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Past the plant room, past the bedroom, past whatever parts of his flat the angel had seen, there was a room Crowley had never shown Aziraphale.
There were things he just didn’t share with him.
He had never told Aziraphale, for example, that he liked to knit. Yeah, he liked to knit. Very undemonic of him, and his creations always turned into many-limbed monstrosities, but so what? It relaxed him; and maybe one day he’d make a cold spider very happy.
He’d also neglected to mention he’d picked up playing the guitar. He thought it made him look very cool. Also, he liked puzzles, spoke fluent Italian, and sometimes forgot himself and spent a week or two building the most intricate houses of cards, spanning the entire surface (walls and ceilings included) of his secret hobby room.
So what? It was none of the angel’s business anyway, and Crowley would repeat until his dying breath that he didn’t read, didn’t sing, and most definitely didn’t knit.
He’d also lie and say he didn’t know how to draw. That he didn’t collect more sketchbooks than he could fill, that he didn’t adore running his fingers across the rough, butter-coloured paper, or having his hands stained with black charcoal all the way to his wrists.
He’d definitely lie about the subjects of his drawings. He would never, under any circumstances, admit that he’d drawn vegetation, buildings… and Aziraphale, over and over and over.
It wasn’t his fault, really. Sometimes he’d get home – or wherever he’d been staying through the centuries – and let his hand draw whatever it wanted. He’d generally start looking out the window, copying what he saw. Ironic that it was mostly trees, and boring ones at that. If he was lucky, he’d get a river, or a view of the city from high above. That was how he’d come to favour the last floor of any apartment complex.
It’d take a couple of glasses of wine for his hand to become more honest. For it to start drawing the same pair of blue, green, brown, whatever-bloody-colour-they-decided-to-be-that-day eyes, with the long pale eyelashes and the lovely lines at the corners. Aziraphale always had bags and slight black circles under his eyes, and they’d be much more evident if he’d been stressed.
His nose was the most difficult thing to reproduce on paper. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t big either. It was a perfectly shaped, symmetrical nose, smack in the middle of his face (where noses usually are, anyway), with an irreverent little upturned tip.
His eyebrows were very defined, with deep wrinkles in the centre when he frowned, which was most of the time Crowley was around. At first, Crowley had thought he didn’t like him much, then realised Aziraphale was simply worried. If he wasn’t worried they’d be found out, he’d be worried he was fraternising too much, and if he wasn’t worried about the fraternising he’d be pretending to be worried about the way Crowley drove, talked, reasoned. Either way, lots and lots of frowning involved.
His chin and jaw were round and soft, and he had big ears. His hair… that was a very difficult part too. It was soft. Well, it looked soft, Crowley had never touched it, not even when they’d swapped corporations. It had seemed like a transgression to touch Aziraphale’s body in ways he wouldn’t normally.
The old wooden chest opened with a loud creaking noise. Crowley ran his fingers along the familiar edges of paintings and etchings he’d done through the years, then picked up a maroon leather folder from the very bottom of the chest. It was big and heavy, its cover worn where his hands had touched it many, many times.
He brought it to the sofa with him, then crossed his legs and opened it over his knees.
Aziraphale looked back at him from dozens of drawings. In togas, in silks, in velvets, in armour. In shirts and dresses and the most ridiculous of hats. With his cheeks flushed from the wine or with a hard-suffering glare that pretended to be annoyed at Crowley. Half-asleep on a plush couch or looking a little green, holding tightly to the railing of a ship during a storm.
A secret collection Crowley had accumulated accidentally, something he liked to look at when he was feeling a little… well. Not sad , of course – demons don’t get sad. When he was feeling a little… bored , yes – let’s go with bored.
Today, he was feeling bored because it’d been a month exactly since the world didn’t end. And, maybe, he had certain expectations about how their friendship would have developed by now.
Here’s the thing: Aziraphale loved him. Crowley knew he did. He’d insisted many times that demons couldn’t feel love – of course he had, what else was he supposed to say? ‘My, angel, today your feelings for me feel like standing in a house on fire!’ . No, no. Aziraphale would’ve been spooked and run away for far less than that.
Aziraphale’s love had grown slowly. At first, Crowley had no idea what it was, he just had a vague feeling that he was always a little warmer when Aziraphale was around.
As for himself, well - for a really long time, he hadn’t even known what ‘love’ was, much less that he loved the angel back. He preferred not to think about it much. So he liked Aziraphale a little, big deal.
