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It so happened that Mr. Fell’s neighbors liked to give him little gifts. This would not have seemed likely to anyone who asked about the pricing of one of his rare volumes, but the fact was that Mr. Fell was quite amiable, a fine listener and a cheerful talker, and if you did something to make his day nicer, your day would be nicer. No one stopped to wonder why this was; they simply thought he was a sweet old gentleman—although, of course, none of those three things was actually true. Old was not incorrect, really, but then, that would have meant that he was young at some point, and he never was.
No one needed to know such things, of course. All you needed to know was—unless you were in books, or real estate, or the protection business—you were bound to like Mr. Fell. Bakers gave him an extra jumble for a make-weight. Flower sellers gave him an extra carnation for his buttonhole. Confectioners threw in a handful of mint humbugs. This was what some of the French called lagniappe, although Mr. Fell kept this to himself; his neighbors would not like to be told they were doing anything that seemed a bit French. As it was, he simply beamed and said, “Oh, bless you, Mr. -----,” and left it at that—but then, of course, when he said bless you, it was a gift beyond naming.
On occasion, people came into his bookshop to give him their little gifts in person; and these people were almost always women. They were older ladies, generally widows who had seen too much of men or spinsters who wanted to marry a library, and they angled politely for his attention, bringing him oranges or penwipers. Eventually, each of them came to the conclusion that they were in the wrong shop. Even so, most of them were still quite fond of him, and would stop in to see about the latest Miss Edgeworth (or Trollope, or Dickens, or Masefield, or Agatha Christie, as the years rolled on).
On other occasions, they were young men who had heard that he belonged to a certain club,[1] or seen him there, or simply made deductions on their own behalf. They, too, thought it would be a good thing to make an arrangement with a wealthy older gentleman who seemed merry and kind and, frankly, not too swift on the uptake. But Mr. Fell was swifter than that, at least. He did not accept what they offered, but gently and firmly sent them on their way.
Whenever this happened, he spent the night sitting in his best chair in front of a book—which, indeed, he usually did anyway—but he neglected to turn the pages. He sat, miserable, drinking claret and refusing to name his own thoughts. If possible, he would eat one of the oranges.
They were children, these people. The oldest, the wisest, the brightest of men—children, all of them. Aziraphale loved them, but he understood that much. The best of them wanted his kindness or knowledge; the worst of them wanted his money. He gave what he had to give, and he was glad to give it, even when he suspected he was being made a fool of.
But what Aziraphale truly wanted to give someone—well, he was afraid to name it to himself, but he certainly knew he could not give it to some poor creature who would not make it past a hundred years without falling to dust. No one on this earth could understand what it was to carry this, unless it was—
“Crowley.”
“What?”
“Crowley, you’re asleep.”
“No, ‘m not.”
It was difficult to understand why someone who had been lying unmoving on top of him for a half hour, who had in fact just started snoring, would care to deny this.
The two of them were on Crowley’s sofa, where they had been watching some makeover show about hapless American men; or rather, Crowley had been watching it, and Aziraphale, with his arms around Crowley, had been reading an anthology of short stories over Crowley’s shoulder. He’d muted the television ages ago. The thing still made him nervous. No one had watched them through it; not yet.
Once the world had ended—or failed to end, depending on how you looked at it—Aziraphale and Crowley had sorted things out between them fairly quickly. At least, they had sorted out the kissing. That had been the easy part. They had even got started on the harder part—they’d gone to look at houses together, for one thing, bickering in a comfortable way about gardens, and southern exposure, and the sigils and wards they would need to keep the neighborhood safe, and whether they wanted to remodel.
Aziraphale was good at that part. What was hardest for him was—
“Coming to bed?”
Crowley was suddenly quite awake, looming over him, asking a question he had asked before, gentle and meaning. Aziraphale answered him just as he had before.
“No. No, not … not just now.”
“All right.” The same slight and disappointed pause. “All right.”
Crowley slid off the couch and was on his feet in one movement. Aziraphale straightened up, adjusted his clothes.
