripped it off, flinging it vaguely in the direction of the chaise, and laughed when Aziraphale struggled with the fly of his jeans. “I’ve never understood how you can walk in these,” Aziraphale groused. “How do you even get them on?”

“Got a secret, angel,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his miniscule pockets. “Can’t get them on, actually. It takes a miracle.”

Aziraphale stopped dead, staring at Crowley. “Only you would insist on such tight trousers you’d waste actual miracles on applying and removing them every day.”

“Dunno if I’d call it a waste. Clearly it was enough to tempt y—ooh!” Crowley startled as, without warning, all remaining items of clothing upon either of their persons disappeared. He found himself straddling Aziraphale’s (succulent, curvaceous, inviting, positively sinful) hips without a stitch to separate them. Aziraphale had looked pleased with himself for a fraction of a second, but now he looked as though he’d been struck by lightning, or maybe divine inspiration. His hands went to Crowley’s thighs, sliding up them with something like reverence. Crowley looked down, watching those soft gentle hands glide over his own freckled skin, and tried not to discorporate on the spot.

He was distracted, though, by the absolutely magnificent sight of Aziraphale’s cock, bracketed by Crowley’s thighs and straining up toward him. He hadn’t been sure what kind of Effort Aziraphale preferred—and Crowley couldn’t possibly have cared less, he was prepared to be enthusiastically on board with whatever configuration he found—but now that he saw it, thick and pink and with a pearly bead of fluid at the tip, his mouth watered.

“Is it to your—oh, Heavens, Crowley,” Aziraphale hissed, as Crowley dove down and licked him from root to tip. He settled on his belly between Aziraphale’s luscious thighs, hands pinning the angel’s hips in place, and thought that he would be deliriously happy never to move again. He opened his mouth, met Aziraphale’s wide-eyed gaze, and swallowed him down in one smooth slide.

Crowley had seen Aziraphale in every possible time, place, and situation. He’d seen his wondering face tipped back in the first rain the Earth had ever known; he’d watched the angel giggle tipsily in his candlelit bedchamber in the Palazzo Medici, extracting a purloined bottle of sweet malvasia from beneath his voluminous skirts; he’d spent the entire premiere of Don Giovanni watching Aziraphale’s enthralled profile, his sky-blue eyes shining with tears. But looking at him now—eyes closed, lips parted, chin tilted up and brows drawn together in something like rapture—Crowley felt he was seeing him for the first time all over again. He was filled with a fierce, almost painful gratitude at being allowed this, at finding himself here.

Aziraphale was making some very promising sounds, his fingers back in Crowley’s hair and his hips twitching upward under Crowley’s hands. Without really thinking about it, Crowley let a little of his serpentine nature unspool, his tongue growing longer and more dextrous, his jaw loosening to take him in further. There was a gasp from above, and the hands in his hair tightened, sending delicious little sparks down Crowley’s spine. “Oh, darling,” Aziraphale gasped, “your eyes,” and Crowley realized he’d lost control of them—probably they were fully snakelike again, yellow and inhuman. He squeezed them shut and concentrated, working to rein them back in, but stopped at Aziraphale’s hand on his cheek. “No, no, please, Crowley, don’t,” Aziraphale was saying, and Crowley paused, blinking up at the angel in surprise.

“You look just like you did when we met,” Aziraphale said softly, tracing his thumb over the skin below Crowley’s left eye. “Back when your eyes looked this way all the time.”

“It’sss not—” Crowley’s voice came out hoarse and sibilant; he cleared his throat and tried again. “You don’t mind, then?”

“Dearest, I adore them,” Aziraphale insisted. “I miss them so much when you wear your glasses. Please, don’t change them on my account.”

Crowley wavered, uncertain. “They’re…not very, you know. Human.”

“They’re very you.” Aziraphale smiled at him, so transparently happy, Crowley felt the last of his doubts slip away. “Proof of exactly who’s doing such divine things to me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said, giving Aziraphale’s perfect cock one last long, serpentine swirl of the tongue. Aziraphale exhaled as though he’d been punched in the stomach, head falling back against the pillows. “I thought you were going to have it any way I wanted?”