Aziraphale was the only one who’d shown Crowley any kindness, starting from that day he raised his wing over his head, on the wall of the Garden of Eden. So Crowley found excuses to spend more and more time with him, and had learned what all his favourite foods and drinks were, big deal.
Who else was he supposed to make intelligent conversation with, Hastur? For somebody’s sake, of course he wanted to spend time with the angel. And also, yes, he thought Aziraphale looked terribly soft to the touch, and the way the corner of his eyes crinkled when he smiled made his little demonic heart skip a beat in his chest. And when Crowley stared at him for too long, he thought he understood the way humans seemed to covet beautiful paintings and white marble sculptures. Big . Bloody. Deal .
He’d come to it in phases. Aziraphale was his ally, then his friend, then his best friend. And Crowley kept obstinately thinking about him as his best friend for a very long time, because he couldn’t let himself call it love , the angel would have felt that right away. In hindsight, maybe Crowley had been ruined from that first moment on the wall, and he’d just been lying to himself and trying to rein it in as much as he possibly could. But then the world didn’t end, and Crowley couldn’t hold it back any longer.
If Crowley’s acceptance of his love for Aziraphale had grown slowly and steadily, Aziraphale’s had felt like a flame in the wind. Uncertain and tremulous, as if somebody was desperately trying to stifle it. But always bright and warm, maybe even a little dangerous. It came and it went, and then it exploded in that church, in 1941, when Crowley handed him the books he’d rescued for him.
Crowley had walked back to the car feeling as if he’d been hit on the head. Which he was pretty sure he hadn’t, Aziraphale’s miracle had barely let any dust settle on his trousers.
In 1967, in the Bentley, Aziraphale’s conflicted love had filled the air around him, making it hard to breathe, until Crowley’s throat felt tight and the palm of his hands burned, aching to reach out and touch – but he hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.
And then the world didn’t end, and Aziraphale’s love poured out of him with no restraints. Crowley had thought, maybe a little naively, that he could finally do the same. So he had. He’d let it all out, allowed himself to think ‘yes, I am in love with this infuriating, beautiful angel, and I don’t care who knows’. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. For the angel to close the distance between them, possibly for him to take his hand or touch his cheek or just – something. Anything .
And nothing had happened.
That’s why he was – what was it? Bored . That’s why he was bored. He’d expected something to happen, and nothing had. They met for lunch on Mondays, dinner on Wednesdays, and went to a museum or to the opera on Fridays. Every other Sunday, they went for a day trip out of town.
That was it.
And it was perfectly lovely, and Crowley wasn’t sure what he’d expected anyway, and that’s why he found himself bored , definitely not brooding , sitting on this couch with a hundred Aziraphales looking back at him.
⚜️
He woke up with a start. Someone was banging on something. Possibly on his head. No… on a door, maybe? How much exactly had he drunk the night before?
He must have fallen asleep on the sofa. He closed the folder that was still sitting on his knees in a rush and stuffed it back into the chest before he even knew what was going on. He slammed the chest shut and then tried to figure out where the noise was coming from.
It wasn’t his front door. It was… wait, could it be possible it was coming from his bedroom?
He had no holy water left, but he armed himself with his mister anyway. If his unexpected intruder was a demon, they couldn’t be the brightest crayon in the box, and it was possible he could fool them very easily, since they were dumb enough to announce themselves by banging something in his bedroom.
Crowley swatted away a thought along the lines of ‘ not that there’s any other banging going on in that room’ . He didn’t need that right now, thank you very much.
He stopped just outside the door. He extended the arm holding the mister and held his forearm with his other hand, like he’d seen in spy movies, to steady his aim. Then, he turned the corner.
He found a completely empty room. Nobody was in there. The banging was coming from—
“Crowley!”
Crowley blinked twice, which was a lot of blinking for a snake. He turned towards the big mirror on the side of his room, and saw… uh. That couldn’t be right. He blinked another couple of times as he realised Aziraphale was trapped inside his mirror.
But it wasn’t just that. Aziraphale also seemed to be… well, a drawing of himself? And a rather infuriated one at that.
Crowley gaped like a fish, then looked back towards the door, wondering how much wine he’d had before falling asleep.
“Crowley, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there like an idiot! Help me!”
“Uh,” Crowley argued.
