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They stride out into the early evening. The bustle of the city, the rustle of the wind through the trees, the birdsong in the air, the honking of horns, the clatter on pavement. All persisting, existing, resisting fate, because of them and Adam. The sun is setting into a spectacular dusk, and for the first time in millennia, neither the angel nor the demon have anywhere they need to be.
“Fancy a bit of a walk?”
“I certainly would,” Aziraphale nods, his smile a relief in the city, and they set off wandering. Aimlessly, gloriously. An old man and his dog walk by, the dog in a small tartan sweater, and Crowley can feel Aziraphale’s love emanating. He’s always been able to feel Aziraphale’s love, ever since he felt it for Eve and Adam back on the wall, but it’s been growing stronger and Crowley’s not sure why. Crowley realizes, as they walk, that his feet feel heavy. His head’s a bit fuzzy, his back aches where he keeps his wings. He’s feeling far more tired than usual, but all told, he is having quite a long day.
They wind up at their usual spot in St. James Park just as the sun has very nearly set beyond the horizon. They stand there, in the world they’ve just saved, together.
“I suppose I’ll be headed back to the bookshop in a bit,” Aziraphale says presently, and Crowley’s heart sinks.
“Yeah, of course,” and he keeps as much disappointment out of his voice as he can. What was he expecting? He had been hoping, though. Always. It’s a part of him, this hope, a second skin he can’t shed. “Got to check on any of Adam’s alterations, I suppose.”
“Oh, good lord,” the angel groans, rubbing his temples. “I hadn’t even thought of that. That marvelous, foolish child.”
Crowley chuckles, but it comes out weak. He’s really feeling rather off. He blinks hard beneath his glasses.
“I’ll just totter off to my flat then,” he says. No point in dragging this out -- or discussing what they will, or won’t do. Aziraphale might -- he might not want to have much to do with him from now on. And Crowley doesn’t want to hear that, especially not now with his head pounding at him. He pushes him up off the bench, for all intents and purposes prepared to stride off without another word -- and his legs give way beneath him.
“ Crowley! ”
He feels the angel’s arms catch him right before he crumples to the ground.
“Sorry, angel,” he mutters. Aziraphale’s hands are warm and steady on him, they’re on him, the angel’s hands, and in something like panic, he tries to break free.
“Sorry, nothing!” Aziraphale sits him back onto the bench and crouches in front of him, gazing at him with concern. “Oh goodness, I should have known. The Bentley, stopping time, switching bodies, the hellfire -- ”
“I’ve been through worse,” Crowley interrupts, face pinking. “I’m not weak …” except he definitely is, at the moment, he can’t even stand. Aziraphale kindly doesn’t point this out, only purses his lips and, absent-mindedly, brushes Crowley’s hair out of his eyes. Not for the first time, Crowley feels a rush of gratitude for his glasses. He never would have hid this love without them. He can hardly look directly at Aziraphale sometimes. It’s like looking at an eclipse, so jarringly beautiful and dangerous it could blind you, except Crowley wouldn’t go blind looking directly at an eclipse, but he could lose so much more, looking directly at Aziraphale.
“I’m taking you home,” Aziraphale says, businesslike, and Crowley finds that he does have enough energy to argue, but instead, lets the angel help him to his feet, and, after checking no one was looking, miracle them into the apartment above the bookshop, in which Crowley promptly collapses into Aziraphale’s comfiest sofa.
“Is there anything I can do?” Aziraphale asks, pushing a cup of water into Crowley’s hands. He gives a little wave without his eyes leaving Crowley’s, and the kettle on the stove switches on.
“There’s no need for tea,” Crowley says tiredly.
“It’s milk, for cocoa,” Aziraphale replies primly, and this, Crowley begrudgingly does not argue with. He lies back against the cushions with a groan.
“Probably just have to sleep for a week or so and I’ll be fine.”
“Well, you’re doing it here,” says the angel, preparing the cocoa. “I know we probably have a few hundred years before Hell or Heaven come for us, but I’m not leaving you alone exhausted and defenseless.”