“Oh, I certainly intend to. Did you have something in mi—my—oh, my God.”

Crowley was quickly developing a taste for rendering Aziraphale shocked and blasphemous. He was also developing a taste for Aziraphale’s skin, which was why he’d released the angel’s cock to explore further afield. During those last few words, he’d pushed Aziraphale’s thighs upward and over, against his chest; he now put his long, flexible tongue to work against the tight furl of Aziraphale’s entrance. It was a filthy idea, not something Crowley had ever done with a human (or angel, or—Satan forbid—a demon), but he’d thought of it approximately six hundred thousand times over the millennia, particularly when the fashion of the times took a turn toward tight-fitting trousers. Aziraphale’s arse could tempt a priest, and Crowley hadn’t exactly taken any vows of chastity.

But almost better than the feel of him under Crowley’s hands and tongue was the unbroken, incoherent stream of nonsense pouring out of his mouth. “Ohh, Crowley, darling, oh God, that’s—your mouth, dearest, your tongue, I’ve never—ahhh—please, can you— oh!” The last syllable came out in a way Crowley could only categorize as a squeak, as Crowley’s tongue breached him. “It’s—it’s so good, Crowley, I need—can you, your fingers—”

“Anything, angel,” Crowley promised, and added his miracle-slick fingers into the mix. He worked one in as he kept up teasing Aziraphale’s rim with his tongue, and a second and third in very short order. The sight of any part of himself disappearing into Aziraphale’s body was so surreal, Crowley couldn’t tear his gaze away. He twisted his fingers experimentally, stroking at a different angle, and Aziraphale’s entire body jerked as though he’d been electrocuted.

“Now, Crowley, please!”

Crowley didn’t need to be asked twice (though the begging was sweet enough he was tempted to make Aziraphale keep doing it anyway). He withdrew his fingers and tongue, let everything shift back more or less to its normal human shape. He couldn’t have said what his eyes were doing, but when he shifted up onto his knees Aziraphale gazed at him with almost unbearable tenderness, so he supposed it didn’t really matter. He gripped the base of his cock, lining it up with the slick mess he’d made of Aziraphale’s hole, and for a moment he was so overwhelmed by the thought of fucking Aziraphale that he worried he’d come on the spot. His hesitation must have shown on his face, because Aziraphale reached out, fingers circling Crowley’s wrist.

“Anything you do, my darling,” he panted, flushed deliciously pink all over, “I’m going to love. I only want to be—yours. The rest is just detail.”

Yours. That really wasn’t helping Crowley get himself under control, but he couldn’t wait a second longer, not while Aziraphale looked up at him like he was the only important thing in the world. He pushed forward, slowly—so slowly, Aziraphale was so tight, his velvet heat welcoming Crowley inch by blessed inch—and stared down at Aziraphale, ready to pull back at the slightest sign of discomfort. But the angel looked utterly undone in the best way, his eyes heavy-lidded, plump bottom lip between his teeth. He released it with an obscene sound, mouth dropping open, and Crowley dove down to kiss him again. The champagne-fizz sensation of his tongue against Crowley’s was so intoxicating, on top of the unimaginable bliss of being inside him, Crowley nearly laughed from sheer joy. He propped himself up on his elbows, either side of Aziraphale’s head, and revised his earlier thought: this was where he would happily stay for the rest of his existence.

He bottomed out against Aziraphale’s arse, fully sheathed inside him, and drew back to examine his face. Aziraphale looked back at him with such adoration, Crowley wondered how he ever could have doubted the angel’s affection for him. He pressed light, gentle kisses over every inch of Aziraphale’s beautiful face, heart squeezing in his chest. “All right, sweetheart?” he murmured between kisses, keeping his hips still with difficulty. Every cell in his body cried out to move, but he was going to stay put until he discorporated if his angel needed him to.

