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Even though Crowley was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, he knew there were far worse places to start his heat than halfway down a hole in the ground.

That there were quite a lot worse was why he was wedged within the long opening of his old hideaway den in the first place. But just as he hadn't anticipated the full scope of the fallout of breaking off with Lucifer, he hadn't considered that the last time he'd visited the den… he'd not yet been fully grown. So, whereas the slide through the stone-lined entrance tunnel had been a little snug over a decade ago, today he'd only managed to slither down into the den as far as his waist before a slight bend in the passage coupled with a particularly long slab of stone meant his ribcage and shoulders were very much not going down any further.

Crowley rested his face on his outstretched arms and sighed with as much drama as the squeeze around his chest allowed, which wasn't nearly enough in his estimation.

The good news was, he wasn't physically trapped. The passage wasn't that long, and he'd backed into the hole feet-first and on his belly. Apart from needing to be careful when getting his chest unwedged, he was well positioned to push-pull himself back up and out of the hole.

But the bad news was twofold: One, he'd dropped his supplies pack down the hole first; and while he could feel the pack next to his feet, he was not confident in his ability to get both himself and the pack back out of the hole, and both were crucial to have a realistic chance of sorting out a plan b for getting to the other side of his heat without an unwanted mating bite. Two, he could hear the rest of his ex-pack prowling through the woods hunting for him, which meant even though he was starting to ache and leak with how close his heat was to knocking him for six, he couldn't risk leaving the hole just yet to try to find some other place to hide.

Another bead of slick gathered at the rim of his slackening arsehole, and Crowley gritted his teeth against the urge to clench down to try and stop it from leaking out. Giving his increasingly aroused body any amount of encouragement was a bad idea at this stage; he needed to hold off tipping over the edge into true heat for as long as possible. Instead, he had to live with the indignity of his inner thighs growing more and more wet as slick oozed out his increasingly loosened hole and trickled down. At least he hadn't been stuck waiting for so long that it had started puddling around his knees. Although, with how bloody persistent Lucifer's goons were in sweeping the forest above and outside the entrance to the den, that was looking to be a "when" not "if" eventuality.

Crowley forced himself to relax and breathe deep and long—in through his nose, out through his mouth—as he held onto his sanity and his patience by the thinnest of threads. Back when he was little more than a precocious pup, he'd planted a whole variety of pungent foliage around the entrance of the den. At the time, he'd felt dead clever about the idea, and as an adult he did have to give his younger self credit.

For a long time, he'd cringed at the memory of his brashly optimistic youth, when he'd been so confident he'd find his mate during his first heat that he'd spent months and months digging out and prettying up a cozy den on a hillside in his favorite patch of the woods. In his bitterest moment, he'd sneered at that bright-eyed, long-dead version of himself as nothing more than a silly child playing house.

But now, he could be nothing but grateful for that kid's naive but hopeful egotism. Because he'd constructed the whole damn thing with safety and comfort in mind, which meant he was relatively confident there wasn't anything lurking down the hole that might bite his leaking arse that could be bigger than a mouse; the large, camouflage flat stone he'd used to cover the entrance had looked perfectly undisturbed before he'd dragged it aside. And the surrounding, overgrown garden had been just as pungent as he'd hoped, which should obscure whatever heat scent might leak out the edges of the entrance now that he'd awkwardly shifted the stone back into place overhead.

If he could just stay calm and quiet and still for long enough, his old pack would push the search to another part of the woods, and he'd be able to slink back out and… manage some other plan. With any luck, they'd move on quickly, while he was still coherent enough to find some other place to hide before he was lost to the need to be filled up and well fucked.

Staying calm meant breathing evenly, and resting his face in the inverted v of his outstretched arms. It meant relaxing as much as he was able within the grip around his chest that kept him in an awkward kneeling position on the den floor. It meant ignoring the way the uneven dirt was digging into his knees and how his inner walls were starting to twitch all on their own as the ache of being horribly empty crept like a slow-rising fever through his entire pelvis. His cock was starting to chub up too, and it was a small mercy he'd shoved his legs through a skirt in the predawn dark when he'd snuck out this morning. The lack of underpants meant there was nothing stopping the steady drip of slick, but it also meant there wasn't any incidental friction to reward his traitorous dick for getting a big head.

Everything was fine, he chanted silently to himself as another wet drizzle slipped down the premoistened tracks of slick along his inner thighs. The drip beaded all the way down to the inside of his knee, where it paused and clung for a long second before finally overcoming the last resistance of gravity and dampening the packed dirt of the floor by his knees. Crowely channeled the need to clench into tightening and slowly releasing his fists. For fun, he imagined the necks of various members of his ex-pack caught in his grip as he strangled them. If they hadn't been such pustulant arseholes, or so ready to do Lucifer's bidding, Crowley wouldn't be in this mess.

But even this—slowly losing his mind as the aching heat in his body steadily built and built—had to be better than giving in and submitting to whichever of the hateful fuckers decided to hump him first. Because now that he was definitively no longer Lucifer's pet, they'd all take their pound of flesh, betas and subordinate alphas alike. And probably, he could expect that once he'd been passed around enough times that the pack was well satisfied, Lucifer would give whoever was currently in his favor the all clear to brand Crowely with a mating bite.

Honestly, at this point, it would be a shock if Lucifer didn't allow one of them to forcibly claim Crowley, both to make it nearly impossible for Crowley to run again and because he was always looking for ways to reward the faithful without giving up an ounce of control. Because if Lucifer gave his blessing to lay a claim, Crowley would end up swollen with someone's pup, for sure. It was too little too late in this particular heat cycle for his body to have finished processing the pack rejection memo; they'd all still smell and feel and taste like security, however repugnant, which meant his womb was well primed to accept their thrice-damned spunk so long as at least one of them injected the necessary catalyzing agents.

It was Lucifer's signature move, after all: to look at the quirks of shifter culture and biology and manipulate systems intended to favor safety and stability to exert perverse control. Crowley could distantly remember a time when heats and ruts meant a lot of good-natured ribbing and collective mother-henning to get whoever was in need well provisioned and sent off with their chosen bond- or heatmate. Now, if you weren't held apart as one of Lucfer's mate candidates, you were the pseudo-property of the pack at large until Lucifer, in his beneficent wisdom, decided a particular chosen toady was ready to and worthy of starting a family. And it was rotten luck that, in Crowley's situation, his goddamn womb would aid in the betrayal. Because the poor whelp he'd end up stuffed with would make it too difficult for him to fight the forced claim before it fully took, and then he'd be twice as tied to the whole fucked-up lot of the pack in one fell gang bang.

Crowley realized he was starting to tremble, tears leaking out his eyes, as the distant horror of all those what-ifs collided with desperate arousal and knocked him out of the semi-meditative state he'd managed to wrangle himself into. He gritted his teeth hard and blinked rapidly to try and wrestle back something like control. But it was increasingly difficult, because even with as awful as his imaginings were, all his heat-addled body registered was "pup," which of course meant being bred, and that led right back to heat and the need to be ready for a fat knot and sharp teeth to fill him up.

His hole practically spasmed with a furious pulse of arousal that brought his stupid cock to full mast and sent a veritable gush of slick sluicing down his inner thighs. God, he wasn't going to make it. He was going to go into heat right here, stuck and empty and wanting, with his travesty of an ex-pack running down the clock on any other options. By the time they buggered off, Crowley wasn't even sure he'd have the coordination or wherewithal to get himself back out of the hole. And even if he did, he'd probably not get any further than a few yards before collapsing to desperately fuck himself on his own fingers for some relief—right in the middle of the woods, where anyone could happen along and try to force a claim.

Still, all better outcomes than if he'd not run, honestly.

He choked on a laughing sob and gave over to the urge to writhe his hips, just a little. It felt shamefully good to arch his back the scant bit he could and clench down, even with as useless as it ultimately was. God, he needed to get off so bad. It was getting harder to think of anything else but how empty he was and how his cock was throbbingly hard. A wave of heat pulsed from between his legs up through the rest of his body, raising goose pimples in its path and making him shiver. He was teetering on the edge, now. Any minute, he was going to fall into it and lose what little reason he had left.

And then, something touched his bare calf.

Crowley swallowed his automatic yelp as he flinched hard, which his ribs protested vehemently. The lance of pain did help clear a little of the fog from his mind, like a small but damp blanket thrown on a fire.

He tensed and tried to focus on what might be behind him, in the den. It had felt too deliberate and precise to be some small creature scurrying over him, but that was more alarming than reassuring. A lizard or mouse crawling over him wasn't ideal, but at least it would have fit within his expectations for what might be in the den.

A second touch came, at first as a hesitant brush but then a little more firm.

Crowley froze as dread seized his lungs.

That was unmistakably a claw-tipped paw. And even though there were a lot of creatures in the forest with both paws and claws, he knew with bone-chilling certainty that it was the paw of another wolf, another shifter.

Terror had him automatically scrabbling at the sides of the tunnel with his hands to pull up, get his feet under him to try and push out, away. His ribs creaked in protest as he tried to gasp a huge breath and couldn't, as he tensed in a way that worsened the grip the tight space had on him rather than lessened it. The pain was immediate, making him freeze and whimper, but it afforded him the crucial second needed for his higher reasoning to kick back online and remember he needed to be quiet, to be still, or something horrible might happen. He panted through a wave of intense vertigo as he closed his eyes and tried to take stock.

The strange wolf had moved, tapping their paw almost frantically on Crowley's calf, and pressing something furry up against the outside of his hip and thigh. Hot washes of what had to be breath fanned down his leg against his knee, and Crowley realized after a moment that they'd probably pressed the crown of their head against his hip.

It was such a strange thing to do, given the circumstances; it knocked Crowley back out of the panic spiral, gave his mind something to puzzle over so he could slow his breathing again and relax enough that he wasn't actively bruising his chest against the tunnel walls. He was an omega in preheat, leaking enough slick to make the floor a little muddy, arse and greedy hole practically on display with the way the forced kneel was making his skirt ride up. But instead of doing something perhaps dickish but expected like immediately mounting him, the strange wolf in Crowley's not-so-abandoned den had first gotten his attention and now seemed to be trying to both calm him down and warn him off doing something stupid like bolting up out of his hiding spot before the woods were clear.

Oh, God, the other wolf hadn't announced themself until Crowley had started actively presenting,because he'd thought there wasn't any audience to be wary of. Presumably, the other wolf was just as stuck as Crowley was, seeing how Crowley was blocking the only entrance in and out of the den. He hoped like hell they weren't an alpha, because if so, he could not imagine how the poor fucker was coping with a ripe arse plugging the door so the scent of preheat slick fugged up the small space.

Crowley opened his mouth to try and call down, hoping his voice would carry at least a little bit, but then a voice bawled out from above. It was close enough, clear enough that he could recognize it as Hastur checking in with Ligur. The alpha had to be within spitting distance of the entrance. Crowley tensed up again and shrank in on himself. He took a deep breath through his nose just to reassure himself that, for all he was in preheat, he wasn't stinking too badly up here, with his torso acting like a cork against everything his arse was producing and his scent glands still at normal production levels. Most of what he could smell, beyond his own acrid fear scent, was the befuddling combination of an entire apothecary's worth of pungent medicinal herbs from the wild garden above.

Below, the other wolf drew their head away only to rest what felt like their lower jaw across the small of Crowley's back. He felt a faint rumbling vibration that increased as a furry chest pressed up against the outside of his leg, warm and solid and stupidly reassuring. He supposed the vibrations could be from a growl, but the rhythm was steady and mellow enough that he was pretty sure it was a stress purr.

Fucking hell, the mystery wolf really did seem intent on reassuring him. Crowley wondered how much they could hear of what was going on above, and whether they were able to connect the correct dots between a desperate, preheat omega trying to hide down a too-small hole and a whole pack's worth of wolves on the hunt in the woods. Or, if they simply realized Crowley was stuck and frightened and were doing their best to calm him down so he could take the time needed to get unstuck again without undue injury. Either way, they were doing a fabulous job.

Crowley let his hips sag sideways into the wolf's chest and did his best to let the purr and the grounding weight and warmth do their work. His breathing slowed again, and he relaxed enough that he no longer felt like he was going to bruise something with every inhale. The wolf patted his calf with their paw again and worked their jaw in a way that felt like they were issuing a small boof. Crowley rolled his eyes a little, because honestly, it felt like getting a "there's a love" from his Cousin Tracy, and he only tolerated that sort of thing from her because she was his favorite. Still, his eyes burned suspiciously as he pressed his face more firmly into his arms again, because sometimes bodies were the worst and a tiny bit of praise at the exact wrong (or right) moment took him out at the knees.

Of course, now that he was calming down again, and Hastur's voice was growing fainter, his traitorous body was ready to interpret all this sweet attention not as simple reassurance but as an overture. And fuck him if his equally stupid brain wasn't also doing some hasty arithmetic and trying to insist that two and two equaled five. He'd chalk it up to instinct and his "inner omega," but those bits of himself had been on board from the moment he'd realized the other wolf wasn't going to immediately jump him, so they could fuck right off, their opinion was already duly noted.

Regardless of what Crowley might or might not think about whether the other wolf was metaphorically looking pretty good at the moment, his body had apparently decided it had found a viable heatmate. The steady leaking that had paused during the worst of the fear response kicked back into vicious—or perhaps viscous—gear, and another pulse of slick oozed out his arse, reheating the wet trails already smearing his thighs.

