Work Text:
14th century
Crowley was tired. The current century was awful (and lonely). Churches were being built and expanded all over the country in gratitude and placation for surviving (and hoping to survive) the Black Death, and Heaven kept Aziraphale hopping from one to the next.
Crowley couldn't even share the work, it being churches. Consecrated ground and all that.
He found a village where no one lived anymore and appropriated one of the bigger and sturdier cottages. Its gray stone walls and slate roof suited his mood. He tossed up a few wards and preservation miracles to make sure he wouldn't be woken either by intruders, or by his bed rotting out from under him and dumping him on the floor, and settled down for a nap.
When he woke up a few decades later, the cottage was half-buried in blossoming gorse bushes like some half-formed Sleeping Beauty tale. Crowley didn't mind gorse - it was tougher than roses and just as prickly. Burn it down, drown it, hack it to pieces - gorse just bounced back, its tiny yellow flowers filling the air with scent.
He glared at the bushes until they let him through and then left the gorse to grow as it wished. It wasn't as if anyone had repopulated the village, after all.
19th century
After Aziraphale refused him the insurance of holy water, Crowley went back to the old cottage. The gorse hid it and a good sized patch of land from anyone passing, though it wasn't in flower right now. The wards were still there though. So was the bed.
Crowley took another nap.
21st century
"Oh, how delightful," were Aziraphale's first words when he saw the gorse hedges studded with yellow blossom.
"Don't give them ideas, angel." Crowley glared out of the Bentley's windscreen until the gorse shaped an entrance for them. He drove through and parked outside the cottage door. "It's not much of a place, but neither of our old sides got a toehold in it."
Aziraphale climbed out of the Bentley and tugged his waistcoat down into place. "Yellow is a beautiful colour, and, as the saying goes, 'love is not in season when the gorse is not in bloom'."
"Some variety of gorse is always in bloom, angel, that's hardly a seasonal thing."
"Precisely, my dear." Aziraphale reached out and took Crowley's hand in his own. "A little expansion and modernisation, and your cottage will be perfectly lovely. Does it, perchance, have a name?"
"Not as such, angel. Could give it one though. If you want." Crowley's fingers tightened around Aziraphale's and he tugged. "Come on, let me show you around, hook you into the wards, that kind of thing."
Aziraphale's smile was smaller and more tender than his usual one. "Gorse Cottage," he said, following Crowley in. "Our cottage for our side. Now that it's blooming."