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They had a deal to do Christmas once every five years, and once only - any more frequently than that and Aziraphale would go a bit mad like he did in the 1150s, and neither of them wanted to go through that again.
It's not that he didn't like it (although it did make him a little uncomfortable for reasons he couldn't quite decipher); it was more so that when you're immortal the years rolls by quicker, and having every December of the year being drowned out by the same headache of glitzy decor and brass-band music and the rest of it, was... well. It starts to grate on you.
Birthdays were alright, because neither of them ever did much to differentiate the day from any other (Aziraphale, for one, always made sure he just happened to be in Paris); on solstices they made their habitual trips to the equator to bask in the metaphor; Crowley was particularly fond of Saturnalia, but that died out before they had the chance sick of it anyway. A lot of the holy days petered out as religious fashions changed over the years, but throughout all the wars and fallen empires and agricultural revolutions since the bloody birth of Christianity, Christmas remained a constant, long after its original meaning had been chipped off.
In Aziraphale's opinion, humanity seemed to be clinging onto it at this point, out of desperation and some strange sense of ancient, inherited nostalgia - but who was he to judge? He hadn't tried very hard to fix it, because by then he was already on a diet of two Christmases a decade and tried to spend the rest of the time not thinking about it.
Crowley, on the other hand, found a great perverse joy in the festivities when they deigned to take part. The truth was that it was almost always an exact equal measure of happiness and pain across the board for everyone involved, so it worked out rather well for both of them. Heaven got the iconography and goodwill, Hell got the grief, anger and small talk.
He was in agreement about the snowballing passage of time, and often he had more interesting things going on anyway and it took him a couple of autumns to remember Christmas existed at all, so he cheerfully joined in with the abstention. He liked the sherry, and the sight of Aziraphale in garish knitwear, but these he could get all year round if the planets aligned; it was enough to know the misery happened like clockwork without him, like those strings of metal balls very dull people had on their desks - set it off and it goes on forever. They would do something small, but otherwise pay as little mind as they dared.
By the eighteenth century, the divide between them had already started slipping, and sometimes Christmas would jolt them back into their respective boxes for a while, force them into black and white, bad and good, if only in show towards the other. It made Aziraphale morally anxious, and on several occasions he found himself actually dreading the season, which he added to the growing list of things he wouldn't think about. Once, Crowley accused him of enjoying Christmas significantly less than he did and wasn't that ironic, and Aziraphale pressed his lips into a thin line and went to South America for eighteen months in reply. (Crowley didn't bring it up again.)
But this isn't a story about one of the Christmas years. This is one of the other times.
-
In the last few decades leading up to Adam's arrival, the two of them spent a great deal of time apart. This was in part due to cabin fever, and the ever-growing sense that the luxury of freedom, however poorly used, would eventually run out.
It was also largely in part because of the rise of technological communication: no more would Crowley have to moodily hang around in the nicer bars of Europe until he heard a far-spun tale of an eccentric gentleman and could hunt Aziraphale down to tell him Will Shakespeare wrote a play about his superiority complex. Suddenly they could wire each other monthly, although they rarely did as they were still stuck in the treacley sloth of the middle-ages, where nothing happened for generations at a time and was never worth the wait.
But it meant they no longer had to stay on the same continent just in case something happened. Letters turned to telegrams turned to letters turned to telephones, and it reached a point in time where they had spoken every week but hadn't seen each other for twenty two years.
"What happened to Christmas, eh, angel?" Crowley's slithery voice crackled down the line.
The angel in question was sitting in a stiff chair in a drawing room and looking out of the window. It was a cold night; the street was empty and blue. His hand went to his temple.
"Nothing, my dear. Still a beacon of something or other over here."
He heard Crowley smile, and wondered briefly and not a little nervously how he did.
"Still rationing your patience for it?"
"You know jolly well that the rules are different for us, Crawly; as it is, I still participate twice as much as the regular person." An old argument, older than most cities.
"Of course, of course," Crowley placated. "All I meant was- well, we haven't had one in a while."
Outside Aziraphale's window, the icy ground was turning brown with slush from wheels coming in from the country.
"My, my," he said, and found he couldn't repress his smile. "Do you miss it?"
"Curses, no!" Crowley replied, and for a moment Aziraphale insisted on not believing him, but then the unspoken rebuttal hung a little longer and he realised what Crowley had missed instead, although he'd never say it. It was against the rules.
"You fiend," he said, for no particular reason.
"Thank you, sunshine. Vienna?"
"Natürlich."
"Bis später."
Later. The nights were already drawing in. Aziraphale shivered as he replaced the telephone receiver; his eyes flashed gold for a moment in the darkness of the room.
-
Vienna was ever so crowded despite the poor weather, as was the case for much of Europe, but the restaurant itself was quiet and warm. Suspiciously so. Never mind that Aziraphale would have helped if there had been no remaining tables, but Crowley knew nothing about moderation, and seemed to enjoy the warm bath of natural order less and less as of late - restless. The hush in the foyer reminded him of a few months ago when Crowley had relayed a story where he'd given a whole village amnesia simply to avoid the drag of bidding them farewell.
