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It’s not that Crowley can’t read. He can, for a little while. It’s that he’s not quite built for it, something about the snake eyes and what not. They’re not meant for looking closely at little words in print. He squints, and it gives him a headache. He can read menus and street signs, sure, can fumble through the paperwork Hell’s bureaucracy sends him. But getting through a novel or a thick biography? It takes too long and his eyes start to swim.
He did well with play-scripts, back in the day, though he worked his way through all the comedies first. That said, it’s still a long process, and his slit pupils make his stumbling somewhat dyslexic. But he likes the stories. Though it was always better going to hear them anyway.[1] It does annoy him though, as he’s always had a gift for languages. He and Aziraphale can speak most of them, but he’s always had a little more verbal flair, or been a bit more on top of the slang, silver and snake-tongued as he is. Whereas when Aziraphale was rusty, he ended up sounding a bit like a textbook.
So he gave up reading, more or less, until he started catching up again to impress his angel. His angel who lived in a bookshop, whose very being lit up at the sight of a musty old tome like a kid who had just ripped the colored paper off of his birthday present. His angel, whose clothes smelled just a bit like antique books, who lent Crowley his favorite novels when he wouldn’t even allow his own customers to buy them.
Aziraphale figures it out, one day, catches him sounding out at words and furrowing his brows to focus his eyes. Crowley’s worried the angel will think less of him, the intellectual, Wilde-collecting angel. But he doesn’t. He purses his lips and gently pulls the book out of Crowley’s frustrated hands. It was something he had read before, something he had recommended to the demon, actually.
“My dear boy, all you had to do was ask,” says Aziraphale, softly. He catches Crowley’s yellow eyes as they meet his and then flick away, uncertain.
So he sits next to Crowley, flicks his eyes to the spot where a black fingernail had just been sharply digging into the page, and he reads. He reads out loud to Crowley, and in response, the demon curls up against him on the couch. Crowley leans his back against his shoulder and stretches out his legs, lets his yellow eyes flicker closed to rest from the strain.
And he listens.
Oh, how he listens. There’s something so natural in the way that Aziraphale reads. It’s as if he were speaking with him, just as casual. But he slows down enough to really let Crowley picture it all. Pauses in all the right places. His character voices are differentiated, but not caricatured, or cartoonish. He’s not show-offish. Aziraphale’s voice doesn’t really get tired either. They can spend hours like this, neither needing to eat, sleep, or drink.[2] The only other noise in the room is the slow and gentle rise of Crowley’s breaths.
Eventually, Aziraphale stops reading, having finished the book. Crowley is so still against him that he fears he’s fallen asleep. He gently sets the book down on the table and shifts to get up. Before he can leave though, a quick hand grasps his shirtsleeve. So he was not asleep after all. He turns back to his companion.
“Aziraphale, can you—again—tomorrow?” says Crowley.
Aziraphale’s face softens as he looks at him. “Of course, dear. After dinner?”
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After, Crowley tries reading audiobooks. He really does, but every time he gets halfway through a novel, he screws up and brings his phone or his laptop with him into his Bentley.[3] Now, suddenly, the author from the very interesting book he had been listening to about Norse mythology sounds strikingly like one Mr. F. Mercury. That had been a good one, a rather sore loss, but not the only casualty. He’s lost six books to “Old Fashioned Lover Boy” and “You’re My Best Friend” alone.
He tried spending some time with customer support on that, trying to get them to replace the purchase, or at least give him his damn money back. But the lady on the phone told him it wasn’t her fault that he had purchased The Best of Queen album 12 times, and that she couldn’t do much about it.
The idea of audiobooks also makes him a little tentative. He feels like Hell could tap into the recordings just like a radio or a tv. They don’t really check up on him anymore, but it’s enough to tense his nerves. You didn’t get that fear with a book. You didn’t get any with Aziraphale. He prefers the angel’s voice, all the same.
So Aziraphale reads to him: in the car during long drives, on the couch, on a park bench. It’s become a bit of an evening routine now. After a late lunch or dinner, when they’re both stuffed, they head back to the bookshop. Aziraphale will pull something from the shelves, or Crowley will surprise him with something that he’s picked up for the two of them, which the angel will proudly add to his collection later, gently touching the pages with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics.
The two will sidle up together, a good book between them. Something new or something ancient. They’ll have water or wine, coffee or cocoa. Sometimes they’ll both hold the book and Crowley will flip its pages lazily while Aziraphale gently holds an arm around him. Other times, Aziraphale will do the whole thing himself and Crowley will wind himself so that his head is pressed up right against the angel’s chest. He says it’s something to do with hearing the vibrations through his bones, something snakes do. He likes the way he can feel the gentle rumble of Aziraphale’s calm voice in his temples, in his jawbone.
These moments are as intimate as the two have gotten. Their bodies have started to leave an impression in the padding of the sofa out of routine; it has adjusted to their shape. But they are tentative. They can blame these moments on practicality or comfort, their closeness only out of a shared activity.
After all, it’s not as if the urge for closeness lingers once Aziraphale closes the book, finishing that night’s chapter or collection. It’s not as if Crowley has been looking with increasing frequency at the way Aziraphale’s adam’s apple—what a name for that tempting thing— bobs ever so slightly in his soft white throat, as if he wants to kiss it, bite it gently in a reenactment of original sin. Crowley doesn’t ache for the angel to hold him as if he were as delicate as yellow paper, because he certainly isn’t. Not like their breathing syncs and their ever-so-human hearts start beating together.
No, it isn’t like that at all.
It is so much deeper.
They are reading through the Iliad, Aziraphale with an arm around Crowley, occasionally and absent-mindedly stroking his hair, when it finally happens. When one of them breaks the unspoken rules of their engagement. Crowley speaks.
He has commented before, critiqued a character or turn of phrase, offered his own colorful thoughts on a passage, but not like this. Aziraphale is reading of the death of Patroclus, singing of the grief of Achilles, when the demon croaks out.
“Aziraphale.”
“Yes, my dear?”
“You know that, if anything ever happened to you—”
“Yes?” Aziraphale asks, treading carefully. They are advancing the game now, playing beyond where the instructions end.
“That I’d…” he buries his face into the side of Aziraphale’s neck.
“Dear heart, what?”
He retreats from the cushion of warmth he has found at Aziraphale’s shoulder.
“Blast it, angel, you know,” Crowley says, and with it catches the side of Aziraphale’s face softly with his hand and draws him in. He kisses him with lips that seem to say, “I’d circle Ilium for a millennia, dragging the corpse of whoever wronged us behind me,” and “I would suffer all the pains on this earth to see you happy,” and “I cannot exist in this world without you, angel.”
As intangible as these sentiments are, being pressed deeply and fully into lips, Aziraphale receives them. When they finally break away, Aziraphale places the gentlest of kisses on the shell of his ear.
“I love you too, Crowley.”
I cannot tell you what happens afterward, but I can tell you this:
They write their own happy ending.