Aziraphale slammed his palms against the mirror. “There has to be a way out of here!”
Crowley’s brain finally caught up with the fact that he couldn’t just stay back and watch, and he stepped closer to the mirror. He pressed his hand to the glass - and almost lost his balance when his fingers went right through it.
Aziraphale looked at his hand, a little offended. “So you can get in, but I can’t come out?”
“Do I look like I know anything about what’s going on?” Crowley flexed his fingers – which, thankfully, had not turned into a drawing too – and had an idea. “Hey, try grabbing onto my hand. Maybe I can pull you out.”
Aziraphale looked at him like he’d gone mad, but Crowley thought he had no room to criticise, at least Crowley wasn’t a sketch of himself. The angel finally sighed and took his hand.
“Really, Crowley, this doesn’t seem like it’s going to—” easy as anything, Crowley drew back his hand and brought Aziraphale along with it. Well, the angel still looked like a paper cut-out of himself, rather than the real thing, but at least he was now standing in Crowley’s bedroom. “Oh.”
“Yeah, don’t thank me.”
Aziraphale looked down at his well-drawn hands. “Oh, I have to wonder how this could have happened. Do you have any idea?”
“No.” Crowley frowned. Something in the back of his mind clicked. “Well, maybe.”
“You—what is it?”
“I, uh.” Crowley rubbed the back of his neck, averting his gaze. “Once I drew a snake I had seen in the woods on some cursed paper I’d got in Hell, and as a result I soon had an actual, live snake slithering around my hut.”
“Your… hut .”
“I feel like you’re focusing on the wrong thing here.”
“Are you—did you draw me? Are you saying this is your fault?”
Crowley sighed. “Wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes. I might be the cause of – whatever this is.”
“Oh dear.” Aziraphale sat down on the bed, clearly needing a moment, and Crowley’s heart skipped a beat – or several. He’d just never thought he’d see the angel on his bed, in any circumstances. “Oh my. How can this be reversed?”
“How would I know?”
“What do you—Crowley, what happened to that snake?”
“Stayed with me for a while. Problem being – he wasn’t waterproof, as I soon found out.” Aziraphale couldn’t get any paler, not when he was already black lines on white paper, but Crowley thought he could spot it anyway. He sat down on the bed next to him. “Hey, no need to worry. We can figure this out.”
“Right, yes.” Aziraphale wrung his hands. “I’m… I’m sure we will.”
“We just need to know where to start,” Crowley said, giving the room a long glance, as if waiting for something to jump out at him and inspire him.
“Well, do you have a library?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley cringed a little at the hope in his voice.
⚜️
Crowley’s library was a truly miserable thing.
Some books about astronomy, some about modern and classical art, some about interior design. A bunch of comic books he’d only bought to piss off Aziraphale whenever they went into a bookshop together (it worked). A few romance novels stashed at the very back.
Aziraphale sighed more loudly than was polite.
“Anything about demonic… well, demonic tools?”
“Ah, afraid not. These things don’t exactly come with an instruction manual.”
Aziraphale took a fortifying breath and reached out to get a random book while Crowley stared at him. It was so weird, it felt like he was looking at one of those stop-motion cartoons. Aziraphale was – well, definitely Aziraphale, except drawn by an expert hand.
Crowley hissed as, all of a sudden, he realised the expert hand was his own. Yes – that was definitely the way he used to draw Aziraphale’s nose, his bow tie, the knuckles of his hand. He needed to sit down.
“Do you, uh, want some tea or something?” He asked, looking for an excuse to take a moment for himself. Aziraphale looked at him with a paper eyebrow raised. “Ah, right. Forget I said anything.”
Crowley miracled himself a sofa and fell back into it. Shit. Shit shit shit. He’d really fucked up. He’d been concerned Aziraphale wasn’t interested in having a more intimate relationship with him, and now he’d gone and thrown that possibility out the window for good, hadn’t he? He’d gotten a little too drunk and used the wrong kind of paper - and made a huge, terrible mess.
He put both arms over the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling while the angel rummaged through his books. Aziraphale kept muttering things like there has to be something somewhere and all books can be useful (not this one, though) , while Crowley tried to force his brain into coming up with something useful, anything at all, but it seemed to be out of commission.
Time was a slippery concept, but he realised a lot of it must have passed when he looked back in front of him and saw Aziraphale had made considerable progress through his pathetic library and was now beginning to tackle his romance section.