He mouthed several expletives to himself and banged his forehead into his arms as he tried not to squirm. The surprise and fear had cooled things down enough that he didn't feel quite so on the edge of dropping into true heat, but it was still very inevitable and definitely going to ramp back up again quickly now that there was another being in the vicinity who didn't make his stomach turn just from thinking about the possibility of them doing something to him.

Because they were pressed so close, though, Crowley could feel the way the wolf's chest expanded quick and deep against his leg and then shuddered a little as they breathed back out. The jaw resting across his lower back twitched a little in the direction of his arse before stilling again. To Crowley's randy body, that was as good as a declaration of intent, and renewed, urgent arousal swept through him, making him clench and have to swallow down a moan. Just like that, he felt back on the brink, about to tumble into something far less lucid and rational.

He realized—with about five parts trepidation to one part rabid curiosity—he had a decision to make.

Although, maybe it wasn't much of a decision. There was no way he was getting out of this hole and somewhere else safe before his heat kicked in properly. He'd much rather throw himself at the mercy of a wolf kind enough to hold themself in check and offer comfort in his compromised state than take his chances on whoever else might wander upon him in the woods. But, in this rapidly closing window of opportunity, there was at least a smidgen of self-determination he could claw back for himself before his body fully hijacked his mind. And, if the poor bastard stuck in the den refused, then Crowley could at least try to get himself out of the hole so they wouldn't be trapped down there for the duration of his heat, because that was a really grim fucking prospect, actually.

So, with a lot of fatalistic resolution but also a tiny flare of hope, Crowley bumped his hip into the wolf's chest to get their attention, and then tipped his pelvis up and gave his pert, lewdly ripe arse as much of an enticing wiggle as he could manage. The purring and unsteady rise and fall of the other wolf's chest against his leg froze completely for a long moment. So long that Crowley stretched his near leg out and gave the wolf a tiny, encouraging little kick to what he was pretty sure was their haunch and then wiggled again. He thought about just spreading his knees and tipping up in a more formal mating presentation pose, but he thought that, given how they'd behaved so far, the other wolf would probably respond better if he made it clear he was still pretty well within his right mind when making the offer.

There was another long minute where the other wolf shifted their weight from foot to foot and sighed a few times, like they were debating with themselves, and Crowley tried to be patient with them. But the need for something to happen was starting to verge on painful again, and his arse was fairly drooling at this point, so the next time he felt the urge to squirm in horny discomfort, he didn't try and hold it back. That seemed to do the trick, because the wolf stopped dithering and started purring again, and he got a brief, barely there lick against the sliver of skin exposed between the waistband of the skirt and where his shirt was riding up. He waggled his arse again impatiently, and now he did spread his knees and tip up, which jostled the wolf's head and earned him an offended huff of warm breath across his lower back.

Crowley shivered and swallowed down another moan. Now that it seemed like the other wolf might actually do something, the warmth that had settled low and throbbing in his pelvis flared outward. He swayed on weakened knees with the rush and then strained up and out with his hips, hole clenching on nothing.

The wolf dragged their jaw along Crowley's lower back as they pulled away, and the rub of silky fur felt so good against his oversensitized skin it was literal torture. The air of the den was too cool after the warm bulk of the wolf pressed against his leg; Crowley wasn't a fan. But then there was a ruffle of movement along the hem of his skirt followed by a shock of cold as the wolf pressed their snout against his bare hip. He could feel the drag of cool air as the wolf inhaled deep, taking in his scent, and Crowley had to turn his head to bite his own bicep to keep from making a sound. Which was good, because then there was the hot, wet swipe of a tongue across the lower swell of his arse, and at least this way his groan was muffled by his arm.

The wolf moved their snout lower along the outside of his leg and licked again, and this time they must have gotten a little slick in the taste, because suddenly Crowley felt the hard, ridged press of clenched fangs against his skin as hot breath wafted urgent and rapid against his leg, leaving the wet patches chilled with every inhale. Crowley whined low in the back of his throat and leaned into the pressure, needing more of something, anything, to quench the rising swell of arousal. His cock was so hard it felt strangely heavy hanging between his legs, precome beading hot then chill at the tip.

The wolf started licking again, adjusting around the back of Crowley's thighs until they were licking directly at the layered trails of slick coating the insides. There was so much buildup that Crowley could feel the difference in sensation between skin coated and not coated as the wolf licked in steady, overlapping swipes, working on a single patch just south of Crowley's tiny, drawn-up pseudo testicles until the last of the slick had been thoroughly laved clean and he was swiping directly at the scent gland beneath. It felt absolutely amazing, especially once there was nothing between Crowley's sensitive gland and the thick, hot swipe of the wolf's tongue. But then, instead of moving up to the source, the bastard tilted their head down to begin working at a new swath of tacky, slick-coated skin.

Crowley growled low in his chest and swayed his arse back and forth in as sarcastic manner as possible. For fuck's sake, he wasn't sure what the other wolf thought they were doing. With as badly as he was leaking—would keep leaking—they were an idiot if they thought they were going to get him something like clean. All he got in response was a tart nip to the back of his thigh, which embarrassingly sent a bolt of arousal zipping so hard and fast to his cock that he wheezed with the effort to keep from crying out as he almost came on the spot.

The wolf worked their way down to his knee, giving the sensitive inner bend quite a lot of attention, which felt weird but in a squirmy, good way that had Crowley questioning everything he thought he knew about his own arousal responses, and then switched over to the other side.

By the time they'd worked their way back up to the high inner crease of Crowley's opposite thigh, teasing the mirrored scent gland there, he was trembling and leaking slick almost as fast as the wolf was lapping it up. He was horribly, painfully empty, and he needed that fat, fussy tongue lapping with that sort of dedication at his hole, damn it. He needed it squirming inside, lapping at his inner walls, so deep he could feel the bastard wolf's fangs pressing against his tender, loosened entrance. It wouldn't be as satisfying as a knot, but it would be a really fucking good start.

The wolf was panting hot against his skin in time with their licks, now, with great, gusting washes of hot-cold air that was driving Crowley wild with how wet all over he was with spit and slick. And then, finally, the bastard turned their head and the next swipe of their tongue slurped hot and perfect against his balls. Crowley swallowed back a shout and shuddered hard. God, it was coming now, finally; he'd get pressure against his aching hole, something to fill him up, however shallow. But the wolf pressed their cold snout more insistently into the swell of his arse, just to the side of his hole, and stretched their tongue out longer, lapped upward, along the underside of Crowley's cock.

He made a horrible, grating noise in the back of his throat at that. Because his cock was pretty long for an omega's but still very slender. So when the wolf lapped at it—with some sort of curling move—it didn't just glide along the underside alone; it wrapped up along the sides so far it almost felt like being fully enveloped. They did it again, and Crowley whined and squirmed. Precome and slick pulsed simultaneously, and he could just imagine how it must be flowing right down onto the wolf's waiting, perfectly positioned tongue, which somehow made the whole thing even hotter.

Crowley felt a faint buzz of vibration against his arse, and that was definitely a growl this time. But presumably a pleased one because the wolf set up a languorous pace licking up along Crowley's cock and balls, tongue curled like a sluice to receive everything Crowley was producing. The overwhelming wetness of it, the heat and teasing pressure, the feeling of being almost but not quite sheathed with every slow, almost silky pass of the wolf's tongue was absolutely too much for Crowley to handle with as long as he'd already been on the edge.

He came embarrassingly fast, keening as quietly as he could manage, fighting not to make too much noise or move too much as his cock pulsed hard with release. At least some of his jizz dribbled down along the underside of his cock to get lapped up too, and it was maybe a blessing or curse of preheat that he didn't really suffer too much in the way of overstimulation, because it meant the wolf was able to keep licking him, over and over, in unhurried laps that didn't let him get truly soft before he was coaxed back to aching hardness again.

Crowley sobbed softly into his arm, but he also tipped his hips further into it, because it was fucking incredible. He was still losing his mind a little at being left so empty, but with how well his dick was being lavished with attention, it was impossible to feel it as a neglect. And pretty soon, every indulgently slow, thorough swipe over his cock was accompanied by an echoing stab of viscous pleasure deep in his core, until he was trembling and quietly weeping with it, blissed out with how awful and wonderful it felt, so perfectly unsatisfying.

When he came again, he bit down hard on his arm to keep from shouting as he rutted as well as he could against the wolf's bastard tongue. The wolf's pace picked up and Crowley could feel the faint rumbling of a pleased growl. Once the peak had ebbed away, the wolf drew back enough to nip gently at the swell of Crowley's arse, and then, finally, licked directly over his loosened hole. Crowley keened with giddy need and arched back into a few gloriously broad swipes along the entire crease, and then almost choked as teeth shoved up against his skin—just as perfect as he'd imagined—and the wolf's beautifully thick tongue squirmed inward with another vibrating growl.

The relief of being filled was so acute, the release of tension that had been held for too long so overwhelming, that Crowley came again within a few awkward, thrusting strokes, cock twitching dryly and arse clenching down hard as he shuddered and moaned into his arm and was finally, irrevocably swamped by full heat.

Time went a little liquid after that. At some point his arm started aching enough that he muzzily switched to using the other bicep to keep himself muffled; he didn't taste blood, so it probably wasn't too bad. The wolf licked and nipped and growled him through some number of additional orgasms that he lost track of without the swell of a knot to help break the heat temporarily. He was only aware that time was passing because of the way the pain in his knees and his arm where he was biting down was becoming difficult to ignore—almost as difficult as the increasing desperation to be filled up properly on a fat knot.

Crowley whined and squirmed, then growled and bucked as the wolf attempted to keep ministering to him. He needed more, and he couldn't remember any longer why his heatmate wasn't giving it to him. Except that he was stuck, and maybe that had something to do with it. As the next orgasm crested and started to recede, he clumsily tried to get his feet under him to push up, stretched his hands out to try and find the lip of the entrance to the tunnel so he could wriggle out. He was limp enough now and so slick with sweat that when he tried to stand, his chest eased free almost immediately.

Behind him, the wolf was keeping their snout pressed to his arsecheek, breath whuffing hot against his skin. Then, with a swift lick over the swell of his arse, they put their head up under his thigh and pressed up, encouraging him to move. Crowley did his best, but it was difficult to stay coordinated with the heat addling his thoughts and reaction times. He was so focused that it took him a lot longer than it probably should have to realize he couldn't feel the wolf pressing against him anymore. When he paused, he couldn't feel the waft of their breath either.

"Hey…" he warbled, and under other circumstances he would have hated how lost he sounded. But as it was, he was thinking of sinking back down onto his knees again, soreness be damned, to try and kick out and find his heatmate.

But then there was the sound of shuffling and a quiet boof of sound from above him, and Crowley looked up just as the flat rock covering the entrance of the hole was shoved partially aside and a white-furred, slightly damp wolf's snout shoved into the entrance with a grizzling yip. Oh, there was his heatmate. Of course. It would be a lot easier to knot if he wasn't stuck in this hole.

Galvanized, Crowley reached up and pushed the rock the rest of the way aside. The tunnel was angled well enough that, with some judicious wriggling and a bracing grip on the edges of the exit, he was able to slither up and out first onto his forearms, and then his hands and knees. His heatmate paced anxiously around him as he worked, on alert and ears swiveling as they kept an eye out for—oh, right, Crowley was being pursued by his former pack. So, probably, he should not just turn and present himself to be immediately mounted.

Still, now that he was out and had his heatmate in a space where he could not just see but smell them, he boggled a little.

"Oh, you're an alpha!" he rasped, a little boggled.

His heatmate turned toward him and cocked their fluffy head in an unmistakable gesture of "are you serious right now?" Crowley shrugged; he'd been fixating on a knot, sure, but that was mostly the heat's influence. He didn't really have a preference outside of that.

Their fur wasn't just white; it was frothy and full, looking by turns feathery and almost curly in spots, which had to be an absolute bitch to keep groomed. And they were big in the way many alphas tended to be: barrel-chested with wide paws and a thick, sturdy tail. Crowley was probably still a little taller at the shoulder in his own furred form, but his heatmate had enough weight on him that they could probably just lie down on top of him and achieve a good pin without much extra effort.

"You're very pretty," he told them earnestly, a little slurring, and reached out to get a handful of fur to… do something. Maybe pet them. Crowley's thoughts were slippery, hazy things right now. But as his fingers sank into the white ruff, the search for motivation fell away easily. "Oh, fuck, and soft," he breathed, newly fixated, and moved to crawl close enough he could wrap his arms around his pretty, silky heatmate's neck and cling. It was viscerally satisfying, as though Crowley had been wanting to know how soft this particular fur was for a long time, and expectations had been thoroughly exceeded.

In fact, the longer he drank in the sight and smell of his heatmate, the more familiar and almost… comforting the alpha felt to him. There was something about him that was tugging at Crowley's memory, but he couldn't quite catch the tail end of it at the moment.

"Do I know you?" he asked, muzzy and frowning.

But that thought scattered too as he shifted his weight and newly rediscovered how awful and scratchy-sharp the ground felt against his sore knees. He looked down, vision sliding a little to the left as he did so, which made him glad he was still holding his gorgeous heatmate around the neck. His heatmate, who had such a brilliant tongue that had been doing amazingly depraved things to his arse, which was currently horrifically empty and aching—almost worse than the pain in his knees—and why was he looking at the ground instead of doing something useful like presenting himself to be filled up, and…?

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to see stars and blinked them open again. This time, when he saw the mixture of leaf mold and pointy twigs and cracked acorn caps and tiny, sharp-edged stones he was kneeling in, he was able to connect that to the pain of kneeling, and that to the realization that he was exposed in the middle of the forest. And that was… not good. For being in heat.

