Work Text:
Aziraphale never initiates contact.
It’s a thing they do. Crowley reaches out first and Aziraphale doesn’t push him away. But he never reaches out on his own, always keeps them at a distance, shoulders apart, a meter of space between them while they’re standing. And Crowley, like a man starved, reaches and reaches and reaches.
It’s what they do.
Things change after the Armageddon-That-Wasn’t.
“Crowley, could you come take a look at this?”
Crowley wanders over to where Aziraphale has taken residence on his favourite seat in the bookshop. He’s been at it for hours now, pouring over a new set of texts that he had gone up north to get his hands on. Crowley had taken the time to slither onto the couch for a nap, but now he’s wide awake and curious.
“What’s up, angel?” Crowley peers over his shoulder.
“It’s just- the French. I don’t quite understand this passage,” Aziraphale admits sheepishly.
“We really need to get you into a translation app. What’re you going to do when I’m not here, hm?” Crowley teases, but scans the passage dutifully, leaning over Aziraphale to do so.
“I’ll just call you, of course,” Aziraphale replies with a shake of his head and then reaches his hand up to squeeze Crowley’s arm.
He doesn’t jump away but it’s a near thing. Aziraphale has already pulled away, and Crowley is saved from the mortification of wrenching his arm out of the grasp entirely, feeling a bit shaken. “Ngk. Of course.”
A few seconds of silence where Crowley feels like he’s going to topple right over, and Aziraphale clears his throat. “The passage, dear?”
Crowley swallows. “Hng. Right.”
It happens again. And again. Aziraphale places a guiding hand on his back when they walk down the street. He nudges their shoulders together when he finds something particularly amusing, and once even reaches out to grasp Crowley’s hands entirely in a fit of excitement.
The worst one was when he placed his hand on the back of Crowley’s neck in a passing gesture. That one keeps him awake at night, the warmth of Aziraphale’s hand spreading out through his body. Sometimes he swears that he can still feel that touch.
It’s maddening. Crowley was always one to reach out, sure, but it was never direct contact. Aziraphale, for centuries, had remained layered up, to the point that reaching out was a simple matter of grazing his hands over sleeves, or gloves, or sometimes a protective arm curled over a jacketed waist.
This was new. This was frightening. Because what if it all stopped one day? What if Crowley eventually got used to it and Aziraphale decided he’d had enough of whatever human experience he had wanted to try and then stopped?
What then?
It doesn’t.
Suddenly a couple of days of touches turns into a week, which turns into a month and then more months and at this rate, it’ll be a whole year.
Sometimes they cuddle. Well, an approximation of it. Crowley intends to sit on opposite seats, but he always ends up on the couch, melting into Aziraphale as he runs a hand through Crowley’s hair, the other occupied with a drink. Or he’ll rest his head on Crowley’s shoulder, sitting in a way that Crowley can only slip both his arms around Aziraphale, hugging him from the back.
A whole year of unguarded affection; of caressing hands and grazing knees and fingertips on the back of his neck. Of hands through his hair and being held into the deep of the night until one of them (Crowley) eventually pulls away.
Crowley is trying not to get used to it.
Eventually, eventually, Crowley musters up the courage to ask. He’s been resting against Aziraphale’s side, the angel’s arm draped around him while the other flips through a novel that Crowley can’t make out the cover of. They’re both seemingly relaxed, but Crowley’s been going back and forth in his head about what this conversation would entail. Whether it would end with more or less.
“What’re you playing at?”
“Hm?” Aziraphale looks up from his book and pulls Crowley in closer. “What do you mean?”
“The- the-” His courage is slipping away as Aziraphale looks more confused by the second. He can’t say touching, it sounds too intimate, too much. “The contact.”
Well, that’s certainly a word for it.
Aziraphale’s brow furrows, glasses slipping down his nose as he looks Crowley over. “That contact.”
“Yes!” Crowley would throw his hands up if he wasn’t essentially trapped by Aziraphale. “The hands and the neck and the bloody cuddling.”
Realisation dawns on Aziraphale far slower than Crowley would like, and he deflates.
“Oh, dear boy, I hadn’t realised it’d been upsetting you!” There’s genuine worry etched on Aziraphale’s face as he untangles himself from the embrace and puts distance between them, leaving them on opposite ends of the couch. Crowley misses the warmth instantly and barely stops himself from chasing it. “I just thought- for years we’d been- and you- oh dear. Ah, I’ll stop. I apologise if it’s been too fast and-”
“Too fast?” Crowley nearly screeches. It comes out rather ragged instead. “Aziraphale. What do you mean too fast?”
“I’ve been, ah,” he pauses, looks down at his abandoned book and looks back up. “Reading.”
“Evidently,” Crowley says.
“I noticed that you enjoy… proximity.”
There’s enough implication in that word for Crowley to turn scarlet. “Ngk.”
“I wanted to show that I also enjoyed it. The contact, as you put it.” Aziraphale, if it were somehow possible, deflates further with his next words. “Of course, I see now that I have grossly misread all of this-”
Crowley can’t stand another second of Aziraphale interpreting this whole thing wrong and being the sensible demon he is, reaches out and captures both of Aziraphale’s hands in his own. Aziraphale stops, going silent as he stares at their connected hands. For someone who’s been rendered speechless multiple times these past few months due to Aziraphale, Crowley revels just a bit in turning the tables.
“Angel, you’ve not misread this or whatever you think you’ve done. I’ve just been waiting for the other shoe to drop. You can’t just-” Crowley swallows past the words stuck in his throat, willing them to come out. “You can’t just go six thousand years without so much as patting me on the arm and then start doing this and expect me to not be on edge, just a bit.”
“Oh,” Aziraphale breathes and his hands are so soft underneath Crowley’s. They’ve always been so soft, so well taken care of with lotion and hand cream or whatever else humans have created that his fussy angel loves. “I hadn’t realised it might come off that way, dear. I do apologise, again.”
“Oh please, you have nothing to apologise for-”
“But I do! I took your silence as complaisance! I should’ve asked.” Aziraphale is well and truly fretful now.
Crowley wants to laugh. Oh Hell. He goes for poorly masked exasperation instead. “Well, ask me now.”
Aziraphale looks down at their now intertwined hands and Crowley rolls his eyes but dutifully pulls them apart.
“Right, well. Crowley, would you be fine if I-” And he sets his book aside, reaches out, grabs Crowley by the waist and pulls him onto his lap. “Do this.”
Crowley is, once again, stunned into silence. It takes him a minute, or possibly several to remember how to speak, to form words that aren’t just incomprehensible sounds. He twists his neck and buries his face into the crook where Aziraphale’s shoulder meets his neck, his legs stretched out. “Oh, you bassstard.”
Aziraphale laughs, a delightful sound that Crowley can feel. “Yes well, a bastard worth knowing, as you once said. Do answer the question, dear.”
“It’sss fine,” he hisses, but twists himself further into the embrace, wrapping his own arms around Aziraphale. He feels him sigh contentedly underneath him and Crowley is this close to just turning into his snake form and wrapping himself around Aziraphale, letting the warmth seep into this cold-blooded body. It’s a tempting thought, but he’s enjoying this as it is.
And if this is a thing they do now, he has all the time in the world for something like that.