No, Aziraphale was not nervous. It was hardly an inspection from above, or even a buck-up from below. It was merely Crowley at a red-clothed table at the top of the stairs, peering into a tiny glass between his fingers. Twenty two years or twenty three? Hardly worth mentioning. But here they were, mentioning it.
He handed his coat to the young man by the doors and let several unobtrusive kronen manifest in his pocket, and walked up the stairs, looking at the high domed ceiling and the chandeliers and the marbled bannister, and then there he was.
Crowley stood and gave him a grin, one unbefitting of the type of person Aziraphale was purporting to be these days. He held out his arms, and Aziraphale sat down heavily in the chair across from his, feeling red at the ears and spelling them to stay pink. After a moment, Crowley sat too and picked up his tiny glass again. He tilted his head.
Neither had spoken.
"How was your journey?" Aziraphale began, like they hadn't been arguing just last night about... what was it, aestheticism? Or consequence? Far beyond this.
"Let's not do this, angel," Crowley chuckled, and he will have to have words with him about calling him that: don't want him getting the right idea. "Small talk is our side's, and besides, we've never talked small."
"Perhaps it would do us good to try it occasionally." Aziraphale picked up his own empty glass and took a sip of brandy from it. From Crowley's expression, it made him sound more haughty than usual, which was hardly his intention. Maybe he was nervous. If the others could see him now.
A plate of appetisers appeared by way of a quick-footed waiter; Crowley perused it blankly and plucked a miniature sausage from the selection. "The journey was fine," he said, and then couldn't seem to think of anything interesting to divulge about it, and ate the sausage.
"Good," Aziraphale replied, and thought: This is horrid. "It's, uh..." he began again. "Good to, uh..." Crowley met his eyes and raised his brows. It was exactly like chess, except if chess solely consisted of first moves and checks. "...See you," he finished at last, and lost concentration on his ears as he hurriedly took a mouthful of his brandy.
Crowley stared at him, then laughed, then beamed. Aziraphale's whole body sighed with relief.
-
Dinner was a spectacular affair, with more courses than patrons around them and everything to talk about under the sun, despite having discussed everything worth mentioning in writing already. (In fact, a few of Crowley's excitable pieces of news were things he had already mentioned, but Aziraphale hardly minded letting him tell them again, especially with the entertaining addition of hand gestures.) It was simultaneously like they were meeting for the second time in a week and the more accurate - but less drastic in the human meaning - of meeting for the first time in years. For a while, he even forgot he was meant to be anxious.
They weren't doing Christmas: he was very clear last night that it was an off-year, and that he had barely started recovering from the previous winter, when he'd made the poor decision to pay a visit upstairs for the festivities. Off-years for the two of them were just particularly nice days. When they had been more of less cohabitating (as it felt when they were in the same hundred-mile radius), they would still get together on important days, and indeed days with no importance at all, and have a bit to drink and a few slices of cake. It was an excuse, if nothing more.
It goes without saying that Aziraphale would happily have continued this non-tradition and fully expected to do so. Crowley too, although more from the angle of dismissing any keenness than trying to muster it up. After all, as evidenced later by his very downfall, he was a sentimental bastard.
He was staying for the winter in a tall terraced house on the western outskirts of the city; it had come with a maid and a footman that he had promptly sent away with the dazed idea in their heads that they had a previously unknown fortune and a future to rush off to. Crowley had dropped his single suitcase onto the carpet and flopped into a plush armchair by the fireplace, cold only for a moment.
"Mm," he had grunted, pleased, as he appraised the room. Yes. This is the place. If anyone had asked him exactly what for he couldn't have said, but he was sure of it.
There were some heavy green curtains across the window that he delighted in hating immediately, and the voice in the back of his head (as much as a voice in the back of a head can have its own voice) remarked that Aziraphale would equally hate them, and with no joy in the feeling. This depressed him. Not through any regular sense - but because Aziraphale would not see these ugly curtains, and there was almost no point in them if Aziraphale was not there to hate them.
They hadn't seen each other since... what was it? Some civil war somewhere neither of them wanted to stay. It was hardly a dramatic parting, although afterwards, as was his nature, Crowley felt rather dramatically distraught about it. He did not share his feelings, and instead learnt to play the violin. He was quite good at it now, which just showed how long it had been.
He'd missed the old tosser. Human friends made for poor imitations. If it wasn't for the telephone, he's sure he would have cracked sooner and drifted back to France, the divine watering hole. As it was, he had avoided it, to make a point to himself.
Sitting across from Aziraphale like it was nothing again pepped him up enormously. Weeks ago when he had suggested this, a cloud of doubt crawled over him and refused to shove off: surely he wouldn't come, not for dinner, not to Austria. Not on an off-year. Crowley was never very good at off-years: he liked the rituals, and often forgot something would make Aziraphale tense, like the mere presence of a mince pie. It wasn't such a big deal to him, but he tried.
Luckily for him, tonight Aziraphale seemed as carefree as he ever was (which equates to a normal person's 'alert and a bit twitchy'). He'd been letting Crowley fill his glass too, which helped; Crowley liked Aziraphale either way, but he preferred himself a few whiskeys deep.
