Work Text:
It had been an accident, the first time. Quite the sort of thing that might have happened to anyone, if they'd imbibed as copiously and indiscriminately as Aziraphale had done, and if (he supposed) they'd had company as diverting as Crowley's. Not to mention, of course, that they'd had a bit of a trying day, what with one thing and another. The Son of God lay in his tomb and poor old Judas Iscariot had been set upon by a mob when all he'd ever done was further the Ineffable Plan, and Aziraphale rather miserably thought he knew the feeling. Beside him, Crowley, flame-capped too, commiserated when Aziraphale was drunk enough to express a shadow of a doubt. His eyes were soft, the colour of goldenrod, and Aziraphale could have sworn they were kind.
That, of course, was what came of drinking with a demon and forgetting he'd been made -- or unmade, beaten and recast -- to tempt and confound, to blur the straight lines of things. But Aziraphale's heart had been heavy, and Crowley was the only familiar thing there was. It really could have happened to anyone.
He couldn't remember, thinking about it, exactly what Crowley had done -- how he had signalled, by word or gesture, invitation. He remembered reaching for him, suddenly compelled to touch the braid in Crowley's hair which had drawn his eyes all evening. He remembered its texture, like stitches of silk beneath his fingers, and how Crowley's breath caught, afterwards, when Aziraphale traced his eyebrow, the high plane of his cheekbone. He remembered these things, but not how Crowley had pressed him to them. There must have been something.
He couldn't remember.
He'd put his hand in the fire of Crowley's hair, and realised only later he'd expected to be burned.
"Aziraphale," Crowley said, in a voice uncertain, almost fragile. His mouth had been dark with wine and Aziraphale had craved, quite suddenly, the taste of it from his lips. He had never wanted such a thing before, but now the yearning was so acute that he could almost feel the heat of Crowley's mouth, his serpent's tongue. That, he supposed, was the nature of temptation.
He'd leaned in, chasing the promise. It had been an accident.
He remembered -- he could never forget -- the way Crowley's breath had caught when Aziraphale's lips brushed his. His mouth had been warm and slightly dry, the ridges of his lower lip palpable against the soft curve of Aziraphale's. A suggestion of dampness just beyond reach made Aziraphale open his mouth searchingly until Crowley responded in kind, and their lips fitted together, clung.
A tingle set up at the base of Aziraphale's skull, then swept up his scalp like a low fire rushing through kindling. It should have been a warning but, instead, it seemed the most irresistible of enticements. Aziraphale set his hands on Crowley's shoulders and pressed closer still, daring to smooth his thumb along the promontory of clavicle until Crowley gasped into his mouth, clutched at Aziraphale's robe.
After that, it was as if the world had tilted. They grasped at shoulders, arms, breathing quickly, as if they, like the humans, needed to. Aziraphale's hand curved around the back of Crowley's neck and their mouths slid wet against each other and then -- oh -- this must have been Crowley's real temptation, the part of him that warped the mind and refashioned it as he wanted it. Crowley's tongue brushed slow over his; withdrew; returned. Fucking his mouth teasingly at first, and then with heat, as if Crowley intended to possess him, and Aziraphale had fallen so far that he might have allowed it, after what the demon had done to him. He wanted it.
A shout went up at a distance, unexpected and rousing. A miracle, Aziraphale now supposed, for had it not been for that riotous crowd, they might never have startled apart. He might have --
But, no. He couldn't dwell on it.
"Aziraphale," Crowley had said again, a little raggedly, as the angel gathered his robes about him and stood. Aziraphale had felt hollowed out, empty, as if Crowley had been preparing him for occupation. The feeling left him rattled, and he could not quite look at Crowley as he made his excuses and left.
Afterwards, he lay in his bed for a long while and did not sleep, running his fingertips over his lips and thinking of Crowley's mouth, Crowley's eyes. The danger they posed.
He didn't know why he was so drawn to it, but then, there had always been something wrong in him. Crowley must have sensed the seed and, with his gardener's touch, made it grow.
***
It took him many centuries to realise his mistake. To understand that it was neither he, nor Crowley, who had been wrongly made. On the contrary, the more Aziraphale saw of the world and all its facets, the surer he became that he and Crowley were the only right things in it.
***
The next time he saw Crowley, after The Incident, was at a wedding. It had been, he supposed, six or seven years. The bride and groom had been Aziraphale's to bless; the ceremony now was long over and the guests had all spilled out, drunk on wine and shared cheer, into the grass to celebrate their fill. The place was in a hilly area, secluded, and the sky, too, was mountainous with evening.
He had picked Crowley out by his hair. Red as the sky at morning: shepherd's warning. That was Aziraphale, the diligent shepherd, attending his flock. Crowley blundered into all that like an uncontained fire, a threat to be beaten back, fenced in. Everything in Aziraphale ought to have said so.
He didn't know why he kept circling back to Crowley, again and again, like a moth that ached to be burned.
