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Folklore is a funny thing. Most of it is pure fantasy, or at least pure whimsy, which is closer to the truth, but not quite there yet. Humans are charming in that way; they’re remarkably skilled at coming up with arbitrary rules to live their lives by (step on a crack, break your mother’s—well, you know how it goes), but almost never actually hit upon the right ones.
One of the right ones was fairy circles. Lor—Sata—Somebody help the poor fool who mistakenly stumbles into a fairy circle. (Another one was actually the Loch Ness Monster, although that was less of a rule and more of an “Oh my, that’s quite an unflattering photograph of a perfectly polite and introverted survivalist dinosaur in a Scottish lake, let’s all agree to call it a rather mean name and make it more self-conscious than it’s ever been.”)
Another one humans have gotten right was the one about freckles being angel kisses.
Well. That isn’t exactly right. It’s not really that all freckles are caused by angel kisses, but that all angel kisses cause freckles. There are quite a lot of humans in the world, and more and more are born every minute, and frankly no one in the Upstairs Head Office wants to be in charge of kissing a bunch of babies. They’re angels, not politicians.
However, if an angel were to give someone a kiss, then yes, a freckle would appear in that spot. Who knows why. Sometimes, things just happen. It’s all, as Aziraphale would probably say, rather ineffable.
Speaking of Aziraphale, there he is now, in exactly the place you’d expect him to be for a story like this: sitting in his favorite armchair, sipping cocoa, staring rather unapologetically across the room at the demon Crowley. Crowley was perhaps not where you’d expect him to be; he was standing by Aziraphale’s old Bakelite phone, trying to figure out how to transfer its landline to the new smartphone he’d decided to give to his angel for Hanukkah. (Demons—and angels, for that matter—are nondenominational by nature, and don’t tend to celebrate any human holidays, but neither do they keep indoor plants, so. There you go.)
“Bloody thing,” said Crowley, slamming the phone down when the Verizon customer service hold hangs up on him for the third time in a row. (Crowley had helped found Verizon back in the 1990s, but by now he had completely forgotten that that was one of his. AT&T, however, was all the humans’ doing, and although he’d taken credit for it he’d been consistently horrified by it over the years.) “What the bloody Heaven does someone have to do to talk to a real, living person on this blessed thing?”
Aziraphale was not really paying attention to what Crowley was doing, and if he was he would not have understood it anyway. So instead of answering Crowley’s question, he said absentmindedly, “Why haven’t you ever kissed me, Crowley?”
It is important to note, for the reader’s benefit, that at this point in Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship, the words “love,” “forever,” and “stay” had been said out loud, but the words “date,” “move in,” and “kiss” had not. Communication was not exactly their strong suit.
You can imagine that this question caught Crowley off-guard. You could also imagine that it side-tackled him, dunked him in a fish tank, and wrung him out again, all while a chorus of annoyingly cheerful people yelled “SURPRISE!!” in the background. You would be more accurate if you imagined it like that.
“Gnhuh?” said Crowley.
Aziraphale soldiered on, quite unperturbed, as though it was a perfectly ordinary question to ask. “Why haven’t you ever kissed me? I’ve kissed you. Several times, actually, and you don’t seem to mind it.”
“Ynnghk,” Crowley said, before managing an actual word: “You. You kiss me on the cheek. You’ve been doing that for centuries. ‘S a politeness thing. France, bisous, you know. All that.” Crowley was as aware as you are that he wasn’t making much sense, but cut him a break, he’d been badly shocked.
“Well,” said Aziraphale. He didn’t have anything to follow it up with, though, because he’d understood Crowley well enough, and really, on some level he knew he was right. They’d never kissed properly, after all, the way human romance demanded it. A bit embarrassed, he added, “No reason you can’t start now, then.”
“Start what?”
“Kissing me. If you want to, I mean. I’d hate to rush you.”
“You, rush me?” Crowley laughed incredulously.
“Well, why aren’t you the one rushing me, then? I’d have thought you’d be all for it by now.” Aziraphale’s voice wasn’t exactly wounded, but it sounded as though it might have a scraped knee or a paper cut.
“Angel, it’s not that,” Crowley said, making his way over to the sofa. He sat in his usual spot, on the side nearest Aziraphale’s chair. “There’s—erm. Just. Something I’m not sure about.”
Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at him. “My dear boy, do you need lessons?”
“Not about kissing. Well—alright, yes, about kissing, but not about kissing. Just—argh. D’you know how, when you kiss me, or anyone, they get freckles?” Crowley’s cheeks had accumulated quite a dusting of freckles over the centuries from all the bisous, as it were. He often used concealer to cover them up, not necessarily because he disliked them, but because they ruined the whole bad-in-black aesthetic he was going for and had consistently failed to reach.
“Ah, yes,” Aziraphale said, in much the same satisfied way the reader might presently be saying to themselves: Ah, yes, now we can finally get to the point of the matter. “Side effect of being an angel, apparently. Not sure why. I suppose it’s rather ineffable.” (Told you so.)
“Well, don’t you suppose that if angel kisses give you freckles, demon kisses give you something worse?”
Aziraphale blinked a couple of times. He took a sip of his cocoa. “Well, there’s an idea,” he said.
“Like—boils, or pimples, or a rash, maybe.”
“I suppose that would make some kind of sense.”
“Something awful, at least. Something I’d never want to subject you to, Angel.”
“But surely, the other demons would know?” said Aziraphale. “Surely they’ve tried it out before?”
Crowley made a face. “Don’t make me picture that. Besides, you don’t talk about that sort of thing in Hell. It’s a workplace, Angel, it’d be inappropriate.”
