Work Text:
- Mesopotamia, not too long after Eden
- Crete, quite some time B.C.
- Italy, 16th Century
- The Dowling Estate, 2012
- Tadfield, 2019
He knew it was stolen because a fight broke out a few doors away, one neighbor accusing the other of stealing a precious item. He worked a quick miracle to soothe them—squabbles tended to result in murder back in those days, and he avoided having anything to do with murders as a matter of principle—and whirled on Aziraphale, looming over him.
"You're going to get me killed, giving that thing to me," he complained.
Aziraphale's eyes widened impossibly, looking less shrewd and more innocent in a single blink. "But angel, it reminded me of you!" His clawed hand gestured at (but didn't reach for) the stripes of angelic gold visible on Crowley's hands and forearms.
The hue was similar, Crowley had to admit, but the rock shimmered in response to the sun while Crowley's markings resisted any pull from earthly forces. He thought the stone looked a little warmer, as a matter of fact, but he wasn't going to say so in the face of Aziraphale's excessively dramatic pout.
"Fine. But—seriously, can you at least not take things that are going to make people try to throttle each other?" he pleaded, tamping down the swell of affection that always rose when Aziraphale brightened to smile like that.
"I promise to try, my dear," he said, "but of course it is in my nature."
"Right." Crowley added the rock to his pouch, which was otherwise filled with seeds of interesting flowers he'd seen. It was the closest he dared to get to expressing gratitude, and the spring in Aziraphale's step told him it was enough.
Aziraphale was fretting. This was unusual because Crowley typically did enough fretting for both of them.
"What." Suspicious, Crowley eyed her as she wandered around the small room he was currently leasing.
"Nothing."
"You're the worst at lying. How can a demon be so terrible at lying?"
Aziraphale gave him the sort of look that was very difficult to ignore. It made her eyes appear very large and very innocent despite neither being technically true. Knowing that Aziraphale had, if anything, smaller, beadier, and more devious eyes than most human-shaped beings did absolutely nothing to help Crowley resist.
Of course, he wasn't even sure just yet what it was that he was supposed to be resisting. "What?" he sighed, inflection marking it as a question this time.
"Now, dear, before you say anything, please know that they were already quite finished with it. I think."
Having gathered exactly zero additional information from that disclaimer, Crowley crossed his arms and did his best to stare a little harder at her.
A little more time passed during which Aziraphale made no move to reveal anything, but finally, worn down either by Crowley's silence or her own—whatever it was (surely not guilt)—she raised a hand to reveal an item speared on one fierce-looking talon. "I know you made it for her, and of course it should have been her choice what end it would come to, but Theseus just left it there, you know, all strewn throughout the labyrinth, and—"
"Did you wind it back up?" Crowley asked, momentarily stopped by the idea of Aziraphale doing so manually and somehow not cutting the thread2.
"Well—no, not entirely. I enlisted the help of some very brave little creatures to seek out the end and move the slack along. But once I was sure it wouldn't snag or break on the rocks, I did perform the miracle that tidied it back up."
Well, that explained it being spooled so loosely. Aziraphale was good at very specific kinds of tidying, such as polishing metals and arranging valuables, but was a bit useless at the more practical variety. Amused, Crowley shook his head and reached out to accept the thread. "Settle in, then."
"Hm?"
"It's basically unbreakable," Crowley pointed out. "Not to say your taking care with it was pointless, but, ah, well. It'll do nicely to mend the places where you keep ripping that skirt. Even you might have trouble tearing it unless you're really trying. Handmade by angels and all that. Angel, singular, anyway."
To his surprise, Aziraphale pouted. "If you fix it permanently, I won't need to come back and have it repaired."
Crowley blinked. "Yes?"
"I won't have any reason to come and find you," Aziraphale emphasized, almost a whine.
"And yet," Crowley murmured, trying to conjure a needle from the metaphysical plane without pricking his finger on it, "something tells me you'll turn up just the same. Like a bad penny, you are."
"Surely not all that bad," Aziraphale protested, sounding extremely put out3.
Crowley, more for the drama of it than for genuine consideration, let the pause draw out as he prepared the needle and thread. "Nah," he said finally, kneeling beside Aziraphale. "Not all that bad. Now hold still."
