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The Fourth Day Of The Rest Of Their Lives
The passersby flowed past the windows of the bookshop in one long, unending stream of humanity, and Crowley and Aziraphale watched them go.
“They don’t even know how lucky they are,” said Aziraphale.
“A pity,” said Crowley. “We’ll never get the parade we’re owed. Honestly, we should be given medals. Hey, imagine me with an OBE!”
Crowley fully expected Aziraphale to retort with some remark about demonic pride, but instead the angel just smiled at him, and it was everything Crowley could have dreamed of. There he was, the only person Crowley could stand in this entire wretched, wonderful world, and he was smiling at him, no conditions, no need for caution or care, and Crowley could just watch him do it, without averting his eyes or turning away out of politeness.
They were seated in Aziraphale’s back room, drinking, which was traditional, but they’d been there for a good long while, and at some point Aziraphale had moved onto the half of the sofa that wasn’t occupied by Crowley’s lengthy form, which was fairly unexpected. Crowley had one leg up on the cushions and the other dangling below, and Aziraphale was sitting primly as ever despite the drink, knees to the front.
“I still can’t quite believe it,” Crowley went on. “Everything that happened. And now it’s just…. Done. I dunno.”
“It is strange,” agreed Aziraphale.
“Well, we’ve got plenty of time to get our heads around it.”
“Hm,” said Aziraphale. “I nearly think I have the shape of it already.” His smile had faded, and he was looking at Crowley oddly now, his usually round and guileless eyes narrowed inscrutably. Then he stared down into his glass and sighed— a heavy noise, as unreadable as his expression.
“What is it?” Crowley asked, minutely attuned as always to fluctuations in the angel’s mood and affect.
A silent second, and then: “I said some awful things, didn’t I?” Aziraphale pressed his mouth into a hard line, and then glanced back up at Crowley. “Last week.”
Crowley waved a hand, as casually as he was capable of with the prickly memory of the bandstand confrontation involuntarily flaring up inside his head and heart. “S’fine,” he said. “I get it. No biggie. You were having a bad day, we’ve all been there.”
Aziraphale didn’t look very reassured. “Well, you should know— I do like you. Very much so.”
“I knew that,” said Crowley confidently.
“Of course you did.”
“And you’re not so bad yourself,” continued Crowley. He drained his drink, dropped the glass with a soft thunk on the table, and changed the subject. “Think about it. We don’t have to see any of them, ever again.”
Aziraphale didn’t seem to require any clarification to understand who exactly Crowley meant by them. “There’s a thought,” he said, wonderingly. “It can just be… us. ”
At that, his hand brushed Crowley’s leg, and Crowley, more out of habit than surprise, quickly jerked it away. He was long used to giving Aziraphale his personal space; providing the angel with enough plausible deniability to explain away any touch as a mere accident of movement. He rarely thought anything of it, the way he always circled Aziraphale at a comfortable distance, telegraphing I’m here, but I won’t come any closer, you’re safe, from me, from them, from anyone.
Aziraphale’s hand moved quietly back to its place in his lap, and Crowley said, “Just us, then. There you are. I don’t really need a medal. Got my reward right here.”
At that, Aziraphale beamed so brightly that Crowley was tempted to retrieve his shades from the table and put them back on.
“Oh,” the angel said. “Oh, what a lovely thing to say.”
“Shut up,” said Crowley, reflexively.
The Third Week Of The Rest Of Their Lives
In theory, Crowley knew things were sure to change. You didn’t just avert an Apocalypse and then profess your devotion to one another (in so many words) without expecting more newness to follow, a cascade of interpersonal events unfolding in a manner of weeks to rival the developments of the past hundred years, if not the past thousand.
But in practice, he was so brilliantly contented with what had already come to pass that he could hardly stretch his usually-capacious imagination to cover anything beyond that.
So when Aziraphale’s hand brushed his as they stood in front of the glassed-in premium cabinet of their favorite specialty wine store and argued over what to buy, he nearly thought he’d hallucinated, a misconception which was helped along by Aziraphale carrying along the conversation like nothing was strange at all.
And when Aziraphale greeted him at the water’s edge at Hyde Park with a gentle rub of the shoulder, Crowley stared at him wide-eyed and incredulous for just a second before shaking the shock off and returning his face to carefully studied neutrality.