Before he completely lost the thread again, a cold wet nose pressed against the back of his neck, and he looked up to see his heatmate craning his neck awkwardly to look at him with worry clear in the twitch of his furry brows. His eyes were a gorgeous shade of blue-green that complemented his fur beautifully. When Crowley shifted into his other form, he knew they'd make a tremendously handsome couple: light and dark, blue-green-amber, fluffy bulk alongside lithe sleekness. But when Crowley reached for his fur, he couldn't find the focus to make the change.

"I'm in heat," Crowley reminded himself dumbly. "We need shelter." And then he groaned as his kaleidoscope attention shifted right back into an overwhelming throb of aching, needful emptiness.

His heatmate huffed and ducked his head down to press up against Crowley's ribcage, urging him to stand. Crowley went along simply because it was easier than trying to grasp onto a reason for why he shouldn't. His heatmate was sweet and beautiful and had a wickedly sinful tongue that Crowley wanted to feel again soon—but mostly he wanted his heatmate's cock with its nice, fat alpha knot, and… right, the point was, if his heatmate wanted him to stand, it was probably part of some larger plan to take care of him. The other wolf had been doing a bang-up job of that so far, so Crowley had no reason to worry.

His balance was not having it, though. With every listing attempt at a step, his knees wanted to buckle, to bring him back down onto all fours where it would be easier to make himself ready to be tied down.

Crowley buried both hands into his heatmate's thick ruff and leaned heavily against his side to stay upright. His heatmate rumbled an approving sound as he fussed with the flat rock to push it back over the entrance of the hole. Once done, with a few scratches of leaf litter dragged over the top for good measure, his heatmate started walking at a slow, steady pace to lead them out of the overgrown garden. Crowley stumbled along after, feeling dizzier and dizzier as he was guided down the slope of the hill in a zig-zagging pattern to keep the angle of decline reasonable for Crowley's precarious relationship with gravity.

The babble of the creek in the ravine below grew louder as they descended, and Crowley focused on the soothing sound and the warm softness of his heatmate's fur to keep from being so overwhelmed with heat-need that he lost all ability to walk. Still, he sobbed in relief when he felt the ground level out beneath his feet and walking didn't require so much concentration.

His heatmate whined in sympathy and angled them to follow the bank of the creek upstream for a few steps before turning again to face back up the slope of the hill. Crowley looked up in mild alarm, hoping that he wasn't going to be expected to climb back up now that they'd finally gotten all the way down. But, after a hazy moment, he saw that just a short ways up there was a good-size patch of herbs and flowers framing a low-arched hole dug into the hillside.

He frowned as his heatmate encouraged him first up the slope and then down onto his belly to crawl into the hole. There was something about the position of everything that felt significant. Luckily, once he'd squirmed inside, a wall of scent hit him and made things a lot clearer. He was back in his old, abandoned den. Only, not so abandoned, because now it was clear his heatmate must have widened an old, narrow air flow vent he'd dug into the back wall into a second entrance.

"Oh, thank fuck," he breathed when he spotted his supply bag just to the side of the original entrance tunnel. The visceral relief of realizing he wouldn't have to find anywhere else to ride out his heat after all made his eyes prick with grateful tears.

From behind him, he heard labored chuffing and the thumping and dull clinking sound of stone being rolled around. When Crowley looked over his shoulder, he saw his heatmate shoving awkwardly at a set of oblong stones to get them positioned in front of the opening. It took a moment for the actions to make sense in the syrupy heat of his mind, but then Crowley shuffled around on his knees to help.

"Clever alpha," he approved warmly and ignored the half-hearted attempts to gently push him out of the way so his heatmate could finish the defense work alone. "Come on," he drawled. "Faster with two. Especially when only one of us has got thumbs right now."

That earned him a world-weary sort of sigh, but his heatmate stopped trying to interfere and instead switched to indicating which rock should go where with bossy taps of his paws and lots of fussy weaving around Crowley's crouched form to make sure he was getting it right. The instinctual urge to shore up the den was temporarily quashing the worst of the need to be mounted, which freed up just enough brainpower for Crowley to connect a few dots.

"Oh!" he exclaimed and turned to look at his heatmate more closely. "I do know you. You're the angel who brings me Tracy's letters."

His heatmate's ears flattened against his skull, and Crowley got a furtive look out the corner of blue-green eyes before the other wolf nodded once, stiffly.

"Ooooh, so you'll be like this the whole time," Crowley realized.

Part of the reason Lucifer even suffered the angel to deliver letters from some of the surrounding packs was because he was well-known in the surrounding communities for being stuck in his wolf form. And Lucifer, for some reason, seemed to think this made him less of a threat. Not such a small threat that Lucifer allowed the pack's omegas to directly interact with the messenger wolf—he was still an alpha, and being stuck in his wolf shape didn't make him incapable of completing a mating bond—but not so much of one that Lucifer had forbidden him from entering the inner bounds of their territory altogether.

Crowley had been able to catch enough glimpses of the fluffy alpha over the years to become familiar with his form and link it to the faint scent that transferred to his cousin's letters during transport. To admire how fine his wolf form was and wonder if his fur felt as gorgeous as it looked.

His heatmate—his angel—whuffed an affirmative sound, his eyebrows shifting apprehensively.

"I don't mind," Crowley assured him. "Can change too, if you want." Crowley closed his eyes and tried to focus, but while the change was closer now that he had a temporary dram of clarity, he could tell it wouldn't be worth the effort—not when he could just wait for a true break in the heat. "No, nope. Need you to knot me first."

The other wolf shook his head fretfully and tapped impatiently at one of the remaining rocks. There were only a few left to place for the entrance to be blocked well enough to prevent easy access or sightlines inward, but still allow a bit of a breeze to circulate. Crowley's body was anticipating being able to let go of that particular worry and melt back into the fuzziness of the heat, so he took the hint and rolled and shoved things about as directed with increasingly trembling hands.

By the time the last stone had been wedged into place, he was panting through his mouth, unable to push fully up off his hands and knees, and his thighs were back to being fully coated in slick and oozing oil from his swollen scent glands. His angel crowded close and licked at the side of his neck, pressed his chest against Crowley's shoulder. But when Crowley immediately bared his throat and tried to sink down on his elbows, to arc up his hips in invitation, his angel huffed and ducked his nuzzle under Crowley's chest to urge him back up again.

Crowley whined and reluctantly pushed himself back up on arms that felt too loose to support his weight.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "Den's secure. Need you."

His angel whuffed and nudged against his shoulder harder. When Crowley didn't move, he sighed and dipped his muzzle to push the crown of his head against Crowley's cheek, physically making him look around. Crowley's muddled gaze landed on a lumpy blanket lying on the ground up against one wall of the den. No, not lumpy; the blanket was spread over the top of a thick pile of dried leaves. Crowley could see a few strays leaking out from under the edges.

"A nest," Crowley realized with a relieved laugh. "Oh, that's grand, that is."

He shuffled over and practically whimpered as his hands and knees sank into the material. It wasn't very thick, and it was noisy with the crunch of compressed leaves, but compared to cold, hard-packed dirt or the prickly forest floor, it was absolute luxury. And that was even without Crowely's omega instincts rolling around, belly up, in approval that his angel of a heatmate had prepared a nest.

Crowley groaned and shamelessly collapsed forward onto his forearms, rubbing the glands on his wrists against the blanket to spread his scent properly. He buried his face in the soft fabric to take the concentrated smell of his heatmate deep into his lungs: apple blossom, chamomile, and oak. Crowley really wanted to lick it. Unfortunately, they weren't in the right configuration of forms for Crowley to get at the angel's scent glands if he didn't also want to choke on fur. He was going to fix that, just as soon as he could concentrate long enough to shift.

"Come on, come on, come on," he chanted, dipping his spine to raise his hips as high as he could get them, making his aching hole an easy target.

Because his angel was also a bit of a bastard, though, Crowley didn't get mounted and stuffed up the way he was craving. Instead, he got a ridiculously dextrous tongue once again swiping up over his thighs, hot and damp. The tease of it was a little too much to bear now, though, when he'd been left waiting for so long, and he groaned and bucked his hips away, then immediately shoved his arse back and growled.

"Your cock, you bastard," he garbled into the blanket. "Fucking fuck me already."

He got a lot of fussy grizzling for the attitude and a swift nip to the arse cheek, which made him yelp, but finally—finally—he felt warm fur dragging along his back as his angel hunkered over him to get into position. Crowley moaned through a sob as blunt pressure nudged at his slick hole. It hurt like pressing on a nearly healed bruise as the thick head pressed slow but insistent where he was throbbing with heat.

He tried to shove himself back onto it, impale himself as quickly as possible for the relief it would bring. But with a muted snarl, his angel opened his jaws around the back of Crowley's neck and set his teeth against Crowley's frantically tripping pulse points.

"Oh, fuck," Crowley wheezed, instinct making him freeze at the same time arousal punched hot and sparking through his entire pelvis.

His world narrowed to the brightly visceral points of pressure against too-thin skin, the hot wash of breath ruffling the short hairs at his nape and raising goose pimples up over his scalp. The hot, thick press of his heatmate's cockhead breached him as slow and inexorable as a glacier. It carved into him, swelling him up in a way that his angel's tongue, as wonderful as it had felt, just hadn't been able to achieve.

Crowley keened, not as worried now about being overheard, and shuddered as the desire to move, to not just welcome but actively embrace the joining, warred with the instinctive need to hold still and patient under his heatmate's careful pin.

"Please, please, please," he chanted, clawing fitfully at the blanket under his cheek with weak human nails. "Need you—please, Angel—can't wait."

His angel panted hot against the back of his neck, tongue flicking out to taste mingled sweat and the oozing oil of his scent glands, which had started leaking nearly as much as his hole now that he was in full-blown heat. It felt like it took an age, but finally there was the warm press of fur against Crowley's arse as his angel bottomed out. He could already feel the slight ridge of the knot starting to form, which was immensely satisfying.

"God, you're already about to pop," he said with a half-hysterical laugh. "That's so good. Absolutely love that. Fucking tie me down, quick as you can, I'm losing my mind."

His heat mate groaned and shakily adjusted his stance, interlacing furry limbs with Crowley's naked ones in a way that felt far too mincing for how desperate Crowley was for some sort of movement in the arse region. But then, seemingly satisfied, his angel tensed in a way that had hot anticipation racing up Crowley's spine a full two seconds before he pulled out part way and fucked back in experimentally.

"Yes," Crowley hissed and then almost immediately whined, "No, no—? What are you? How many times are you going to reposition your—fuck!" he shrieked as the sharp points of his heatmate's teeth sank in nearly hard enough to bruise before easing back up again. "OK, OK, OK," he panted, doing his best not to squirm as he fairly gushed precome and slick alike at that little demonstration. "Submitting! Submitting. Very submitted. But also dying a little. So—?"

His heatmate made an uncannily human-sounding harrumph and shifted his limbs again. This time, when he gave a cautious thrust, he seemed a lot more pleased with things because he shuddered out a sigh, gave Crowley another one of those awkward, open-jawed licks to his neck, and then started up a slowly building rhythm. Crowley moaned in relief at the consistent drag of a fat cock against his inner walls. The insistent stretch left no room to doubt that he was full, full, full. Not as swollen to bursting as he could be—and would be soon, thank fuck—but well on the way toward meeting that final need.

His angel picked up speed and force, until the rhythm tipped from a thorough fuck into a claiming pound, and Crowley belatedly realized why he'd been so damn particular with the positioning. The way they were so well tangled up, his heatmate was able to brace against their interlocked limbs for the leverage he needed for each vigorous thrust without having to put additional pressure on Crowley's neck. It gave the earlier warning bite additional context, and Crowley's chest swelled with sudden emotion at the care, the brilliance, beneath it all.

"S-smart bastard," he grunted and did his best to help, to give his heatmate more support. "Fuck, you're so brilliant, figuring out how to make it work like this. Your teeth feel so good. Gonna shift after this, so you can pin me properly. Can't wait till you can bite down good and tight, but fuck this is already amazing. You're so clever. Fucking incredible."

His angel whined loudly, breath huffing hot, and Crowley felt the knot starting to swell larger with every dragging catch against his slippery rim.

"Yeah, come on," he groaned, breath shuddering with the final, bruising thrusts. "Need it, need you, so good, taking care of me so well."

His angel warbled a choked-off howl as he shoved in deep a final time and started to grind. Crowley answered him with a thready moan as the knot inflated the final few centimeters in a rush, locking them together and stretching Crowley wide enough to bring tears to his eyes. Heat pulsed deep inside him as his alpha's release filled him up. His own cock twitched greedily.

"M'close," he keened. "Fuck, bite down again, please? Just a bit—it was so good before—that's all I need. That's all—fuck, yeah, shitshitshit," he babbled as his gorgeous angel of an alpha snarled weakly and tightened his grip just enough to trigger his submission instinct and arousal response hard and shove him over the edge into coming untouched.

After another minute of panting and trembling together, his angel eased his jaws open and gave Crowley's neck a few apologetic licks. Crowley garbled something he hoped was reassuring and then started slowly sinking down further into the makeshift nest. Luckily, his angel was already thinking along similar lines, because Crowle didn't meet even a nanosecond of resistance. There were a lot of polite licks and encouraging grumbles as they awkwardly melted down together into a knot-locked puddle of goo.