“You leaving?” Crowley asked. “There’s no need to.”
“Well …”
Outside, there was a chill rain, cold enough to freeze; the year had turned over into an uninviting winter, and the night was thick. In here, it was warm—always warm, almost too warm to bear—and faint with the scent of Crowley’s night-blooming jasmine, which was doing its best to please.
“Make yourself at home,” said Crowley, and wandered off towards his bedroom, where Aziraphale had never yet been.
It can be a terrifying thing to get what you want.
Aziraphale sat with his book, not turning the pages. There was no light—neither of them had turned one on since sunset; neither of them needed it. That was not the matter.
As far as Aziraphale could tell, the matter was that nothing should have been the matter. Nothing in the wide world should have been wrong for him. What he wanted most in the world was a few dozen feet from him, down a hallway; and it was his if he could get off the sofa and go ask for it.
So far, he had not been able to.
Here in the dark, he was suddenly sick of it—sick of being afraid, sick of making Crowley be patient, sick of disappointing him. Of course, he did not want to disappoint him, which was exactly the trouble. He did not want to end all of this, this joy and this hope, in such a dull, commonplace way: being stout and ordinary and not at all the sort of thing that earned a demon lover. But even a demon deserved to know whether or not he was wasting his time, didn’t he?
Aziraphale put down his book, got up, and adjusted his waistcoat.
This was, of course, not the bravest thing Aziraphale had ever done. Hopefully, nothing ever would be again. But confronting the hosts of Heaven and Hell, harrowing as it was at the time, was right. This was … not that. It was just something he wanted. He wasn’t good at knowing what he ought to want. There were, he had come to realize, a lot of things he wasn’t good at knowing.
Even so, he walked quietly down the hallway.
“Angel?”
If Crowley had been asleep, it was not for long. He sat up quick as a snake, the orange light from the city below glinting on his satin pajamas. Aziraphale stood in the doorway, meeting his gaze, doing his best to smile.
“May I?”
Crowley’s eyes were wide and sun-yellow. He pulled aside the bedclothes.
“For hell’s sake,” he said. “Get over here.”
The bed did not creak as Aziraphale sat on it. His own bed would have creaked; he had purchased it for emergencies in the early 1900s, and it sounded every inch its age, despite the fact that it was barely used. But Crowley had whatever sort of bed the best hotels had, and it was soft and gray and silent.
Crowley’s voice was barely above a whisper. He set his hand on Aziraphale’s forearm.
“What do you want?”
“Please,” said Aziraphale, his head lowered as he fiddled with his many and various buttons. “Have I got to say it? There aren’t words. There aren’t good words, that is.”
“Yep. Have to tell me. Otherwise I don’t know, do I?”
Crowley was smiling enormously, fondly; Aziraphale was not. He kept his gaze across the room, to the door he had shut behind him. He tried to speak twice before he managed it.
“I want,” he said, with the air of a man confessing a theft, “I want you to have me.”
“Oh,” said Crowley, sliding out from between the sheets, “no, those are good words,” and he turned Aziraphale’s shoulders towards him, kissed him, kissed him down to the bed; and this was good, this was everything Aziraphale had ever wanted, if he wasn’t about to ruin it; before long, the buttons were opened, and the waistcoat was gone, and so was the shirt, and—
“Wait, wait, listen—”
—so was the white cotton undershirt. Crowley stared at his chest, unspeaking, for a long breath. Aziraphale shut his eyes.
“Listen, I wanted to tell you. I know I don’t—I don’t look like much. Not like you, you’re so beautiful, it … Say the word, I’ll go, we never have to speak of this again. Or, um, I could make changes, I suppose, but then I thought you should tell me—”
Crowley pressed three fingers to Aziraphale’s mouth, and said, with deep tenderness,
“Shut up.”
Aziraphale’s angel’s mark, which covered his stomach and chest, was fractal and golden, something like lightning—not a simple zigzag, but genuine lightning, jagged and arched and branching, which made it look rather more like—
“You have a tree,” breathed Crowley. “A tree of gold.”