“You know,” Crowley said, desperate to say anything that could distract Aziraphale from those embarrassing novels. “You look like… that guy from that video…”
“Obviously.” Aziraphale rolled his eyes at him. “That ‘ guy ’ from that ‘ video ’.”
“Come on, you know the one. Ah, scratch that, you probably don’t. The one that goes like…” He tapped his boot on the floor to give himself a rhythm while he tried out the tune. “ Taaaake ooooon meeeee… ”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“ Taaaaake meeeee oooon …”
“Will you stop that, it’s really quite annoying.”
“ Iiiiii’ll beeeee goooone…”
“No, you will not.”
“ In a day oooor —” Crowley’s voice clearly wasn’t meant to have such range, and he choked on his spit as his throat closed on that awful, awful high E note.
“Are you quite finished?”
“Yeah,” Crowley croaked out. “Point being, in the video, the guy managed to become real again.”
“I can assure you I’m already quite real, Crowley.”
“I know, Pinocchio.” At that, Aziraphale shot him an icy glare that made Crowley cringe a little.
“Would you just share how he turned back into flesh and blood, please?”
“Uh, kind of slammed himself against the walls? Wait.” He pulled out his phone and found the video. He skipped to the end and showed it to the angel.
“That doesn’t seem sensible.”
“Sens—what about this situation seems ‘sensible’ to you?”
Aziraphale gave a long-suffering sigh. “Crowley, I’m not slamming myself into a wall. Paper is not that resistant. It could be dangerous.”
“Ah. Yeah, hadn’t thought about it that way.” He stared at the blank wall in front of him. “So what do we do?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Aziraphale picked up a few books. “Nothing useful here. Everything seems to be solved by ‘true love’s kiss’ and other such nonsense.”
“Yeah. Course. Utter bullshit.” Crowley considered this for a moment. “Safer than running into a wall, though.”
“Yes,” Aziraphale conceded, looking between Crowley and the very solid wall behind him. Slowly, he edged towards the sofa. “Surely.”
“And it’d be quite inconvenient to be stuck like this for a long time.”
“Hmm,” Aziraphale agreed, sitting down next to him. “Can’t ask Heaven for help either.”
“Oh, yeah.” Crowley scrunched his nose in disgust. “Definitely not.”
“We might find ourselves having to… consider even the most absurd of solutions.” Aziraphale licked his lips and glanced sideways towards Crowley, who was suddenly feeling as if his spine was the heaviest object on the planet. And also liquid at the same time. It was a very weird feeling.
“It’d be reasonable. Sure.”
Aziraphale nodded and Crowley saw the angel’s paper hand hesitantly reaching out to touch his knee. It curled around it, looking for all the world as if it belonged there. A delicate, gentle hand against a bony knee. A quiet revolution right here in his living room. “Would you?” The angel asked, softly.
Crowley nodded and swallowed around the knot in his throat. “Sure, no problem,” he replied, as if Aziraphale had asked him to pass the salt, rather than implying he was his True Love – a thought far too big, far too extraordinary to hold in his anxious snake mind.
He twisted around to face the angel. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, and his mouth felt dry. Was it? His ears felt hot. Why did they feel hot? And his cheeks – his cheeks were definitely on fire. If his face dared give him away and turn red, there would be hell to pay for it.
His spiralling thoughts came to a screeching halt when Aziraphale put a hand on his cheek, his ring finger along the line of Crowley’s jaw. Then, the angel leaned forward and pressed their lips together softly.
It felt like—well, paper, at least at first. It felt like kissing a page, but Crowley didn’t care, this was his angel he was kissing and he would have enjoyed it if it felt like rubbing against his mouth one of those flimsy plastic bags that smell synthetic and break if you so much as look at them the wrong way, dropping all your groceries to the ground.
Soon after, though, Aziraphale’s lips filled up, they became warm and soft and parted with a little pleading noise that made Crowley’s brain melt right out of his ears. Aziraphale clutched at Crowley’s face and pulled away with an inquiring noise. Crowley knew that, in that moment, he would have said yes to anything.
“You’re going to need a bigger library,” Aziraphale said.
Well, almost anything.
But Aziraphale sounded a little breathless, and happy in a way Crowley had never heard before, and the words were whispered against his lips, so, all in all – maybe he would indeed get a bigger library, for Aziraphale. After all, he imagined he’d stay over much more often, from that moment on.