Something occurred to Aziraphale. “My dear boy,” he said, “does that mean you’ve never kissed anyone before?”
In any other kind of story, with any other kind of characters, this would be Crowley’s turn to blush and mumble an excuse. Perhaps Aziraphale would seduce him afterwards, and it would all be very exciting. Supernatural beings, however, are unbeholden to human standards of physical affection and sensuality, and even more unbeholden to societal expectations of same. So instead, Crowley merely waved an unimpressed hand and said, “Eh, never really seemed like my scene. Tempting’s best when done from a distance.”
Aziraphale, who had done his fair share of tempting during the Arrangement, couldn’t help but agree. “Well, if you’d rather not, I’ll drop the subject. No hard feelings, my dear,” he said with a comforting smile.
“I mean with humans,” Crowley said, backtracking faster than an overdue VHS tape. “With you, I’d be willing to give it a shot.”
“Oh!” said Aziraphale, beaming. “Wonderful! Let’s get started, then.” He set down his cocoa and turned towards Crowley.
“Angel, I’m saying I would, but I don’t know what it’ll do to you, you see? I don’t want you breaking out into blisters on my account.”
“Nonsense,” said Aziraphale, who by this point had spent enough time thinking about Crowley kissing him that he was ready and willing to throw caution to the wind, provided the wind was very strong and wasn’t about to reverse directions anytime soon. “Whatever happens, I’ll just miracle it away.”
“Aziraphale,” said Crowley, who was trying to be very serious despite the fact that ever since the conversation had started he’d been thinking about kissing Aziraphale, “I’ve never been able to miracle away the freckles. Why would this be any different?”
“There’s always ointment. Remarkable stuff on the market nowadays, Crowley, medicine has really advanced since they stopped using leeches for everything.”
“Aziraphale.”
“Oh, Crowley, you can’t be sure until you try it! Just one small one, that can’t do much harm, can it?” Aziraphale turned his head so Crowley had easy access to his right cheek. “Just one quick bisou, my dear, that’s all.”
By then, Crowley was as impatient as I imagine the reader must be, so he, too, decided to throw caution into the proverbial tornado. Closing his eyes, he leaned in to kiss Aziraphale lightly, and quite chastely, on the cheek.
It was barely a peck, really, because Crowley thought that might make the side effects less severe. Aziraphale was quite pleasantly surprised at how warm and dry Crowley’s lips were. He turned back to Crowley, who had opened his eyes and was staring very closely at the spot where his lips had been. “Well?” said Aziraphale. “Anything?”
Aziraphale half-expected there to be nothing. Crowley fully-expected there to be a cluster of warts.
Neither of them expected there to be—
“Hngkf,” said Crowley. He was having a very articulate evening so far.
“What, what?” said Aziraphale, who was growing concerned.
Crowley pointed. In the center of Aziraphale’s cheek, where it definitely hadn’t been two minutes before, was a—
“Freckle,” said Crowley.
Aziraphale blinked at him. He touched his hand to his cheek. When he couldn’t feel anything, because freckles aren’t bumps and never have been, he went over to a nearby looking-glass on the mantelpiece. And, lo and behold, there it was: a single, brown dot sitting on Aziraphale’s pale cheek, just an inch or so below his right eye. “Oh, my dear,” he cried, “you did it, I’ve never had freckles on this body, never!”
“I—I mean it makes sense,” Crowley was saying, half to himself and half to the room in general. “Doesn’t it? Because I used to be an angel, just fallen, guess falling doesn’t revoke your freckle-gifting privileges. That makes sense. Doesn’t it?”
“Far more sense, I’d say,” said Aziraphale as he admired himself in the mirror, “than a kiss from you making me break out into pustules or something equally unpleasant.” He wandered back over to the sofa, and this time he sat right next to Crowley. “As if you could give me an allergic reaction, my dear.” He scoffed.
“Hmm.” Crowley thought for a moment. I won’t tell you what he thought, not yet, because that would ruin the fun of it, but he did think of something. And then he leaned over and rolled up Aziraphale’s sleeve.
“Darling?”
Crowley didn’t answer. Instead, he pressed precisely seven kisses, in a very precise pattern, over the inside of Aziraphale’s wrist.
Aziraphale was slightly ticklish there, and he had to stop himself from laughing and ruining Crowley’s handiwork. “What are you doing, Crowley?” he said, though he already had some idea.
When Crowley moved away, he was grinning triumphantly. He held up Aziraphale’s arm so he could see. “Orion’s Belt!” he exclaimed, and indeed it was. Four dots in a vaguely rectangular shape, representing Orion himself, plus three in a line in the middle forming his belt. It was exactly to scale, actually, which was impressive, considering Crowley had never even bothered to learn enough mathematics to torture humans with. “Oh, Angel,” Crowley said in a rare moment of genuine, unironic, pearls-clutching, romance-novel-cover-swooning, human-in-the-best-way-possible romantic passion, “I am going to paint the night sky all over you.”
“Crowley,” said Aziraphale, who, just between you and me, has read far more of those previously-mentioned romance novels than he will ever admit to. He couldn’t help the shiver that went through his body at a line like that; Crowley could really be quite seductive when he wasn’t trying to be.
“Angel,” said Crowley, in a voice that suggested he was now trying to be seductive and failing horribly, but Aziraphale didn’t mind. They had a lot of painting to do, after all, and between the two of them they could spend the rest of the night on it, thought Aziraphale as he kissed a star shape onto Crowley’s cheek.
Who knows, maybe eventually they’d get around to kissing one another on the lips. But that’s a story for another day, and besides, drawing constellations on your partner’s skin is so much more productive.