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“Angels don’t have homes,” Crowley had snarked, once. “They just live in these - great, big glass houses. You know. Throwing - all kinds of smitey stones.”
Aziraphale had glanced about them - the bookshop, the firelight, the demon lounging on the antique couch - and thought Oh, I suppose he must be right. It rang strangely through him, like some kind of untruth. But all things holy found their place with him, no matter how the firelight haloed Crowley, playing through his red, redder mane, finding the lighter accents there. So there could be no untruth today.
Strange.
Now, all these - oh, how long has it been? Decades? Days? - all this time later, the bookshop does not sit abandoned. It never sat empty, no matter how long, how callous Aziraphale’s pilgrimage Upstairs. (“At the risk of sounding cliche, angel, you can’t fix them -” It had been a plea, a demand, everything he knew but had refused to listen to. And then there was fire, and starlight, and the husk of an archangel falling - But that was neither here nor there.
There was Upstairs. Here was home. Maybe angels didn’t have them; Aziraphale had burned for long enough to dare to imagine that, perhaps, he could be the exception.)
That couch, though, is still here; that firelight; that demon; all gathered into the one nest, these things Aziraphale holds dear. (The couch had been quite historical. He’d paid a hefty sum for it and, of course, tipped heftier; since the day he brought it home he couldn’t quite bring himself to sit on it. Would using it not rob it of that faintly holy air that made it antique - prove its days of being sat on were not yet over? But Crowley had draped himself over it. Quite lasciviously, actually. Aziraphale had been forced to disapprove by - well, propriety and such. Not that he had needed the encouragement to disapprove, or anything so ridiculous. Of course he disapproved of the sprawl of those limbs, the fall of hair, that old and slanted smirk that had seen him through six thousand years. They were demonic.)
“It’s pretty comfortable, you know.” Crowley rounds out each syllable the way he does when he’s savouring a word, biting them off - com-for-ta-ble, you know. Aziraphale starts, just a little. He’s been ... reminiscing. “This old thing.”
“I suppose you -” There’s some remark about hedonism and sin and comfort that’s always sat ill with Aziraphale, and he can’t quite finish it now. (Not with his ... recent ... voyage. Not to Crowley.) “I suppose you must be - Would you like anything?” When in doubt, dither. “Tea, biscuits - I have some of that wine you bought me back in, oh, when was it? Sixteen -”
“Angel.” It’s fond enough that it almost glows in the air between them; Aziraphale has, for so long, turned thousands of blind eyes to the heart-glittering brilliance of every endearment Crowley turns his way. (Love sits in the bookshop like a dense, sweetly scented mist. It’s quite ... well, it leaves Aziraphale a little light-headed, these days, when he steps over his own threshold to this home that tastes like song. No nightingales, certainly, but - song, nonetheless. It need not be perfect to be savoured; Aziraphale considers himself somewhat of an expert in savouring, and thus qualified to make such a statement.)
“What,” he says, faintly despairing - he knows, after all, that whatever Crowley says next he will be utterly powerless to deny. Such is always the way. He can’t really help himself.
Crowley, though, only grins. “You’re looking at me funny.” It’s a rare smile, this: less menace or self-effacing cynicism, none of that razor-edge black humour that always seems to murmur this smile is not a kind one. This is a smaller smile, a hazy sunrise. Like one of the first dawns they’d ever watched together, back when the sun was still figuring out what it was meant to be doing. Seven days and nights, and all that. Oh, but you could see the stars in the distance, that morning - the dancing nebulae, strewn across the sky, every inch of them beloved.
Aziraphale clears his throat, no matter how his eyes are darting between the scars that draw constellations across Crowley’s vessel. It’s a clunky, physical construct, not quite real, but Aziraphale confesses a fondness for the old thing. The way Crowley has grown into it, made it his own, the subtle markings that this body is lived-in.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he says, abruptly, flustered.
Crowley, when he rolls his eyes, does so with his whole body: an exasperated out-flinging of the hands, a wave of fond frustration all throughout him. It drags him up to his feet, off the couch, in that way he has - the serpentine quality through which one is never quite sure which part of his body is actually doing the work, only that he is, now, standing, and was not doing so five seconds before, and has presumably gotten to said standing position through using at least one muscle group. He crosses the empty space between them, tilts his head; Aziraphale watches his eyes shutter briefly. The glasses, those damned beloved things, are waiting by the door. Crowley crowds into his space, but there’s no threat in it - only a sort of fond understanding.
Aziraphale still isn’t sure how he feels about, well, kissing. Only that his most marked experiences of it have been loss, and grief, and fury - that crush of lips on lips that was profane and fierce and desperate, that still hounds his memory like some kind of ghost. He had hated that kiss. Hated, even more, that there was another world in which he could have had what it was offering. Crowley kisses him, these days, like some new and soft revelation; Aziraphale supposes he likes it well enough, these sensations of contact, pressure, closeness. More than that, he likes that Crowley enjoys it. Loves the way that Crowley will draw back, sometimes, with blown-dark eyes and a hoarse voice - or, other times, rarer ones, with a genuine blush dusted across those craggy cheekbones, a smile like all the good things in the world, like he can’t quite believe what he’s being offered. Aziraphale lets himself be kissed, these days. Slowly, these moments are repainting what it means: he has been kissed more often in softness or sweetness than in anger, and Crowley has been there through all of them, close, holding him. Being gentle with him. Letting him take time and space and breath, then follow along as best he can, at a slower pace.