Crowley sprawled his limbs out as much as he could, while his angel wriggled his hind- and forelimbs up under Crowley's pelvis and shoulders respectively, both to give him a little extra cushion and to keep his hips properly supported to avoid tugging on the knot. Crowley laid with his cheek smooshed into the blanket, his angel's warm weight keeping him grounded. After a hesitating brush of fur, Crowley felt the slight weight of a fuzzy chin rest against his temple as his angel fully committed to a post-coital mating press.

It was, honestly, the most comfortable Crowley had felt in far too long a time.

After about five minutes of just existing in the relief of not feeling like he was losing his mind from arousal or fear or anxiety, Crowley dredged up enough consciousness to open his eyes and start the gears in his brain ticking along again. He was reluctant to do it, but he was all too aware that the length of time between bouts of the heat could be capricious, and there was a lot of ground to cover between now and when he'd again lose his ability to reason beyond "alpha good, knot gooder" for a while.

When he was fairly sure the last of his heatmate's residual orgasms had passed and they were just waiting for the knot to go down, he cleared his throat awkwardly and said, "So, um… hi. I'm Crowley. Nice to meet you."

The body draped over him twitched minutely, and then he got a rather polite "boof" in response, which felt a bit weird with how part of his angel's lower jaw was resting on his upturned ear.

"Suppose it's not officially an official meeting, since you can't tell me your name like this," he went on. "I've been calling you Angel in my head, on account of… things," he said, fumbling a little as his mouth got ahead of his brain a bit. "If you hate it, I dunno, give me a nip or something."

Angel's entire torso swelled up rapidly and collapsed again in a startled chuff, but it sounded distinctly amused, and Crowley felt the lazy tick-tock brush of a tail tickle against his splayed thighs, so Crowley figured he was in the clear on bestowing such a ridiculous nickname.

"Sorry for, uh, dropping in arse-first while in preheat," he said with a wince. "In my defense, I didn't realize someone had moved into my old den."

Angel tensed and lifted his head. When Crowley looked up out of the corner of his eye, Angel was staring down at him, ears pricked forward intently in what Crowley assumed was surprise.

"Yeah, I built this yonks ago. Before things with the old, original pack went to shit… multiple times. You been using it long?" he went on hurriedly, not wanting to dwell on what a shit show it all was. "I mean, when you're in the area. I got the impression you have a pack you stay with when you're not out running messages."

Angel bobbed his head affirmatively, eyes wide. Crowley grinned up at him in what he hoped read as reassurance.

"Glad someone's been getting good use out of it," he said, which was only scratching the surface of things.

Because the heat definitely had his omega instincts feeling dead chuffed that the alpha whose knot was currently stuffing him up liked the den he'd built. But it also kicked up a bittersweet ache in his chest that this particular alpha—who for years had been helping Crowley maintain a connection with a cousin he'd recently realized was also a much-needed lifeline—had found shelter and safety in something Crowley had built.

"You wouldn't happen to be in the area because you've got a letter for me, would you?" Crowley asked, hoping he didn't sound too desperate.

Angel grinned wide, showing off a lot of neatly kept, gleaming teeth, and then bobbed his snout toward the top end of the nest. Crowley lifted his head to look and spotted a slightly bigger lump under the blanket where a pillow might normally rest. He reached up and dragged the blanket back to reveal the sleek little leather vest Angel usually wore whenever he was in the village. On closer inspection, Crowley realized it was something between a harness and a pack with an adjustable strap around the middle that looked like it could be loosened and tightened with a judicious application of lupine teeth.

"Ooh, that's clever," Crowley admired and lifted the weighted flaps of the twin pouches that would rest along the alpha's sides when he was wearing it.

The left pouch was empty, but the right held a bulging envelope addressed to Crowley in Tracy's familiar hand. When Crowley opened it, there was a letter inside as well as a second envelope. The latter was addressed to Lucifer, and while Crowley didn't recognize the hand, it was stamped with the official mark of Tracy's pack and used Lucifer's full title, which meant it was probably a pack leader-to-pack leader missive. Crowley stared at it for a moment, the higher-functioning parts of his brain still too scrambled to do more than register that, probably, it was Significant that it hadn't been sent to Lucifer directly.

With trembling fingers, he set aside the envelope not for him and carefully eased open the folds of Tracy's letter:

Crowley, love, of course you can come live with us. I've been waiting for you to ask for YEARS! I've asked Alpha Device to write a formal declaration that she's granting you asylum, so Alpha Morningstar will hopefully think twice about trying to start trouble. But, you know better than me how receiving something like that would go over now that little Lucy's head's grown so fat. If you need to, just leave it where he'll find it later and go. Aziraphale knows a little about what's going on, and he's agreed to lie low in the forest nearby for a few days after his usual message run, in case you need to make a break for it immediately. He knows your scent, so if you head east out of the territory and hang about for a tick, he'll come find you and help you get back to us safe. (Please try not to antagonize him too dreadfully on the way, dearie. He's a lot softer than he looks.)

There were a few more entreaties for Crowley to stay safe, and assurances that Tracy and the hodge-podge family she'd built within the newer pack would be excited to have him, before she signed off. Crowley read the whole thing through again, throat tight and eyes stinging.

Then, he swallowed hard a few times and rasped quietly, "You're Aziraphale, then?"

The alpha nuzzled the side of his jaw against Crowley's cheek and nodded.

"Tracy says I'm not to 'antagonize' you. Do you suppose this counts as antagonizing?" he asked, forcing a little levity into his tone and describing a lazy circle with his finger to indicate the circus that was his early heat and Aziraphale's impromptu stepping in to help see him through it. "Doubt you or she counted on something like this being part of escort duties."

Aziraphale grizzled and opened his mouth just enough to fake chew on Crowley's jaw, like they were pups play fighting. Crowley jerked his head to the side with a surprised bark of laughter.

"Quit that, you bastard," he said but angled his arm up so he could dig his fingers into Aziraphale's ruff to keep him close. Not that there was much danger of either of them getting too far with the knot still tying them together tight. "Save it for when I've got thicker skin and fur. When I can get you back."

Aziraphale whuffed and rested his chin back on top of Crowley's head. Crowley shifted to lie with one cheek to the blanket again but kept his grip on Aziraphale's fur.

"Thanks for this, by the way," he said quietly. "You're restoring my faith that not all alphas are absolute cockwaffles. You've done amazing."

Pressed so close, he could feel the way Aziraphale cringed in on himself. With a frown, Crowley shifted his hand up and felt the way the alpha's ears were pinned back tight to his head.

"What, you don't believe me?" he asked, letting indignance color his tone.

When Aziraphale stayed suspiciously silent and still, Crowley scowled and yanked gently on one of his flattened ears.

"I'm serious. You know how many of my pack—former pack—would have seen my arse leaking with preheat like that, realized I couldn't risk fighting back in the moment, and not taken immediate advantage? Zero, that's how many. Took me… way too long to realize that, obviously, but…" He trailed off with a frustrated growl and reached up with his other hand so he could give Aziraphale an awkward, backward hug round the neck. "They're all awful, is my point. But you—! That was good, how you handled it all. Didn't even need to see you or smell you to know it was going to turn out all right, that I could trust you to take care of me."

Aziraphale whined and ducked his head to shove his snout under the back of Crowley's neck.

"Why are you hiding?" Crowley demanded, half-laughing. "S'a compliment! You're a good alpha!"

That earned him another, even more mournful whine. And, after another moment of wary befuddlement, Crowley felt the alpha start shaking and trembling.

Alarmed, Crowley gripped Aziraphale's neck tighter, but the hold was too awkward for him to feel like he was really doing anything in the way of comfort, and he had an urgent, heart-hammering need to see the alpha's face and body language and figure out exactly what was happening. His instincts, both as an omega attuned to his current heatmate and as someone with a little too much experience clocking people trying to hide how upset they were, were insisting that if Aziraphale were in his human form right now, he'd be quietly sobbing. And Crowley absolutely could not handle sitting idle while someone near him was in tears; Tracy used to joke he had a cuddle or chaos response that kicked in, and it was anyone's guess which would turn up any given time.

An experimental wiggle of his hips revealed the knot had deflated enough that he could pull loose, if he wanted. It wouldn't be comfortable, but it wouldn't hurt either of them. Given the givens, he was willing to risk the chance Aziraphale might momentarily mistake it for a rejection if it meant Crowley could do more for the both of them than just lie there.

"Hey, I need to see you better. I'm gonna pull off," he said urgently. "Not going anywhere, promise."

When he didn't get a specifically negative response, Crowley shifted and gently tugged his way off the knot with a grimace and then slithered his torso out from under Aziraphale's bulk so he could prop himself up on an arm and get a better look at his heatmate's face. Aziraphale slumped down onto the blanket like a furry bag of wet sand, eyes squeezed tight and ears pinned as he shuddered in apparent anguish.

"What—? What's wrong?" Crowley asked, absolutely bewildered, and reburied his fingers into the fur of Aziraphale's ruff to give the back of his neck a grounding squeeze. It wasn't going to be anything as effective as if he were in his other form with fangs and the bite strength to mimic the soothing effects of a reciprocal pseudo-claim, but he needed answers too much right now to dare shift.

Most of Crowley's knowledge about comforting a partner—of any designation—while in heat or rut was mostly theoretical. He'd had many occasions to soothe a partner's ego or jealous insecurities, sure—done that in spades, and had grown heartily sick of it—but not something like this, where his partner was actively in distress. And sure, his aunts had warned him not to believe anyone who tried to insist alphas had the market cornered on snarling, protective anxiety when their partner was upset. But it was one thing to hear such things and quite another to feel it like a punch to the solar plexus.

Seeing Aziraphale so miserable made his pulse race and hair stand on end; Crowley had the nearly overwhelming urge to do some objectively ridiculous shit like stand protectively over his heatmate's prone form and snarl at shadows. But the rush of adrenaline cleared his mind of the heat haze even further—which was a spooky feeling, since he hadn't realized just how fuzzy he still was during the relative calm of the break—and he was able to shake his head hard and temper his instincts. A little bit.

He scanned Aziraphale's form from nose to tail with eyes and questing fingers, and gave the rest of the den the hairy eyeball in search of some other possible source of his misery. Then, he scrutinized both entrances in turn and stretched his senses as far as they could go in his human form. But there was nothing. No strange sounds or smells that indicated some sort of danger—either from his former pack or something more mundane, like an ornery bear—had found them.

"Aziraphale, help me out. Are you hurt?" he asked, hushed and intense. "I want to make whatever's going on better, but I can't do that if I don't know what the problem is."

Aziraphale shook his head briefly and then squirmed around so he could wedge his face back under the lee of Crowley's propped-up chest. Crowley's arm automatically curled in with the movement to clutch him closer, but it didn't feel like nearly enough. So, with a determined set to his jaw, Crowley wrestled them both around until he'd more-or-less reversed their positions from before, with him draped over Aziraphale's back this time.

"Here, you can be the little spoon for a minute, yeah?" he muttered as he took a moment to thoroughly rub the scent glands on his wrists over as much fur as he could, hoping it would help. Then he twined his arms and legs around the limp, furry bulk underneath him and rested his cheek on top of the crown of the alpha's head.

And it did help, because within a minute, Aziraphale's trembling had tapered off dramatically, and the subvocal whining had all but petered out. In turn, Crowley's high-alert anxiety bled off into something that felt a little less like he wanted to bare his teeth at nothing.

He gave it another minute before he grimaced and said, tentatively, "Look, I get this isn't ideal, and that we're not well equipped to have an in-depth heart-to-heart at the moment, but…" He broke off into some self-conscious vowel chewing before admitting, "I'm afraid I said something that set you off, and I don't know what it was exactly, and I really, really, really don't want to accidentally do it again once my heat rolls back in and I get even more stupid in the mouth. So. Uh. I'm just going to spitball here, and you let me know if I'm getting close or not. Yeah?"

Aziraphale huffed a huge sigh and then whuffed a miserable-sounding affirmation.

"Great. Grand. OK. Um… all right, let's start with this: Is there something else going on I don't know about that makes all of this… not good?" he asked and cringed at his own phrasing. "Like, for example, you've got a mate or someone promised to mate, and helping me out like this is going to fuck all of that up?"

Aziraphale gave a warbling yip of alarm and jerked his head sharply in a negative.

"OK, OK, no mate or promised," Crowley affirmed, scratching his fingers into the fur over Aziraphale's chest in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. "Although, sorry, I am very shit at posing these questions, aren't I. Too many at once. Not good for yes-no answers. Trying again," he babbled and then forced himself to pause and take a deep breath.

He could feel it, now that he was no longer knotted and after the spike and drop of anxiety: his heat was starting to creep back in. It wasn't making him feel horny again yet—thank fuck for small mercies—but it was needling his own insecurities and anxieties. Nascent worries about whether the problem wasn't just with something he'd said but something he was—or wasn't— were starting to coalesce into much heavier and destabilizing concerns. That Aziraphale might be so upset—so upset with Crowley—that he might leave altogether. It wasn't rational, and Crowley was still coherent enough to remember that for now, but it wouldn't last.

In a deliberately measured tone, he asked, "Is there something else going on that you believe—if I knew about it—would make me change my mind? About thinking you've handled this pretty damn well, all things considered?"

There was a significant pause before Aziraphale sighed disconsolately and shook his head in a tiny, fractional movement.

"All right. Then…" Crowley trailed off and pondered for a long moment, feeling increasingly lost. "Do you not think you handled this all right? Like, do you think you took advantage?"

That got him a rather petulant shrug at first followed by a short shake no.

"OK, good. Cause you didn't. I mean, obviously, really fucked circumstances, but I could have crawled out and taken my chances. And I didn't. I picked you," Crowley said firmly, because even if that was maybe sugarcoating things, a lot, it wasn't incorrect.

