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“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
- Richard Siken, Crush
If Anthony J. Crowley were to be completely honest (something that offered, as expected, a modicum of difficulty for a demon), he would say that his worst scars weren’t from Falling.
The most egregiously permanent of marks left on his eternal being were not from slicing past cumulus, his form warping and twisting as he hit terminal velocity; not the blackening of his wings as holy flame erupted around him, erupted, became torturous, became infernal, became ash; not the curlicue of tissue that developed on his physical being near his ear, a reminder of his true self whispering temptations in the ear of a woman, the tissue he’d later call a tattoo, a choice, in a mockery of free will; and not even the yellow of his eyes, jaundiced and stretched and so far from his original blue he felt he should cry some days, a feeling he immediately rejected and then bought sunglasses to cover instead.
His worst scars could perhaps not be called scars at all, but echoes. Memories. It didn’t do much good to split hairs on the nature of these marks to begin with, as Crowley felt them, every last one of them, felt them etched into his skin, burning still. They were carved into his molecules.
Ineffable.
And, if one were to inquire as to the nature of these scars, all they had to do was look closely at one: there they would see the signature, clear as anything, the mark of the Maker, whose soft hands had left hard truths emblazoned forever on the essence of what Crowley was.
Here was the truth of it: years passed and the world changed, but Crowley could feel every place on his being, physical or otherwise, that had ever been touched by Aziraphale.
***
On the wall of the Garden, Crowley slithered to Aziraphale and stood at his side while the man and woman began their struggle through the desert.
The raindrops fell, fast and hard around them, cold water sluicing through his hair and down the skin that had so recently been scales, and Crowley shivered. Not a delicious shiver, the sort he’d experienced when Aziraphale admitted his wrongful kindness - a miserable one, the cold of the water a strange bite in the warm air.
Without a word, the angel lifted one of his wings - the great, diaphanous thing, gaudy and soft and pure - to cover Crowley’s head. Aziraphale sought no shelter for himself, but looked out onto the world he’d so easily changed through nothing but an act of compassion (one Crowley found himself wishing wouldn’t get the angel cast out).
It wasn’t like him to care what happened to angels. He had to pause for a long moment, his tongue darting out between his teeth, testing the air, testing his theory, wondering why it was he cared what happened to an adversary, and an insufferably pleasant one at that.
He wondered and wondered, as demons who’d Fallen for wondering often do; but, he was shaken from his wondering by a brush against his shoulder.
Crowley stared at Aziraphale then, at his upturned nose and blue eyes that were the color of the sky before everything had gone to shit. Aziraphale continued watching Adam and Eve, his mouth set in a frown that looked so earnest in its kindness (and Crowley remembered that there were, in fact, things he missed about Heaven).
He didn’t ask any questions though. It had gotten him into enough trouble in the past, and the last thing he wanted was for this soft-spoken fragment of Heaven to turn its back on him too.
So they stood in the growing rain, Aziraphale’s hair a halo of light around his round face, Crowley huddled into his side, ignoring but not ignoring the feathers that grasped his shoulder like they could stop him from Falling any further. Crowley stood, and he shivered, and he wondered if Aziraphale knew how he touched him, how it scorched him in and out, the feathers on his left shoulder left there as casually as the postman left the paper on the front stoop every morning.
He tried not to focus.
He focused.
A brush. A touch. A glimmer.
It should have felt like a sin, but it was something much holier. It stained him to the core.
***
At the middle of it was an inescapable truth of a demon and an angel:
Demons wanted chaos. Angels wanted order.
To be perfectly honest, these weren’t so much wants as instincts, as inclinations, as modes and habits. It wasn’t wanting when you were programmed for it, after all.
There was room for simply nothing else: humans were the Wanters, the Wanted, full up to the brim of what they desired, of what they burned for. Angels and demons played on those Wants until they got what they needed, Temptations and Encouragements going ‘round and ‘round ‘til they all Fell down.
Perhaps Crowley should have taken a step back on that Eastern wall in Eden to re-examine what it meant, that he should want something.
He’d never been touched before, not in his physicality. Perhaps that was all it was, he thought. Perhaps that was it.
Aziraphale’s touch sank under his skin and was left to fester for millennia, like rot that had gotten into the foundation.
