Work Text:
When Aziraphale disguises his wings from the view of mortals, they don’t simply disappear – they are banished to a kind of ethereal pocket dimension, a side effect of being a principality on Earth, he thinks. He hasn’t asked any of the other angels about it, and he does not intend to let on that it’s there at all should they ask him, which they never have.
Although he would like to consider his memory across the centuries to be fairly perfect, there are little gaps in his narrative, such as the first time he discovered said ethereal pocket. He doesn’t remember when or how he came to be aware of it. In fact, he knows very little about where his wings go – only that he can make them disappear, and when he summons them – which he rarely does in the modern world – they are warm and dry, sun-soaked and pristine. He comes to enjoy the sensation of their fresh warmth when he does call them to his shoulders now and then. He notes that the sensation of putting on clean socks fresh out of the dryer (or, in Aziraphale’s case, freshly miracled socks after trudging through the London rain) is similar, a distant echo of the ecstatic comfort of feeling his own white-hot feathers stretch and retract to settle against the shape of his back. After summoning, the warmth fades bit by bit, and leaves him feeling a bit wistful, albeit on a subconscious level.
It is the bone-deep sadness of humanity’s self-loathing and cruelty that dog the angel’s steps as he returns to the bookshop and straight to the comfiest sofa in the back room. He has spent a particularly long week comforting a woman called Valerie. The dark turns her domestic married life have taken over the last decade are heart-wrenching, and recent events have put Valerie on the brink of several drastic possible choices for her future. Aziraphale has spent days at her side, both invisibly and as a smattering of acquaintances and bystanders, desperately trying to ease her pain and encourage her heart towards preservation rather than ruin. He is not sure yet what will become of Valerie, but he has helped her pack her bags and left her in a safe place with her sister in Croydon before returning to his bookshop to recover his own wits.
He removes his coat, sighing, and the ache in his heart rises to almost a tea kettle’s whistle of frustration. He turns, stretching, and without even thinking reaches into the aether for his wings. Straightaway they come, and with them the golden, toasted warmth of some unknown sun, enfolding him in such a tender embrace that he can almost just think the Almighty has been saving this warm hug just for him.
He closes his eyes, savoring it as the warmth begins to fade. The mortal realm has these pesky laws of thermodynamics set in motion aeons ago and unfortunately it means that warm things get cooler and cool things get warmer and all sorts of inconvenient nonsense like that. It makes food a particularly time-sensitive activity, he’s noted over the years, and now, this particular self-care gesture falls into the same category.
Aziraphale opens his eyes slowly, exhaling a deep, reverent breath. It is a kind of meditation, he supposes, although he hadn’t been thinking about anything in particular. His eyes, half-lidded and soft-focused from the warmth, shift to something on the air that is, at the moment, lazily wafting down towards the ground.
With a lightning-like clarity, Aziraphale’s gaze snaps wide and he leans forward to watch the single black feather flutter downwards, landing gossamer-fine on the aging floorboards of the back room.
A… black … feather…?
No.
But yes?
Aziraphale crouches, wings lifted slightly to balance himself, and tenderly reaches for it. His fingers brush the downy barbs at the base of the shaft, and his mind’s eye fills with flame-yellow eyes and a steep grin the likes of which could stop a charging bull in its tracks, let alone –
Aziraphale gasps and recoils, the sudden movement disturbing the little feather along the ground, caught in his wake.
Crowley.
Before he can rethink it, Aziraphale snatches up the feather and straightens. There. Not so frightening, now, was it?
But was it frightening? It was, a bit. To think that Crowley – or anyone really – has been in his own private wing-space… but was it his? It has never occurred to him that the space might be shared, or even belong to someone else entirely. What if it wasn’t his, but Crowley’s after all?
The thought is almost too much. He hides the feather away in a desk drawer somewhere he doesn’t have to look at it and promptly forgets all about it.
Until it happens again.
Aziraphale, having forgotten about the first feather incident, is not sure how long it has been between then and now, but now he stands tiptoed on a stepstool between the shelves of his antique books. His spectacles slide a little further down his nose as he studies the spines, trailing his finger along the shelf’s edge. Taking inventory is a particular pleasure of his, but today he is troubled. Distracted. Something he heard through the celestial grapevine, so to speak, about the end of the world being a little bit closer every day.