They left the restaurant at nearly midnight and entered the frosty streets. Crowley glid a little on his feet, but fortunately his long coat obscured this from the occasional passersby.
"So how are the-?" he jabbed a thumb up towards the swirling sky, and quickly brought it back into the warmth of his deep pockets.
Aziraphale spared him a look, and answered, "Very well. Busy."
"Oh, yes - the artistic movements. We've had a lot of that."
"Quite. But it's brought in business."
"Business," Crowley scoffed under his breath. "Specifically, though, I meant how was the party."
"Party?"
"The C word."
Aziraphale's face scrunched up momentarily. "Colchester?"
"Christmas!" Crowley hissed, and was pleasantly surprised he wasn't smited.
"Oh, that. Sorry."
(It's not like he was scared of saying it out loud; he just didn't care for the vulgarity.)
"It wasn't much of a party. Days of singing, mostly."
"We have that too," Crowley pointed out, and Aziraphale glared at him over the tiny glasses he had begun wearing. He didn't take too kindly to the similarities of their vocations being pointed out, but Crowley had to get a point in at least once a year.
"I admit I've been keeping to myself in the intervening time," he continued, and it was obvious this was an admission of something, and one that would not be extrapolated on further. Nevertheless:
"No worshipping His Holiness?"
"That's inherent," Aziraphale dismissed, but didn't say what to. "All I mean is I haven't properly... done Christmas, since we..."
"The turkey incident."
"Yes. Since then."
"Me neither, angel. What could top that?"
"And I'm not saying I want to, heaven knows it does me in, but..."
He was doing a lot of trailing off. That was the brandy.
"But it was fun, wasn't it?" Crowley jostled him as they turned the corner onto his street.
At first he thought he wasn't going to answer, but after a long moment he huffed, "It was a bit."
Crowley's grand front door (made grander after he moved in, and several times after that whenever he passed through it and thought it could do with sprucing up) loomed before them, half-lit by a nearby lamp. The half that was in darkness proved to be the unexpectedly interesting half, however, as a small sprig of mistletoe had appeared above the door knocker, a fact Crowley didn't register until they were at the top of the steps.
"Drat," he muttered, which didn't really capture the ferocity of his irritation. It had to be one of those ware-sellers who thrust bouquets and tiny fruits into your hands and then insisted that counted as a incomplete transaction. He'd undoubtedly have someone knocking tomorrow and demanding he pay for it.
His annoyance was so immediate and great that he didn't notice for a few seconds the way Aziraphale had frozen beside him. When Crowley turned to him, the lamplight showed a faint red glow to his ears from the cold.
"Mistletoe?" he asked.
Crowley thought about expressing his petty laments, but something about how struck Aziraphale looked stopped him. He probably thought I planned this. I could very well have planned this.
If anything, aside from sherry and this one little hat Aziraphale had been wearing for a century, mistletoe was his favourite part about Christmas. And if anything, mistletoe was from his side of the pond - he couldn't imagine they were all too keen on it upstairs.
But Aziraphale- he never seemed to mind.
"Uh, yes," Crowley said.
There was a silence between them as they stood on the doorstep; just the whistling wind.
"I never had mistletoe on my own," Aziraphale said, and then appeared to realise what a nonsensical statement that was. The ears got redder.
"Why ever would you?" Crowley grinned. "Takes two to tango."
"As you always say."
Aziraphale was looking up at him now, a backdrop of endearing embarrassment under his flushed skin.
"I say because it's true. When have you ever tangoed without me?"
Aziraphale shrugged, or perhaps just thought about it because angels don't shrug. He was smiling. Their faces were very close now.
"What I mean, of course," Crowley said quietly around his own smile, "is would you care to dance?"
"Love to," Aziraphale murmured, and leaned the last little bit up into the kiss.
They do this every year they can, even in off-years, but it never gets less nice. That's all Crowley thought: that it was nice. Nothing had ever really been 'nice' for him, and as weak a word as it was, it was a whole new experience for him. The Aziraphale experience. And he must have thought so too, because he never once objected.
The light snow flurried around them - and yes, Crowley got caught up in the moment and may have had a hand in that - and they were pressed together enough to keep the cold out. Aziraphale's hands were in Crowley's scarf, keeping him where he was, although Crowley wouldn't have moved for the life of him.
When he pulled back, his eyes were glinting that fierce gold Crowley always aims for. He wondered faintly what his own eyes were doing, but couldn't bring himself to concentrate on a show right now. Crowley took Aziraphale's hands from his scarf to hold them, fizz some warmth into his fingers.
"Shall we go inside?" he suggested, flicking the latch without moving an inch. He let go of one of Aziraphale's hands to rest it in the small of his back as he let him go through first.
For all his tricks, Crowley locked the door behind him manually and took a moment to bask in... well, the moment.
"My dear!" he heard Aziraphale exclaim from the next room. "What hideous curtains!"
As he hung up his scarf on the coat hook, Crowley tried to tamp down a smile.