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"A temporary setback,” said the demon with the hair like flame, fumbling with the wineskin stopper. “That’s what management is calling it.”
“ ‘A temporary setback’?” Aziraphale repeated.
“Yep,” and the p sound was unnecessarily punchy, the angel thought, annoyed. Overstated. Just like everything else about his companion.
“Gosh,” was all he said, though, as he tilted his face up to the night sky, letting the chilly air cool his wine-flushed cheeks. “That’s quite mild, isn’t it? Our memos all said it was a decisive victory.”
“I mean, it is,” admitted the demon Crawly. “It’s an ace up the sleeve. Ugly surprise for the firm. But that doesn’t automatically make it a flush, you know.”
“I really don’t follow your turns of phrase sometimes,” Aziraphale said curtly.
His companion laughed, tipping his head back at an inhuman angle, so that the fire of his hair licked up the long white column of his throat. Glancing sideways at the pale skin, the angel felt a small, tipsy, idiotic part of him marvel, as he frequently marveled when he'd had a bit to drink, at the lack of singe marks. He was sure – certain, in fact – that if that those flames ever touched his own corporation, he would be horribly burnt.
It was cold out, he told himself. That was the only reason, the only possible reason, that he was so tempted to find out if he was right.
They really should go inside. The thought split open inside him with the force of a chestnut popping, a sudden clear-eyed moment of lucidity. There might not be any rooms available at the inn this evening, but there would be enough space downstairs by the fire for a mug of something hot. They could miracle up another chair or two. They could sit too close. They could be warm again, and although Aziraphale wouldn’t necessarily stop looking at that fall of wine-red hair, he would be better able to resist this strange desire to bury his hands in it.
Instead, however, they were in a field, patchy and still, utterly desolate in these early hours of the morning. There had been shepherds, here, not too long ago. Aziraphale remembered this fuzzily. He had spoken to them, for a little while, letting his true form shine through, and lo, they had been sore afraid.
Some time after that, as inevitable as night, there had been Crawly.
Or rather, there had been Crawly and several accompanying skins of wine, as if he had had a suspicion that they would be needed. Bearing these as gingerly as a peace offering, he had come across the angel sitting in the weeds, feeling tired and very nearly melancholy, and startled him badly by prodding him with a foot.
“Oy,” he’d said. “Thought I’d find you here.”
And Aziraphale, looking up at him, had thought, or possibly said,
“Oh, thank God.”
Or, well. Probably not said, not out loud. That seemed important, now: that he had not thanked God for the arrival and subsequent company of a demon. Vaguely blasphemous, that, especially tonight of all nights. He hoped fervently that he had kept quiet.
“Can you tell me anything?” Crawly said softly.
It took Aziraphale a moment to remember that they were in the middle of a conversation. “What?”
A waving of that slender white hand, fingers splayed, encompassing the whole tableau. The town, the sheep, the star. “These memos,” the demon said. “This decisive victory of yours. State secrets, or can you tell?”
“Ah,” Aziraphale said, and he swallowed. “Um. We all got a one-pager, in our inbox.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think it’s a secret. Not if it’s a policy change, you know.”
“Stands to reason.”
The silence stretched out between them, and Crawly, returning Aziraphale’s desperate look, raised his eyebrows.
“All right,” the angel said. He found that his throat was still horribly tight. “The gist of it. Um. I'm told that the child represents absolution from sin. Because,” and he squinted, trying to remember the words. “ ‘Whosoever believeth in Him shall have eternal life.’”
Crawly was quiet for another minute, and then he said, eyebrows climbing even higher, “What, anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Murderers, for example,” the demon with the hair like flames went on, sounding incredulous. “Say, this tit of a king, about to snuff out a whole bunch of babies.”
Aziraphale twisted his hands together. “If he repents, and turns to God -”
“If he repents,” Crawly repeated, and the angel, daring to look at him, saw something in his face harden.
“Yes.”
“That’s all it takes.”
And, though they remained unspoken, the next two words still managed to ring out like a bell between them: For them.
Aziraphale felt wretched. He didn’t want to sit here any longer, not here in the dirt, not in this chill. He wanted to go inside, and get warm, and not answer questions from this entity who could not be permitted to be a friend.
Irresistibly, irrevocably, as he tried to formulate a response, his gaze was drawn up, towards that star that blazed like a second sun. With Crawly now silent beside him, he had to concede, privately, that it was a touch that seemed a little… unnecessary. The implications would be lost on mankind entirely, of course, but stars were a sensitive matter in the immortal sphere. For whatever reason, nearly all of the angels that had fallen had been the ones involved in their creation, pouring their devotion into the construction of those nurseries that the humans would learn to call nebulas.
