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There are so many beautiful, descriptive passages that build a picture of Crowley, his flat and his demeanour. He saunters and struts, he is either tempestuous or nonchalant, he has chiselled, angular features. His apartment is clean, sparse, with London’s most verdant and luxurious plants.
Except none of that was true. Not anymore.
As Crowley kicked his feet off the table and stood up, his movements were uncharacteristically jerky and almost human. Instead of his features being chiselled and his frame slender, he looked gaunt. His brutalist concrete flat was covered in a layer of grime and dust and cluttered with empty, broken bottles. The wrestling angels that had once adorned the far end of the corridor had been smashed with a hammer. The plants – once his pride and joy – now hung limply, with dead leaves and sunspots.
And this Crowley didn’t saunter down to the bathroom, he just walked. He didn’t mope, didn’t storm, didn’t strut or sashay… he just walked.
He turned on the tap, then rested his hands on the edges of the sink. He stared down at the swirling water, his longer, unkempt hair falling over his face. After a few minutes of gazing blankly, he splashed his face, then turned off the taps. He caught his reflection in the broken mirror and sighed. It wasn’t worth punching the pathetic creature again.
There was a buzz from the door and Crowley sneered. No-one would fucking dare come near his place. He wiped his hands dry on his charcoal grey fitted hoodie and wandered back to his “office”, pulling off a few leaves on the way and crushing them in his hands.
He sat back in his chair and placed his hands on the golden arms. He had no idea what he was going to do next. Probably the same thing he had been doing for the last two years – sit, drink, exist.
The door buzzed again.
“Fuck off!” he yelled.
“Nice to see you too,” came an unexpected reply.
Crowley turned to his right and saw him. In a crisp, pale grey suit and white shirt with a lavender bow tie, stood Aziraphale. It was jarring, seeing him in such cold tones, tones that almost matched Crowley’s flat. Aziraphale was always warm, in soft creams and beiges.
Crowley’s eyes were flicking up and down Aziraphale’s body, as if he was trying to decide if this was real or a hallucination. Satan knows he had drunken hallucinations before now.
“So this is where you live?” asked Aziraphale lightly. “It is very… modern.”
The angel subtly moved his hand and Crowley felt the air move. If he had looked around, he might have noticed the grime and bottles had been miracled away.
“I told you to fuck off,” he said quietly.
Aziraphale perched on the edge of the table so that the two of them were facing each other.
“Yes,” the angel agreed, “I heard you.”
Crowley turned on the television and turned the volume up as far as it would go.
Aziraphale moved his hand and turned it off again.
“You’re not making this easy for me, you know,” he told the demon.
Crowley shrugged.
“Crowley, this is not like you,” Aziraphale tried.
The demon pushed the lank red hair back then ran his hands down his face.
“I can’t do this Aziraphale,” he muttered. “Not today.”
Aziraphale gave a gentle nod. “Tomorrow then?”
“Not tomorrow either.”
Tentatively, the angel reached out a hand to touch Crowley’s. The demon didn’t react. No eye contact, no flinch, nothing. Aziraphale would almost have rather had him scream. So he took back his hand and folded them in his lap.
“I can do the apology dance, if it would help?” he asked hopefully.
Crowley took a deep breath. “There’s nothing to apologise for.”
“We both know that’s not true,” Aziraphale told him.
The two of them sat in silence for a few minutes. Aziraphale was facing the sketch of the Mona Lisa. Under different circumstances, he might have admired the handiwork, but his mind was on other things.
Aziraphale decided to try speaking without looking at him, see if the indirect approach might help a little.
“I could get into some rather serious trouble for being here, you know,” the angel told him.
Crowley pulled his long legs onto the chair so that he was almost in a squatting position and rested his forearms on his knees.
“Then, for the third time, will you kindly fuck off?” he told the angel. But there was no anger or malice, just resignation. “It will save us both a lot of trouble.”
“I can’t,” Aziraphale said sadly. He paused for a moment. “I’ve heard things.”
For the first time, Crowley looked and met Aziraphale’s eyes. It was brief, but the pain hit him like a train. This was what he had been trying to avoid, with his months of carefully curated apathy.