***
“Maybe She won’t kill the children,” Aziraphale whispered, hands clasped in front of his body as he rocked back and forth, the drops falling faster and fatter around them.
It was the second time they’d seen each other. It was raining again.
Crowley could not, in fact, remember if it had rained at all since he’d seen Aziraphale, a thousand years prior. He couldn’t remember caring if it had.
It was raining now, though.
“Maybe She won’t,” Crowley agreed. His fingers twitched. They ached. They burned.
At his side Aziraphale fretted. “It - it wouldn’t be like Her to just … you know…” He vaguely mimicked the throwing of dice, and Crowley, for all his Malice and Toughness, couldn’t be bothered to correct him.
Nearby, a stream became a river became a flood. It swept through the flatness of the desert and swept up the sticks gathered by the children of People Who Were Decidedly Not Noah; they watched the would-be makings of their raft disappear, and Aziraphale watched, his frown growing decidedly more pronounced.
“Look away, angel,” Crowley murmured. It was the only kindness he could offer.
“I can’t,” Aziraphale said, eyes not leaving the children. The water reached their ankles. Their knees. Their hips.
Water began to stain the edge of Aziraphale’s sandals.
Crowley’s fingers burned. They ached. They twitched.
He placed a hand on Aziraphale’s shoulder; even through the heavy fabric, he felt it -- the only fire present in the face of a flood. It carved him open.
“Look away,” he urged. His thumb stroked softly over a crease in the fabric, which was coarse and broken and did nothing to dampen what it was to touch the angel. He wondered if Aziraphale could feel it. “I hear China’s got a new thing -- silk. You’ll love it.”
“I --” Aziraphale ducked his head. “Oh.”
He was gone in another blink of an eye, the faint smell of ozone the only reminder he’d been there at all, ozone and the aching rivulets of proof Crowley could feel forming in his fingertips.
The demon took a breath, and another, and another. He could still feel it in his fingertips, an open wound, an eternal scar.
He took a breath.
And he walked through the water to the children.
A few hundred miles southeast of Noah’s building site, a grove of trees was very surprised to see four dozen children, aged three months to nineteen years, suddenly crop up amongst them.
New recruits, eh? one tree said to another. Wonder if they know any good songs?
No one likes your songs, Walter, the other tree grumbled back. This is not a time for your songs.
The tree known as Walter sang his song anyway, and the children couldn’t hear it; but, the red-haired, questionably infernal entity with a scar on his cheek and in his fingertips certainly could. He grumbled about it the entire time he spent making sure there was adequate shelter in place in that grove of trees.
When he disappeared, there was the smell of sulphur, and Walter privately thought that it rather tickled his chloroplasts.
***
He held his hand briefly at Golgotha, offering comfort in a comfortless time (his palms felt like they’d been whipped with a switch for years after).
At Petronius’s restaurant, their knees brushed against each other while they dined on oysters (Crowley thought he’d choke on the slimy shellfish when the heat bled through his tunic, but Aziraphale didn’t pull away, and he certainly wasn’t going to call chicken before an angel).
Aziraphale toyed with his sleeve in front of the stage at the Globe (and Crowley gloated that no matter how talented Aziraphale thought Burbage was, how talented he thought Shakespeare was, it was him he touched, his sleeve , on his body).
Where the executioner’s shackles had left red marks on Aziraphale’s wrists, Crowley rubbed them away absentmindedly at lunch, not summoning the demonic intervention, but it bleeding through all the same, soothing and healing so naturally neither of them particularly noticed (Aziraphale would later say it was the crepes that had distracted him, and Crowley, a shade of blue that walloped him harder than a guillotine).
***
St. James’ Park was where it fell apart, and Crowley Fell even further.
He left with no Holy Water, no smile, no promise of lunch or crepes or any of it.
“Fraternizing,” he snarled to himself, dragging his hands through his hair.
(He could still feel it - his wrist, his knee, his palms, his fingers, his shoulder - all of it, and - and - and Aziraphale thought - he so easily thought -)
Crowley tended to his old scars that night by himself, and he couldn’t even revel in the placement of new ones.
“Fraternizing!” He roared to the trees in the dark.
The descendent of Walter, whose children had been carried by bird and bee and water and wind throughout the centuries, hummed a faint tune in an attempt at comfort. The tune had been passed down in his family for thousands of years after all, coursing through his xylem and forming his heart’s blood.
