Chapter Text
The Kingdom of Wessex
537 AD
There is an angel in front of him and he should be used to this by now.
But he isn’t, not yet, and when he takes a seat next to that angel it is with his hands shoved up on the sides of himself, cupping his ribs, his shoulders hitched high up around his ears.
“So that’s when I told Cynric that I simply couldn’t do it anymore—“
Aziraphale is drunk, or something close to it, the white furs around his shoulders colored red by firelight.
“—I’m out. I’m— I’m finished,” he waves his tankard and the honeyed mead inside of it, gestures at the brazier.
His teeth are straight. Remarkably so. And Crowley runs his tongue along his own sharp ones, jagged ones, crooked ones— aware for the first time of how they must look when he speaks, wonders if they seem like too much, too many, too monstrous.
“I’m telling you, it’s too damp,” Crowley responds in polite conversation, weary at the bone.
“Exactly. Too damp. And this armor is dreadful.”
Aziraphale looks at the index finger on his hand, studying it, mutters something that sounds like, and too sharp.
“Not very warm, either, is it? The armor I mean,” Crowley says, trying to suppress the on-going seizing of his muscles, the knocking together of his teeth. He has not felt warm in a very long time— his banks of internal heat depleted by all this fog, this persistent cloud-cover.
But Aziraphale, he has decided, does not need to know this. It would not do for an angel to know that he could be defeated by something as silly as a chill.
“You know I hadn’t noticed,” Aziraphale says dreamily, still staring at his finger. He looks up and over to Crowley’s black breastplate sitting in the corner, propped up next to his own. He considers it for a moment, and then turns his gaze to Crowley— sitting there with his black cloak pulled up high around his neck, his long hair dusting over his shoulders.
“Oh,” Aziraphale says, his eyes widening, “ohh.”
He gets up suddenly, begins rummaging through the trunk at the end of his bedroll.
It is a funny thing to Crowley that he even has a trunk. It is not as though he needs it— not as though he is incapable of manifesting anything his fussy little heart desires through sheer angelic will. Like this tent, Crowley thinks, his eyes rolling up to stare at the sealed corners, the airtight top, the curious lack of curling paper edges along his books in this thick and persistent damp. Aziraphale can have whatever he desires, at any time— he just chooses to do things the difficult way. The human way.
Which is perhaps, Crowley thinks, the mead going a bit to his head, why he is such an interesting angel in the first place.
It takes more than a moment, Aziraphale pulling out odd bits of things— clothes and cups and books and writing utensils. There are pieces of what look like a game, tiny carved figures, and then Aziraphale is standing up, something clutched in his hands.
He may have had a bit too much to drink himself because the angel is fuzzy near his edges, moving as if underwater.
“Here,” is the familiar voice, and then a weight over his shoulders.
It’s a blanket, smelling a bit like horsehair but also like vanilla or maybe fresh bread, like sunshine.
Crowley jerks back a bit at the closeness, at the heft of the material.
“Please take it with you,” Aziraphale says, sinking down next to him again, “I have no use for it.”
Crowley eyes him sidelong.
“It smells a bit like horse,” he remarks, trying not to think about whether or not there is blood coloring his cheeks.
“Well yes, it arrived on one so that’s fitting, really.”
Aziraphale takes a long sip, blinks slowly down at the fire.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were cold?” He asks.
“M’not,” Crowley tries to bite around his vibrating molars.
He can see Aziraphale sucking on his incisors, deep in thought.
“It makes sense a bit,” he starts, glancing over at him, “what you were saying in the field today.”
“Oh? And what was that?”
That stubborn round chin looks for all the world like it is trying to stop whatever traitorous words are about to come spilling out of his mouth.
“That we are cancelling each other out.”
“In very damp places,” Crowley adds, ignoring perhaps for the millionth time the strange weathered ache that lies down in his joints whenever the temperature dips into anything that is decidedly not warm.
Aziraphale rolls his eyes over to him, studies the nearly painful set of his bones in the chair, the clearly shivering muscles.
“Does the cold hurt you?” He asks softly.
His heart is rather loud in his ears, louder than the wind wailing outside and he tries to push down the pulse in his throat, swallow it, digest it.
“Oh— nh, nah.”
He brushes off the question with an extra bit of perhaps too theatrical facial expressions, shaking his head a bit too hard, ignoring the ache of his spine.
“I— I mean,” Crowley’s voice is startlingly high-pitched and he clears his throat, deepening it, “I just thought it would a good thing for one of us to stay behind. Bit daft that we’re both out here, isn’t it?”
Aziraphale’s eyes look a bit more gray than blue in this light, a bit more glassy than usual.
“I suppose it is,” he says quietly, and Crowley does not miss how his eye-line lingers on the hitched up set of his shoulders, the perpetual bouncing of his knee.
He looks back down into the fire, feeling all at once like he has said too much without saying anything, the angel somehow capable of seeing through to his underneath, to that place he himself doesn’t like to look.
He wishes he had something to hide beneath, cover himself up with— armor that is perhaps not so cold and not so stiff, armor that is less heavy.
Crowley does not look up at the sudden rustling next to him, not even to see Aziraphale moving his wooden stool closer to his. He closes his eyes and lets the heat of the brazier paint across his face, leans a bit into it.
And then there is a shoulder pressing snugly up against his, that blanket that smells like horsehair shared across the twinned spread of their shoulders.
“Body heat,” Aziraphale says, as if that explains away an angel gathering up close to a demon, keeping his cold blood warm.
That point of contact— the press of shoulder to arm to hip to thigh— feels a bit volcanic, a bit geothermal. Like the whole mess of his easily changeable skin has a fault line along that edge and might erupt— tectonic plates shifting, lava bubbling.
He bites down on the meat of his tongue and is grateful at least for those too many teeth in his mouth, the way they prevent at least part of him from vibrating into the ether.
“That’s better,” Aziraphale is saying, and Crowley can smell him as he does— the vanilla, the fresh bread, the sunshine.
He closes his eyes and wants to live there, in that sunbeam.
“It is,” he says, as quietly as he is able, the stiffness in his joints easing.
If the chattering of his teeth stop and the shivering of his muscles do too— the ache in his bones evaporating— he does not particularly notice it. He notices only the absence of bad in the presence of such good, Aziraphale humming softly next to him.
He lets the high heft of his shoulders ease down, his guard too, and thinks for perhaps the first time that he might get used to having this angel in front of him, next to him, with him. Always.