“You must be exhausted too!” Crowley points out.
“Not quite as bad as you, I’m afraid,” responds Aziraphale. He pushes the winged mug into Crowley’s hands, leans in, puckers his lips, and blows on it to cool it down. Crowley swallows, hard. That mouth, kind and soft and open. It’s spoken cruel words to him. It’s asked for him to come back. He’s seen it part in sleep. He’s dreamed it a thousand times, frantic wanting, quiet agony.
When Aziraphale moves away to remove his jacket and set the kettle in the sink, Crowley shakes his head and sips the cocoa, which is definitively delicious, because of course it is, and has a hint of cayenne in it, because Aziraphale remembers that’s how Crowley said he liked it, the first time he tried it in the Mayan era.
“I think,” Aziraphale goes on, “if you are really to sleep for that long, you ought to do it in my bed, so I can keep an eye on you. I won’t disturb you so much when I head to and from the bookshop, and it’s the safest place in the building, I’ve got it quite enchanted for security and privacy. Had to, after that Shadwell fiasco.” He gives a shudder, then extends his arm for Crowley to take.
Crowley looks up at him. His angel, concerned and matter-of-fact and taking care of him. And for once, they have nowhere else to be. For a moment, he thinks he sees a flicker of -- but no, it can’t be. What he feels is Aziraphale’s normal levels of love, anyway, strong and lovely. He figures it chalks up to the angel being made of love. Perhaps he’s feeling it more these days because there’s something less holy, more human about it, given that they did just defy Heaven and all that. He should stop trying to figure it out, for his heart’s sake.
“Come along,” Aziraphale urges, taking the mug and proferring his arm. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”
Crowley takes it, and allows himself to be guided to the bed. He flops forward onto it with another aching groan.
“Get your jacket off, let’s get you comfortable,” he hears the angel say. Crowley shrugs off his jacket, and on second thought, his vest and shirt as well.
“These sheets feel good,” he observes, pressing his cheek to the pillow. This is where he lays his head, when he does. This is where he rests, dreams, where he goes when he’s vulnerable. Don’t think it.
“Egyptian cotton, terrific thread count,” Aziraphale says absently. Crowley opens an eye to see the angel folding his clothes.
“Oh, you don’t need to do that…”
“I’d like to!” Aziraphale insists, and then Crowley feels him carefully removing his shoes. “I think you’ll be quite a bit more comfortable without these on.”
“You just don’t want my shoes on your bed.”
“Of course I don’t want your shoes on my bed. But I do think this will be more comfortable.”
“You’re right,” Crowley says. He stretches out, languishing until -- “ ouch!”
“What is it?” Aziraphale’s concerned face is at his in an instant.
“It’s…” Crowley sighs. “It’s the spot where I keep my wings. I’m a bit sore all over and I think that’s the Bentley’s fault, you’re right, but I hadn’t unfurled the bastards in a couple thousand years and they felt good coming out, stung like Heaven coming back in.”
Aziraphale tsks.
“You’re meant to stretch them occasionally, you know.”
“We’re not meant to have them in our human bodies anyway!” Crowley snarls, but he knows Aziraphale is right. He sighs. “It’ll feel better after some sleep, anyway.” He closes his eyes, stretches out snake-like, on his stomach. “Hey,” he says, pulling his head off the pillow.
“Hm?” Aziraphale’s face is still terribly, torturously close.
“Thank you.” And Crowley very much does not mean only for tonight.
The angel’s lips part, and Crowley knows he’s breached something, better not , but all that is lost now anyway, and he’s going to say it. It’s time he says it.
Crowley closes his eyes, trying to shift into a comfortable position that doesn’t press his shoulderblades into the sore spots on his back, and then he feels the most delicious pressure. He lets out an involuntary moan as the angel, standing next to the bed, pushes his thumbs into the exact source of his pain.