“Draping yourself across the crucifix, trying to steal holy water,” he started. “The various attempts at discorporating yourself. The three months in hell where you were tortured mercilessly for doing good deeds.”
Crowley felt his eyes beginning to burn. Not in the good way, the passionate, righteous anger, but burning with shame and heartbreak.
“I… I… I care to much to let you do that, Crowley,” the angel told him, stammering a little.
The demon looked up at the ceiling, trying to blink back the tears.
“I thought angels weren’t supposed to lie,” he muttered.
Aziraphale gave a slow nod. He should have seen that one coming. If only Crowley knew the lies he had told to be able to come here in the first place.
“I had to go, Crowley,” Aziraphale told him, speaking more to the Mona Lisa than to the demon in the chair. “You know I had to go to heaven and try and make a difference.”
“And did you?”
Aziraphale smiled wryly and began to sing softly. “You were right, you were right…”
“Mmmm,” Crowley muttered.
“Not good enough?” The angel pulled at the watch chain on his waistcoat. “I said I would do the dance.”
“You think the dance could…” the demon started. The dam was bursting now and feeling was coming through. He wasn’t shouting but the embers of a fire were there in his low voice. He got to his feet and pressed himself close to Aziraphale. “I told you that I loved you and you walked away. You think a stupid dance is going to make up for that?”
“L…love… No… No, you didn’t say anything about…,” stammered Aziraphale, leaning back a little, before scooting off the table and away from Crowley.
It was like the world had suddenly shifted back into place. Crowley’s fire and Aziraphale’s wide-eyed nervous energy. The cool, collected Supreme Archangel was gone. The serious bookseller was gone. Now, it was just Aziraphale. His Aziraphale.
“You told me that you wanted to spend time with me, that you wanted to run away,” Aziraphale countered quietly. The ground had moved from under him and he was lost.
Crowley rubbed his forehead as he circled the room. “Like Gabriel and Beelzebub! What did you think I meant?!”
“No, no, no!” protested Aziraphale softly, holding his own head now. “You were trying to stop me going to heaven because you hate heaven so much! It was the same argument as when Gabriel arrived!”
“I kissed you, for God’s sake!” Crowley practically shouted at him.
The two of them were facing each other again, both breathing heavily. There were beats of silence, of stillness. Aziraphale pressed his fingers to his lips, just as he did on that day in the bookshop.
“You… love me?” he asked softly.
Crowley gave a minute shake of his head, as if asking the universe what sort of idiot he was talking to.
“No, I just tolerate you,” he drawled sarcastically.
Aziraphale pressed a hand to Crowley’s chest.
“Don’t joke,” he whispered. “Not about this. I… I couldn’t bear it.”
Crowley grimaced. “Don’t make me say it again.”
“But…”
“If you don’t understand that I love you after 6000 years and the things I have done, the things I have risked, the moments we have shared…” Crowley growled.
Inside, Aziraphale was smiling with wonder, that same smile he had at the beginning of the universe, the same smile he had when Crowley rescued his books in 1941, the same smile he had in the bookshop when he realised there was hope. But on the outside, he was rigid, lips apart in surprise.
“You said it,” Aziraphale told him.
Crowley gave a slow, pensive nod and sucked his teeth. There was no taking it back now.
“I’ve been saying it for years,” Crowley told him gently. “You just weren’t listening.”
“What happens now?” the angel asked. He was uncharacteristically still, his blue eyes locked on Crowley’s yellow ones.
Crowley leaned back to rest on the side of his chair, arms straight and rigid beside him, gripping onto the arm. He observed Aziraphale thoughtfully.
“Nothing,” he murmured. He paused and cast an eye past Aziraphale and down the corridor. “We carry on for another 6000 years.”
Crowley flicked his internal switch back to apathy, tried to disconnect. He couldn’t relive the past two years. He would skip the anger and the grief, and go directly to numb.
“And what if… I don’t want nothing?” Aziraphale asked him, reaching out a hand and touching the demon. “What if I want… us?”
“You’re an angel,” Crowley told him blankly. “You don’t want us. You want them.”
Aziraphale smiled nervously. “I’m an angel who eats, drinks, performs magic tricks, reads novels, occasionally swears, and is in love with a demon,” he told Crowley. “It is, quite frankly, a miracle I haven’t been cast out.”