"But…" Crowley said, feeling even further at sea. "I don't understand," he said and hated that there was the ghost of a needy whinge right at the end. Fucking heat. "I just said you did a good job!" he insisted, concentrating fiercely on keeping his tone reasonable. "Is it that upsetting? That I think that makes you a good alpha? Do you think being decent and kind and—and respectful—makes you a bad alpha?" he demanded, voice going a little shrill as he cut himself off, hearing how off-the-rails he was getting.

Crowley sucked in a shaky breath and hugged Aziraphale tighter, as much for his own comfort as the alpha's now.

"Fuck, sorry, sorry. It's, ngk, coming back. Course you don't really think that. If you did, you wouldn't be a good alpha. It'd be a contradiction, right?"

He buried his face into Aziraphale's ruff and whined as arousal stabbed sharp and vexing through his guts.

"OK, bad idea, trying to talk this out," he decided through a mouthful of fur as he fought not to squirm. "Should just change. Can't say something stupid again that way. Don't want to h-hurt you," he managed, squeezing his eyes tight against tears and furious with himself for it.

Beneath him, Aziraphale heaved upward with a broken-sounding moan, head twitching back and forth in denial. Crowley squeaked in surprise as a second heave of Aziraphale's body beneath him made what had felt like a secure grip around the alpha's torso suddenly feel noodly and vague. A third, upward surge dislodged him completely, and Crowley landed on his side with a grunt followed swiftly by a curse as the blanket-covered leaves did not nearly enough to cushion an awkward landing on one arm and hip.

But he was too bamboozled by the strangeness of the whole situation to do more than vaguely note that he'd probably end up with a couple of bruises. Because it had felt less like Aziraphale had been trying to buck him off and more like Aziraphale was collapsing in on himself at the same time he was expanding. It had felt weird and woo-woo and ridiculous in the way Crowley always felt like magic ended up coming off. It had felt like Aziraphale was shifting. But that couldn't be right, because Aziraphale was stuck—infamously stuck—had been that way for years.

And yet, as Crowley watched with eyes that felt like they might pop out his head at any moment, the creamy-white, huge wolf he'd been aggressively cuddling was warping and wibbling around the edges in a way that made his brain hurt, like watching a crystal-clear reflection in a still pool of water suddenly get plonked by a giant pebble and ripple like the visual equivalent of someone messing about with a slide whistle. Really undignified, magic was.

Then, with a gasp, there was a man kneeling on the blanket next to him, with the same rather barrel-chested build and white-blonde curling hair, sturdy-looking hands, and—when he glanced over at Crowley, wild-eyed—pale, blue-green gaze.

"Oh, shit," Crowley breathed and then, more stridently, "Oh, shit," as he lunged forward to help catch Aziraphale by the shoulders as the alpha tried to reach out, got tangled in his own limbs, and nearly ate it. "You shifted!"

Aziraphale opened and closed his mouth a few times, sounds garbling as he tried to say something, before he cut himself off with a furious, mutinous pout.

"Take your time," Crowley rushed to say and helped him to sit up. "The shift lag after however many years has got to be a massive bitch." And then, because he had absolutely zero shame but a lot of burgeoning, arousal-laced anxiety, he clambered right into the alpha's lap and looped his arms around his neck. "Don't mind me, just… heat stuff. You know how it is. Probably."

Aziraphale managed to get his arms around Crowley in turn with an alacrity that did a lot to soothe Crowley's inconvenient insecurities. He'd looked a little bit like an aggrieved puppetmaster soldiering through a performance with tangled wires while doing so, but he'd powered through like a champ. And now, Aziraphale was humming to himself through truncated musical scales, with a look of ferocious concentration on his face. At the same time, he was awkwardly and stiltedly tapping his fingers, one-by-one, against Crowley's back in sequence, obviously trying to remaster the finer points of his human form.

Crowley studied his face in fascination, not nearly as alarmed as he probably should have been at how instantly smitten he was with his heatmate's other form. It was a little bit down to the influence of the heat and already having been well-knotted by this particular alpha. But a lot of it was that Aziraphale's human shape was, objectively, fucking adorable.

"You're still very pretty," Crowley informed him, to Aziraphale's obvious, wide-eyed surprise. "Just in case you were wondering. And soft," he said with a lecherous amount of satisfaction. It was taking a lot of willpower not to just lift himself up and onto Aziraphale's half-hard cock and lock him up in a full constrictor hug, so Crowley could fully revel in all the softly padded firmness.

But since he was examining Aziraphale's new appearance so avidly, he didn't miss the way the term "soft" made him flinch a little.

"Soft," Crowley said with a lot of horny emphasis, "is good."

"Mmmm," Aziraphale said, eyebrows caterpillaring as he concentrated. "Mm'noh…t," he forced out and then huffed in irritation and tried again. "Mm not."

"Not soft?" Crowley asked, quickly growing too distracted with wondering if kissing would be a good way to help Aziraphale regain his mouth dexterity to moderate his tone, so he ended up sounding a lot more dubious than he'd been intending.

"Aaaalpha," Aziraphale said stubbornly, with only the thinnest hint of an el sound that made his meaning clear.

"Not an alpha?" Crowley asked, newly intrigued. "What do you consider yourself, then? What term should I use?"

Aziraphale leaned his head back and groaned in exasperation before shaking his head. He fought a brief, vicious battle with some sort of consonant that was apparently still beyond his out-of-practice tongue before sighing and saying, "-ood," with a frown that might have looked angry except for how it trembled around the corners.

Abruptly, about a million dots from their previous, disastrous conversation and Aziraphale's breakdown crashed into each other in Crowley's brain in a massive clue pileup.

"Have other people told you you're not a good alpha?" he asked, tone tripping up in dismay.

"Yes," Aziraphale said, the little bit of slurring along the consonants and sulky pout to his mouth doing nothing to undercut the raw devastation in his tone.

"Ah," Crowley said dumbly. Whatever blood flow that had temporarily fueled his realization was quickly draining south to his swelling cock and drooling hole. "So was that… happy crying? Cause I was, nnnngh, laying on the praise?" he asked and bit back a moan as things began throbbing in earnest again.

"Nnno," Aziraphale said, a lot more quietly, but there was a tiny twitch at the corners of his mouth that suggested he was starting to cheer back up. "Ssstu–hhh," he said and then screwed his mouth up in a grimace.

"Stu—ff? Stu—n? Oh! Stuck," Crowley blurted out about a second before the implications hit him and he snarled viciously. "That's how you got stuck?" he gritted out and couldn't stop himself from pressing in as close as he could, bringing his wrists in to grind his scent glands into the ones on Aziraphale's neck, melding their scents. He pressed their foreheads together, noses slotted side-by-side. "Some absolute brainless tosser convinced you you aren't a good alpha? Got you so twisted up you got stuck?" he seethed, lips brushing against Azirphale's mouth as he slowly rutted the base of his cock against the head of Aziraphale's.

"Yes," Aziraphale murmured back, voice dropping deeper and huskier as he regained the coordination in his hands to clutch Crowley close.

"Want me to kill them?" Crowley asked, only a tiny bit joking in the red haze of heat.

"No," Aziraphale replied, a lot more crisply.

"Fine," Crowley relented with ill grace. "Should I lay off telling you how good you are?" he asked, a lot more solemnly.

"No," he got back on a hitched breath, and he could feel Aziraphale's lips flicker into a tiny smile against his mouth.

"Thank fuck, cause I can not shut up when I've got a cock in me," he said and braced so he could lift up enough to catch the head of Aziraphale's with his slick hole and sink down onto it again with a keening hiss. "Yeah, yeah, that's better. Thought I was going to go insane earlier, when it was only your tongue."

"Pa-ck," Aziraphale said tartly, only a little stumbling now.

"No, yeah, that makes sense. Needed to wait for them to move on," Crowley said breathlessly as he worked himself in short, jerking thrusts on Aziraphale's cock, gripping him by the back of his head and bracing his forearms against his collarbones for better leverage.

Aziraphale hummed in agreement and did his best to help Crowley along, obviously experimenting with his grip strength and coordination as he wrapped his hands around Crowley's hips and tried to assume some of the lifting power.

"Don't worry," Crowley insisted, "I can do this one. You focus on remembering what having proper elbows and knees that bend the other way are like. Plenty of time for a mutual railing later."

Aziraphale laughed bright and breathy against his mouth as they panted together, Crowley only leaving barely enough room between their chests for him to be able to lift himself up and down. His cock slipped and slid against Aziraphale's beautifully plush belly, the way eased by sweat and precome, and it felt amazing, but he wasn't really chasing his own orgasm. He'd already come enough times that his body wasn't craving release so much as fulfillment. So, he concentrated on what angle and pacing made Aziraphale's breath stutter and limbs twitch, chased the rising flush he could feel heating the alpha's skin.

"Gorgeous," he growled. "Look at you. An absolute angel on both sides of the shift. So committed to making sure I didn't lose my head with worry you got your shifting mojo back. Even had the good grace to do it when I wasn't stuffed up with your knot."

Aziraphale made a noise that sounded torn between alarmed and amused and pulled back a little so Crowley could appreciate his wide-eyed "what the hell are you talking about?" expression.

Crowley grinned sharp and picked up the pace, fucking down onto Aziraphale's cock like he had a score to settle. Which he kind of did, probably, with as many orgasms as he was ahead at this point.

"Don't get me wrong," he panted. "Magical healing heat hole makes for a great story, but seems pretty tacky in real life. Can you imagine how weird it would feel having a cock go all magically loopy and distorted while still inside you?" He paused to grind down on the burgeoning knot, relishing the slippery stretch to his sensitive rim. "Although, shit, maybe it feels amazing? What do I know. Never tried. Still, definitely seems like something best asked about ahead of time. So, good on you."

Aziraphale was full-on giggling now, pink cheeked and bright eyed, staring up at Crowley like he was a marvel. Crowley probably would have felt self-conscious about it if he weren't so distracted by the consuming need to rut himself fast and juddering on Azirpahale's cock, chasing the growing swell at the base. He gasped when on the next stroke down he almost didn't fit back over and had to shove hard enough to sting to take it back in.

Aziraphale grunted deep in his chest and pinned Crowley's hips down to keep him still. He flexed thick fingers over Crowley's skin and then started rocking in place at the same time he used his grip to tilt Crowley's lower body how he wanted, quickly achieving a rolling grind that rubbed his cock and swollen knot deliciously within the clench of Crowley's arse.

"Yeah, fuck, got me tied perfect," Crowley hissed, bearing down in counterpoint and twining his arms and legs tighter around the alpha. "Fuck, put your teeth on me again? Need to feel you." He threaded his fingers through white-blond curls and encouraged the alpha to fit his mouth over the scent gland at the juncture of his neck and right shoulder.

Aziraphale groaned, fingers digging in hard as he pulled Crowley down rough onto his knot. There was the feeling of spreading warmth again at the base of Crowley's spine that signaled the start of the alpha's strung-out orgasms. And then, a series of sucking, nipping nibbles to his scent gland that sent bolts of sensation darting down to his cock, pinned between their bellies. Crowley warbled a moan as his body spasmed, and the way he couldn't move, between the near-bruising grip on his hips, the knot tying him down, and the way his own joints felt locked up with pleasure only goaded the heat to greater heights.

"Harder," he demanded, tipping his head to the side to better expose his gland. "Don't, you know—but, mark me up. Want everyone to see. They'll smell it for sure, but I want them to see," he growled. "How good you are, how careful, how in control. That you're a fucking perfect alpha."

Aziraphale made a sound like he was dying, but he fitted his jaw around the edges of Crowley's gland and bit just hard enough to bruise. He might as well have sucked directly on the head of Crowley's cock.

"Yeah, like that," he panted, squirming in place. "Fuck, that's good. Do the other one too."

Aziraphale shuddered in Crowley's arms and moaned around his mouthful of flesh as he came again. The pressure of his bite didn't change an ounce, still perfectly calibrated to leave a stunning mark without breaking skin and trigger the start of a mating bond and all that could follow. When the pulse of release had eased off, he removed his teeth and swiftly pursed his lips directly against the gland and sucked hard, working the puckered, heat-swollen flesh with his tongue.

Crowley clenched his jaw around a series of bitten-off howls. His eyes watered with how good it felt, a vicious stab of pleasure. If it hadn't been for Aziraphale's fixed grip on his hips, he'd probably have jerked hard enough to injure them both.

"Nnnn—gonna make me come," he whined.

Aziraphale's hum of acknowledgement was exceedingly smug, vibrating between their chests. But he released his grip on Crowley's gland and dragged his mouth, tongue a line of blisteringly hot wetness against the thin skin of Crowley's throat, around to the other side of Crowley's neck. He spent some time laving the gland with his tongue, suckling a little to urge even more oil out. Crowley cursed and used the hand not desperately keeping Aziraphale's face pressed into the curve of his shoulder to get a little of his own back by thumbing at the alpha's own gland. Aziraphale huffed a broken-sounding laugh that edged onto a moan as he jerked up into Crowley and flooded him with another gout of spend.

"Yeah, come on," Crowley begged, yanking on Aziraphale's curls and grinding down onto his knot, clenching hard to coax out the next pulse of his orgasm and also because it just felt really fucking good.

Finally, Aziraphale set his teeth with intent and clamped down with a rumble that was more purr than growl. The sharp pinch jolted Crowley from head to toe and then bloomed almost instantly into a throbbing, arousing ache that welled up to overflowing within the space of a few high, keening sobs, and then Crowley was coming again, dry and nearly painful.

