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“Can I ask you something?”
Aziraphale’s tone of light curiosity belied the weight of the question. Crowley, lying with his head on the angel’s chest, couldn’t see the concern in his dark eyes or the frown on his lips, so he nodded minutely.
“Sure, angel, go for it.”
“I was just wondering,” Aziraphale murmured with that same calculated nonchalance, “when the last time you slept was?”
Crowley furrowed his brow, tilting his head up to look at the angel. “The last time I slept? Why?”
“No reason, really,” Aziraphale replied. “Only, well. We’ve been quite active the past two days; I should think you’d be tired. You haven’t slept as long as I’ve been here, and I rather thought you preferred to sleep about every other night.”
“I didn’t know you paid that much attention to my sleeping habits,” Crowley deflected easily.
Rolling his eyes, Aziraphale rubbed a warm, flat palm across the demon’s back. “It’s hard not to get a sense of these things after six thousand years,” he said drily. “If I were unreachable for several hours at a stretch every few days, you would certainly notice.”
“Yeah, you got me there.”
“Anyway, you’ve not answered my question.”
“Which question?” Crowley asked with wide, innocent eyes.
Growing more concerned the longer Crowley avoided the topic, Aziraphale risked becoming quite exasperated as well. His hand had migrated up from Crowley’s back, and he began to stroke through the demon’s hair idly as he spoke. “When was the last time you slept, my dear?”
Crowley hummed and pushed into the warm touch of the angel’s hand, turning back to his original position with his cheek pressed to Aziraphale’s chest. “Sometime around… August, maybe,” he mumbled, as quietly and dismissively as he could manage.
Aziraphale sat up abruptly, dislodging the demon from where he was lying on top of him, and looked at Crowley for a long moment, studying his face. “Jesus, Crowley,” he muttered eventually, “no wonder you’re such a mess.”
Hoisting himself up to sit facing the angel, Crowley shot him a halfhearted glare. “Thank you, angel.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true,” the angel said with a soothing hand on Crowley’s knee. “Why haven’t you been sleeping?”
“I don’t know,” Crowley lied.
Aziraphale scoffed and narrowed his eyes in a display of biting skepticism for just a second, and then he remembered that he was being supportive and concerned for Crowley’s wellbeing, so he made an effort to adjust his attitude to that end. “I think you do,” he said in the least judgmental tone possible.
If Crowley had gotten the memo about the angel’s sincere worries and how they came from a place of love, then he had promptly ignored it, discarded it, and forgotten it. “Well, I don’t,” he insisted, a tad irritably.
“Please, Crowley.” Aziraphale reached out for one of the demon’s hands, rubbing his thumb in soft circles along the back of it, and continued softly, “I want to help.”
Crowley had never been any good at resisting Aziraphale’s sad eyes. A small voice in the back of his mind reasoned that they had been entirely more open with each other in the last few days than in the previous six thousand years combined, and so he shouldn’t feel reluctant to talk about this. Another voice countered that perhaps having a panic attack in front of Aziraphale, confessing his love, and spending forty-eight hours in bed with him was enough vulnerability for the time being. And then Aziraphale squeezed his hand, and the first voice won out.
“Fine,” the demon sighed with a shake of his head, “fine. I’ve been – I was… having bad dreams.”
Aziraphale frowned, unconsciously scooting a bit closer. He couldn’t empathize, never having experienced a bad dream himself, but he felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the demon. “What kind of bad dreams?”
Crowley took a slow, deep inhale, then breathed it out even slower before answering. “I was dreaming about… well – do you remember armageddon?”
“Yes, Crowley, I remember armageddon.”
“I dreamt that we lost.”
A stunned silence fell over the angel, who sat with his jaw hanging open, looking at Crowley with so much sorrow and pity and horror written on his face. It went on for only a few seconds before the demon could no longer stand it, the quiet or the look, so he chose to elaborate.
“Over and over and over again,” he said softly, averting his eyes to stare at the bedspread. “In a thousand awful ways. We kept losing, and – and I kept losing you.” Crowley’s voice broke, and he cleared his throat and swallowed hard before continuing, still just as ragged and desperate. “I didn’t know how to make it stop, so I just decided not to sleep. And I shouldn’t have to sleep, this shouldn’t be a problem for me, but it is a problem, and I don’t know what to do.”
By the time he finished speaking, his words had all but dissolved into choked attempts to hold back sobs. When Aziraphale brought his hand up to cradle Crowley’s cheek, he had to bite down on his lip as hot tears spilled from his eyes without permission, and the angel responded immediately with gentle reassurances.
