Work Text:
A cottage in the South Downs
2020
“Wha—?”
Crowley didn’t think he’d been gone that long — out to the village for coffees and pastries, a quick stop at the grocery to grab something for dinner: the idea of staying in all day was particularly appealing to him when the weather got cold and rainy and dark like it was now.
He glanced at his watch, mostly to confirm with it that he was right and he hadn’t actually been gone a full hour. Yup, just as he thought — it hadn’t even ticked over to 10 am yet.
So how, exactly, had the cottage changed so much in that time?
A stupid question, he realized the moment he thought it. After all, he wasn’t the only man-shaped being who lived in it.
He stepped into the warmth of the kitchen, glad to be out of the wind and rain, and set down the bag of groceries and the weird little cardboard tray the barista had given him with the coffees.
The things humans did for their pointless convenience.
“Angel?” he called through the cottage.
“Oh!” Aziraphale’s answer came out a little muffled, seemingly from the living room. “You’re home!”
Crowley dumped the pastries onto a plate, balancing it on his forearm and the coffees in either hand, and went out to the living room. “What’s all this, then?”
Aziraphale was sprawled out on the floor of the living room, buried nearly to the waist beneath a sizeable evergreen, and his tone was just a shade tetchy when he answered without getting up, “What does it look like?”
“Like Christmas vomited all over the walls.”
There was a grunt, a small creak like the sound of metal against wood, and Aziraphale slithered out from under the tree. He looked around the room. The walls which were hung with at least a dozen strings of fairy lights, and a wreath the size of a small country hung above the fireplace. He’d even hung stockings — fucking stockings — from the mantle.
The light in his eyes seemed to dim as he frowned around the room. “You … don’t like it?”
Crowley swallowed, aware suddenly of just how his words must’ve sounded. He’d been going for teasing, another moment in the 6,000-year battle of wits they’d always been engaged in, but obviously that had come out wrong. He frowned, a bit too dramatically to make up for it, and glanced pointedly at the pastries and coffee cups in his hands. “Don’t go putting words in my mouth, angel. ‘S fine. You know. Pretty, I guess.”
“Oh.” Aziraphale smiled and stood, relieving Crowley of his burden and settling down on the couch — the scruffy old one from the bookshop that Crowley had flat-out refused to allow him to get rid of in the move. That couch had seen a lot, and while Crowley would deny it from here until next Armageddon, he was fond of it.
He collapsed now next to the angel and sprawled in his usual, somewhat-boneless way across more than his fair share of the space. “What brought this on?”
“Brought what on?”
Crowley waved toward the fresh décor. “Never pegged you for one to make a fuss about lights and trees and such.”
“Well.” Aziraphale fidgeted, twisting his cup around and around against the palm of his other hand. A faint blush speckled his cheeks a warm pink, and it was all Crowley could do to not kiss him into next week right then. “It’s just, well, our first Christmas.”
He chuckled. “Please. We’ve been around since before humans celebrated anything, let alone the winter solstice.”
“Well. Our first Christmas here. In the cottage. As … as us.”
Crowley shivered at the meaning Aziraphale pushed into the final word. Would he ever get used to the idea that they were a ‘they’? An ‘us’? No longer hereditary enemies, an angel and a demon, fraternizing, not friends?
He hoped not. He thought not. Not after six millennia of wanting and hoping and longing for there to be more there. An us.
“Course,” he mumbled at last, not really sure what he was saying. He covered for the warmth in his face and lump in his throat with a long sip from his own coffee — black, no cream or sugar, powerful and bitter on his tongue.
“I was hoping to have the tree done before you came home, but the stand gave me some trouble.” Aziraphale tasted his own beverage and smiled, pleased, without even noticing the expression.
Crowley noticed it, though. He hoarded the angel’s smiles like Aziraphale hoarded books.
The lump was back in his throat, the warmth in his cheeks. He set down his cup, then reached for Aziraphale’s, plucking it out of his hands and putting it down, too. “Good,” he whispered, pushing into the angel’s space until only the barest inch separated them. Just enough space for him to murmur into the soft curve of Aziraphale’s cheek. “That means we can decorate it together.”
Aziraphale smiled again and closed the distance between them.
It took a small demonic miracle to make their coffee warm again when they finally separated.