“So much more than all right,” Aziraphale answered dreamily, with a languid little roll of his hips. Crowley heard himself make a truly embarrassing noise at the slight friction against his cock, and gritted his teeth to stop any more sounds from slipping out between them. “You feel—oh, it’s even better than I’d hoped, it’s—the best thing I’ve ever felt. Please, Crowley, move.”

“Best thing?” Crowley repeated, giving his hips a minute, experimental push. Aziraphale moaned, hands scrabbling for purchase on Crowley’s back.

“Without—ah!—without question.”

“Better than Petronius’s oysters?” Crowley teased, punctuating it with another, slower thrust. Aziraphale’s nails dug into his shoulder blades; Crowley hoped they would leave marks.

“Yes.”

“Better than Parisian brioche?”

“ Yes, my dear, but would you please—”

Crowley kissed him, cutting him off mid-sentence and giving his slowest push yet. “Better than that black forest gateau we had at the Grosvenor in—”

“Yes, you bloody serpent, the best, but I’ll take it all back if you don’t stop faffing about and fuck me this instant!”

It was as though Aziraphale had possessed him. Hearing that word out of his holy mouth spurred Crowley’s hips forward without any conscious instruction from him. He thrust into Aziraphale, hard, and the keening noise it produced was so incredible, he did it again. Aziraphale’s ankles hooked around his back, spurring him on; Crowley felt near delirious with pleasure, fisting one hand in Aziraphale’s hair and kissing him in rhythm with his movements. Aziraphale made little moaning sounds into Crowley’s mouth, and Crowley drank them down more eagerly than the ‘82 Chateau Latour (which he would be finding a replacement bottle of the moment they got out of bed—several weeks from now, he thought hopefully).

He broke away to taste the sweat gleaming on Aziraphale’s throat, the delectable curve where his neck met his shoulder, the shallow dip of his clavicle. Experimentally, he let his teeth drag over the skin there, and Aziraphale’s gasp told him it had been a smashing success. He worried a small patch of skin between his teeth, sucking hard, and drew back to examine the shining love bite he’d left behind.

“Are you marking me, you fiend?” Aziraphale asked, a teasing glint in his eye. “Am I going to need higher collars on my shirts?”

The thought sent a groan through Crowley as he remembered the blessed Victorian era—Aziraphale buttoned up tight under twenty layers of clothing, not an inch of his neck visible. Crowley had developed a fantasy in which he coaxed Aziraphale into loosening his collar for him, just a little, just enough for Crowley to give him a secret mark to carry around underneath it all. He’d developed such a furious fixation on the idea, he’d done little else but toss off to it for the better part of 1861.

“Don’t worry, angel,” Crowley panted, grinning down at him. “You’re not going to need shirts at all, not for ages.”

“Is that so?”

“Got a lot of time to make up for. I don’t want to see you in anything but your skin and my marks for the foreseeable future.”

Aziraphale’s smirk gave way to a meltingly soft expression, and his arms tightened around Crowley. “More,” he breathed into his ear, “more, darling, please—”

Crowley wrapped his arms around Aziraphale’s waist, held on tight, and rolled them so Aziraphale straddled him. The angel let out a breathless noise of surprise, but recovered himself quickly: by the time Crowley’s hands found his hips, he had braced his hands on Crowley’s chest and begun working himself up and down the length of his cock. Crowley was so overcome by the sight of him, he forgot to breathe for a full minute. (Fortunately, he didn’t need to.)

The sky outside had darkened to night while they’d been occupied, and the skylight above the bed now looked out on a dizzying canopy of stars. Whatever miracles Aziraphale had performed to bend space and time around his flat, he’d clearly added one here: there was no way this was the view over London, with all its light pollution. The Milky Way stretched, vast and glittering, across the square of sky; thousands upon thousands of stars cast Aziraphale’s hair and skin in ethereal light. He looked, Crowley thought foolishly, like an angel—really like an angel, like he had in Heaven, probably, back when Crowley still had a place there.

“Do me a favor, angel,” Crowley said, and Aziraphale tilted his head inquisitively. “Get your wings out for me?”