“Shh, shh, darling, it’s alright,” he whispered. “It’s alright, you’re alright.”
“How can it be alright?” Crowley cried out desperately.
“I’m here,” Aziraphale told him, reaching to hold the demon’s face firmly in both his hands, wiping his tears away. “I’m right here, and so are you, and we’re safe. We didn’t lose. We won, and we’re still here. Aren’t we?”
Crowley sniffed pathetically. “Yeah.”
“Let me tell you a story,” the angel said, brightening slightly. When Crowley responded only with apprehensive silence, Aziraphale began, “It’s about a man named Judah –”
“I know the story of Chanukah, angel,” Crowley interrupted, his voice thick and undercutting the snark he was aiming for.
Dropping his hands from Crowley’s face, Aziraphale waved him off with a look that was more fond than anything. “Yes, yes, you know everything,” he placated the demon. “Let me tell you anyway.”
Though he still didn’t seem entirely convinced, Crowley nodded his head and mumbled a small “Okay.”
“Thank you. Come here,” the angel purred, leaning back against the pillows and opening his arms in invitation.
Crowley immediately yielded to the request, stretching out his long limbs only to curl up in Aziraphale’s arms, half on top of him, his dark, unkempt hair tucked under the angel’s chin. Aziraphale pulled him in, sneaking in a quick kiss to the demon’s temple before he settled in his position, and then used one hand and part of a miracle to pull the blanket over the two of them. When they were both comfortable, he began his story.
“A very long time ago, there was a king who was not very nice to the Jews living under his rule.”
“That’s most kings since the dawn of time,” Crowley pointed out, snorting softly.
“Yes, I know,” Aziraphale said patiently, squeezing the demon’s shoulder, “but that’s how the story starts. This king wanted the Jews to stop practicing their religion and worship the Greek gods instead. You see, he had all this power, and he thought he could use it to force people to believe what he wanted them to believe. But of course, that never works. We know that, don’t we?”
Crowley hesitated. Everything the angel had said was true, but Crowley had never thought of it in so many words, had never made the personal connection that Aziraphale was so blatantly drawing now. Gaining interest, eager to hear where Aziraphale was going with the story, he hummed a quiet “Mm-hm.”
“So he decided to turn to desperate measures: he ordered an attack on the city, and his soldiers killed thousands. And, in service of his original goal, they built an altar to Zeus in one of the Jewish temples, and they sacrificed pigs there so the holy structure was tainted.”
“S’bad,” Crowley grunted.
“Quite,” the angel agreed. “Now, the Jews weren’t going to just take it lying down, of course. But they’d had this war foisted upon them unwillingly, so they played on their own terms. Do you know what they did?”
Absently nuzzling into the crook of Aziraphale’s neck, Crowley hummed another affirmation. “Guerilla warfare,” he mumbled, his lips brushing against the angel’s skin.
Aziraphale smiled and gave a small nod, as much as he could manage with where the demon was situated. “That’s right,” he replied softly. “They fought back in their own way, with unorthodox tactics, sneaking around, planning and coordinating in clandestine meetings.”
“Oh,” Crowley breathed.
“And it worked,” continued the angel in a fervent whisper. “They won. They drove the king’s soldiers out of the city. And then they got to work on rebuilding the lives they’d lived and loved, the lives that so many had tried to put an end to and always failed because they underestimated the strength and perseverance of the Jewish people.”
Pausing to let the last part sink in, Aziraphale pressed a kiss to the top of Crowley’s head before speaking again. “So they cleansed the temple,” he explained, “to get it back to holy standards. It may seem a bit petty, to worry about a house of worship when people have died and homes have been destroyed, but it’s important to have faith, and their faith was important to them. They counted on that temple to always be there for them. They needed something to come back to, someplace to belong.”
“Like home.”
“Like home,” Aziraphale repeated softly. “And of course, the rededication of the temple involved lighting the menorah, which is meant to stay burning at all times. But there was only one day’s worth of oil left, and it would take much longer than that to fetch more. And they say – we can’t be sure, but they say that that oil burned bright for all of those eight days, the menorah stayed shining until they could replenish the oil. And that's why we celebrate Chanukah, the rededication, to commemorate the survival of the Jewish people and the miracle of the oil.”
“Miracle,” echoed the demon, more entranced by the rumble in the angel’s chest against his ear than anything else. Floating on the edge of sleep, he turned his head to kiss the nearest accessible spot on Aziraphale's neck. "Love you, angel."
“And I love you," the angel replied, voice full of warmth and tenderness. "Get some rest, please, honey."