Work Text:
--
They're posted up in the bookshop (it is unbelievably, quiet definitely, supremely closed) when Aziraphale squirts Crowley with the bottle spray for the fourth time this past hour. "Stop it."
Crowley glowers at the angel from where he's sprawled out over his favorite armchair, currently gnawing on one of the Blackwing wooden pencils he's plucked from the front desk that 'sells' stationary and various writing instrument type accoutrements. The water from the squirt bottle assault has misted his cheek, made even more handsome by the growth of 5 o’clock shadow that never seems too far away.
"They're sore." Crowley grumbles, palming the wet of his cheek, frowning, grimacing, scowling. Brooding.
"Take a paracetamol." Aziraphale wets the tip of his finger with the tip of his tongue before leafing through the ledger spread out in front of him.
"'ve done that." Crowley goes back to chomping down on the pencil. Some of its black paint has peeled off and now flecks stick all over his chin and cheeks. Apparently, the molt is more bearable in his human corporeal form. Aziraphale no longer believes this; rather, he's sure that the human form is what garners more attention.
Aziraphale is supremely annoyed over how adorable it is. He rolls his eyes with enough chagrin to be felt by others at the atomic level. He all but shoves his glasses back upon his face and returns to his ledger, writing out long handed arithmetic in his immaculate script.
"Really, Crowley. If you refuse to behave then I shall have no other choice but to take you to the dentist."
Crowley hisses at this and curls into himself, his little socked feet poking out from the bundle he's made of himself under the throw blanket previously draped over the back of the chair. He’s even pulled the blanket around his head as though it were a hood from a sweatshirt. His eyes, nose, and forehead peek out. Impishly, impudently. "No."
Aziraphale works to remain lovingly stern. Really, all be wants to do is go over to his demon and squeeze his little foot poking out. The print on the ankle socks are especially adorable: seagulls who have stolen french fries in their bills. "No?"
"No thank you?"
Aziraphale gives him a look with his eyebrows that says if he isn't careful, he may have a petite stroke. Crowley puts the pencil behind his ear, wipes his mouth with the edge of the blanket, and Aziraphale goes back to poring over his book.
Twenty three minutes later, Crowley is gnawing on his shirt sleeve, where it is hanging over his wrist, his hand, while scrolling on his phone with his free hand. No doubt he is watching those awful pimple popping videos that he watches to 'relax' at night before falling asleep.
"Anthony J.! Really!"
"S'not your precious wares, Aziraphale."
"Surely you don't enjoy biting holes into your clothes!"
"I chomp them when I must, angel. 'Sides, it adds a lick of style and utility to the overarching aesthetic." He's smug with this vocabulary as he waves his damp sleeve at Aziraphale (who is scowling behind his reading glasses), and Crowley pokes his thumb through the fresh hole at his henley's wrist. "All the goth kids were doing it in the aughts. You remember that, Aziraphale? I'm sure even a preppy sweetheart such as yourself can recall."
Aziraphale remembers the 2000s. He remembers the worst of it. He remembers the best of it. He remembers Crowley. Remembers Crowley's black painted fingernails, his studded belt, his hair. The chain he wore on his wallet and how he let it pat-pat-pat against his bum and thighs over his skin tight pants when. he walked.
--
This happens every six to eight months. Crowley's fang molting. Crowley will start poking at his upper human canines (read: fangs) with his slightly forked human tongue on walks to the coffee shop, on drives to the country; he will start suckling on them at the dinner table, drowning out Aziraphale's delighted sounds over a particularly scrumptious dessert; in the last few days of the molt, before the teeth finally fall out, Crowley will start putting his teeth on everything in the bookshop. Aziraphale knows it is soothing for Crowley to have his rabid chomps on different textures; Aziraphale also knows that Crowley relishes this time of his molting cycle because it gives him free reign to be like a berserker feral house cat causing chompy chaos in his wake.
Aziraphale will come home from the market with something like fresh basil and pine nuts to make a nice homemade pesto in the evening, and find Crowley sitting in the middle of the floor, lovely long legs stretched out, and crushing a cardboard delivery box to his chest--breaking it down to take it out to recycling--while gnawing on one of the flaps. Aziraphale is mortified to be the only shop on the block who puts out boxes for pick-up that have curious soggy, wet stains in strange spots. Not to mention the strange series of vampiric holes left throughout.
"You look absolutely deranged when you do this, my love," Aziraphale tells him in these moments, sitting down the bag of groceries and searches for the squirt bottle.
"Ngk," and "!!!," Crowley says.
—
Aziraphale keeps the teeth in old-timey cigar boxes, and always takes Crowley out for ice cream to soothe his gums after filling these strange treasure chests just a bit more with his love's...oral essence. If he doesn't take Crowley out for ice cream, his demon will follow him around the bookshop whistling through the gaps between his teeth, or sticking his tongue in them and wiggling it sideways and obnoxiously at Aziraphale until he gets a treat of some sort.
—
But Crowley snoops. And Aziraphale should have known it would only be a matter of time before he was found out.
"Angel have you been collecting my widdle teefers throughout the ages?"
"What, I — no. Why would I, its preposterous."
Crowley flips open the cigar box and marvels at the mountain of dental doubloons. He raises an eyebrow, smug. “What’ll heaven think of that, d’y reckon?”
Aziraphale puffs up and snatches the box away from Crowley, holding it to his chest like he does only his dearest of tomes tucked safely away in his flat above the bookshop. “Collecting teeth of a loved one is something that humans do! I am simply…applying the research that I've gleaned over the centuries.”
“S'alright you have them, angel. I don't mean the teeth, I meant what d’y think they'd think of the lying.” And oh how the insufferable grin minus his top incisors widens. “You love me.”
“I—“
“It was only a matter of time, really. Big fan of me, me. Apparently you're the bigger fan.”
“If you don't shut up, I'm afraid I'll have to divorce you on my way taking you to the dentist in six to eight months.” Aziraphale tucks his glasses in his vest pocket. Exhales. Then he's his jolly self, tickety-boo. "Ice cream?"
--