In six thousand years of on-and-off friendship, Crowley had never known Aziraphale to be… well, touchy-feely. Angels in general disdained physical contact; the creatures were cerebral, spiritual, ethereal. Aziraphale, of course, was different in some ways, in many ways, from most angels, possibly owing to the amount of time he’d spent down on Earth, but in other ways he still hewed close to their standards of decorum.
I mean, just look at him, Crowley would think. Starched to perfection. Covered up since the Garden, top to bottom. Crowley was pretty sure the last time he saw Aziraphale’s bare elbow was sometime during the Pax Romana. And the two of them, well, they’d hardly exchanged anything more intimate than a handshake since an experimental, unprofessional drunken kiss around the time of Cain and Abel. Too risky. Too... human.
Aziraphale probably didn’t know what he was doing, was all. The high stress of recent events had just— scrambled his brain, or something like that, leaving him stripped of his usual defenses and uncharacteristically forthright.
The sooner Crowley said something about it, acknowledged it, the sooner the angel would clam back up, apologizing for his impropriety, and Crowley would have to just take it, deal with it like the mature demon he was.
Which would be no fun at all, really.
The Second Month Of The Rest Of Their Lives
Most things can be chalked up to coincidence.
Immortals like Crowley know that it’s really just a matter of probability; if you live long enough, everything that can occur will occur, in one form or another, and you cannot necessarily always derive meaning from pattern, repetition, or correlation.
But this whole thing, the Aziraphale-touching-him thing, it happened, and then it happened again, and then it kept fucking happening.
And Crowley, being who and what he was, couldn’t possibly turn off the part of his mind that was constantly asking questions like what does it all mean, however much he’d wished to be able to for millennia.
It all came to a head on one particular lazy autumn afternoon. Crowley had fallen asleep on the bookshop sofa while Aziraphale dealt mercilessly with an infuriatingly persistent pack of Portuguese professionals who had their eye on a full set of ancient Austens.
And when he awoke, surfacing slowly through layers of distant, dissolving dreams, he found that the pillow underneath his head was no longer a pillow but the comfortable, linened lap of an angel, and said angel’s fingers were combing through his hair in impossibly gentle strokes. His whole body was electrified by the sensation, fizzing down his spine, releasing tension he hadn’t known he’d been holding even in sleep.
Fuck, it was just too much. This was no longer happenstance. The questions were all lined up on his tongue, battering like an army at the inner hatches of his teeth.
“Hold on. Hold on,” he hissed, going stiff under Aziraphale’s hands. “Are you— did you— what are you doing? Do you know what you’re doing?"
“I’m playing with your hair, dearie.”
“Yes, yes, I noticed,” croaked Crowley, and he slid right out of Aziraphale’s lap and into a shellshocked sprawl on the floor at his feet.
Aziraphale leaned over the supine demon, examining his face with a look of concern.
“Are you quite alright, Crowley?”
“Fine,” said Crowley, not sounding fine at all. His eyes slid out of focus as he gazed back up at Aziraphale, turning the angel into a pale, fluffy blur above him.
“But you’re on the floor. Can’t be comfortable, darling.”
“How— how long’ve you been calling me that?”
“Calling you what?”
“Um.” Now Crowley closed his eyes. “Darling. Dearie. N’ the rest.”
“Oh, ages,” said Aziraphale. “Ages and ages and ages.”
He reached down, unseen by Crowley’s still-shut eyes, and picked up Crowley’s hand from where it lay at his side. Crowley let him do it; Aziraphale took the demon’s hand between the two of his, and used his thumbs to rub gentle circles on each side.
“And that,” Crowley said. “You’ve been doing that—”
“Yes,” said Aziraphale, “and you’ve been letting me. Is there a problem? I can stop, you know, if it’s making you at all uncomfortable—”
“Please don’t,” Crowley tried very hard to say, but it came out as more of a wordless whine.
Aziraphale, his hands still soft against Crowley’s, now slowly knelt down off the sofa to land gently on the ground, squeezing himself into a space that hadn’t existed moments prior. The side of his leg was right up against Crowley’s hip; even through the layers of fabric on either end, the feeling of the angel’s warmth against his body was excruciatingly pleasant. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this close to another body. It simply hadn’t occurred to him as something he might have needed; now, he couldn’t understand how he’d gone on without it.
