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When they are in public, it really doesn’t hurt as much. Aziraphale rationalizes it, makes a point of saying to himself, he’s just trying to protect me, he doesn’t trust Heaven or Hell, he’s trying to make sure they don’t know what we are to each other. It doesn’t exactly fall flat, but it isn’t exactly convincing either, because it’s obvious that Crowley doesn’t love him. He can almost swear he feels the snake writhing over his heart, and knows it’s only his own turmoil swirling there instead.
But when they are alone, that justification crumbles into nothing. The bookshop is safe, safer than it’s ever been. Heaven’s cut off his gateway and Hell has never been able to penetrate. So here is where they’re safe, here is where they don’t neeed protection. Here is where Crowley keeps withdrawing from him, shying from any contact. Here is where Crowley proves that Aziraphale’s affections are unwanted. Over and over again, he proves it.
And so he tries to pull away. He tries to distance himself from Crowley--he can’t even think of Crowley as a demon any longer. Just Crowley. He has seen the feather on Crowley’s shoulder; he knows what it means. Crowley must have seen the snake, and is therefore rejecting him. That hurts. But Aziraphale soldiers on, trying to go back to the contentment they had as just friends all those millennia ago. (It’s a failure; Aziraphale only comes to realize they were never just friends, and that just makes everything worse.)
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Falling didn’t hurt like this.
Crowley is in agony, almost every second of every day. Worse than before, worse when Aziraphale still had the excuse of Heaven to hold himself back. Now, even that barrier is gone, and Aziraphale is letting loose the full bore of his friendship.
He is drowning in it, suffocating as every act of kindness is another albatross around his neck. Every touch of Aziraphale’s hand he must reject is another stone tied to his waist, and can’t that bloody angel see that he’s slowly dying? A cell a day, two cells a day, something inside Crowley combusts every day, burns away a tiny portion of who he used to be, until there is only the Crowley that loves Aziraphale with all of his being. The Crowley that has always existed but now cannot be denied.
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It comes to a head when Anathema has come to visit Aziraphale’s shop. She needs a copy of the Nemean Codex of Nymphic Fauna and Aziraphale is the only person in... well, pretty much the entire world that has a copy. She doesn’t even want to buy it; she just wants to borrow Aziraphale’s comfortable chair and look a few things up, maybe copy out a couple of diagrams. And so Aziraphale installs her in his office, brings her a cup of hot cocoa, and leaves her to it while he putters about the shop.
After a couple of days, she notices that there’s a rather large black snake that’s fond of draping over the back of the chair. “Hello, Crowley,” she says kindly, and he lays his head back on her shoulder. Oddly enough, she feels protected, not threatened, and she offers him drinks from the hot cocoa that Aziraphale continues to replenish for her.
And when she stretches out on the old couch in the back to sleep, Crowley drapes over the back of the sofa, whispering into her ear the answers to the questions she asks him. Is everything all right now? Are you and Aziraphale safe? The world isn’t going to end, is it? Yes, everything is all right now, yes, I think we’re safe, no, the world isn’t going to end.
And Aziraphale is jealous. He is jealous because Crowley only talks to him. He is jealous because Crowley only curls up around his shoulders like that, because Crowley is giving attention to Anathema and he does not like it.
Of course, he apologizes for Crowey’s behavior, promises to have a talk with him about leaving her alone, and how not everyone likes having a great huge snake hanging all over them. And Anathema is silent for a very long moment, and she asks Aziraphale if he’d ever gotten any tattoos.
Aziraphale is silent, too, because he doesn’t know how to answer that. he’s flustered by the personal nature of the question, so flustered that he doesn’t notice that a tiny garter snake is coiled around Anatheman’s hair bun, eyes closed so that the bright yellow doesn’t give him away. Anathema asks again, pointedly.
Finally Aziraphale answers that he doesn’t have a tattoo, as such, more like a mark that appeared in the 1940s. He pretends to be vague about the date, so that he doesn’t have to explain it, but he remembers it precisely. It was the night a certain demon dropped a bomb on a certain church and saved a bag of prophecy books from Nazis.
Oh, one of those. Anathema pulled her skirt up to her knee, rolled down her stockings, and showed Aziraphale the tiny little blue newt-shaped mark on the back of her calf.
Aziraphale hesitated to show his off, because it was going to be quite obvious who it meant, but then he reflected that Anathema was a fairly sharp observer of the people around her and had probably figured it out already, hence the direct questioning.
It took him several minutes to unbutton and untuck everything enough, but he opened his shirt and displayed the coiled black snake over his heart.
A loud hiss from Anathema’s hair startled the angel, and he quickly buttoned everything back up, hiding the tattoo. Anathema held out her hands, and Crowley quickly slithered out of her hairstyle and into her hands. Gently she placed him on the floor, and quickly exited to the office and closed the door behind her as Crowley took on his own shape.
He didn’t bother to unbutton anything; his own jacket and vest and shirt disappeared, exposing the white feather, such a brilliant white it made him look almost sallow in comparison.
Aziraphale miracled his own layers open again, and pulled them aside to expose the snake over his heart, coal-black with yellow eyes and a lava-bright underbelly.
The wing on Crowley’s skin fluttered with the rapid, panicked tattoo of his heartbeat. The snake on Aziraphale’s skin slithered in a repeating circuit, twining in on itself over and over again. “They all saw it in Hell,” Aziraphale whispered, looking at the feather. “White and pure and gleaming, just like you. completely human, completely not demonic.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Crowley demanded, nearly breaking down as the weight of knowledge pressed in on him. He could barely keep his feet. “Almost a hundred years, and you never said. You never said after you saw mine.”
“I thought you’d seen it,” Aziraphale confessed softly. “It never occurred to me that you didn’t.” He reached out to touch the rippling feather, and he was gutted when Crowley flinched away.
Crowley grabbed the angel’s hand and dragged it back onto his skin. “It’s your feather, angel, it fell out of your wing when you lifted it up to keep the rain off, and it never moved. Ever.”
Aziraphale’s breath caught in his throat as he felt the softness of Crowley’s skin rolling with the tattoo. He fumbled his grip for a moment, but he finally had hold of Crowley’s wrist, and lifted cool fingers to press against the scaly surface of the snake tattoo. “It’s you, Crowley.”
The kiss that follows is almost anti-climactic. Crowley kisses Aziraphale because for six thousand years, he’s been denied the chance. There’s longing, need, hunger, want, and even blessed satisfaction in that kiss. Aziraphale kisses back, because he understands now, and there is regret and apology and promises of new beginnings and so much love in that kiss. There was more in the kiss than could ever be communicated by lips, or marks, but that was all right, because the combination of the two took care of it.
Almost like they were meant to be one.