He leans a little too far, counting book bindings. The stepstool under him wobbles, then tips.
In one instinctive pull, Aziraphale’s wings erupt from between his shoulderblades like sunlight through clouds, illuminating the drafty bookshop around him and pulling him into a kind of slow-motion descent rather than an undignified tumble to the ground.
As his shoes touch the creaky floorboards once more, just to the side of the toppled stool, Aziraphale feels a tickle - no, an itch? - in both wings. He shudders them, stretching the pinions wide and shivering, craning his neck to look at the source of irritation.
Mixed in with the pale pristine feathers of his own wingspan are not one but several ink-black feathers, poking out at strange, rumpled angles.
Are my feathers turning black? He thinks, with a startled cry.
Aziraphale flaps his wings once indignantly, then reaches for the interrupting black quills. They come loose quickly at his touch, and his mind is once again filled with the gleam of sunlight on snakeskin, the throaty indolent chuckle of a demon, and a remembrance of the smell of the first thunderstorm over the Garden of Eden.
Aziraphale stands, trembling, hands cupped together and overflowing with black feathers of different sizes.
But what does it mean?
After several minutes of focused breathing, Aziraphale stashes these quills away in the desk drawer with the first one. He realizes with dismay that he does not notice the warmth of his wings this time, as they have already cooled quickly to room temperature. His mouth turns downward sharply in disappointment, and he goes to fix himself a cup of tea. Just the thing to feel better, he hopes.
Several years go by, and Aziraphale summons his wings with caution only when most needed. Every time he does so, he finds a handful or two of black feathers and with them sensory images of Crowley’s smirk, Crowley’s hair, Crowley’s hiss, Crowley’s hands.
Over these several years, the angel and the demon bump into one another a few times, but not once does Aziraphale manage to bring up the peculiar subject that he believes Crowley’s wings have infiltrated his own private wing storage space. Once of these several occasions does he meet Crowley’s gaze and deeply consider bringing it up but he, well, you see, he just, well, can’t.
It must show on his face, because Crowley’s expression wrinkles with sudden disdain.
“Angel…” His voice is half-purr, half-groan. It makes Aziraphale blush and look away innocently. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“That thing. That thing where you think too hard about something and paralyze yourself with indecision.”
Aziraphale’s gaze snaps back to the demon, who leans forward suddenly, draping himself along the park bench. Aziraphale presses his knees together, bracing for some sort of impact.
“I… well… I’m not sure. My mind is a thousand places at once, old boy.”
“You’re being obtuse on purpose,” Crowley mutters. “I’m bored. Tell me something, anything. Entertain me!” He leers a little over the tops of his dark glasses.
Aziraphale swallows, mouth suddenly dry.
“I… well, I was thinking, Crowley… You see…” He tugs at his tweed bowtie a little as though to loosen it, then tugs it back into place as though thinking better of it.
“Oh, do spit it out, angel,” the demon whines.
“I mean, that is to say, do you ever wonder where your wings go when you’ve banished them from sight?”
Crowley stares at Aziraphale. A strange blankness settles over his fine-boned features. Aziraphale purses his lips a little, defensively.
“What,” Crowley replies at long last, “the actual Hell are you talking about, angel?”
“When you--” Aziraphale glances about to ensure nobody nearby is listening. Nobody is. He daren’t lean closer to Crowley but he raises his eyebrows and tips his head towards him instead. “--that is, when you hide your plumage, where do you suppose your wings go to hide, eh?”
Crowley squints behind his designer sunglasses. His mouth is slightly agape in thought, and Aziraphale tries not to notice the slightly forked tongue as it darts to one corner of the mouth in a completely subconscious gesture.
“You mean, assuming they aren’t still physically attached to my person, but assuming they physically remove themselves and hide somewhere until I call them up again?” Crowley clarifies.
Aziraphale nods. It does sound rather silly out loud. This was a miserable mistake.
“Are you stoned, angel?” Crowley’s question is dead serious, not even remotely mocking.
Aziraphale recoils. “No! No, I am jolly well not. I simply… wondered! I wondered whether you had ever thought about it.”