***
Years went by, and Crowley defined them all, even the ones in which they (God) did not meet. Rome was the lingering scent of Crowley, and the disapproving curl of his mouth as he failed to appreciate an oyster. The shire of the West Saxons, dull and damp, meant mud to Aziraphale, and grass run wild, and Crowley's yellow eyes. Paris, in the years of pain-au-chocolat and pearl buttons, made him flutter to remember because Crowley had been there.
He never stopped circling, but it took another furnace to make him see Crowley for what he really was; to let himself alight again.
***
Crowley's mouth was hotter than he remembered, an inferno in which he wished he might destroy himself completely. To wear Crowley's body, learning all its angles from the inside, had been one thing; but to feel Crowley under his hands like this was something else entirely, and Aziraphale's chest felt broken open with it, tender and aching. Against him, Crowley was panting, his teeth scraping the curve of Aziraphale's lower lip as he pressed himself closer. His hand, long-fingered and tangled in Aziraphale's hair, was trembling.
"Angel," Crowley said, and his voice was desperate in a way Aziraphale had never heard it. "Angel, can I, please --"
"Darling." Aziraphale lifted his face to kiss him full on the mouth, committing himself to Crowley with every pulse of his heart. "My darling, you must understand by now. I've been so terribly silly, but -- anything you like. Please. You can do anything you want with me."
And what Crowley wanted, it seemed, took hours and hours to tell, the yearnings of centuries tolled out in endless peals that wracked the pair of them till morning had long broken.
***
It might have felt like an epilogue, then: this tableau of the two of them in their little stone-built cottage with the roses round the door, the Cotswold-quaint kitchen. Aziraphale had learned, with Crowley's assistance, to cook. Crowley had even learned to eat, at least a little. Happily ever after. Still crazy after all these years, and other human observations.
The trouble with that assessment was that it indicated an ending. Or did it? There's a lot that could be fitted within the generous scope of "happily ever after", one could argue. It's not "happily for another couple of years". But, with humans, there was always an implied end point, an until. An elision. The pair of them lived happily ever after (until one of them died, inevitably, because that's what humans do, and that left the other one bereft and alone).
Aziraphale and Crowley weren't human, or mortal, or likely to die if either of them could at all help it. So, for them, the cottage was just the next bit.
****
An incomplete list of things Aziraphale and Crowley learned in the cottage, in this period which was not an epilogue but starting all over again, might have gone something like this:
1. Crowley liked garlic, to what Aziraphale quickly decided was excess. In retrospect, he couldn't understand why he was surprised, except that he'd slightly internalised, in the late Victorian period, some strange idea that demons, like vampires, might be repelled by the stuff. It was, after all, a heavenly creation. But there were limits.
2. To Crowley's great surprise, Aziraphale was very adept with technology when forced to actually follow the instructions and play by the rules. Without miracles, Crowley was all but useless with everything from Netflix to programming the oven.
3. A dishwasher, on a similar note, was a marvellous thing to have, saving countless hours spent in what seemed an increasingly thankless and Sisyphean task.
4. A dishwasher should not simply be filled with Fairy Liquid when the dishwasher tablets have run out. No, they are not The Same Thing, Basically. No, it will not be Fine, Aziraphale.
5. Crowley took an unseemly delight in holding Aziraphale's hand in places where he particularly expected there to be heckling. He was also an excellent and inventive heckler in his own turn.
6. Aziraphale was surprisingly good at heckling, too.
7. Crowley had a spot just below his jaw that never failed to make his breath catch and his toes curl when Aziraphale so much as breathed across it. When Aziraphale put his mouth there, Crowley would writhe and cry blue murder.
8. When Crowley said bloody hell, Aziraphale, stop, he didn't always mean it, and would in fact quite frequently grip Aziraphale by the hair and hold him in place, giving him no choice at all but to disobey the instruction.
9. Crowley's hair held the scent of his shampoo all day. Aziraphale liked to press his nose into it when they were in bed together, breathing him in.
10. Both of them liked being in bed together very very much.
***
Crowley's hair was the precise dark red of copper beech leaves, so Aziraphale planted copper beeches at the edge of the garden so that one day they might sit together under them in autumn. He pictured laying Crowley out in the leaf-drifts, as if he belonged there. Beeches of that sort would take decades to mature, but they had time.
While they were waiting, Aziraphale liked to pull Crowley into his lap on the sofa instead, running fingers through his hair. Crowley allowed it; Crowley would allow anything if he thought it was what Aziraphale wanted. At first, Aziraphale had been almost worried by this, but now it was simply the way things were. Of course, he could hurt Crowley, very easily, if he put his mind to it; or indeed if he took his mind off it for even a second. But that was in the past, now, except for the little niggles of domestic life: leaving his teacup absent-mindedly for Crowley to trip over, or forgetting to water the plants when Crowley had to go up to London on Urgent Business. The big things, the proper hurting, was over with. Done. When Aziraphale pulled Crowley into his lap, Crowley went.
"Always doing this, angel," Crowley would say, closing his yellow-gold eyes.
"Tell me to stop." Aziraphale's fingers moving through the red whorls of his hair, soft and slow.
"Don't."
Red sky at night, shepherd's delight. That was the line. Aziraphale had had it wrong all this time.