“What? Oh, the mark,” said Aziraphale, bemused. “Nearly forgot about that. It does look like a tree from the front, doesn’t it? I’m not much of a canvas for it, I’m afraid. Deserves better.”
He laughed a little as he spoke, but Crowley was not laughing. He had reared back a little, as if in awe.
“And you never told me what it was like? You didn’t think to say, all this time—?”
“Oh, well, no, of course not,” said Aziraphale, now flushed uncommonly red, “it’s just my angel’s mark. When would that have come up? We’ve all got one somewhere. It, er, it doesn’t do anything.”
But Crowley was alight.
“When was the last time anyone else saw this?”
“Hmm,” said Aziraphale, as if it were some interesting point of logic he’d never considered. “Would it have been when I was at the tailor’s at—? No, not even then, it would have to be the last time I went to a public bath. Two hundred years? And nobody down here ever really saw what it was, of course. I took care of that.[2] Looked like a port-wine stain.”
Crowley traced the trunk of it with his fingertips. Aziraphale trembled.
“So what you mean,” Crowley said, “is that no one has actually seen this for thousands of years. Just me.”
Bewildered, not quite willing to believe his luck, Aziraphale finally smiled.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s true, isn’t it?”
Crowley lowered his forehead and touched it to the crown of the tree, as if it were an altar.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “It does something. It absolutely does.”
Later, it was just as it had been before: Aziraphale with his arms around Crowley, who lay on his chest, his eyes fluttering shut, his breathing even and low. There were, of course, some marked differences, including a complete lack of clothing between them and the absence of Aziraphale’s book. Aziraphale was contemplating whether he might actually be about to fall asleep himself when Crowley unexpectedly spoke.
“D’you ever meet Howard Carter?”
“Who?” Aziraphale was briefly annoyed at the introduction of anyone else’s name at this moment, then placed him. “Do you mean the archaeologist?”
“Right. Him. Bloke who found Tut’s tomb.”
With one finger, Crowley traced the curve of the muscles in Aziraphale’s bicep as he spoke.
“Tried to buy him a pint in the ‘30s, tell him a thing or two. He was a gruff bastard, though. Not much for chat. Could have made him talk to me, but it wasn’t official business or anything. Just would’ve liked to have asked him something about it.”
“Really? But we knew Tutankhamun.[3] And his whole wretched family, poor lad. Don’t you remember, everyone was so glad to be shut of them, there wasn’t much—”
Crowley waved dismissively.
“Yeah, yeah, but it wasn’t about that. It was about the moment he found it. That was what I wanted to talk to him about.”
He moved his hand and traced the branch of gold beneath Aziraphale’s collarbone.
“I didn’t care what he found. Could have been digging in his basement, if there was a discovery down there. I wanted to know about the time he opened the door and he saw it. What it’s like to have that, just then, just that instant, after thousands of years.”
“It … oh.”
Aziraphale had realized this had nothing to do with tombs or kings in the slightest. He held Crowley more tightly, pressing his chin into the red curls of his scalp.
“I had been going to say there wasn’t much of a treasure, compared to all the others you must have seen, but, well … it’s yours, you know,” Aziraphale finished, dropping the metaphor.
“Good,” said Crowley. “’Night, angel.”
He pulled across the sheets from the side of the bed where they had been tossed, and covered them both; and Aziraphale did not stay awake with his book, or awake at all, because sleep, in itself, is a gift.
[1] He had joined this club by invitation from an old customer, after a conversation that turned on serious mutual misunderstanding of the phrases “gentlemen of certain inclinations,” “our sort of fellows,” and “fond of the company of other men.” Afterwards, he was far too embarrassed to explain himself, and in any case everyone was very nice, so he stayed.
[2] The two of them could obscure themselves, partly or wholly, with a minor adjustment to the fabric of reality, although it was much less effort to, say, wear dark glasses, or never wear anything with sleeves above the elbow.
[3] What Aziraphale actually said was something that only Egyptologists and a few linguists would have understood, and only then after a moment of thought, because it was in fact what Tutankhamun’s name had sounded like.