Archive of Our Own

Early 2nd century AD, Italy

The little inn is louder than Aziraphale expected, the communal dining room crowded despite the lateness of the season. Merchants, based on their clothes, and entertainers, traveling to Rome for the November games. He wavers on the doorstep, reconsidering: If he cannot have an hour or more of solitary quiet here, he could hire a fresh horse and stay on the road. He could even, if he so wished, skip the horse and travel by other means entirely, at heights and speeds no band of roving thieves could hope to match.

He looks to the forbidding grey sky and sighs. Rain is imminent, and there’s little point in struggling against what looks to be a day-long deluge in the making. It would be cruel to the horse, and folding away wet wings is uncomfortable at the best of times. Crowded provincial caupona it is. Perhaps he can find some peace when the other guests have retired for the evening.

It’s only after he’s finalized stabling and sleeping arrangements with the proprietor that he takes note of the familiar presence on the edge of his awareness. Watching. Drawing closer.

“Hello, angel.” The greeting comes in Aramaic, not Latin, he notes as he turns. “This is a surprise.” Crowley grins at him, a flash of teeth under polished stone lenses. “Sit,” he gestures at the stone bench across from him, miraculously open. “Have a drink. Did Trajen finally appoint someone to kick you out of his library? Or were you duly dispatched to the edge of civilization and only now returning for the feasting and theatre?”

“I thought you were busy out east,” Aziraphale frowns at him. Four thousand years they’ve been doing this. Chance meetings in odd places. He’d thought, by now, that he could sense the demon’s presence for miles around. “Stirring up the territories and fomenting rebellion, you said.”

Crowley waves a lazy hand and pours the wine. “Boring,” he says. “Hardly anything to do, really. It’s easy to resent emperors. Come on, sit.” He holds out the plain clay cup, expectant, and doesn’t say, Let me tempt you. That much, Aziraphale can take as understood.

He should resist, he knows he should. But he doesn’t. There’s no harm in a drink. A meal. A conversation.

He accepts the cup and sits, quietly encouraging their neighbors to shift further toward the hearth and focus on other business. Most of the conversation seems to be in Greek, with a sprinkling of Coptic and Punic in the corners of the room. Latin or Aramaic will make them stand out, but the language of the Empire is more likely to be understood, and Crowley seems quite dedicated to secrecy, if the coiled quiet of his aura is anything to go by.

“I’m being sent north,” he finds himself saying in Aramaic, against his better judgment. “There’s an oracle who needs a scribe.”

Crowley sips at his wine. “Right up your alley then.” He grins, sudden and delighted. “Did you ever get a chance at those Sibylline books? Fascinating, I thought. Rains of stone, lightning storms, astronomical phenomena all over the place.”

Aziraphale takes a drink. The wine is decent, but only that. “They’ve burned most of it.” He takes another sip. Much better. “The remaining books are kept safe under the Jupiter Capitolinus.”

Crowley is still smiling. Knowing. “You snuck in, didn’t you.”

“That,” Aziraphale points out, “would be illegal.” Crowley arches an eyebrow at him, which he refuses to dignify with an answer. Instead he inspects the thin fish and barley stew that’s been set in front of him. The accompanying bread is thick with beans and peas and well on its way to stale. Possibly not even a miracle can make it all palatable.

“And?” Crowley presses. “Thoughts?”

“Highly inaccurate,” Aziraphale sighs, pushing the bowl away and miracling it empty. “Too many authors and too much interference. Opium, mostly.”

“Too bad,” Crowley says, though he looks satisfied. “Well then, what news from the capitol these days?”

Outside, the rain begins to fall in sheets that roar against the roof tiles. Inside, they loiter over the wine, getting pleasantly drunk through most of the other guests’ first sleep and an hour or so after, until the proprietor, up for his mid-night rounds, gives them a look Aziraphale interprets as suspicious. He has paid for a bed, after all. He’s likely expected to at least use the room.

“You don’t sleep.” Crowley points a wavering finger at him, the ‘s’ drawn out and half-hissed. “I know you—unless you’ve picked it up. Have you picked it up? Do you sleep now?”

“It’s the look of the thing,” Aziraphale insists. “Maintaining appearances is important.”

Crowley snorts at that, but he stands when Aziraphale rises and follows in his wake.

“Go to your own room,” Aziraphale tells him. “I have reading to do.”

“’S jusssst one room,” Crowley says, pushing the door open.

One large room, crammed with bunks and people. Of course. Aziraphale’s not certain why he expected anything better in such a small roadside accommodation. The beds are simple straw ticks, most with three or four bodies crammed in each.

“Come on,” Crowley presses past him, one arm dangling behind him as either coaxing or presentation, Aziraphale’s not certain which. “Might as well get comfortable.”

“I’ll just … find a place to sit, I think,” Aziraphale demurs. But the room is unreasonably free of chairs, stools, or benches. It is quite obviously a room intended for sleep and nothing else.

Crowley snaps his fingers and the bed nearest the window is free of occupants—and the one next to it slightly more crowded. He strips down to his under-tunic with another snap, makes a show of arranging thin blankets and prodding at flat pillows, then lies back and, as far as one can tell with his eyes still covered, prepares to sleep.

Aziraphale would like to call him smug, at this juncture. Or mocking, perhaps, but he has some difficulty justifying the act of lying down on a bed as particularly goading. And so, of course, Aziraphale can only interpret it as something of a dare. Unfortunately, Crowley is also right. Not in the moral sense of Right and Wrong, obviously, but in the more mundane sense of ‘actions to be taken in this circumstance.’

Nothing else for it, then.