"Put that back," Crowley snapped.
"It looked like you!"
"It is me!" he blurted, and then froze.
"Oh, Crowley, I had no idea," Aziraphale mused, pulling the painting back toward himself. "Well, if you don't want it, perhaps I'll keep it."
"That's not better," Crowley griped. "That's actually worse. I look—I look like—" He gestured helplessly at the half-nude depiction of a lanky red-haired angel leaning against a pillar.
"You certainly do!" Aziraphale agreed, entirely too chipper. "How about a bargain, dear boy?"
Crowley grumbled. Aziraphale's bargains had a habit of working out somewhat unevenly4. "Terms?"
"I'll put this back where it belongs if you will join me for a spot of lunch and tell me how exactly you came to let this artist capture your portrait." I would be especially interested in knowing what's there under the paint. I can almost make it out in some places."
Crowley agreed, mostly because it had been some time since they'd taken lunch together, and also because the story wasn't nearly as scandalous as it was tedious.
The painting still made its way to Aziraphale's home. "I told you I would put it where it belonged, not that I would put it where I found it," he pointed out when, years later, an outraged Crowley pointed at it and shouted inarticulately.
Harriet Dowling had a lot of jewelry. Much of it was fake but of a quality so desperate to be perceived as genuine designer work that would-be naysayers felt too guilty to point it out5.
A few items, however (though she herself wouldn't be able to say which), were very, very real and very, very expensive.
None of this mattered one whit to Crowley, who was presently employed as gardener-in-chief at the Dowling estate. It was a rather unnecessary title, given that there were no other gardeners, but it seemed to make the Dowlings happy to brag about having such a thing. She didn't really care what she was called so long as she got to remind Warlock every so often that Nanny Raum's suggestions about stealing or breaking things were only little jokes.
She especially liked to issue these reminders when Nanny Raum herself was within earshot. "Now, Warlock, do you really believe that Nanny, lovely sweet Nanny, would ever actually follow through with stealing something? Of course not," Crowley crooned, and that was her first mistake.
Her second was allowing Aziraphale into her quarters later that evening.
"Lovely and sweet?" she asked, batting her lashes.
Crowley made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan. "We are working on finding something nice to say about each person we meet," Crowley said primly. "It's no good if I don't lead by example."
Aziraphale's grin grew wide. "You know, dearest, I was thinking the very same thing." Her hands emerged, looking impossibly delicate in their long white gloves. Cradled in them was one of Harriet Dowling's most valuable (and also least worn) necklaces. It was crafted from a golden chain so fine that it seemed as if it ought to float upwards instead of draping down, and it featured a gilded cabochon that certainly ought to be too heavy for the chain and, more importantly, displayed an impeccably carved relief of a very familiar face.
"This is you," Crowley half-shouted, her gaze flicking between the cameo and the demon. There were differences, of course: Aziraphale's curls were more subdued lately, not quite in the current fashion but still far removed from the voluminous piles of hair she'd worn at the cameo's creation, and these days she wore the dark feathers at her hairline proudly rather than hiding them behind flowing locks. Still, the round cheeks, the smile, and those teasing eyes were unmistakable even with no color to distinguish her features from anyone else's.
Crowley would, of course, know her anywhere and anytime.
Aziraphale only smiled that oddly pointed smile of hers.
"Well, when did you have that done?"
"Oh, I didn't. If I'd had it made intentionally, I certainly wouldn't have let it out of my sight."
Crowley supposed that was true enough. "Planning to spirit it away to your collection? I don't imagine Mrs. Dowling will miss it. It's not exactly her style."
Aziraphale hummed. "Truth be told…"
Crowley raised an eyebrow. Abysmal a liar as she may have been, there was still something deeply entertaining about her announcing her intention to tell the truth.
"Oh, don't give me that look, angel, you know what I mean. Now. Truth be told," she repeated forcefully, "I was rather hoping it might be your style." She held the thing out further, a clear offering.
"Oh." It was—well, it wasn't, but Aziraphale looked so hopeful that Crowley thought she could make a small exception. "It is very fine," she said diplomatically. "Quite—quite lovely."