“What are you doing?” It comes out almost as a gasp, it feels fresh and strange and so, so good.
“I -- I’m not entirely sure? I know humans do it to each other when their muscles are sore, and I figured the principle would apply -- but if you don’t like it -- ”
“No, I do — “
Aziraphale shifts his weight, digging soft fingers into the sore flesh.
“If you’d rather take your snake form to heal...”
Crowley bit his lip. He’d forgotten, but that definitely would be the most effective and efficient way to get his energy back. He knows this is dangerous, when he’s already too exhausted to hide his feelings. But the angel doesn’t seem averse to the massage...and...he doesn’t want Aziraphale to stop touching him...
“I’m actually feeling a bit too weak to shift,” he says, his first ever outright lie to the angel. He actually feels Aziraphale pause before he goes on.
“Hmm,” Aziraphale says, but he doesn’t counter.
Crowley waits a moment to see if they can just move past it — and then buries his face in the pillow.
“All right,” he mumbles, his voice muffled by the fabric, “I lied, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” He looks over his shoulder at Aziraphale’s satisfied expression. “It just feels so good, all right? I like it. But if you’re too tired, or you’d rather not — “
Aziraphale smiles, then gently pushes Crowley’s face back onto the pillow, climbs to kneel on the bed, and begins on his shoulder muscles. Crowley gives a weak hum of pleasure, sinking into the mattress.
“I’m quite happy to do this. I just wanted the truth from you.”
“You’ve got it, angel,” Crowley says, letting himself be transported by the touch. Except, of course, for the one truth he can’t give.
Aziraphale presses his fingers into the soreness between Crowley’s shoulderblades. He moves so carefully, listening to Crowley’s breath, attune to the tightening and release of muscle. Crowley feels himself relax in a more profound way than he thought he was able, a sort of unfurling, a release.
“Would you mind terribly,” Aziraphale begins, his hands pausing, “if I got on top of you? I know that’s a rather silly thing to ask, but I think -- the angle -- ”
“Please do,” Crowley hears himself say without thinking, and then he becomes quite glad that Aziraphale swiftly doffs his trousers and jacket and climbs on top of him, so the angel can’t see how red his face has gone. He gives a gasp as Aziraphale presses his hands back into him with better access. “Oh, that is better…”
“I thought so,” Aziraphale says, letting his careful hands play across the muscles of Crowley’s back. He gives a small huff, and Crowley can hear that he’s smiling.
“What?” Crowley asks again. He’s finding himself getting wonderfully tired, it feels so good to just relax, but at the same time...he doesn’t want this space to close. The forbidden bliss of it.
“Let your wings out, Crowley,” Aziraphale says. It’s not a question. Crowley feels a rush of shame, but Aziraphale’s thighs are on his waist, his hands are pressing into his flesh, and Crowley has never been able to deny the angel anything. He lets them unfurl, charcoal gray, cupping Aziraphale on his back, enclosing them together in demon wings and fraying feathers. He hears the angel give a sharp intake of breath, and Crowley flinches. This close, Aziraphale can see where God broke the bones of his wings. Where She snapped the feathers that make it so that Crowley can still fly, but not without remembering who he was, who he’ll never be again. They’ve healed long ago, but the scars are there in the shape of them, and Crowley almost can’t stand the thought of Aziraphale staring, until he feels the angel’s hands slip between his feathers and press at the aches of old wounds.
“Is this all right?” the angel asks, running his fingers through the quills, much like if he were to play with Crowley’s hair (would he? Oh god, Crowley melts at the thought).
“Yes,” Crowley manages, a strangled whisper, but Aziraphale understands, shifting his weight to take the demon’s fallen wings in his palms and care for them, see them, not as a mark of shame or pain but as Crowley’s.
“They’re lovely, you know,” says the angel, and it’s like he’s making sure there’s no part of Crowley’s cursed wings he doesn’t touch his fingertips to, shaking out the crimps, a bestowing.