“Shut up!” Crowley roared at the Descendent of Walter.
He stormed from the park, hands shaking, his entire being scarred and twisted and deformed. Angels didn’t fraternize with snakes. They weren’t friendly with demons. They didn’t care about saving Crowley.
Crowley roared again, and he kicked at a lampost irately when the roar didn’t even startle a nearby flock of pigeons.
Just another winged thing that ignored him today.
His toe was broken by the savagery of his kick, and it was the only sensation of touch he’d get that day. It hardly sufficed.
***
Crowley found a way to fix it in 1941, with Aziraphale gasping over the saved books, the prophecies salvaged from the bomb.
“Look at this,” Aziraphale sighed happily. “Oh, Crowley, it’s - it’s so delightful. Come look!”
He gestured for the demon to stand at his side in the illumination offered by a lamp, one that hadn’t been doused in the nightly aerial attack, the sole flicker of light in the dark.
Crowley stood behind Aziraphale, over his shoulder, a strange echo of the way he’d stood behind Eve before the great temptation, and scanned the words on the page.
“That’s a book, yeah,” said Crowley, lifting his eyes again up to the darkened sky, his mind wandering to the font of holy water that had just been sitting out. Were all priests that careless? Would any holy water be left under the rubble? Was it really --
“What a charming turn of phrase,” Aziraphale chortled. He lifted the book up higher and leaned back.
Into Crowley.
“Isn’t it remarkable?” Aziraphale asked, cozying in like Crowley couldn’t feel his folded up, hidden wings crushed into his chest, pressed against him, pressing into him, Aziraphale’s curls tickling his chin while he asked for his opinion like they were doing something as mundane as swapping gossip on a Sunday stroll.
“Uh --”
Crowley blinked. Once. Twice. Aziraphale hummed and looked up at him, unperturbed by their closeness, and Crowle decided that Hell was here on Earth after all, and the chief torture of it was this angel with those blue eyes.
He bit back a groan of exasperated happiness and leaned over Aziraphale’s shoulder, his chin practically resting on the soft curve where the angel’s neck met his shoulder.
“Yeah,” he muttered, squinting at the page. “Remarkable.”
Could he even read? Had he ever learned how to bloody read? Crowley couldn’t remember in that moment. Didn’t matter.
With a hum of contentment, Aziraphale turned his head to beam at him and resumed studying the text, his shoulder and half his back still nestled into Crowley’s chest. It almost cleaved him in two. It really did.
***
Crowley was a demon. Demons wanted chaos. Demons wanted nothing but to serve their Master, to create Chaos and spread Discord and tempt man into Darkness.
Aziraphale leaned into Crowley, and the scars of the past millennia made themselves known anew, and Crowley wanted something else.
He didn’t know he could want.
He tried to put it away.
But then it was 1967, and the angel, that bloody, stupid, brilliant, perfect angel handed him a Thermos of holy water, and Crowley couldn’t help himself, not when the Temptation, the Wanting, All of it, was right there for the taking.
He took the holy water, and then took what he actually wanted.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Crowley said, his voice stretching and choppy where it had never been choppy before.
His hand was on the angel’s, holding it, thumb stroking over soft knuckles, unscarred, unbruised, unbroken by touching a demon.
The holy water rested on the console, forgotten.
“You go too fast for me, Crowley,” said Aziraphale.
He slipped his hand free. The door opened, and closed, and Crowley was left with an ache that started in his fingers and ended in his chest.
***
There were other touches before the Apoca-Fail, other brief moments of tentative contact, contact that sometimes bordered on the careless, the carefree:
Crowley, spread out on a public bench, red hair long and straight and in between Aziraphale’s fingers as he stroked it absentmindedly, eyes on a novel, and Crowley’s entire being unwittingly in his hands.
The gardener’s hand cupped around the nanny’s ear, whispering updates while a young boy watched curiously from behind a half-closed door.
Aziraphale, pressed up against a wall by a demon and looking altogether too unbothered by that fact, hands wrapped around Crowley’s forearms, Crowley’s nose brushing his, Crowley’s thumbs stroking over the cotton collar of his ridiculous clothing, Crowley’s eyes darting down, down to the red of an apple of a tree he’d never eat from, not without permission, not without the All-Clear from the only All-Mighty he’d ever cared about --
And then the worst of the touches happened.