Crowley thought, as he jerked and choked through the searing, twisting bliss that had no escape, pinned so thoroughly as he was, that at some point he might feel embarrassed about coming so readily at the feel of an alpha's teeth in his neck. True, he was a touch more sensitive than most in the general area, and especially his scent glands, but with past partners he'd found attention paid there no more or less inspiring than any other secondary erogenous zone.

He'd heard others whisper or gloat about how sometimes just the idea of being claimed could be so arousing a person could get off on neck play alone, especially if they had a breeding kink as well. And when he'd been young and stupid enough to think building a secret den was somehow a form of dream manifestation instead of pure, garden-variety escapism, he'd had a few successful wanks that had mostly consisted of fondling his glands and digging his nails into his neck while he pretended it was his True Mate's fangs. But he'd long chalked those experiences up to halcyon, adolescent days of naivete and a surplus of hormones.

Even at the deepest point of his infatuation with Lucifer, Crowley had never craved the idea of what the alpha's teeth could accomplish during one of his heats—if only the bastard would have committed to it—in such a visceral, blissful way. It reflected a lot on the past several years of his life that feeling the craving now, with a happiness so raw and jagged that it burned almost as white-hot as the heat-need itself, didn't make him wonder, for even a second, why he hadn't felt it before. It was obvious why he never could have, sticking with Lucifer and his pack instead of following one of the others in the aftermath of the schism. It was only shocking that he could feel it so fiercely and so quickly with a virtual stranger. Though, maybe it wasn't so surprising, given the circumstances and the sort of person this stranger had turned out to be.

It was definitely the heat and the cock still lodged up his arse that made him say anything about it, though.

"Do you get it?" he found himself saying as he shivered and gulped down air, noises that were a little mortifying leaking out of his chest around the words.

Crowley tugged at Aziraphale's hair until the alpha lifted his head. He was damp-eyed but grinning a little foolishly as Crowley gathered his stupidly beautiful face up in shaking palms.

"Hmm?" Aziraphale asked as he left off holding Crowley still in favor of kneading thick fingers up and down Crowley's flanks.

"I've been Lucifer's favorite pet for years. He's gotten me through dozens of heats—when he wasn't making me ride them out alone, pathetically grateful he wasn't tossing me to the literal wolves, as punishment for something. Him. An alpha charismatic enough to pull off shattering a city-size pack into pieces scattered on the wind. Powerful enough to rule his own remaining splinter pack by fiat. So confident in his own authority that he hoodwinked me into thinking he was right to do it all—for a while, anyway. Long enough to get myself proper stuck."

Aziraphale's eyebrows were doing a funny little dance as his expression flickered between concern and anger and something that looked like burgeoning shame. Crowley shook his head rapidly and stroked his thumbs under Aziraphale's eyes, trying to soothe away whatever misinterpretation he was cooking up under those fluffy curls.

"No, no—stop that," he said sternly. "My point is, he's got most of what people think makes a good alpha: smarts, looks, charm, strength, confidence. But all he's done with those things is to become the devil incarnate. He utterly destroyed the world I grew up in—which wasn't perfect by any means, but it was fine—and manipulated me into thinking it was an act of revolution when he burned it all to the ground, and then tricked me into thinking he had any intention of ever building something better, instead of just sculpting the ashes into his own, personal throne."

Aziraphale cleared his throat and hummed a few times before saying, with a lot of slow deliberation, "Tracy said you stayed because you were in love."

"Thought I was, more like," Crowley muttered. "He paid attention to me. Encouraged my questions. Made me feel special. But I didn't have the sense yet to tell the difference between when someone's actually interested in helping you find a good answer versus trying to blow smoke in your eyes—or up your arse." He shook his head impatiently and adjusted his grip on Aziraphale's face. "That's not the point I'm trying to make. Or maybe it is. I don't know—this is a very nuanced thing I'm trying to convey while I'm distracted by heat and you still coming up my arse—so just, bear with me."

Crowley gave Aziraphale his most serious look. "Lucifer's a good alpha on paper, but a shit one in practice. An absolute fuckwad. And even when I thought I was in love with him, I never, ever, got off on the idea that he might kickstart a bond with me. Not even a little bit. Because I never felt safe with him."

At his significant pause and look, Aziraphale nodded, a tiny little furrow between his brows. When his expression didn't change, just continued looking serious and patient, Crowley sighed dramatically and tilted his head side to side to better show off what had to be absolutely spectacular, tooth-shaped bruises coming up around his scent glands.

"Let me rephrase that," he drawled. "I never, ever, asked that cockwaffle to bite me—not a nibble—during a heat. And even when he fucked around by leaving marks all on his own—the vain, territorial fuck likes for everyone to know who he had a pseudo claim on, even when he has no intention of sealing the deal—I certainly never came my brains out when he did."

Aziraphale's face shifted from vaguely puzzled attentiveness to comical shock so fast he actually, literally gasped. Crowley patted his cheeks encouragingly.

"Think about that, next time you think you aren't a good alpha—or doubt when someone tells you that you are."

"Think about you coming?" he practically squeaked, face adorably red.

Crowley frowned. "Uh—I mean, sure. Probably a good distraction from self-doubt, thinking about a time you dicked someone down so good you made them come practically untouched. But I meant, you know, that I, um, the biting is—" He sucked in a sharp breath as a dram of reason and self-preservation-flavored anxiety finally elbowed past all the heat hormones and blissful relief of a good orgasm to reassert themselves.

"I'm not expecting anything, obviously," he rushed to say and flung his arms out wide in jerky emphasis. "I'm just pointing things out. S'about evidence, right? If you find yourself stuck again, cause you're doubting you're a good enough alpha. You can hit whatever shitty little voice you got whispering in your ear over the head with the time you did such a good job an omega came just from the suggestion that you might, uh, go all the way. Which, for the record, was only as hot as it was because I knew you wouldn't. Cause no good alpha would. When it wasn't discussed ahead of time. Which just proves my point again, I think. So, you know… food for thought," he finished, somewhat lamely, as he drummed restless fingers against the balls of Aziraphale's shoulders and scowled at the clumsily smoothed-out wall behind the alpha's head.

"Crowley," Aziraphale murmured, rubbing his hands up and down Crowley's back in a slow, soothing rhythm.

When Crowley was able to wrestle his delayed mortification down well enough to look at his face again, Aziraphale was staring up at him with an unbearably fond smile.

"Don't look at me like that," Crowley grumbled. "I'm just laying out facts."

"Very sweet facts," he agreed, tone sounding unbearably fond. And rather lovely and softly rounded now that he was in better control of his tongue and lips again. Crowley only sort of hoped it was the heat influencing him, that he really wanted to hear more of that voice.

"You're a good alpha. Deal with it."

"I shall try my best," he said, a little dry and a lot amused. "And thank you."

Crowley was a little too unused to being thanked so sincerely (for anything) to be able to handle it without squirming in embarrassed agony, which made them both hiss with the way it accidentally tugged on Aziraphale's knot still firmly tying them together.

"How long do your heats typically last?" Aziraphale asked, a little strained as he reflexively grabbed him by the waist to keep him still.

"Nnnngh, three or four days? Depends." At Aziraphale's expectant eyebrow raise, Crowley shrugged. "Longer, if I'm stressed, shorter if I'm not."

"Well, then I think we should… keep you as relaxed… as we can," Aziraphale said. His speech was coming a little more easily now, but still stuttered around the occasional word, and he seemed to be placing each phrase down with deliberate care. "Should get further away—back to Alpha Device's territory—as quickly as possible. How much water and food do you have? Shall I try and fetch more?"

"Food for a day, maybe, and only one skin of water. Wasn't planning on leaving so suddenly, but I could feel it coming when I woke up this morning, and I wanted to get out of there before it started showing up in my scent and gave them extra incentive to chase." He resolutely didn't think of the rest of it. And sitting as he was now, with someone he was pretty sure wouldn't hesitate to do whatever it took to defend the both of them acting as a physical barrier, it wasn't so difficult to keep focused on the positives.

"Understandable," Aziraphale murmured, once again kneading Crowley's flanks. "Will you be all right if I step away for a little while? If you know it's only so I can bring us both back more food and water? Or does your heat make any separation too difficult?"

"Nah, I don't have it as bad as some. Instincts won't be happy, but I won't fall apart, so long as I don't have reason to doubt that you want to come back. If I start getting twitchy, I can take care of myself for a bit without going bonkers. It's only when I go too long without enough stretch to simulate knotting that I start getting loopy. I've got a toy for that in my bag, if needs must."

"Oh, good," Aziraphale sighed, nearly sagging with relief. "I was starting to worry about the logistics. I've never helped someone through a heat so unprepared. And while roughing it," he admitted, gaze darting about the space. "And with the threat of a pack of unfriendly wolves discovering us."

"We'll figure it out," Crowley said, maybe a little desperately, but failure wasn't an option at this point, even if there were a concerning number of obstacles to maneuver around.

They schemed until Aziraphale's knot went down, then cautiously ventured out of the den as far as the stream to clean up a little and drink their fill, keeping up a continuous back-and-forth of ideas and critiques and considerations. Crowley was reluctant to return to the den without Aziraphale, but knew going with him wasn't really an option. With all the extra slick and oil his body was producing right now, it would be too easy to accidentally leave a scent trail for a scouting party to stumble across, which meant keeping his footprint in the area as small as possible. Also, Crowley was exhausted, and the idea of curling up in the little nest Aziraphale had made in Crowley's old den to catch a brief nap before the next bout hit was shamefully appealing.

Aziraphale saw him back into the den and encouraged him to lie down with some granola and dried fruit for a snack once he'd finished moving the rock barrier back into place.

"I'll be back before you know it," he promised, laying it on perhaps a bit thick, but Crowley couldn't argue with how well it soothed his instincts. And then the arsehole ducked down and pressed a chaste kiss to Crowley's mouth at the same time he brushed his wrists along Crowley's jaw and down over his pulse points, ensuring his scent oil would waft up into Crowley's nose like cologne.

Crowley clenched his own thighs hard enough to bruise with the effort it took not to return the favor. "Fuck, that's unfair," he griped. "Can't scent you back."

"When I'm back," Aziraphale said, voice noticeably gruffer.

"Don't do anything stupid," Crowley ordered him. "Absolutely zero alpha posturing. Just get in and out. And then get back here and get in and out of me."

"Awful," Aziraphale said with a grin and swayed back toward Crowley, like he was thinking of getting his hands on him again, before pulling away with a wincing grimace. "Good lord, this is difficult. Even if I were prone to posturing, I couldn't possibly be tempted when it would mean a delay in returning."

After Aziraphale crawled back out of the den, pack and the letter to Lucifer in hand, Crowley started the work of moving the stones back into place behind him. He got distracted more than a few times watching as Aziraphale first carefully set the pack next to a dry rock and pinned the letter on top to air out a bit, and then ducked back into a deeper part of the stream to scrub himself over more vigorously. The plan was to get as much of Crowley's heat scent dissipated as possible before he snuck back around to deliver the letter and then lay a false trail that suggested he was headed off toward the next pack on, as though he was only just now showing up from the Device pack and taking his usual route when he delivered messages. With luck, Lucifer would assume the timing of everything was planned, that Crowley had slipped out directly to the Device pack's territory, and therefore call off any continued searches. And once Aziraphale was sure he was beyond scrutiny, he'd doubleback to return to Crowley.

Watching Aziraphale bend and stretch and flex as he worked to clean himself—an adorable little frown of concentration on his face the entire time—was not doing Crowley's heat-goosed libido any favors. Aziraphale was the best sort of sturdy and lightly plush in figure that always made Crowley want to push a little, just to see if the other person would let him move them a bit. And Azirphale had really incredibly biteable thighs and well-shaped calves. Crowley felt a bit like a lecherous satyr watching a water nymph bathe, and it was taking a lot of brainpower to keep himself focused on restacking the rocks instead of doing something more enjoyable like bounding out and subjecting the alpha to a good pounce. And he didn't even think that was the heat talking.

Aziraphale finally stepped out of the water and, after ruffling his curls briskly to get the worst of the water out, looked back toward the den anxiously. Crowley had gotten things mostly back into place, but there was enough room at the top to thread his arm through a gap and wave the alpha on with a shooing motion. Aziraphale rolled his eyes, but there was a smile playing about his lips. He blew a cheeky kiss back at Crowley and then took a deep breath and melted down into his wolf shape again.

Crowley swallowed down the anxiety trying to bubble up in his throat as Aziraphale carefully and skillfully used his mouth to maneuver the letter into the pack, and then stepped and shrugged himself into the holes of the harness and reached around to tighten the strap with his teeth. He looked back toward the den once more, ears straining forward, tail stiff with concern. Crowley forced himself to give him another, performatively more irritated shoo, to not let on the way his heart was now crawling up into the back of his mouth. Like he could sense it anyway—or perhaps was just as anxious about parting—Aziraphale took a quick step back toward the den before freezing and, with a shiver that rippled over his entire body, turned and loped off into the woods to pick up the trail he usually took into Lucifer's territory from farther back within neutral grounds.

Like his body knew the brief separation was necessary, Crowley enjoyed a good two hours of blissful relief from the worst of the heat need. He used the time to eat a snack and then kip in the nest, curled in the spot where Aziraphale's scent was most concentrated. He woke leaking and humping the blanket as the next wave of heat washed in. With a groan, he fished out his knotting dildo from his pack and grumpily fucked himself stupid with a mouthful of blanket that smelled especially of his alpha.