“Thank you,” Crowley says again, because he can feel the angel means it, and he doesn’t know what to make of that, can’t let it in, but it’s too late, it’s seeping, it’s too much, the pleasure of his touch and his presence and his words.
“We did it,” Aziraphale says, softly. His fingers are at the demon’s throat now, working into the tensed muscles at the base of his skull, then down to the place where wings join to spine. “We really saved everything.”
“We did.”
“You and I.”
The angel’s hands are hot and strong. They knead the tension out of Crowley’s body, but, Crowley is desperately aware, they’re sparking another tension, somewhere deeper inside him, the starving place that never feeds.
“You and I…” Aziraphale repeats, thoughtfully. He lets the quiet emerge between them, and Crowley lets him. The angel’s hands on him, the delirious startling of peace.
“It’s like the future’s opened up a bit, hasn’t it?” Crowley says.
“You’re not wrong,” the angel murmurs. Aziraphale’s fingers caress the base of his feathers now, and Crowley feels almost intoxicated with the pleasure of it, something far more comforting and heady than the buzz of drink or drug. It’s terrifying, exhausting to be on the brink, but if only, if only this could be eternity.
There’s no rush here. Perhaps for the first time — no, certainly — there’s no glancing over shoulders, no nagging pull that the business is done, the personal is a stolen gift. This is a choice, one each knows the other is making, and Aziraphale’s using it to soothe. To take the vessel of Crowley’s cast out spurned soul and heal it, not in a holy way but with touch, with effort, and it feels so good that, not for the first time, the demon does not feel worthy.
The angel’s hands coax the ache from the muscles in his shoulders, the sides of his chest, the flare of his wings, the base of his spine. Steady fingers, moving careful and firm. Undoing a hurt that goes deeper than body.
He doesn’t mean to, doesn’t think he could ever sleep with the spark the angel strikes in him, but the effort of all of it sinks into him, and as Aziraphale’s strong, sure hands knead the tension out of his body, Crowley dozes off.
The nightmare comes like a knife in the gut, sharp and hideous and inescapable. A cacophony of images, each more terrible than the last, blazing through him: Satan emerging out of the earth. The promise of everything ending. “I don’t even like you - it’s over! It’s over! It’s over!” And the visceral, encompassing terror of the burning bookshop, the lingering grief that became everything he is, the agony that has lived, simmering beneath his skin, since that moment. I never told him. I never told him and he’s gone. I never told him and they’ve taken him, they’ve burned him to nothing and he’s never coming back .
“Crowley! Crowley!”
He bolts awake still shaking, his wings contracted painfully into his body, his face strewn with tears. Aziraphale, mercifully, is kneeling next to him on the bed, very much alive, with his hand on Crowley’s shoulder and that kind face a wreck of concern.
“Are you all right? You went all still, I thought you’d fallen asleep, but then you were trembling, and you cried out — was it me?” Aziraphale asks anxiously. “Did I hurt you?”
Yes, Aziraphale. Everything we are is hurt. Anguish worse than my fall, to approach, asymptote, retract, an infinite enemy, rebuff, retreat, a binary star. And yet I’d take another six thousand years of this destruction in a moment if the alternative was losing you forever.
“No, angel,” he says, his voice too gruff. He pulls the sheet up around his naked torso, suddenly feeling very exposed. “Just -- bad dream,” he mutters, flashing a grin he knows doesn’t reach his eyes.
Damn it. He’s usually better at this, but he’s weak and he’s aching and he’s also more relaxed, more present in himself from Aziraphale’s hands, and he finds, helplessly, that his resolve to hide his feelings has weakened significantly since the fire.
“Crowley?” Aziraphale asks, quietly. He doesn’t need to say anything else. Crowley knows he wants the truth. He puts his hand on Crowley’s trembling one, and even though his hands had just been all over Crowley’s back, this touch is a comfort so intimate Crowley has to wrestle with his urge to pull away. He takes a deep breath, and needless though it is, it steadies him, a bit. That, and that the angel hasn’t yet removed his hand.