“We’re both on the floor now,” said Crowley, dumbly.
“I’m aware,” Aziraphale responded, calm as anything.
“D’you want to, you know. Not be on the floor?”
“I don’t mind.”
Crowley opened his eyes and turned to look at the angel, who was gazing at him with such unguarded, open warmth he felt his insides melt like chocolate in a hot pan, like the first step in a daring new recipe whose final result was as of yet entirely unknown.
“But— what are you doing?” he hissed again, having wholly forgotten that he’d already asked that not a full minute ago.
“I thought it was obvious. You can’t be telling me you haven’t realized what I’ve —”
“I have,” choked Crowley, thinking of the many soft touches he’d obsessively, unconsciously catalogued over the past few weeks. “But I— it’s— look— it’s not an accident?”
“No.”
“It’s not— a mistake, then, or something you’re going to wish you could take back, or an an instinct, or a reflex, or a lie, or a trick—”
“Crowley. No—”
“—or a symptom of some, ah, er, post-Apocalyptic psychosis, or, or a really elaborate prank, am I on camera—”
“Crowley, you are babbling. ”
Crowley snapped shut his accursed, incompetent mouth. Aziraphale’s thumb tracing the lines in his palm was like a scribe rewriting the very lines of his body’s story, changing him at a molecular level.
“Look, it’s new for me too,” said Aziraphale quietly. “I can’t say I even expected it of myself, not at first, but— trying new things, that’s what we can do now. It’d be a shame if we didn’t, surely.”
And at that, a weak smile finally broke through Crowley’s nervous countenance. “Fucking hell. You’re not gonna start jogging, are you? Or— or texting? I don’t know if I could handle that—”
With a breath out so subtly devastating that if Crowley hadn’t already been lying down he would’ve been forcibly unbalanced, Aziraphale let go of Crowley’s hand, and turned his tactile attention back to the demon’s hair. “No,” he laughed softly. “No, I think this is quite enough novelty to last me a good, long while.”
“Shit. Me too. Might have to disconnect my internet. Throw my phone into the Thames. Take myself back a century or two in order to have the capacity to handle it.” Crowley took Aziraphale’s hand again, the one that wasn’t currently in his own hair, and entwined it with his own, running his fingertips over back of the angel’s softly lined knuckles, marveling at their every intimate detail.
“You, without your mobile? That’d be like cutting your legs off.”
“I did very well without legs in the olden days.”
“Ah. Right. Perhaps not the best metaphor, in your specific case.”
“Listen to us,” sighed Crowley. “Why are we still talking?”
“Well, I suppose because—”
“Nope. We’re done. Come on.”
Aziraphale was already sitting so close to him, there on the dusty ground of the bookshop in front of the sofa; it was hardly any effort at all to lever himself up off his back and lean against the angel in a close embrace. He wrapped his too-skinny arms around back of Aziraphale’s shoulders; Aziraphale’s hand, formerly in his hair, fell now to his cheek, and Crowley quickly dipped his head forward and planted a soft, short kiss on Aziraphale’s gently parted lips.
Aziraphale’s eyes widened with a subtle shine as Crowley drew back, tense. “Sorry, sorry, was that too new for—” Crowley began to say, but was interrupted by Aziraphale leaning back in for another kiss, this one infinitely deeper, luxurious, even. It seemed to go on forever; Aziraphale’s tongue worked up against Crowley’s with a surprising finesse that brought thousands, millions more questions to the queue in his throat, all of which were quickly swallowed down, as he could think of nothing else but the feeling of the angel’s mouth at his, fresh and sweet and cool and settling the burning heat inside of him into something resembling the perfect breezy summer evening.
“Angel— why didn’t you start with that?” Crowley said, sounding rather strangled, as he pulled away with his head on fire to take a much-needed breath.
Aziraphale’s cheeks were enchantingly flushed; he raised a mischievous eyebrow. Crowley sighed. Unfortunately, he knew exactly why Aziraphale hadn’t started with that. It would have discorporated him outright. And he ought to have felt ashamed by being known so deeply and so well, but it was Aziraphale, so he didn’t.
“Yeah... probably for the best you worked up to it,” Crowley said, and then slowly lowered himself back down to the floor.
“Er. Can we just. Go back to the hair thing? For now?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
***