Crawly himself had made an allusion to that precious work, once. Though he had turned red and changed the subject immediately, Aziraphale had never forgotten it. It was an idea that had lodged in him like a splinter: once upon a time, those hands, with their long and clever fingers, had, on another plane of reality, illuminated the heavens.
And then the light-bringers had fallen. Abruptly. Irredeemably. The first tearing of a black hole into an otherwise perfect universe.
For God to hang her own brand-new star as the herald of a softening domestic policy, where the humans were concerned, seemed just a little - cruel.
Or, well, Aziraphale thought, drinking from the wineskin again to save himself from answering. Perhaps it wasn’t malicious. Perhaps it was – simply a message, to her fallen children, although what it meant, he couldn’t imagine.
Crawly huffed out a snort when Aziraphale stayed silent, and shook his head. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered, and he reached for the alcohol almost blindly. “What about the other way, then?”
“What other way?”
The yellow eyes were piercing, brighter than starlight. On this night, that was really saying a lot. “Say you have a Muslim kid. Or, Buddhist, maybe. Lives an impeccable life, kind to everyone, great dad, loving spouse, philan- philthrop- gives to charity. Adored at the office. Doesn’t ‘believeth’ in all these,” a sweep of the hand, “dramatic shenanigans. You gonna give him to us, then?”
“It was a very short memo,” Aziraphale said helplessly.
Crawly let out a bark of laughter. It was an ugly sound. “Apparently,” he said. “Let me guess. No one consulted you on this policy decision either.”
“No,” Aziraphale said, clutching at this concession like a lifeline. “They did not. Anyway, it’s – you know, it’s all ineff-”
“Ethnocentric,” said Crawly firmly, cutting him off. Now he was glaring at the wineskin. “That’s the word you’re looking for. Ethnocentric.”
“I don’t have to talk about this with you,” Aziraphale said, in a sudden agony of defensiveness.
A shrug. Dismissive, irritated. “Then don’t.”
“Anyway, it’s wonderful,” the angel went on, feeling that Crawly was rather missing the point. “No more arks or pillars of salt, that’s the key. Things are going to get better after this, and that’s really what tonight is all about. As long as people remember that, things will be -”
“Will they?” said Crawly, eyes glittering suddenly, as he looked up again. “Remember it.”
“Of course, they -”
“Because I rather think they won’t,” Crawly went on, with growing confidence. “I think – I think you’ve hit on it exactly.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” the angel said, bewildered.
Crawly shrugged, twisting his hand in an elaborate gesture that somehow managed to convey nothing at all. “I can make it work for us,” he said. “This thing, whatever you want to call it. Salvation on demand, fine. It'll take me a couple thousand years, give or take, but I bet I can make it work.”
“Ambitious of you, serpent,” Aziraphale retorted, unsteadily reaching for the wine. “But I don’t think even you can corrupt the birth of the Son of God.”
His companion grinned. “Sure I can,” he said. “I’ll make it a holiday. ”
The angel blinked. “A holiday?” he repeated, tasting it. “But that sounds – lovely.”
“A gift-giving holiday,” Crawly said, and the knife of his smile was wide and bright. Aziraphale had the sudden nonsensical urge to touch a thumb to one of those sharp incisors, perhaps hard enough to draw a holly berry of blood. Bitter and sweet. He shook the thought away.
“Gift-giving,” he said, turning over the wineskin Crawly had brought, and looking at it contemplatively. It was the last of five, and less than half full, now. “Presents, you mean. For – the people who are dear to you, I suppose. To show your affection.”
“Ah,” Crawly said hastily, as if the angel was walking too close to a strange and unseen precipice. “Not exactly. I mean, yes, but. The whole thing will become a giant capitalist mess. They'll stop enjoying it. They’ll find out that it mostly just induces anxiety.”
“But how could such a, a tender thing -”
“Oh, please,” the demon said, sneering a little at the choice of words. “Think about it. Someone drops a bag of coin on the perfect gift, when you’ve only gotten them a badly dyed pashmina? Angel, really. They’re going to wonder if you even care about them at all.”
Aziraphale frowned. “But in the spirit of celebration, surely there’s no reciprocal expectation of -”
“Oh, there will be,” Crawly said, looking smug. “There will be. And all kinds of rules about what you can get a coworker, and loveless gifts that can shatter a suffering marriage, and – unwanted things that are given again, and then a second and third time, and then bitchy aunts who find out about it -”
“It sounds awful,” Aziraphale said, trying to sound censorious. Mostly, though, what had sounded awful was the sound of Crawly’s voice, cracking just a little bit on the words unwanted things.