“I’ve — argh.” Crowley shuts his eyes tight. His heart is too loud in his chest, he’s fighting every instinct, but Aziraphale squeezes his hand gently, and his eyes flash open: yellow, demonic, unguarded, and Aziraphale’s holy ones meet them unflinchingly, and Crowley says it. “I thought I’d lost you.”
Aziraphale’s lips part, just for a moment, and then he presses them together again. Crowley feared something like this, but significantly, Aziraphale has still not removed his hand, and so Crowley keeps going.
“I never even got the chance to process that you hadn’t gone. I thought I was dreaming when I saw you appear in that restaurant, but when I realized you hadn’t — you were really there — it’s like the world mattered again, because it didn’t when I’d lost you, I would have given up, I would have let the world die and I would have gone with it!” His voice raises with the last words, and when he stops he flinches, hearing them echo, irretrievably, throughout the flat. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” he says, his voice hardly above a whisper now. “Dreaming about it. I can’t believe I’m actually telling you this, but I — I don’t think I’ll be able to rest again until I do.”
He can’t look at Aziraphale. He wants to, wants to look at him, indignant, with his head held high, because he’s never hidden this , not like this, he’s never had to bother because Aziraphale always looks away first. But this time, he stares at his own hand, the one Aziraphale isn’t holding, and he becomes very aware he’s placed everything of himself in the angel’s palm, and Aziraphale could destroy him if he chose, and he finds he doesn’t care. Or, not that, exactly, but he’s tired of waiting, he’s so tired of not knowing exactly where the line is, he’s tired of hoping and assuming and he just needs Aziraphale to be the one to say it, and if he doesn’t — if he doesn’t — then at least, at last, Crowley will know.
“That was the moment,” he finds himself saying, haunted, unable to hide it anymore, “the world ended for me. Armageddon became an afterthought. When I lost you, Aziraphale. That was my apocalypse.”
There is a silence. Crowley refuses to break it. He fights the urge to make a joke, diffuse the tension. It’s a weak urge, anyway.
Can this be all there is?
Is this where it ends?
Perhaps it’s better this way. Instead of dragging it out any longer.
“Crowley,” asks the angel. “...what am I to you?”
“Aziraphale.”
The demon closes his mouth, then opens it again, and the truth comes out.
“All I know is when I’m with you I forget to hate myself. You can be so stubborn and so foolish but you’re really, really clever, and you know it — you’re kind, and you’re joyful, and you’re earnest, and you’re better than anyone, and you’re why any of this matters. I want to make you happy. I don’t want to be without you. I thought — oh someone damn it — I thought you were my ineffable plan or my apple, or something as human as my soulmate, but I’m starting to feel like you’re the garden, and God help me, I don’t want to leave this time.” Crowley takes a shuddering breath. “I think there’s no word for what you are to me.”
“Crowley...” Aziraphale says his name slow and quiet.
“If you’re going to hurt me, angel,” Crowley says to his lap, “I’d prefer you hurried it up. I’ve been waiting long en-“
“Crowley!”
Crowley turns to the angel at last, his whole body shaking, his mouth open.
He knows what he said, but he can’t help himself. In his mind, he recites a prayer. Not to Satan. Not to God.
O, Aziraphale. I pray to thee, do not forsake me.
He prays, and it does not burn him.
The angel blinks.
“I didn’t know you could still do that.”
“I think,” Crowley says hoarsely, “it’s cause it’s you. Because I believe in. You.” He swallows, his throat strangely, painfully dry. “Please, angel.”
Aziraphale is shaking his head, and Crowley’s heart is breaking.
“I thought you knew,” Aziraphale says at last, and it’s like being pierced with ice. “All these years, my goodness, I thought you understood.”
Crowley’s brow furrows, but he can’t bear to hope, dimly aware that the heat inside him is building, the prayer, coming answered.