The beaming smile Aziraphale sent her way made her sigh, shoulders slumping. "All right." She turned around, grateful that she'd gone with a closely cropped cut for this job. Just the thought of Aziraphale adjusting her hair threatened to bowl her over like some sort of concentrated ray of intimacy, so it really was a good thing that wouldn't have to happen. She was very glad. If she told herself that enough, she would believe it.
Aziraphale's hands when they fastened the chain around Crowley's neck were, as a matter of fact, incredibly sweet.
Privately, Harriet apologized awkwardly for the fuss (she didn't really mean the apology) and begged Crowley to keep the cameo. "I think it's cursed anyway. Always gave me goosebumps," she explained (and she did mean that, solidifying to Crowley her incurable case of poor taste and failure to see true value).
Aziraphale had the good sense to be contrite about it when they regrouped at the flower shop the week after. He didn't, necessarily, have the good sense to refrain from pilfering other odds and ends when they returned to the Dowling household as tutors, but Crowley made sure those things all found less conspicuous homes than his own neck.
He didn't know whose sword it had once been or how Aziraphale had come by it7, but Crowley was, regardless, incredibly grateful for its presence. He was grateful, too, for the competent way in which Aziraphale handled the thing. It seemed as if he might, if needed, be able to do some actual damage with it.
He had been one of Heaven's soldiers once, of course. Apparently the training wasn't something one forgot, unless one was Crowley, whose interest in handling swords had never really risen higher than nah, got other things to do, thanks. Really, it was a wonder Crowley hadn't been kicked out alongside the others.
Shielding Eve Young, now, that was something within his skillset. So long as Aziraphale was also shielding them both with a flaming sword.
But then of course Eve was the one with the real power and the brains to leverage it, and soon enough—Crowley, admittedly, had a bit of trouble tracking all the details afterwards—it was down to the two of them standing behind the security booth of the suddenly immaculate airbase.
"I think," Aziraphale said cautiously, loosening his grip on the thing, "perhaps we ought to let that fellow collect this, too." He indicated the summoner, who was presently whistling to himself and packing up the other items carried by the horsepeople. "Sorry, dear boy. I had meant to give it to you as a sort of souvenir. Think how it would look in the shop window, hm? A flaming sword protecting the garden, just as before."
Crowley's face wrinkled in distaste. "Look, not to say I don't appreciate it, but that's a terrible idea." Unwilling to allow Aziraphale the opportunity to argue or insist on proving otherwise, he levered the thing out of his grasp and, after briefly staggering under its surprising weight, handed it over to the summoner himself.
Not a week later, Aziraphale arrived at the shop bearing the tackiest sword-shaped neon sign the world had ever seen.
"It was just languishing in someone's storage unit," he explained, a pleading tone in his voice. "They're never going to return to making blades. They've become an expert programmer and sold off their workshop entirely."
Crowley placed it in the back room, well out of sight.
It reappeared defiantly in the display window the next morning, and the morning after, and the one after that, until Crowley gave up fighting and allowed it to stay.
It did, he had to admit, draw in a new demographic.
+1
- London, 2023 (or thereabouts)
"Oh, that one isn't for sale," the woman said. "And I'll not be giving it away, either, and having people think that's the quality of my work. It's just an old piece."
Crowley fumed quietly and very, very subtly. "It's just that I really do like that one best, you see. It reminds me of someone."
"Be that as it may," the artist sniffed, "it simply is not for sale."
"Well… well, I think you'll find that it is now," Crowley said, voice starting off at a waver and becoming firmer until it brooked no argument. He handed over a £50 note and the woman, eyes gone blank and dreamy, wrapped up the little figurine and handed it over.
His conscience chased him, making him walk just a little more quickly back to the shop. It wasn't really stealing, was it? He'd paid her. He'd paid her, he was pretty sure, a lot more than the thing was worth. Still. She hadn't really wanted him to take it, and he'd taken it, and that was stealing, right?
"Oh, for—" he blurted, so lost in his thoughts that he walked right into Aziraphale after opening the door. "Good. You're here." He thrust the paper-covered item at Aziraphale, knocking him squarely in the chest with it.
"Oh, Crowley, you shouldn't have!"
"I know!!" Crowley roared, hands coming up to grip his head as he made his way to the backroom.