“I can’t say that I’ve thought about it,” Crowley says simply. “But you have, I take it.”
“I… Well, no, but I…” Aziraphale hedges, squirming in his seat.
Crowley leans in a little more. He says nothing. It is much worse when he says nothing, and Aziraphale can feel those eyes burning into him.
“When I summon them back again,” he says softly, looking at his hands, “they’re very warm. And clean. And well-groomed. They feel… I don’t know, blessed? It’s incredibly soothing. But the warmth fades a little after a while. Thermodynamics, you know.” He laughs, but it feels forced, and he knows that Crowley isn’t amused.
Crowley’s expression is unreadable. There is none of the usual mouth-quirk or eyebrow shift. There is no curled lip or tipped chin. He simply stares back at Aziraphale behind his shades, unmoving for several moments.
“Blessed, you say?” Crowley’s voice is low, and a little husky with something that sounds like need, or envy, or both. “Warm?”
Aziraphale glances sideways at him. He nods shyly.
Crowley purses his lips briefly, then sits back, withdrawing from Aziraphale’s personal space. “Must be nice,” he mutters darkly.
“So you’ve never noticed anything like that about your wings when you summon them again?” Aziraphale presses on, confused. He’s already let the cat out of the bag, more or less. Best get all the answers.
Crowley sniffs and shakes his head. “Nope. Nothing like that.” There’s a cold moment when Aziraphale wonders whether Crowley’s insulted. Then the demon gives a brittle laugh and smirks at him. “Funny, though. You’d think being a demon mine would be warm, too. Being in Hell, and all that.”
“Er. Yes… rather,” Aziraphale agrees, haltingly.
This can’t be right. Whose feathers is he finding mixed in with his own, if not Crowley’s? An uncomfortable pause stretches between them.
Night falls on the park and the greater London area. The lampposts come on in the twilight, the crickets sing, the ducks drift by towards their nests. The park is quiet and very peaceful this time of night, this time of year, this particular decade.
After sitting in contemplative silence for some time, Crowley stands abruptly, stretches, cracks his head back and forth.
“Are you off, then?” Aziraphale asks, somewhat relieved to have surpassed the awkward moments. He stands, straightening his tie and jacket.
Crowley nods several times in quick succession, looking about and shoving his hands in his pockets. Aziraphale watches him bob his head, watches the flash of different muscles across his jaw.
“Crowley,” he says, gently.
“What,” says the demon.
“You’re doing it again.” Aziraphale offers a little half-smile. A kind of truce. “That thing where you think too hard about what to say and it makes you deeply uncomfortable to address feelings of a positive, heavenly nature.”
Crowley gives a kind of pout, glancing down at his fine leather shoes, then up at Aziraphale. He studies him from behind the glasses.
“Well,” he says, drawing the word out reluctantly. “Since you brought it up… I did find this the other day when I summoned mine.”
He pulls a hand out of his pocket. Pinched between his fingertips is a single white feather, as plain as the gravel path they’re standing on. Aziraphale is sure as anything that the feather came from one of his own wings.
The breath goes out of him a little. “Crowley! Why do you have one of my feathers?” his whisper is meant to be indignant but instead it comes out breathless and - of all things - hopeful.
Crowley twirls the little feather back and forth, not looking at it. “Found it, angel. Fell out of one of my wings when I put them on recently. Not a clue where it came from? No idea whatsoever?” He sounds a little uneasy, almost demanding.
Aziraphale blushes. Crowley, too, it would seem, is uncomfortable with some unspoken breach of social and celestial protocol.
“Do you want me to take it back?” Aziraphale ventures.
“No,” sighs Crowley, irritable. “You have other things to worry about than my feathers turning white.”
Aziraphale’s eyebrows lift even higher. “Your feathers --?” He stops. He takes a breath, then huffs it out in a short laugh of uncertainty. “Crowley. Surely you don’t think your feathers are turning white.”
Crowley frowns severely at him, and Aziraphale’s uneasy smile vanishes like dust wiped from his own bookshelves in one fell swoop.
“So you do have another idea where it came from?”
Aziraphale draws himself up a little taller. “Well, you know, I rather think I do.”