“It was never that I didn’t want you. You said it yourself! Your side doesn’t send strongly worded notes! Neither does mine for that matter, we have learned, but — they would have destroyed you. Had I let myself...had I asked you to...”
Crowley’s ears have gone very hot. Could Aziraphale really, truly mean —
“I have never been able to resist an earthly temptation,” the angel says in a small voice. “But you, you, my very own garden, as it were, a place of safety, my -- my home,” he says, and something inside Crowley is spilling over, “it wouldn’t be only my neck on the line, and I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t risk it!”
“When they find out what we’ve done, deceived them, after everything else,” Crowley says at last, his heart going very fast now, “it won’t matter...what...else we’ve done.”
“I know,” Aziraphale says, such small words but they change everything, and he says them without hesitation.
The angel looks at him then, and Crowley feels it, something he always could feel from Aziraphale but attributed to the angel’s love of just that, earthly temptations, food and comfort and soft things, but now it’s unmasked and unmistakable, this rush of unbridled want, and Crowley lets out a gasp.
“You mean it, Aziraphale?” he says in a small voice. “Please don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
“I’ve always wanted you,” the angel says, his own voice barely above a whisper, and Crowley’s never, ever felt so blessed, not even before he fell. “At first I thought it was you, tempting, but I learned it was simply because I do. Because you complete me in ways I didn’t know I wasn’t whole. Because you are clever, just as clever as I, you’re kind, and don’t you deny it, you care and you understand me and you humor me and you’re good to me, Crowley, you’re so bloody good to me.” Aziraphale’s eyes are shining now. “And you’re beautiful, and you’re — well, you’re fun!” Here the angel can’t help but break into a tentative smile, and it is this, so Aziraphale of him, Crowley begins to realize this is really, truly happening. “Whatever joys I chased in Heaven and here on Earth, none of it compares to what it is when we’re together. Nothing you could do could manufacture what I feel. It’s only gotten so much more intense that I — I was so terrified that I’d give in. They’d destroy you! And I could never live with myself.” He gulps. Crowley watches the muscles in his throat move. Such strange, human forms, such a blessing that he gets to share them with this being. “Perhaps it was selfish, my dear, and for that, I am sorry. I chose to keep you at an arm’s length, rather than reach out and risk losing you forever.”
“And now?” Crowley asks, hoarse, on the precipice of something infinitely dangerous, and unimaginably beautiful.
“And now,” says the angel, “I feel that we are in just as much danger as we ever were. I also feel that perhaps we have a bit of time, a few hundred years or so, with luck, before our head offices bother to execute that danger.”
“Aziraphale,” Crowley beseeches. The angel purses his lips and straightens his back.
“I feel, too, that — selfish as this is, mind you — I am entirely certain I can see no point to having saved the world unless I get to share it with you.”
Crowley blinks, gathering himself, letting this wash over him, but before he can speak, Aziraphale does again.
“I mean this not in the heavenly way, though certainly it’s not merely the human way either, Crowley — I love you.”
And Crowley feels it, as pure and powerful as a blessing, but it doesn’t burn, because it’s Aziraphale, and it’s like a nebula erupts within him, spiraling and fierce and impossibly beautiful, and he meant to be so suave about it, he did, but his mouth opens and he’s babbling it, linear time an insufficient host to convey all the buried, desperate, aching love —
“ I love you, I love you, I love you — ”
And Aziraphale’s beaming at him, and it’s only when the angel reaches out to brush the tears from his cheeks does Crowley realize he’s crying for the first time since the flood, but the angel is too, and he gathers Crowley in his arms and Crowley curls up there, his arms flung around Aziraphale’s shoulders and his cheek pressed to the angel’s chest, and he feels all the places they can touch now, all the places Aziraphale will allow him to be close, wants him to be close. It feels too hot. It feels like a crick in his neck and a knee in his spine. It feels like a fresh love the world has never seen, deathless and chosen and theirs. It feels like the polar opposite of his fall.