Crowley’s head snapped up, his long curtains flicking back as he did.
“Yes,” Aziraphale nodded. “Don’t make me say it again.”
Crowley pushed himself upright and took a step forward so that they were almost touching. His eyes looked across the angel’s face, looking for clues. Things were changing so fast.
“Should we…?” he started to ask. “I mean, do you want…?”
Aziraphale beamed that coquettish smile and raised an eyebrow at him.
“It is customary, I believe.”
There was an awkwardness between them, awkward in that coltish way teenagers explore their first intimacies. This was so human, so vulnerable, but they never shied away from earthly experiences.
In the back of his mind, Crowley was telling himself not to be so pathetic – he had kissed Aziraphale before. But that had been out of fear and desperation. It was a last attempt to keep him, it wasn’t a real kiss. He didn’t have time to think it through like this.
Aziraphale made the first move, or as much of a move as his inhibitions would allow. He placed a hand on Crowley’s chest, followed by a second on his shoulder. He wasn’t quite meeting the demon’s gaze now – he was fighting turmoil inside. Aziraphale had never been so sure of anything in his existence, but had never been so unsure of anything either.
The angel rested his head against the demon’s chin, Crowley’s lips touching his forehead. Crowley placed his hands on Aziraphale’s shoulders and pulled back a fraction, so that he could place a proper butterfly kiss on his worried brow. Then his head tilted down and a second kiss fluttered onto the bridge of his nose. The third was the tip of Aziraphale’s nose, and the angel found his chin was being lifted upwards by gentle, nimble fingers.
They looked into each other’s eyes, both looking for permission or protest, both apprehensive. Their lips moved closer, so that they almost touched but not quite, their noses resting beside each other. In a shaky breath, one lip brushed against another, so light that they never knew who it was who moved first, or even if it was intentional at all. But that brush of skin was all they needed.
Over six millennia of emotions spilled out as their lips crashed together. Aziraphale’s hands snaked upwards from Crowley’s chest and tangled themselves in his hair, whilst Crowley cupped the angel’s face and back, forcing them closer together.
Aziraphale pulled back first, his face flushed and panting from the rush. His head was dizzy and his legs unsteady. But he needed more. He needed to show Crowley just what he meant.
The angel let his hands fall from Crowley’s hair, down to his shoulders. He took one cheek in his palm, and ran a thumb gently over a defined cheekbone. Aziraphale’s eyes were welling with emotion and he leaned back in, placing a series of soft, slow kisses on Crowley’s lips.
Crowley audibly groaned at the change of pace. The fury and lust and power had been amazing, but this was… heaven. It was. It was the same joy and happiness and belonging he felt in the beginning. He returned the soft kisses, his hands loosening their grip and starting to gently caress his angel.
Aziraphale had never known it could be like this. He had read about it in books before, of course, but he had never considered the power of this closeness, the assault on the senses. He wasn’t just holding Crowley; he could smell him, taste him, hear him groaning in response to his touch. He was losing himself in this moment, and his kisses began to get deeper, more forceful again, as he felt an insatiable need to get closer to the demon.
Crowley broke the kiss and started to move his lips along Aziraphale’s jaw and down his neck. The angel felt his back arch and he through his chin upwards to give Crowley better access. Small noises came unbidden from his throat as the demon made his way to Aziraphale’s collarbone, deftly ridding him of the bow tie and unbuttoning his collar. The angel had never imagined anything could feel so good.
Aziraphale pushed Crowley backwards, and the demon fell back, over the arm of his chair. He swung his legs over so that - for the first time in forever - he was sat like a normal person, and then he pulled on Aziraphale’s shirt. The angel obliged with a dark smile, placing one knee between Crowley’s legs in the chair and kneeling over him. He wrapped his arms around the demon’s neck and kissed him deeply, gasping as Crowley’s hands caught the bare flesh of his back, where his shirt had become untucked. They moved together forcefully, exploring each other with hands and tongues.
As their kisses slowed again, Aziraphale shifted so that he sat in Crowley’s lap. He rested his head and hand against the demon’s chest, as he was held.
“So what happens now?” asked Crowley, his chin resting in Aziraphale’s white blond curls.
Aziraphale smiled. “We carry on… for another 6000 years.”