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Crowley comes into the living room, still wearing his bathrobe but with hair insta-dried via miracle, to see his husband sitting on the sofa with his head in hands.
“Aziraphale! What’s wrong?”
The angel lifts his face immediately, and Crowley gets a glimpse of raw distress before a smile of something that looks like… relief?... spreads across it. “Nothing’s wrong, now. Did you have a nice bath?”
“Hm? Yeah, yeah, it was fine.” Crowley crosses the room and plops down next to Aziraphale. Nothing’s wrong… now. He frowns. “What was wrong, then?”
“Nothing really. Not now that you’re here.”
Comments like that would ordinarily reduce Crowley to a cluster of embarrassed syllables, but right now he has something else to focus on. He takes a breath. “Aziraphale, please—”
“It’s just… bathtubs. Water. You.” A tremble goes through the angel’s corporation with the admission, and then another. “I don’t… don’t like thinking about it.”
Oh, Crowley thinks, and again, oh. Oh, angel. And I didn’t realize.
“It’s foolish,” Aziraphale adds, frowning. “I am perfectly aware it’s only ordinary water. ”
“Like how I freaked out when you lit the fireplace the other day? Was that foolish?”
“What? No, of course not, but that isn’t at all similar—”
“I knew it was just regular flame, too.”
“Yes, but that…” A pause. Then, begrudgingly, “Ah. I suppose I see what you mean.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes, leaning together and, Crowley suspects, taking mutual comfort in the presence of the other.
“You could have told me, you know,” he says at last. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have—”
“But you like bathing. Pleasure of the world, you always say. I don’t want to rob you of that.”
“And I don’t want to rob you of cozy evenings in front of a fire.”
“We’ve discussed this already, Crowley. It’s not robbing me if I choose not to do it because I wish to save you distress.”
“...Can you just stop a moment and replay what you just said?”
“What— Oh.” The angel sighs. “All right, all right, you’ve made your point. I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner.”
“Forgiven,” Crowley says lightly, and puts a terrycloth-swathed arm around his husband.
“I didn’t actually realize how much it would upset me until you were already in the tub. I thought it would be just a bit… uneasy.”
“Well, I’m glad you did decide to tell me.”
The angel nestles closer, and Crowley can feel the lingering tension draining out of the corporation beside him. “As am I.”
The conversation is far from over. There’s more to discuss, much more; reactions to be considered, precautions to be taken, and perhaps even eventually explorations to be made into ways of making water and fire feel safer. It would be a pity to give up baths and fireplaces forever, after all.
But that’s for later. For now, they snuggle together on the sofa, cool and dry, and there’s nothing that looks like an execution anywhere around.