He removes his shoes, belt and wool over-tunic and clears a space to store them. He hesitates over his carry-bag and the precious scrolls inside, but he does wish to get some reading done. He pulls out the larger one—a partial history of the Empire—and settles onto the bed with as little movement and as much distance from Crowley as possible. Shared meals, shared wine, shared tables and conversation, those they’re well accustomed to. But he’s never actually seen Crowley sleep, despite knowing the demon’s taste for it. There’s something that itches in his mind about it. It feels different to watching humans sleep, somehow. Reading will provide some necessary distance of attention.

He’s just gotten a few lines in when Crowley hisses, “Put that out, angel.”

The light is quite small and dim, Aziraphale had made sure of that. Just enough to make the letters slightly easier to see.

“I told you, I’m reading,” he whispers back.

“Well, stop then.” Crowley turns his head to frown at him. “Put it away and lie down properly. Some of us like sleep, you could actually try it for once.”

Aziraphale huffs, quietly. “Boring, isn’t that what you said earlier? I have better things to do than stare at the back of my own eyelids, and I should think you do as well.” He turns back to his scroll, determined, now, to keep reading no matter what Crowley might say.

The pillow that hits him in the side of the head comes as something of a surprise. He glares, but Crowley’s expression is maddeningly unrepentant. “Maintaining appearances is important,” he mimics, leaving Aziraphale no choice but to drop the pillow on his smug face just as he opens his mouth again. He makes a muffled sort of grunt.

“Hush,” Aziraphale tells him. “You can sleep all you like. I’m busy.”

Crowley claws the pillow off his face and throws it again, nearly hitting the scroll.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale warns, rolling the parchment away carefully.

“If you don’t lie down properly,” Crowley threatens, “I will not only keep thumping you, but I will expend extra effort tempting all these people in their dreams.”

“There’s no need for that.” Aziraphale extinguishes the light. Reading will be more difficult, but he doesn’t precisely require the illumination.

Crowley keeps talking. “Think of it as thwarting. You sleep, I sleep. No one here has any especially demonic impulses come morning. Or angelic ones either. Just simple, human sleep.”

“We don’t need it,” Aziraphale insists. The pillow hits his shoulder this time. “Crowley, this is ridiculous.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Crowley counters, and swings the pillow again.

“You’re going to wake someone,” Aziraphale protests.

“Nah,” Crowley says with a grin that implies devilish powers at work. “Sleeping better than newborns, they are. Much better, considering the general experience of newborns.”

“You’re just trying to tempt me to sloth, I know you are.”

Crowley raises his pillow and Aziraphale, fed up, counters with his own. It’s unexpectedly satisfying. The cushions crash together again, and again, and again, and he’s not certain why he’s doing it except that Crowley will not stop, and has, in fact, begun laughing. Laughing at him, Aziraphale is quite sure. He swings his pillow around again, and a seam bursts, and feathers drift in the air between them. Aziraphale stares.

“I’m almost certain these accommodations are not good enough to merit feather pillows.”

Crowley shoves the ripped pillow at his face, expelling more feathers. “You can sleep on rushes and straw if you want to, but some of us have higher expectations,” he says. “Give up yet?”

There are little fluffy bits of down dancing around his face, and Aziraphale feels the universe shift, just slightly. He catches himself wondering what Crowley’s wings look like on a less physical plane, what his true shape is. Whether they’d known each other before the Fall, and the War.

Which is a pointless thing to wonder about, really. It wouldn’t matter. They would still be exactly as they are.

Angel.

Demon.

Opposite sides.

Crowley looks tired, he realizes suddenly. He feels tired, and not just physically. Strung out thin and twisted as newly spun thread. Something happened out east, Aziraphale thinks. He doesn’t ask what it was. Crowley wouldn’t tell him.

“Very well,” he says, arranging his pillow properly at the head of the bed once more. “Thwarting, you said.” He waves the feathers back into Crowley’s pillow and seals it with a light touch. “I suppose that’s a reasonable enough cause.”

“Right,” Crowley drawls, obviously suspicious. Aziraphale lies on his side and pulls the blankets up over his shoulder. Slowly, Crowley follows suit, tugging on blankets and shifting fitfully, often turning as if to check Aziraphale hasn’t moved. He hasn’t. He lets his eyelids half-close and watches, steady and calm, until finally, almost reluctantly, even the demon’s restless hands fall limply to his side.

When he’s certain Crowley is settled Aziraphale reaches inside himself, to the deep clear well of peace he carries. He lets it trickle out, spreading over the room to soothe nightmares and relieve pain, softening worries and harsh memories. Beside him, Crowley’s breathing deepens and slows, and the buzz of thoughts under his skin quiets.

It is perhaps not entirely an appropriate use of divinity. Certainly Crowley would never ask for it, despite the need he’s carrying. There are some things it’s just better, they’ve found, not to acknowledge out loud. But Aziraphale has played the guardian light before, and he has no doubt the role will find him again. It’s easy enough to fall back into that purpose, that pointed sort of selfishness: this place is mine, the litany goes. This space, these souls. Mine. His awareness spreads out like wings unfurled, a shield and a cradle that stretches to the edges of the building and seeps into cracks in the masonry, spelling safety and health against the darkness outside.

The rain subsides to a gentle patter. Dawn drifts ever closer; he can feel the turn of the Earth, twisting like a flower toward the light. A few hours, perhaps, and the sun will bring wakefulness, and movement, and a resumption of mortal cares. But not yet. Not yet.

Aziraphale watches the shifting curl of Crowley’s shoulders, and the soft shape of his mouth, tugged oblong by gravity, and waits.