Aziraphale looked surprised at the request, but didn’t press Crowley to explain; he closed his eyes, tipped his head back, and moments later the impossible moon-bright span of his wings stretched across the room, gleaming in the starlight. Crowley held onto his hips, rocking up to meet Aziraphale’s thrusts, and stared. Aziraphale had always been beautiful to him—the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, putting nebulae and auroras to shame—but this, this view of him was so stunning Crowley couldn’t tear his eyes away. He ought to have felt unworthy, profane, an infernal creature like himself daring to sully Aziraphale’s otherworldly beauty. Instead, he felt as though he were back in Heaven himself. Crowley couldn’t tarnish Aziraphale, but Aziraphale, it seemed, could make him feel—for this perfect, longed-for moment—divine.

“I love you,” Crowley whispered, soft and confessional. “Aziraphale. I love you.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes then, looking back down at Crowley, and he wasn’t untouchable and otherworldly at all; he was Crowley’s best friend, his ally, his confidant, his beloved, his. Perfect and flawed, anxious and brave, beautiful, impossible, real. He smiled, tears in his eyes, and lifted a hand to Crowley’s cheek.

“Oh, my dearest Crowley,” he murmured. “I love you, too. So very much.”

The climax crashed over Crowley like a tidal wave. He hadn’t felt it building, hadn’t realized he was so close to the edge, but then he’d been distracted by the vision above him. It stole his breath away, tightened his fingers on Aziraphale’s hips hard enough to bruise; he heard himself shouting, probably making very embarrassing noises, but he couldn’t care even a little. Aziraphale was talking him through it, “that’s it, my love, please, I want it, please give it to me,” and the idea of Aziraphale begging Crowley to come in him was so brain-meltingly hot that Crowley could have sworn he came a second time from sheer lust. He buried himself in Aziraphale’s body as deeply as he could, flooding him with the most astonishing orgasm Crowley had ever had.

When he returned to himself—it could have been seconds, minutes, or centuries later, Crowley didn’t know and didn’t particularly care—Aziraphale was still riding him, making little jerking motions with his hips and thrusting into his own fist. His jaw had dropped open, brows drawn together, and Crowley could see he was nearing his own release.

“Getting close, sssweetheart?” he asked in a voice like gravel. “Ready to come for me?”

“Oh, it’s so—you’re so good, Crowley, I want—I need—”

“Come here,” Crowley ordered, lifting Aziraphale up and off his softening cock. Aziraphale let out a disconsolate little moan, his dessert being whisked away before he’d cleaned the plate, but the look on his face transformed entirely when Crowley nudged him forward. He inched along Crowley’s torso, over his stomach and up onto his chest, with a look of mild confusion and thinly veiled hunger. “Right there, yeah, just let me—”

It took a little rearranging, but Crowley got his arms under Aziraphale’s thighs (Satan’s sake, his thighs, Crowley was going to need to spend hours exploring those later) and his head propped up on a pillow. Like this, Aziraphale’s reddened, eager cock was tantalizingly close to Crowley’s mouth; if he leaned forward, he could take it between his lips. But that wasn’t quite what he had in mind. He met Aziraphale’s burning gaze, very deliberately licked his lips, and opened his mouth.

“My dear,” Aziraphale said, his shocked, hushed tone completely at odds with the naked desire on his face. “Do you mean for me—to—”

Crowley hadn’t meant to tease him, not really, but he found he couldn’t help himself, not if Aziraphale was going to keep up the prim and proper act while perched on Crowley’s sternum. “Oh, I’m just having a kip, angel,” Crowley drawled, arching an eyebrow in a way he knew got under the angel’s skin. “Awfully comfortable bed you’ve got. But I s’pose if you need something—”

To Crowley’s unending delight, he didn’t get to finish the sentence, because Aziraphale seized him by the hair, lined up his cock, and plunged it into Crowley’s mouth. Crowley moaned around him, eyes falling closed in bliss, and did his best to suck and lick around Aziraphale’s thrusts. Mostly, he kept his teeth covered and held on for the ride. “You have no idea, absolutely none, how often I’ve imagined shutting you up this way,” Aziraphale ground out, somehow still managing to sound arch in spite of the tension in his voice. “How many times I’ve wanted to—to—”

Crowley pulled off long enough to plead, “Tell me, angel,” before Aziraphale jerked him back into place.