He sat heavily in his office chair, spinning idly and forcing himself to stop mussing up his hair. The mirror on the wall told him he'd already ruined the half-ponytail he'd put it in hours before. With a sigh, he spun in the other direction, his gaze catching instead on the low bookshelf and the items collected near it.
Above the shelf was a painting that should by rights have been significantly more worn-down by now, considering the artist had been an amateur and hadn't varnished the finished product properly. The gaudy frame it hung in was newer by about a hundred years, and the whole thing had only just been relocated to Crowley's shop within the past decade. A cameo on a fine gold chain hung from the center of its upper edge, perfectly aligned such that the little carved face seemed to be smirking at the subject of the painting8.
On the top of the shelf, tucked in among a few small potted plants, were other souvenirs. Toward the right was a bobbin of shining thread, now nearly empty. At the left edge was a highly contested neon sign9. At the very center of the shelf was a thumb-sized rock, entirely unimpressive to the casual viewer.
Crowley's own gold hadn't been visible in millennia. He'd learned to obscure it, and then he'd had the idea to cover it when tattoos had made their way into everyday fashion. The only gold on him now was in the sun and stars inked on his corporation's skin.
He walked over and picked up the stone, turning it in his hands and chasing down the little veins that glittered even under the artificial light. Holding it against his arm, he found that the color shone almost the same as his stars and that now, flesh and stone alike submitted to shadow. Before he could get around to properly worrying whether that meant something on a cosmic scale (perhaps regarding thievery), Aziraphale appeared in the doorway.
He cradled the little object in both hands, keeping it near his body. "Darling," he said, voice a little shaky, which fit with the stricken look on his face. "I do hope you're not making fun of me."
"I… what? No," Crowley said, hurriedly putting the rock back where it came from and only slightly crushing a bit of aloe in the process of leaning casually against the bookshelf.
"Crowley. Its little wings are—"
"Yeah," Crowley said thickly, taking in the sight of the figurine again. It hadn't been fired properly, at a guess. Though a fairly well crafted likeness of a mourning dove fluttering, the thin places where its wings extended from its body hadn't held up in the heat. The left was cracked in some places and unfortunately shriveled in others, and the right was gone completely, likely swept out from the bottom of the kiln as trash. The look on its face was peaceful nonetheless, and it held itself with a kind of grace that was difficult to imagine an actual mourning dove commanding.
"Reminded me of you," he murmured, shrugging.
"Crowley, it's a dove."
Crowley shifted, wrapping his arms around himself and looking away. "Yeah." So was Aziraphale, to Crowley. Black feathers be damned.
Aziraphale made a soft noise not unlike a coo. "May I put it in here? With our other things?"
Crowley shrugged and failed to move away from the bookshelf.
"I think it's very sweet. I'm not trying to give it back."
"Okay."
"Crowley. What aren't you telling me? Did you—oh, angel, did you?" he asked, eyes gone bright and delighted. Gleeful.
"Didn't," Crowley argued instinctively. "I mean. Did I what?"
"You stole it!" Aziraphale crowed. "I can sense these things, you know. Oh, how positively—"
"Yeah, but I didn't really. I paid her," Crowley said, cutting him off in a panic.
Aziraphale hummed, pushing past Crowley to settle the dove on the shelf and then getting Crowley's hands in his instead. "Well, let's see. Did you or did you not decide to take something that wasn't yours? That you would have it one way or another? It's all about the spirit of the thing, you know."
Crowley tried half-heartedly to pull his hands back. "It's your fault then. Corrupting me. Get me in all sorts of trouble if you keep it up." He might have meant it a handful of centuries ago.
Aziraphale tutted. "Don't you worry. You'll never Fall from Heaven. You can't possibly. Do you know why?"
Crowley shrugged, giving up temporarily on extricating his hands.
"Because, my darling, I would steal you away from it first. And then you could hardly be blamed, could you?"
In truth, Crowley hadn't worried about Heaven blaming him for much of anything in a while; the little shivery feeling of you've done something wrong was more instinct than active fear.
Still, it sounded nice when Aziraphale put it that way. Crowley didn't think he would mind being stolen.
In fact, looking around at the space full of their things in the shop they mostly shared, at Aziraphale's kind eyes and knowing smile, at their joined hands, so different but such a perfect fit, he thought that maybe he already had been10.