They spend their mornings together, sometimes, in the coffee shops. Not Nina’s; more distant and anonymous places, where it’s become all too easy to just be. Together, despite everything. Aziraphale doesn’t take coffee, not any more, but Crowley orders him a hot tea with one of those sideways snake-smiles and the cashier discovers, halfway through a polite apology, that their store has indeed just opened a new range of luxury tea imports from Sri Lanka. Crowley wields these miracles like an open hand, and still expects Aziraphale to shrink from them. Not when they are no weapon. Gifts, and kind things, and tricks played to draw a laugh out of the Angel of the Eastern Gate because, surely, doing so must be wicked. (They both ... know that they don’t quite mean it, any more. Crowley holds no such allegiance, no loyalty, to the dank and shadowed crevasses of Hell’s heart, no matter what he professes. And Aziraphale is no longer holy. They’ve become too intertwined for that. Still, Crowley professes ill intent like it’s his six-thousand-year-old version of “street cred”, as Aziraphale hears the Teens are calling it these days, or maybe two decades ago, he’s not quite sure; Aziraphale, for his part, still tries to do good things. Here and there. He can’t fix everything, but he can make someone smile.)
“New blend today,” Crowley says sardonically, raising an eyebrow. “‘Summer Sunset’. How many blends can they make, d’you reckon, from the same three types of leaf?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised.” Aziraphale accepts the cup and saucer graciously, smiling as Crowley - ever the dear - trails fingers across the mug and leeches away some of the heat. He knows, of course, that Aziraphale holds firmly to the ideal that green tea must be brewed in water of only eighty degrees, Celsius, not boiled. No electric kettles when they came up with the stuff, anyway.
Sunlight dapples golden through the windows, draws shallow lines around the pair of them, sharing tea. Aziraphale rests a palm, upturned, on the table. Crowley takes it like it was never a holy thing, never something momentous - only Aziraphale. Only him, and Crowley wants him anyway. Somehow, it feels more intimate than any prayer.
Being here, having him here - it’s a gift. It’s a blessing. All these things that Aziraphale has not earned, does not deserve, is given anyway: love, kindness, care, all in the shape of the snake that crawled out of the earth six thousand years ago and called himself a demon. Some days, Crowley sleeps in his car. “Force of habit,” he says roughly, when questioned; Aziraphale suspects it’s to do with a degree of breathing space. Other days, though, Aziraphale wakes to Crowley in his bookshop: sometimes in his kitchen, sometimes in his bed. Neither of them need to sleep, of course. But beyond its simple function as a luxury, there is a horrid, unflinching trust in it: No one who can enter this space will harm me while I’m defenceless. A demon walks into a bookshop and finds a sleeping angel. “Setup to a bad joke,” Crowley says once, then hesitates, adds, grinning a little, “Or an ineffable one.”
There are grey hairs twined through Crowley’s vessel’s hair, like silver filament, and they mean something impossible; Aziraphale twists them between his fingers, combs his hands through that hair. Crowley had let it grow longer while Aziraphale was ... away, and it tumbles down now to his shoulders. Aziraphale hates that he could not see every day of it, could not be so close as it grew that it almost seemed like there had been no change at all. Instead, he came home to find it longer than he remembered.
But he came home. He will not let himself miss any more.
Love is some kind of miracle; it has made Crowley’s body his, a little older than it used to be, a little more marked. He still smells of nebulae and jasmine and charcoal. But he wears something that is more, maybe, than just a vessel, now; it has been so very loved, and perhaps that has drawn Crowley closer to being almost human. If humans were immortal, capable of miracles, and, well, still very much winged. The differences, Aziraphale thinks, are practically superficial.
There was incense burning in the house of Job when Crowley first tempted Aziraphale into lying; love, much like incense, twines through the bookshop and is more than a little inescapable. Crowley teases him about it, that dopey pause when Aziraphale comes home and is hit by it. Aziraphale teases back: “Were you not so fond of me, my dear,” he is learning to say, to address the fondness (devotion, intimacy, love, all of it love) like it’s something that is allowed to exist, that is not frightening to acknowledge, “perhaps my entire bookshop would not smell of roses.”
“Not roses,” Crowley despairs. He’s distraught; it’s deeply endearing. “Please, angel, tell me it doesn’t smell of roses. ”
“Lying would be unbecoming of me,” Aziraphale says primly. (It doesn’t smell of roses, not really. It smells of old books and jasmine at night, of forming stars and burning worlds, of incense and song and the best kinds of Chinese takeaway. It smells of home the way a home always does: its soul just the same as you remember it, no matter how long you’ve been away.)
“You’re a sap,” Crowley says, delighted and feigning revulsion. “You’re hopeless. You’re a romantic, angel. That’s embarrassing.”
“Demons in glass houses,” Aziraphale says, “should not throw stones.”
He means, of course, “I love you”. He says it in a thousand ways; Crowley kisses him, and stays with him, and lets him come home, and says it in a thousand ways more. Like it’s some new revelation. Like it’s something they’ve both always known. Like it’s both of those things - at once impossible and inescapable - and hovers in the space between them, and stays there, like a promise.