“In St. James’s, when it all—” He waved his free hand vaguely, and with some difficulty Crowley parsed that as when the whole Armageddon business began. “You wouldn’t leave it be, you kept listing off—composers, restaurants, all of it—wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace, and I thought, if he doesn’t leave off soon, I’m going to have to open my trousers and make him, right here on this bench.” Crowley let out a mortifying sound, feeling half his blood rush south again, and Aziraphale raised his chin in triumphant smugness: a face that said checkmate . “Perhaps I should have. It would have saved us a significant— ohh. Oh, that’s—don’t you dare stop.”

Crowley, who was undoubtedly a fool for this angel but was still a force to be reckoned with, had tilted his head forward, suppressed his gag reflex, and swallowed Aziraphale further than would be possible for mere mortals. He wound up with his nose shoved somewhat ungracefully against Aziraphale’s skin, glad he didn’t need oxygen, but it was absolutely worth it to hear the sounds Aziraphale made, feel him fucking into Crowley’s throat with total abandon. It was rapidly bringing Crowley’s own cock back to attention, human refractory periods no match for infernal stamina and divine inspiration. His hands had been clenched in the sheets; now he raised them, gripped Aziraphale’s arse, and thrust two fingers deep into the mess he’d left inside him.

“Crowley, oh God, oh fff-fuck, I’m—I’m—” Aziraphale babbled, and then he was coming, pulsing hot and thick down Crowley’s throat. Crowley held tight to him, greedily swallowing every drop, keeping his fingers moving inside Aziraphale until he felt the angel shudder with overstimulation. He released Aziraphale, who swayed back almost drunkenly on Crowley’s chest; the sight of him, with his hair mussed, wings out and chest flushed, love bite standing out on his neck, Crowley’s release dripping from him, was so inspiring that Crowley returned his come-slick hand to his now aching erection and brought himself off again in three swift pulls.

For a long moment, there was no sound in the room but their breathing. Crowley lay boneless and panting, stomach streaked with his own release; Aziraphale knelt over him, chest heaving, and stared down at him as though he were a particularly decadent crème brûlée—one he couldn’t finish right this moment, but fully intended to return to as soon as possible. Crowley felt a bit like a crème brûlée, soft and sweet and a little cracked open, but in a good way. It was safe to be soft now, at least with Aziraphale.

The angel let out a deep, contented sigh, tucked his wings away again, and toppled over unceremoniously sideways onto the bed. Crowley, correctly sensing that the work would as usual fall to him, lazily miracled away the mess and manhandled Aziraphale into a position more congruent with the layout of the bed. Once Crowley had gotten a pillow installed more or less under that tousled white-blonde head, Aziraphale held out his arms, silently beckoning. Crowley settled himself into his angelic embrace, pillowing his head on Aziraphale’s chest as he’d dreamt of for six thousand years.

“You know,” Aziraphale said conversationally, carding his fingers absently through Crowley’s hair. Crowley knew very little at present, other than that he wanted the petting to continue for as long as possible. “Come to think of it…did you ever actually accept my offer to move in?”

“I don’t think you ever actually offered,” Crowley countered, not caring a whit. There was a finger tracing reverently over the snake sigil on his face, and it was possibly even better than the hair stroking. The finger paused, and Crowley tipped his head back to see Aziraphale frowning in consternation. He let out a soft laugh, throwing an arm over Aziraphale’s middle and pulling him closer. “Angel. D’you honestly think you’re ever getting me out of this bed now? You’re far too clever for that.”

Aziraphale’s frown softened into that familiar pout again. “I only wanted to make sure—”

“I said everything,” Crowley reminded him. “Meant it. So.” He turned over onto Aziraphale’s chest, looking him squarely in the eye, and cleared his throat pompously. “Yes, Aziraphale, Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate. I accept. I’m staying right here, for as long as you’ll have me.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, fond and familiar. “A simple ‘yes’ would do, darling.”