“I’d say I fell in love with you a long time ago,” Crowley murmurs into the hollow of the angel’s throat. He’s wanted to place his mouth there since Eden. He does, and Aziraphale gives a sound he’s never heard before, of approval, of desire, and Crowley realizes, delirious, that he might be encouraged to coax a whole new realm of sounds from the angel now. He pulls back, presses his forehead to Aziraphale’s, and realizes that soft pink mouth is smiling, for him. With him. “But that doesn’t feel right, now that I’m here. I thought it did but no, angel, no — this love for you? This is a rising."
The angel’s lips part, those strong hands hold him ever closer, squeezing Crowley’s waist, his thigh, and Crowley can feel the want, can taste it on his tongue, a messy tangle of physical and ethereal and it’s blazing, it’s fierce, and it’s safe. A safe place to land in. To rise from. To come home to.
“And I you, Crowley.” The angel speaks the demon’s name with something as potent as reverence and Crowley gasps into it.
“Aziraphale,” Crowley says, his voice breaking now, and it’s the final question in need of affirmation, the sound of a creature on the brink of something massive and eternal, of disbelief and prayer and the wildest, purest hope. And Aziraphale looks at him, eyes blazing, and the angel’s wings erupt out of him, silver and enormous and fluttering, and he answers.
Aziraphale kisses him and it feels like the sun. A blaze of sheer creation, of stardust and story and light. A guardian, an awakening, a halo cast in all the colors of the universe.
Aziraphale kisses him and it feels like the sea. Something bigger than humans can fathom. Something fraught and magic that brings you closer to yourself, the fear of drowning never far but lifegiving, somehow, nonetheless.
Aziraphale kisses him, mouths clumsy, hungry, and wet together, tender and healing and it’s theirs, it’s theirs, theirs to make their own. His own wings spring from him, the ache still there but quieter now, and he pulls the angel closer with them.
Their bodies tangle together, Aziraphale still pressing into him, still healing him, grasping at him with searching hands, but now Crowley can balance him out with it, and he wraps his legs around the angel’s waist and reaches for as much of him as he can, and he can, and it’s the sating of a hunger that had so long been a part of him, had defined him, and now he can become something new, something glorious and magnificent, something nourished in shared want and trust and love.
“You heal me, Aziraphale,” he murmurs into the angel’s mouth. A present tense, with the promise of a future.
Without a breath of hesitation, all teeth and tongue and grasp, his lover replies, “you save me, Crowley.”
That night stretches until the early morning and at last, when he catches his breath, Crowley can rest. He curls into the angel’s arms and sleeps a soft and dreamless sleep, and when he wakes, Aziraphale is smiling, and he thinks he might never sleep again, if waking hours can be this.
-------
A year passes and they move to the cottage in the South Downs, they fill it with bookshelves and cozy mugs and growing things, climbing vines and nourishing vegetables, and they let the garden outside overflow with herbs and flowers. They do sleep, occasionally, for the comfort of resting nestled within each other, and waking each morning is the dawn of a new way to love. Every night, they let their wings out, they rub the sore ache of millennia from each other’s bodies, they entangle in the presence of each other.
More years pass and the thing between them only blossoms, fed and sparkling, a pattern of teasing and indulgence and attentiveness. It feels like it was never meant to be anything else, how they orbit each other, tend to each other.
They travel the globe together, blessing queer folks and poor folks and kind people working to change the world for good. Cursing those who are cruel, and leading them to ruin. They fly to Alpha Centauri, Crowley shows him the constellations he once crafted out of void and Aziraphale finds new shapes in them. They hold each other and watch the earth from afar, this miracle they’ve saved together, they come home and bake cookies in the shapes they found in clouds and stars, pull a tartan blanket over each other and listen to favorite symphonies over wine. This is how they live, not worrying about the fight that one day may come, but building on the love between them, and it is enough. Living in a love that’s deathless and tender and ever-growing, so pure and true it startled Her Herself, for She hadn’t made any beings capable to love this way. They figured it out themselves, tending a garden all their own.