“Really!” Crowley growls. “Do tell.”
Aziraphale startles a little, then balls his fists up at his sides to keep himself standing tall. “You know, Crowley, I brought it up because you aren’t the only one finding feathers of a different color caught in his wings.”
“Excuse me?” Crowley steps forward, looming over the angel with a hard-set jaw.
“I know it’s a very personal thing, wing-grooming and feather-maintenance, and all that, but I’ll have you know that on several occasions now I have discovered black feathers caught in my own white ones. Not attached, just… sort of… rumpled in there. Mixed-up, you see. And I thought, well! There’s really only one person I know with feathers like that.”
Crowley hisses through his teeth. “Feathers like what , angel?”
“Like… l-like this!”
Aziraphale summons his wings.
Warmth rushes through and over him, instantly soothing the indignant hurt and uncertainty that had been burning in his chest. His wings stretch side to side, a vast wingspan of sunlit warmth, and both he and Crowley snap their attention to see one or two long black quills flutter out from between his own feathers.
Aziraphale grabs at one as it flutters on the air. Catching it, he waves it triumphantly. “There, you see!”
Crowley’s expression does not abate. Instead his eyebrows knit and arch in something like outrage, and with a tug of his body he pulls his own wings into existence.
Aziraphale has not seen Crowley’s wings up close in a long time. They are black, shimmering in places but dull in others, ragged all over from wind and weather and what Aziraphale can only assume has been some sort of fighting. Here are marks of aging, of defeat, of trauma. The black pinions stretch meekly, nowhere near the lush snowy canvas of Aziraphale’s own spread, and in the dim light of the lamp post several feet away, the angel and the demon note a large, fat, sleek white feather poking out from one of Crowley’s wings.
There is a moment where the two of them stare at the feather, followed by a moment where they stare, gobsmacked, at one another.
“Crowley!”
“Angel, I --”
“But how is this…? I say, you’re missing quite a lot of feathers, you know, are you all right?”
Crowley’s expression is suddenly pained, almost to the point of anguish, and Aziraphale feels a familiar tug on his heart usually reserved for humans in various degrees of catastrophe. He needs comfort.
“Crowley,” he says again, more seriously and much softer. “It seems as though our wings are… closer to one another than perhaps we realize. At least when we’ve hidden them away.” He holds up the black feather, then reaches across the short distance to retrieve the white feather from Crowley’s wing.
At the angel’s touch, the demon shudders visibly, his teeth gritted, his thin shoulders slumping. Aziraphale is quick, and recoils, holding both feathers in one hand.
“My dear boy,” the angel says quietly. “You said yours aren’t warm when you retrieve them?”
Crowley’s throat works silently. He shakes his head.
Aziraphale says nothing, unsure of what to offer in terms of words, but for the first time, he feels sure of what he can offer in terms of gesture.
He steps forward, his bright white wings enfolding the demon’s black ones in an embrace of comfort, of understanding, of kinship.
Crowley trembles and nearly buckles at the sudden warmth. Aziraphale’s arms reach out to catch him, and they lean against one another, chest to chest.
“It’s all right,” Aziraphale says. “It’s all right.”
This time, warmth from the unknown place where wings go when hidden does not seep away into the night air like breath on a windowpane. This time, as the white feathers enfold the black ones, the warmth magnifies, moving gently through one set of pinions into the other. Aziraphale, in spite of himself, closes his eyes and feels the heady rush of delight that accompanies the warm feeling. He never wants to let go. He hopes with all his might that Crowley feels the sensation, too, but has no idea how to ask it.
Please, Almighty, bless this--
The heat echoes back. Aziraphale feels the ripple like a tingle down his spine. Delighted, he pulls back a little to speak, but is interrupted as the demon’s arms pull around his waist, hugging him closer.
The feeling is brighter, more clear than Aziraphale has ever felt it before. He doesn’t fully understand why it is so, but he thinks he might understand what it is.
He closes his eyes, returning the gentle squeeze with his own arms around Crowley, their wings encircling and enfolding one another like an armillary sphere: circles and circles and circles on all axes and all angles, perfectly round and close and in harmony with one another.
Together and separate. Near and far.
Blessed and warm.