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Crowley loved a good couch.
Not that he'd ever have such a thing in his own home. Ruined the "feng shui"- and he liked all his energies in their most open flow, thanks.
But he loved a good couch nap at Aziraphale's. The old thing was worn soft and threadbare around the arms, with the perfect hollow against the back on both sides, and smelled faintly of spilled wine, and ozone. He'd been there when this couch was purchased new. And apart from allowing itself to be comfortably broken in, it had had the good sense to keep its structure about it. Mostly so the angel could keep his book and his cocoa at perfectly within reach without moving his head.
But when Aziraphale stepped out of the back room to shoo away some pesky customers- i.e. any at all- Crowley's mind drifted to couches from long ago.
When the Greeks had started hosting parties around such items; he supposed that's when he'd picked up the habit. It was one thing to nap on warm rocks or litters as a snake, but those lush- in more ways than one- parties had held heaps of reveling mortals and sweet wines and bowls of nuts and fresh squid all balanced on soft couches smelling of the night's festivities. He'd watched Aziraphale joining in in the food and wine and generally forgetting all about his duties, and had taken a seat for himself on one of the couches in a drunken stupor. He was out before he'd even had time to upend a jug of wine onto a young soldier and his handsome companion.
Since then, he'd rather been keen on keeping an eye on such furniture that was long and soft and usually predisposed to have an equally long and soft back along one side.
Fainting couches had been all the rage for a long while. He'd made good use of those as a comely young woman with weak ankles, beautifully delicate collarbones and a penchant for swooning. The angel had nearly been present for one particularly dramatic performance and had just stepped out of the room when Crowley had made her move. A bloody duke had caught her instead and soothed Aziraphale's concerns before he'd come to investigate. Shortly after that, they all became "grandma furniture" and then it wasn't so fashionable to faint on one. So what was she to do but chalk the whole business up as a failure and find other ways of garnering attention?
At the advent of folding couches, he found a new passion. He especially loved futons and hide-a-beds. Great opportunities for business. Possibilities were endless. You could shut someone up inside them or make the springs break out of one side. Humans would go about angry for days, if not weeks, spreading their infectious foul moods and sometimes not even know that the origin of their simmering rage was an artfully misplaced spring in the lower back of their furniture.
He watched Aziraphale haughtily recommend another locally owned bookshop- because he was still an angel after all- and shoo a handful of ragged looking college students away from his shop. To Crowley, they seemed to be some literature students.
Which brought Crowley to another idea, as he let the curves of the old shop couch cradle his head.
He'd been around since the advent of academies. Hell, he'd helped build a few, seeing it as prized real estate for chronic stress, curiosity and some debauchery, too. The early ones had been much less unwieldy than he'd hoped and he still felt a little guilty about that.
In the 60s and 70s, he spent a lot of time on couches, talking and philosophizing and spreading seeds of curiosity and doubt- and as Aziraphale could never resist in pointing out to him, enlightenment. He pretended to be mad about that. But it was around then that he saw the full impact of colleges on their students and professors, all from those lumpy, hard couches which he had recommended to be installed himself. Crowley felt bad. Really bad. But he was a demon, so job well done, right?
No, Crowley may have been a demon, but he had a rather un-demonly soft spot for these wretched dorm couches and their tortured occupants. Dorms were universally- (Ha.)- full of sleepless young students who were over-worked, under-nourished, and easily burning years off their lives for every missed night of sleep. He felt rather bad for them in a truly awful way. Some of the poor buggers were steadily paying penance for their minor misdeeds and childhood misdemeanors without even realizing it. Yes, Hell was certainly a thing which you carry with you.
And so, it was with this tiny sympathy that some of Crowley's favorite work as a demon was done.
He'd hang out on the couches of professor's offices, demonically miracling packets and cups of grading pens to run out of ink, or in some cases, to explode in spectacular fashion all over any nice shirt, tie, or expensive blouse of the owner. Consequently, most cleaning places in the area routinely cut the prices for cleaning ink stains and sympathetically offered professors discounts for repeat service. One or two professors even started grading in the tub or using red dip pens to avoid the mess entirely.
He'd had great fun lounging upon common room couches in work spaces, looking out the window, making the meter maids outside break down in front of their own meters, leaving students free to hurriedly move their own vehicles before the dreaded red slips appeared under their windshield wipers.
When he was done with that, he would slouch into a suitably trendy, cheap, coffee house across the street and pour himself into a worn leather sofa, quietly making devilish mix-ups at the counter so that several passing patrons pressed their incorrectly made drinks to shocked and sleepy uni students behind them, leaving them to marvel at the accuracy of the drink to their own usual orders.
And from the park benches of the college greens, Crowley made sure that most of the tardy bells in universities all around England were always out of order, or chimed ten minutes too late. Especially those big noisy ones that drew much too much attention.
One such bell rang not a minute or more later, as Aziraphale, fussy but warm and carrying a mug of cocoa and with a book under his arm, sat on the other end of the couch and pulled Crowley back into his lap to pet his hair. The meter maid across the street threw down his hat and book after the third breakdown that day. A coffee shop two doors down had three indecisive customers right as the three haggard would-have-been-bookshop-customers walked into the shop deciding on three cocoas and receiving three free ones almost immediately.
Were it not four weeks past The End of The World, and had he still had his wretched job, he would have said that all of this mayhem was nothing personal. Just business, after all.
It was only now, curled against the worn velvet of his angel's warm-smelling waistcoat, that he could admit it quietly to himself.
Crowley, despite being an over six-thousand-year-old demon, could safely say that whatever the other humans called them, the poor uni students were just kids. Even the grad students, late finishers, and, retired returnees. And he wasn't into torturing and killing kids, not even since the Beginning.
It certainly didn't hurt that he could still protect his reputation and do all this in secret. Because his angel didn't know.
(Except he did.)