“Maybe I just want you to be very,” and here he leaned in to underline the point with a soft kiss to Aziraphale’s mouth, “very sure.” Aziraphale gazed at him, eyes shining; after a long moment, he drew Crowley even closer, wrapping him up tight in his arms. Though Aziraphale’s wings were now back in whatever alternate plane he kept them on, Crowley felt the same as he had on the wall of Eden: sheltered, protected, cared for.

“I am sure,” Aziraphale murmured into his hair. “More certain than I’ve ever been. Our side, always and forever. I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, but I’m so very grateful you did.”

Crowley’s impulse was to make a joke, a flippant comment, something to deflect Aziraphale’s blame away from himself. He felt the sincerity in the angel’s words, though, and maybe Aziraphale needed to say these things more than Crowley needed to hear them. “S’alright,” Crowley said, nuzzling into Aziraphale’s neck. “Knew you’d be worth the wait.”

The hand was back in his hair now, a soothing rhythmic motion that promised to lull him to sleep in record time. It was night, he supposed, might as well get a start on his first night in Aziraphale’s—in their flat. (His heart and stomach did some sort of complicated gymnastics maneuver at the thought of having a their anything with Aziraphale.) Thinking of the night sky, a question from earlier returned to him, and he turned his head to look up through the skylight.

“This sky,” he said, half-questioning. “It’s not over London.”

Aziraphale let out a little laugh that Crowley felt rather than heard, and rolled his head lazily back and forth on the pillow. “No,” he agreed. “I tried it that way, but it was such an uninspired view. There’s far too much competition from the streetlights and whatnot, and it’s so often dismal and gray outside. I thought, while I was miracling things, I might as well miracle us a better climate.” He met Crowley’s eye, smiling conspiratorially. “Somewhere that always has perfect weather for the time of the year.”

“It’s Tadfield,” Crowley realized. “You clever old sap. Of course.”

“We could have a real country view someday, if you like,” Aziraphale said, with a studied casualness that meant he didn’t feel casually about it at all. “A little cottage in the South Downs, perhaps, or somewhere on the coast.”

“Sure. Looking forward to it,” Crowley said, mostly thinking about someday and all the glorious time together it implied. “But not yet. We’ve got things to do in London.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, absolutely.” He kissed Aziraphale’s clavicle, resting his chin there. “We’ve been here for centuries, angel, and I’ve spent most of them thinking about everything I’d do with you if you ever decided to let me.”

“Such as?” There was a wistfulness to Aziraphale’s smile, and Crowley understood, but they were finally, finally here and he didn’t intend to waste either of their time regretting anything. He lifted Aziraphale’s hand to his mouth, trailing kisses over his palm and wrist like bullet points on his mental list.

“Wanna hold your hand while we eat at the Ritz,” he said. “I want a picnic, like you said, way back when. Don’t care where, as long as there’s wine. I want to kiss you in Berkeley Square and listen to you whinge at the Tate Modern. And now I absolutely want to annoy you in St. James’s Park.”

Aziraphale turned gratifyingly pink at this. “The poor ducks,” he sighed, a bit sleepily. “We’ll have to bring extra bread.”

Crowley had imagined dozing off in Aziraphale’s arms for millennia. He had always pictured it being the most comfortable, blissful, relaxing experience of his life. Reality, as it so often did, turned out to be a little different: one of Crowley’s arms had to be bent at a slightly weird angle, as did his neck; his face was sore, unaccustomed to smiling so much (to say nothing of the other ways his mouth had been overused); Aziraphale turned out to be both an unrepentant duvet thief and a bit of a snorer. But because he had never imagined any of these things, it finally sank in: this was not a dream. Crowley loved and was loved in return. He had a home, one that had been carefully arranged and designed and fussed over just to ensure he’d be happy in it. He had the freedom—for now, at least—to go wherever he chose, live wherever he chose, love whoever he chose.

Crowley fell asleep, for the first time, at home. It was the best sleep of his life. 

(So far.)