He left the dildo in as long as he dared, curled on his side with a corner of the blanket pulled tight over his shoulders. With his eyes closed and lost in a tired half-doze, he could almost pretend the pressure across his back and in his arse was from Aziraphale snugged close. But his poor muscles weren't meant to stay stretched so wide for so long on something that didn't have the same give as a flesh-and-blood knot, so eventually he pulled it out and tried again to get some sleep.

He didn't start worrying until the start of the third bout of heat to roll through since Aziraphale had left. The hormones making him too hot and twitchy for comfort also made him inclined to paranoia. The sun had sunk low enough that there was barely light enough to see by in the den any longer. Crowley could distantly appreciate that, at least, his anxiety wasn't circling around the fear of being abandoned to his fate. But imagining all the many and horribles ways that things might have gone wrong, and how Aziraphale might at this very moment be lying broken and bloody in the woods somewhere, or chained down with silver-plated shackles so Lucifer could draw out whatever interrogation or torture he was set on, wasn't a huge step up.

Crowley writhed and twisted in the nest, plagued by both miserable thoughts and creeping heat. He was just thinking about shoving the dildo back in when he heard the sound of splashing outside the den. He scrambled upright and hurried to the edge of the opening so he could peer out through one of the cracks without the shadow of his movement being readily visible from outside.

"Oh, thank fuck," he breathed when he saw Aziraphale's furry, white bulk somehow both hurrying and mincing his way into the center of the stream.

Aziraphale wasn't wearing his pack, but there were no visible signs of injury. His fur was a little matted with what looked like mud splatter and leaf litter, like he'd taken more than one tumble in both the forest and along the stream banks. When Crowley craned his neck around to look deeper into the surrounding woods, he didn't see any obvious sign of pursuit, but he did spot the pack left on a dry rock on the far side of the bank.

Figuring Aziraphale couldn't be too concerned about discovery if he was obviously taking the time to have a bath before sneaking back into the den, Crowley hissed out a questioning call.

Aziraphale's head jerked up first, but then he perked up all over, tail flagging excitedly and jaw dropping open in a grin as he pranced in place in the water and boofed quietly but happily. Crowley rolled his eyes and blushed through a pleased smile, and started shifting rocks so Aziraphale could crawl back inside once he was cleaned up.

A few seconds later, the splashing increased enough that Crowley paused to look up again, heart juddering with a spike of nerves, but it was just Aziraphale shifting back to his human form for the benefit of hands to help with the hasty scrubbing. The sight of his plush bum as he bent over to soak his curls in the current and tease them free of what looked like a few twigs and a mud clot, was nothing short of inspiring. Crowley squirmed in place and sternly told his randy body to, just, hold on for a damn moment.

Aziraphale wriggled into the den a few short minutes later with a bright smile, not seeming at all alarmed to discover Crowley crouched shivering and scowling just inside. He absorbed the force of Crowley flinging himself onto him bodily with nothing more than a quiet "oof."

"Hello there, my dear," he chirped as he tossed his pack to the far side of the den so he could wrap Crowley up fully in both arms. "I'm so sorry that took so long. They followed me far further than either of us anticipated. I'd practically made it all the way to the Sandwich pack's territory before they left off, and then I had to circle round awfully wide to avoid them when doubling back."

"Glad you're safe," Crowley cut in when it looked like Aziraphale was gearing up to launch into an entire epic tale. Crowley had finished smearing his wrists over just about every inch of Aziraphale's damp back and shoulders, and rubbing his cheeks and jaw over the glands on either side of Aziraphale's neck like a tetchy cat. The aggressive scenting was helping take the edge off the jittery pulse of "mine mine mine" throbbing in his chest in time with the much more pelvically centered ache in his cock and arse, which he was staving off by shamelessly rutting against the soft pudge of Aziraphale's water-dappled belly. But these were half-measures at best; now that his alpha was back and confirmed safe, the heat was roaring back to the forefront. "Need to fuck, now. Talk more later," he gasped.

"Oh! Oh, of course," Aziraphale said and immediately slid his hands up to simultaneously squeeze the back of Crowley's neck and one of his bruise-ringed scent glands. "We need to close up again, first. Can you manage a few moments more?"

Crowley's eyes had fluttered shut at the first hint of blissful, grounding pressure from his alpha's hands. He sagged hard against Aziraphale and groaned, mouthing at his jaw desperately.

"Dunno," he gasped. "It's not letting up this time. Think I'm not worried enough anymore."

"I'd say I'm flattered, but we really do need to block up the entrance," Aziraphale said, apologetic and fretful. "I don't suppose getting you off without a knot will help?"

"Nnnno, probably make things worse, at this point," Crowley admitted, though it wasn't stopping him from continuing to hitch his hips high up against Aziraphale's belly, chasing friction and trying to squirm into position so his hole was centered over the head of the alpha's hardening cock. "Might need to use your alpha voice. Order me to go wait or something. Don't know if I can let go, otherwise."

"It's… not terribly impressive," Aziraphale said reluctantly. "I don't know if it will work."

"Well, I'm about two seconds away from losing my damn mind and just sitting down," Crowley groused. "You're not giving me enough of a 'stop that' for me to use as leverage against some really fucking noisy instincts." He panted with the effort it was taking to hold himself up on his knees and not sink down onto the hard cock he could feel brushing against his arse with every twitch of his hips. Aziraphale was still gripping him hard by the neck and shoulder, but it was a rapidly fraying tether to sanity. "Or, drag me to the nest and shove the dildo in. I don't think I can let go right now, though."

His voice was pitching up with anxiety at the same time his scent was starting to go a little acrid. He knew, objectively, all the reasons he shouldn't just take what he needed no matter the objections, but in the midst of heat there was only so far and for so long reason could override instinct before complete feral need took over. And he really didn't want to come back to himself with the realization that he'd both jeopardized their safety and treated Aziraphale no better than a fancy dildo.

"Crowley, stop that," Aziraphale said, stern and chiding, with that extra thrum of something that always undergirded an Alpha's voice when they were exerting dominance. "I need you to hold still, right now. I know you can."

Crowley knew instantly why Aziraphale had been worried: His alpha voice didn't contain the sort of forceful push that demanded obedience or else, which was certainly the most common expression. But, Crowley couldn't help but laugh a little hysterically against the side of Aziraphale's neck as his hips immediately juddered to a stop. Because he'd had years, now, to get used to shrugging off that sort of tone, either in resentful defiance or out of sheer bloody self-preservation.

However, the sort of alpha voice that prissly expected better of you? Because you were capable of much more than whatever silly thing it was you'd been doing before the alpha had been forced to step in and intervene, and they were a little techy about it? An absolute sucker punch. He didn't know if he wanted to bare his throat in mea culpa shame or obey simply because doing so with enough alacrity might make the alpha even more fantastically tetchy, if it was simply that easy to do better.

Crowley continued to snicker into Aziraphale's skin when he realized the alpha was fairly frozen in surprise.

"Whooee—I'm beginning to think whoever it was that messed you about had zero taste in alphas. 'Not sure if it will work.' Well, here we are," Crowley said, trembling with a messy blend of arousal and affection and giddiness as he continued to hold perfectly still.

"Good lord," Aziraphale muttered but then hastily cleared his throat and continued, fabulously bossy and kindly stubborn. "My dear, I need you to go and get comfortable on the nest, now. In whatever position you like best to be knotted. I'll come take care of you just as soon as I finish this. Do not even think of trying to distract me—it will only drag things out needlessly. Use your dildo on yourself, if you absolutely must. But it would please me ever so much if you're able to manage with just your fingers until I can come fill you up nice."

"Bloody buggering fuck," Crowley wheezed, half laughing and half moaning as he gave Aziraphale a final, cheeky nip on the jaw and then peeled himself away to crawl back over to the nest. "I think I see the appeal of having an alpha talk you into an orgasm. Your voice is ridiculously effective."

"I think it might be more accurate to say we're ridiculously compatible," Aziraphale replied, obviously trying to sound tart but coming off rueful.

"Tomato, tomato," Crowley said glibly and flopped onto his belly in the middle of the nest. He hitched one leg up just enough to be able to comfortably rut his drooling cock against the blanket. "Now, hurry up with those rocks so you can come fill me up 'nice'—fuck, I can't even tell you why that's so hot. Nngh, just that it is. Shit." He contorted a little to be able to reach down between his legs and rub fitfully at his aching, slippery hole.

"Yes, yes, hold on," Aziraphale said, sounding gratifyingly harassed.

Crowley wanted to keep teasing, to moan loud and wanton, really work his hips as he dipped his fingertips in and out of his hole and put on a show. But his alpha had asked him not to be a distraction, and it was kind of awful and lovely that he actually wanted to lean in to the command both on its own objective merits and because for the first time in a long while it didn't feel like a trap to relax into his instincts. Because sometimes instincts could be useful—even fun—so long as you could trust they'd only be exploited just as far as you wanted.

So, he only touched himself enough to keep from wanting to crawl out of his skin with need, and only moaned as much as he might if he were in his room alone without an audience to perform for, and watched avidly as Aziraphale hastily moved stones with a lust that was so barely leashed his hands were fairly shaking. And that was nice, too, getting to see how desperate his alpha was all of his own accord—cock jutting up and wild eyes glancing back every few seconds to check Crowley was all right—without Crowley needing to goad or tempt him at all beyond simply existing and following his instructions to the letter.

When Aziraphale finally placed the last stone, Crowley slid his fingers away from his hole in favor of holding his arsecheek further out of the way, to make where he was flush and slick and so very welcoming more obvious in the dim light. Aziraphale's nostrils flared tellingly as he stumbled forward and then down onto his hands and knees over Crowley's sprawled form. Crowley groaned and tipped his hips up at the feel of Aziraphale's heat and scent looming over him.

"Fuck me hard," he begged. "Been too long. Need to feel you."

"Of course," Aziraphale panted into his ear. "I'm so sorry I had to keep you waiting. You've been so patient."

His chest and belly brushed against Crowley's back as he got his limbs arranged and lined his cock up; every place their skin touched tingled and sparked like a dead limb waking back up. And even though he'd been feeling hot and shivery before, it was nothing compared to the searing heat of Aziraphale pushing inside after hours with nothing but a bloodless dildo for comfort. Crowley made a noise so embarrassingly guttural and grateful that Aziraphale actually paused only halfway in, obviously worried Crowley was in actual, physical pain. Which he was, but it was the sort of necessary, acute pain that preceded immense relief.

Crowley flung his free back to claw at Aziraphale's hip to pull him in. "Don't stop—please—need you."

"OK, all right," Aziraphale said shakily and pressed a trembling kiss to the scent gland on Crowley's neck. "But you need to tell me if it gets to be too much," he insisted.

"Fine, whatever, just fuck me before I die."

Aziraphale choked on a disbelieving laugh, but thankfully he seemed reassured, because he briskly shoved one arm under Crowley's chest to brace against the floor, banded the other across the front of Crowley's hips, hooked his chin over Crowley's shoulder, and then started absolutely slamming his hips into Crowley's arse with enough force Crowley felt his bones rattle.

"Fuck, yes, perfect," he babbled, scrabbling to get his own limbs braced and pelvis perfectly tilted to achieve the sort of pounding demonstration of unstoppable force meeting immoveable object that made his entire lower half light up with urgent, overwhelming pleasure.

His cock was pinned between his lower belly and Azirahale's forearm, and it ached and drooled in a way that was toe-curlingly maddening because the pressure was perfect but without nearly enough consistent friction to satisfy. But that was fine, because with as brutally as Aziraphale was thrusting into him, it almost felt like the alpha's cock was rubbing up against Crowley's dick from within. His orgasm was winding up fast, but with a warmth that was spread out so far over his body—from high up behind his navel down almost to his knees—that Crowley was already tearing up in anticipation of how badly and completely it was going to wreck him.

He was chanting obscenities and half-formed pleas and demands, grinding his cheek into Aziraphale's temple, arching his back up into Aziraphale's chest to mold them together. In the fugue of heat and juddering pleasure, the urge to feel teeth in his neck hard enough to break skin was so acute he didn't dare ask to be bitten at all, too afraid he wouldn't be able to stop from begging Aziraphale to claim him, leave a mark as permanent on his skin as he was feeling branded on the inside. Fill him up and light the spark that would let Crowley's belly grow fat with more than just come. And honestly thank god for shitty caves and the specter of danger still lurking, because it gave Crowley's instincts just enough pause that he could remember why that wasn't something to jump into willy nilly.

Then Aziraphale growled low as his knot started to swell, and with the way he was hooked snug over Crowley's shoulder and back, Crowley could feel the faint vibrations against his swollen scent gland. That was it, for him. He came bruisingly hard, clenching and howling over Aziraphale's growing knot. The pleasure was so all-encompassing his body started spasming, hard enough that Aziraphale had to shove him all the way flat on his belly and jerk his head up so he could bite down hard on the back of Crowley's neck in a scruff hold to make sure he didn't do either of them an injury. Crowley sobbed and whined high in his throat as the combination of the pin and the final, rushing swell of Aziraphale's knot in his twitching hole, the way being made to hold still let him feel that first hot wash of spend coat his aching inner walls, tipped him right into another orgasm.

Excruciatingly keen pleasure swamped him, and all he could do was endure it, because he couldn't move beyond a full-body shiver that set his teeth chattering, crushed under Aziraphale's weight, tied tight to his knot, pinned by his teeth. The noises he was making were awful, ugly things; he really did sound like he was dying. He felt a little bit like he was dying, but in a "reborn through perfectly distilled peace and pleasure" sort of way.