And the world ended.
***
They argued, as they always did, but this time the stakes were a little higher than what they would eat for dinner or whether or not the Velvet Underground constituted bebop.
They argued, and the world was ending, and then it didn’t.
“You’re so clever! How can somebody as clever as you be so stupid?” Crowley demanded, grasping Aziraphale’s left wrist, trying to get him to see reason, to see that the only way this could end, the only way he’d accept it ending, the only way he wanted it to end was with them together.
The particulars didn’t particularly matter after that point.
And nothing at all mattered after what happened next:
Aziraphale’s hands - those holy, sacrosanct, punishing, scarring, beautiful, terrible hands - reached up slowly, and Crowley still held onto his wrist for as long as he could. Aziraphale’s hands lifted up to his face and stayed there, fingers aligning with his jaw, the world, the universe, the Apocalypse fading away into white noise that burned and fizzled outside the bubble the angel had created.
Then, Aziraphale kissed him tenderly, cradling his face in his hands as though he could reach into the past and catch him so that he never Fell in the first place; his lips pressed against Crowley’s, softer than he’d imagined (because of course he’d been imagining in all the spaces between, how could he not, when this angel’s name was written on every crevasse and secret place in his body and spirit and mind), and firmer too, his breath becoming Crowley’s breath. It was a physical act, but they were physical creatures now, they’d made sure of it, living in this world and fighting for this world and loving this world; it was physical, and it was more than physical, and Crowley kissed him back.
Aziraphale pulled away, his hands still holding Crowley like a delicate thing that needed to be held with care.
“I forgive you,” Aziraphale whispered into the minimal space between them, space barely big enough for breath.
He leaned in, or perhaps Crowley did, the space diminishing, diminishing, noses brushing again--
--And he remembered in that space, remembered how that one disciple, Iscariot, yes, Judas Iscariot was his name, kissed Christ before he was betrayed, and he remembered that this felt an awful lot like that, a betrayal, or a goodbye, or a reminder of something he wasn’t allowed to have --
-- and he reared back like he’d been slapped.
“Don’t you dare, angel.” Crowley pointed a finger at Aziraphale, a thrumming in his body he’d only felt at times, this perfect, miserable encapsulation of humanness, of physicality, of existence.
Six thousand years he’d carried on; and now he had to have an actual taste of what he wanted.
Hours on the clock ‘til Doomsday, and he wanted.
(Oh, he wanted )
“Don’t you dare.” Crowley lowered his finger, eyes lingering on Aziraphale’s face, which didn’t show so much the signs of a heart breaking, but a heart already broken.
He strode to the Bentley and climbed half in, shouting about the stars like the stars had any sort of meaning if Aziraphale weren’t there among them, shouting lies about not thinking about Aziraphale, the principality imprinted on every last molecule, atom, and jagged piece of spirit he had left; he had to get in the car, unable to tell if the soldiers were already coming for him in Gethsemane, because if they weren’t, they would be soon.
And Aziraphale didn’t move, didn’t get into the car with him - silly angel, thinking the end of the world could be averted if he wouldn’t get in the car and save himself - he simply stood on the curb and forgave him like it was any business of his at all to forgive Crowley when the angel was the one who broke the rules, who broke them time and time again and even managed to break a demon while he was at it.
Crowley drove through London, his lips still burning, his body still burning, Aziraphale thrumming in his veins as surely as blood.
***
In the conflagration of the bookshop, hours later, Crowley stroked his fingers over the book of prophecy, not caring about burning when he was already burnt, already destroyed, already lost ; pressing his palm to the book, he remembered that line from that stupid play the angel liked so well - And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss - and he remembered Aziraphale’s lips on his, lips that no longer existed, palms that no longer existed, a future that no longer existed.
Crowley stood; he tucked the book in his jacket, and screamed one, last, futile time, to an unanswering and uncaring universe that his best friend was dead.
Crowley had wanted. Crowley had lost. Everything he had slowly grown to want over six thousand years, all the ways he’d never get to touch his angel again, the way he’d learned to want to, everything he always ignored, now alive and screaming for attention inside of him: alive and screaming, when Aziraphale was not. When Aziraphale could no longer Want, but could still be Wanted.
Crowley wept.