“Parents who don’t give a rip about anything but spoiling their children,” Crawly went on. “Charities playing on the warm and fuzzy feelings and pocketing all the donations, oh, just imagine -”
“I’m really not interested in -”
“And it’ll be environmentally ruinous,” said Crawly, swept up in the fantasy. “Packaging and travel and shipments of goods. Fancy papers with glitter and ribbon that everyone dumps in the trash a minute later. Tinsel,” he added, with relish.
“Oh, dear,” the angel said weakly.
“And maybe some nonsense tradition of cutting down some sort of plant – trees, maybe – the bigger, the better – and decorating it with wasteful gewgaws -”
Aziraphale lost the thread of the conversation for a while as Crawly talked. The gleam was back in the demon’s eyes, as if he had pushed down whatever he had been feeling a minute ago and was determined to be cheerfully horrible, here, in the angel’s company, never guessing that said angel was in fact aching for him, and wanting to reach over and put his hands in that marvelous hair -
“- every one of them with an angel on top,” the demon was saying, and there was a wicked sparkle in his eyes as he reached across for the wine. “Wouldn’t be the first angel, would it, with a twig up his -”
“Cheek,” snapped Aziraphale, but he couldn’t stop the heat from flooding into his face as Crawly leaned in.
Their fingers brushed together, just under the mouth of the wineskin. Crawly hesitated, looking at him, his eyes lingering on the color burning brightly in Aziraphale’s cheeks. Meeting his gaze, the angel told himself, sternly, that it would be a waste of a miracle to stop his corporation from blushing. No point. The demon probably couldn’t even see it, in the dark, even with the starlight -
“You,” said Crawly thickly, and he leaned forward.
Aziraphale jerked back, but there was no need; the long, elegant fingers were closing on the wineskin, and his companion tugged it carefully it out of Aziraphale’s grasp. “You’re hogging the wine, angel,” said the demon quietly, no longer meeting his eyes.
The angel found that he could not reply. Instead, flummoxed, he watched the serpentine line of that white throat work, as his companion put his lips on the mouth of the skin and drank. The word beguiling swam through his addled mind, and then, immediately afterwards, a vision of the hilarity that would follow if Crawly ever dreamed that he had thought him so.
He looked away, and leaned forward, and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t know what he was doing. He really should go inside. He should stop thinking about theological questions, and terrified shepherds, and especially this poor fallen angel whose idea of corrupting the birth of the Christ Child was to ensconce it in a holiday of gift-giving.
“Well, angel?” Crawly inquired, and when he glanced back to the demon he saw that he was being offered the wineskin again. “Anything you want to add to my vision?”
“Yes,” Aziraphale said, more bravely than he felt.
“Excellent,” said Crawly. He grinned again, arching a brow. “You should know, though, that I’m not taking constructive criticism.”
“It’s not criticism,” said Aziraphale. Recklessness was sweeping through him. “You need, ah. Another plant.”
The demon looked completely blank. “Another plant,” he repeated flatly.
“A kissing plant.”
Abruptly, Crawly’s echo had a note of hysteria in it, a different sort of crack that Aziraphale might have found extremely gratifying if he had been sober. He hadn’t heard that particular tone since confessing that he had given away a flaming sword, four thousand years previous. “A kissing plant?”
“Yes,” said Aziraphale, wondering what on earth he was playing at - but another, more insistent part of him was thinking of their hands touching on the neck of the wineskin a minute previous, and the way Crawly’s eyes had gone molten, an embankment of flame, and the way he had put his mouth – “It - it could be a, a silly little holiday ritual,” he went on, feeling bolder. “A decoration. You hang it up, somewhere, and if two people meet underneath it, they – they have to kiss.”
There was a long silence. When he chanced a glance across, he discovered that Crawly was looking intently at him.
“Angel,” he said, and his voice still had that strange quality to it, not quite hoarseness, but close. “What if – what if one of them doesn’t want to be kissed? What if he doesn’t feel the same way?”
Aziraphale looked up at the star, ablaze in the heavens. Technically, he knew, it meant that the first Advent season was over. Yet he felt strangely expectant all the same, as though he was waiting for the arrival of something else, something still nameless but more potent than gold, more precious than myrrh.
“Oh, well,” he said, and drank. “What if he does?”