"S'good, so good, s'p-perfect, jus'right," he forced himself to stutter out, not wanting Aziraphale to mistake anything.

Aziraphale shuddered hard through another residual orgasm and curled into him as much as he was able when lying nearly prone over Crowley's body. His teeth dug harder into Crowley's nape, and Crowley moaned ecstatically to feel it.

"God, yeah, that's great. Kept me nice and still when I couldn't manage. Love your teeth on me. Your knot in me. You all over me. Fucked me right into the floor—fucking fantastic. Shit, that feels good—when you come. Keep doing that. Nnnngh, next time, want you to get me close but then stop so you can come first, and then every time you come after, I want you to fist my cock and suck on my glands. Bet I'd pop off hard enough to see stars that way."

Aziraphale groaned and shuddered with another aftershock at the same time Crowley could feel his lips pulling back from his teeth in a grin. The groan trailed off into giggle.

"Are you laughing at my dirty talk?" he accused and somehow found the energy to flop his free arm up to dig his fingers into Aziraphale's hair and scritch.

Aziraphale licked the back of his neck, which was somehow much grosser in his human form than when he'd done the same thing as a wolf. Crowley seized up in disgust and laughter.

"Oh, you bastard! Fuck, that feels good. Not you licking me, you arse—the—all the rest of it. I can't move, it's fucking fantastic."

And it was, which was so wonderfully strange that it stung. There had been precious few times in his life when he'd reveled in the feel of being pinned by a partner. Mostly, the feel of a hand or teeth at the back of his neck, a body holding him down, inspired a vague, apathetic relief—a basic if inconvenient need met. At worst, he felt the tight breathlessness of claustrophobia. The number of times he'd had to breathe carefully through the back half of an evening spent in Lucifer's company, to keep his scent from spiking acrid and his limbs from twitching into a thrashing panic, had been the final push to get him to swallow his pride and shame both and finally write to Tracy for help.

But here he was, during one of his most vulnerable times, after one of the worst mornings of his life, squashed flat under the bulk of an alpha he barely knew but who'd managed to make him feel so safe he was about two deep, contented sighs away from purring. And fuck everything because suddenly he was leaking out of his eyeballs and gasping for air to keep from sobbing.

Aziraphale tensed up all along his back and let go of the bite.

"Crowley?" he asked, sounding near to panic himself. Good. Served him right, after the bullshit he'd put Crowley through earlier.

"Sssss'just—a long day," he insisted, half choked around the gigantic lump in his throat.

"Ah," Aziraphale said delicately and then, a little hesitant, nuzzled behind Crowley's ear. "Quite right, my dear. It has been. And, I suppose it's only fair you get a turn at crying while we're tied together."

Crowley honked a very undignified laughing sob and then started crying harder, partly down to the mortification of it all and partly at a relief so deep it felt a little bit like he might bleed out if it weren't for the staunching pressure of Aziraphale draped over his back. "F-fuck you. You c-can't be funny and understanding now. S'not fair."

"Hmm, turnabout is never fair," Aziraphale said, tender and teasing and the faintest bit wicked, and feathered tiny kisses along the shell of his ear and tightly clenched jaw. "It's a good thing you're already in the little spoon slot, because I don't think this knot is going down anytime soon." He settled with his nose tucked up behind Crowley's ear, chin digging comforting and grounding into his scent gland. In a much more hushed, diffident tone, he asked, "Is there anything else I can do to help? Or does it just need time to all come out?"

"Just! Shut up!" Crowley wailed, carving his fingers deeper into Aziraphale's hair and fumbling his legs so he could hook his ankles over the alpha's to keep him even closer. "Or talk about something stupid."

"I don't know about stupid," he huffed, revealing more of that enticing, tart streak of bitchy bastardry that threaded through his overall marshmallow cream softness, "but I'm certain I can come up with something distracting. Do you wish to participate in this talk, or no?"

Crowley growled wetly.

"Very well. I can't claim to be terribly up-to-date on the genre—goodness, it will be so nice to be able to read to myself again—but I've always been fascinated with books of prophecy and prognostication. It's one of the reasons I first approached Alpha Device's pack, you see—she has a many times great ancestress who was reputed to be one of the few seers whose visions were unfailingly accurate, and I was terribly curious…"

Crowley zoned out a little as Aziraphale wittered on—still a little halting here and there when there were too many syllables or tripping when he got a little too excited—and focused on the cadence: the way Aziraphale's chest hitched against Crowley's back in stuttering rises and falls with each sentence, pressed down as he took a deep breath to make an impassioned point, or fluttered quick and light as he chuckled to himself. It let Crowley ignore, a little, the humiliation of breaking down so thoroughly and suddenly, which made it easier to relax into it enough that the mess of grief and rage and confusion could drain out in a messy but steady stream.

By the time Aziraphale's knot went down, Crowley was left with just the shuddering, sniveling dregs clogging and scratching up his throat and nose. Aziraphale paused his rambling monologue to encourage him to have some water and adjust their positions.

"The ground is far too hard to stay like this much longer," he fussed. "You've not enough built-in cushion to make up for how thin this nest is."

Crowley was too exhausted and smitten to argue, and soon enough he found himself rearranged so he was using Aziraphale as a body pillow, his face tucked up close to his neck so that every inhale came with a fresh waft of concentrated scent.

"How is your heat coming along?" Aziraphale asked. "Can you sleep a little, do you think?"

Crowley roused himself from a hazy stupor that was two parts physical and emotional exhaustion and one part sensory stupefaction from the way his hollowed-out head seemed to be filled with nothing but Aziraphale's scent and the tingly feeling he always got when someone gave him a thorough neck massage.

"Hngh, yeah, can sleep. Heat's fine."

"Then we'll sleep. If the next wave comes and I'm still asleep, do not hesitate to wake me. After, I think it will be best if we both change and I fetch us back some breakfast. Since we don't have any cooking implements here, and I'd not like to risk smoke from a campfire."

"Hmm, gonna show off your alpha prowess? Fetch me a whole passel of nice, fat rabbits or somesuch?"

"And what's wrong with that?" Aziraphale pouted. "You're in heat and had a very trying day besides. It's to be expected I should take on hunting duties. And that's even before considering we need to maintain our low profile."

"I'm teasing, Angel," Crowley grumped. "S'good you're thinking ahead."

"Well!" Aziraphale exclaimed, shifting awkwardly. "I want to be a good heatmate, that's all. And to say these are less than ideal circumstances is, I think, a criminal understatement. I suppose it's starting to weigh on me a bit. I have standards. And very little chance of meeting them."

Crowley grinned to himself. "Don't make me list all the ways you've already outperformed literally every other heatmate I've ever been with. Cause I will."

"That is not the endorsement you think it is, considering the company you've been entangled with," he said darkly and tightened his arms around Crowley protectively.

"You saying I don't have standards?" Crowley goaded, voice fuzzing out sleepily.

"I—no," Aziraphale protested immediately before he seemed to catch himself and started huffing and tsking prissily. "Oh, you're—you're quite provoking, aren't you."

"Little bit. S'part of my charm."

"I believe your cousin warned you against antagonizing me overmuch," Aziraphale reminded him primly. He'd left off the neck massage but had started up lazily running his fingers through Crowley's hair instead.

"Not great at doing what I'm told. Also part of my charm," he insisted loftily and then yawned hugely.

"I am terribly charmed," Aziraphale said with an overabundance of sighing reluctance that made Crowley smile a bit stupidly. When they were both changed tomorrow, he was absolutely going to gnaw on his ears and tweak his tail and otherwise harass the soft stuffing out of him.

He felt lips press against the top of his head just as he slipped to sleep.

By the end of the third day in the den, after his heat had finally and petulantly given up the ghost, Crowley was heartily sick of moving rocks around. As well as cold baths, food eaten raw, and sleeping without a proper mattress. But, shockingly, even though there'd been some stressed bickering toward the end, he wasn't sick of Aziraphale. Quite the opposite. And, even more shocking, Crowley was getting the impression that Aziraphale wasn't sick of him either.

They'd debated the merits of taking advantage of their wolf forms to get on the road immediately. If they traveled straight through the night, they could be back in Device pack territory by midday. But then, Crowley had almost fallen asleep sitting up while air drying on the streambank after a very thorough post-heat scrubbing, and Aziraphale had put his foot down. Crowley still insisted on helping hunt for dinner, though, now that his scent levels were back within normal parameters. The baseline exhaustion that came in the immediate aftermath of heat meant he wasn't able to romp and pester Aziraphale nearly as much as he wanted, but it was still incredibly heartening and maybe even a little spooky how well they worked together.

After dinner and another long drink and brief rinse in the stream, though, Crowley was dead on his feet and Aziraphale didn't look much better. Crowley didn't have it in him to change back into his human form, so he slithered into the den and sprawled out long on his side in the nest and decided that was it, he was done. A few minutes later he heard Aziraphale shuffle in and start rolling the goddamn rocks into place. Crowley grumbled and grizzled in irritation but eventually rolled back up onto his feet to pad over and help.

Aziraphale had changed to make good use of his hands, so he was better equipped to lift and set, but Crowley had learned his system well enough that he could help organize and shove things into approximate locations. Aziraphale smiled at him tiredly in obvious gratitude, to which Crowley pinned his ears back and curled his lips up in a halfhearted sneer. The likelihood of either of them using this den ever again was pretty low; he doubted Lucifer would suffer Aziraphale's presence after being the bearer of such irritating news. However, if they did, he was going to figure out how to build it a proper, locking door.

"Yes, I know," Aziraphale murmured. "I haven't always bothered, but I'd hate to test our luck when we're so close to being able to go home." He tensed a little and glanced over at Crowley with a guilty little smile. "Or, I suppose, I shouldn't assume you'll be staying with the pack. We haven't really spoken of your plans. Alpha Device does have quite a lot of contacts, and of course I have a wealth of first-hand impressions of everyone who's even remotely local. If you're looking for a certain sort of place or, um, people to settle in with."

It was incredibly difficult to execute a proper eye roll while in wolf form; Crowley compensated by adding in a head toss. He really wanted to do something terribly dramatic like lean over and play bite at the nearer of the scent glands on Aziraphale's neck. But, signaling he was already certain he wanted to put a ring on it might not be received the way he intended. He knew how quick he could become sure about a person (for better or worse), but he also knew how it might look from the outside in: the desperate omega in need of safe harbor, fresh off a relationship and a surprisingly successful heat. He didn't want to move so fast he made Aziraphale doubt how serious he was.

So instead, he leaned over and licked a long, sloppy stripe up the side of Aziraphale's neck and face. And then, when Aziraphale yelped and jerked away in shocked offense, Crowley crowded in to phantom nip at his jaw and his hair, pressed a paw into the center of his chest to rock him a little bit off balance, made a few awful, fake whining noises followed by a snort of disgust. Basically, pulled out every nonverbal "stop being an idiot" trick he had and bullied Aziraphale until he was a spluttering, laughing mess.

"Fine, all right—stop that, you fiend," he said, pushing Crowley's head away by the snout when he tried to get in another too-wet lick. "Your point is made."

Crowley wasn't so sure of that, if Aziraphale wasn't confident that Crowley was, at the very least, interested in sticking around long enough to try and pursue something with him. But he was tired and exasperated enough that he didn't think it was a good idea to dredge up the energy to change forms and try and talk about it. Not if he didn't want to end up accidentally proposing out of either ineptitude or sheer bloody irritation. So, instead, he flung himself back onto the nest on his side and stretched to take up as much room as possible—so much room there was no way Aziraphale could join him without having either to ask him to move or accept the inevitable cuddle.

To his delight, however, Aziraphale shifted back into his fur, minced his way into the space between Crowley's front and back legs, and circled himself into a tidy ball fitted snug against Crowley's belly.

Crowley chuffed in pleasure and shifted so he could tuck his front leg over Aziraphale's back and in general curl himself around the alpha more comprehensively. In answer, Aziraphale heaved a sleepy sigh and stretched his neck back to fit his head along the underside of Crowley's jaw, and then licked up high enough to graze Crowley's chin. Crowley couldn't have stopped the purr that rattled to life in his chest if he'd tried, but a second later it was joined by Aziraphale's own content rumbling, so it wasn't as mortifying as it might have been otherwise.

He mentally shortened the timeline he'd sternly given himself earlier in the day, when he'd been watching Aziraphale's hands dance excitedly in the air while he described all the lovely pastries he'd be able to bake again, now that Crowley had helped him regain the use of his thumbs. A few months, Crowley had thought as he'd listened with a ridiculous smile on his face that he couldn't be arsed to do anything about. Time enough to get settled, circle each other a bit, do a bit of old-fashioned courting. Then he'd lay out how ready he was to start a proper bond and discuss whether they'd want to then let nature take its course or start being careful.

He'd not thought seriously about pups in a long time; such a thing had seemed impossible for so many reasons, under Lucifer's heel. But Aziraphale had given him so many things in the past few days—joy and pleasure and comfort and catharsis—and chief amongst that was hope in a future that stretched further than just a handful of days or weeks. And he was getting the impression that he'd not just done something along the same lines for Aziraphale as well, but that Aziraphale was just as grateful and excited for the possibilities that were suddenly opened back up to him, and that he wanted Crowley by his side while he figured out what he wanted to do next.

Which meant that, maybe, Crowley wouldn't look like a complete lunatic if he proposed earlier.

A lot earlier.

He was still debating timelines with himself when he fell asleep, his alpha cuddled close and already snoring peacefully.