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The Garden, Before
After his conversation with adversary, Aziraphale is surprised to find himself at a bit of a loss. That is, he admits, a first. There have been rather a lot of those, recently. He’s not sure how he feels about that. Even if it is Written.
The sky is still ominously dark, crammed to the brim with towering thunderclouds, and spilling over in fat wet droplets into the Garden. They pack more of a punch than he remembers, and it isn’t until a change in the wind sends them clattering, rat-a-tat-tat on a nearby rock, that he realises why. He picks one up, wincing at the biting cold to his fingers. Frozen solid. Another first. The angel sighs, and wanders off to get out of the rain.
When he wakes up, the storm has passed, although the clouds are still hovering, menacingly, out by the eastern gate, as though to fold arms and furrow brows discouragingly at anyone who might try to come back. He remembers the frozen rain from earlier, and wonders if that might count as the tapping of angry feet. Hail, he thinks, suddenly. That’s what it is.
He’s under a tree, which is more comfortable than you might think. He wriggles, settles back into the moss at the base of the trunk, and shuts his eyes again, lulled by the soft whisper of the wind in the leaves above him, and the warmth of the strengthening sun on his skin. A sudden gust drops a fresh shower down the back of his neck, and he starts, levelling the tree with the expression known by minders of small children and poorly trained pets as “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.” It rustles back at him, unconcerned, and the angel wonders why it seems so familiar.
Aziraphale blinks. All the trees in all the Garden, and he falls asleep under the Tree. In his defence, the capital letter isn’t particularly apparent at the present moment. The Tree sleeps, as gnarled and crooked as a crab-apple, basking in the sun as it glows golden on its leaves and dances off the raindrops slipping down its fruit, drinking in the water from the ground; it’s as much a tree as any other in the Garden, maybe a little more. He pats it, absently. “Dreadfully sorry about all this,” he says. It’s an odd little world, he thinks, where something so ordinary (inasmuch as anything can be ordinary when everything has recently been created out of raw firmament and the celestial equivalent of a toddler’s compulsion to stick their fingers into electrical sockets) should cause so much fuss. The angel supposes that it is Written, somewhere, and makes a note to look it up some time.
The sun warms his face, brings colour back into the Garden and flowers back into the light, and as he settles back into the trunk with a little hum, intending to make the most of it while it lasts, (and it almost certainly won’t last, he thinks, guiltily. Who knows what kind of trouble those two will be getting up to outside?), he realises that the breeze has stopped.
The sound of it, on the other hand, has not, and as Aziraphale looks around, puzzled, for the source, it resolves into a regular, even, two-beat hissing. Almost – snoring? He cranes his head back, and finds himself face to upside-down face with the Serpent. The angel stares.
The Serpent shifts, and Aziraphale doesn’t manage to avert his gaze in time.
“’Lo,” says the Serpent, blinking.
“Good morning,” Aziraphale says, politely, then wonders if he ought to be treating the Adversary politely. That’s probably Written somewhere, too. He knows he’ll have to get round to reading what is Written at some point, it’s just that right now everything is calm and peaceful, and he’s really quite comfortable. There’ll be plenty of time, later. Almost six thousand years or so, give or take.
The Serpent makes a face, and stretches (Aziraphale watches with puzzled fascination, then pretends to be watching the birds). “Is it? Any word from Himself yet?”
The angel shakes his head.
“Hmph,” says Crawly, “might as well go back to sleep.”
Aziraphale feels compelled to ask. “In a tree?”
The Serpent shrugs, a notable achievement considering the complete lack of shoulders. “Why not? S’a good spot, this.”
“Yes,” says the angel, watching the meadows roll into hills into forest-laden mountains, swooping up blue in the far distance. “Yes, I rather think it is.”
Winchester, 1031
“Crowley? Crowley!” Aziraphale whisper-shouts, peering down the hall. It’s been ten minutes since his opening salvo, consisting of the occasional polite cough and escalating to frequent throat-clearing interspersed with the odd “harrumph”, and a little genteel foot-tapping. Clearly more drastic measures are in order.
They’re going to be late, after all.
They’re going to be very, very late.
Aziraphale looks round the demon’s house, nervously. He supposes he shouldn’t be in here, really, but the dear boy wasn’t answering, and it was raining, and, well, surely it was better to come in than to shout for him from the street? Surely? Aziraphale worries about this for a moment, then remembers that they’re going to be late, and moves cautiously forward.
Really, it is too bad of Crowley, Aziraphale thinks, peering around anxiously. It’s not every day the queen presents gifts to the Minster, and rumour has it that some particularly fine books will be included. The angel has been looking forward to this for weeks, and he thought Crowley had been too. He’d always had a soft spot for the woman, which Aziraphale is prepared to overlook for the sake of good books, although he will concede that the humans Crowley likes are not always on his side.
It’s very well-appointed, the house. Simple, comfortable, clearly expensive, but without being gaudy. Tasteful, Aziraphale thinks, a little surprised. None of the clutter that spills over whenever Aziraphale spends more than a day in one place. If there are any books or papers, they’ve all been tidied away. The angel realises that, despite having been working, if not together then at least in tandem, for the past ten years, and having gotten rather used to seeing each other around the place for the last five thousand, he has no idea what the demon does with his time. Aside from tempting, and…and wiling, and that sort of thing. Which Aziraphale now knows rather more about than he probably should, but it does make everything simpler.
Though why Crowley had to lay claim to Winchester is beyond him. “It’s a holy city!” Aziraphale had hissed, when he’d bumped into the Adversary in the market square some time in the 900s. “A place of pilgrimage! Can’t you go bother York, or Dublin, or something? Dens of iniquity and vice, the lot of them.”
“I could,” Crowley had said, blinking lazily, “but I won’t. They’re getting along quite nicely without me. Besides, I was here first.”
Aziraphale steps further into the main room, and looks around. He wonders, for a moment, if the demon has simply overslept. Crowley loves his sleep, that’s one of the few things Aziraphale is absolutely sure he knows about him. But the bed, when he spots it up against the far wall, is empty, and it doesn’t even look slept in. Aziraphale blinks.
The angel walks towards the hearth, half-heartedly hoping for a Clue, and trips over. His landing is softer than expected, and it sounds an awful lot like a demonic entity sleepily swearing.
“What on earth are you doing on the floor?” Aziraphale says, and Crowley pushes his way out of his slightly ashy blanket nest and blinks at him, indignantly.
“What are you doing on the floor?” he asks, wriggling out from under the angel and glaring at him. “Actually, what are you doing in my house?”
“We’re late!” Aziraphale gasps, suddenly remembering.
“Really?” says Crowley, not sounding very worried. “I guess we’d better get going then.” He stands up, and, like an afterthought, offers Aziraphale a hand. The angel ignores it and claws his own way up the wall. The demon shrugs, and strides off, Aziraphale trailing behind him, into the rain.
London, 1811
The demon swings his feet backwards and forwards, and yawns. Aziraphale ignores him, and carries on sorting the books.
Crowley leans back in his chair, stretches, and yawns again, so widely that the angel begins to wonder if he can unhinge his jaw in human form, too.
Aziraphale ignores him, and carries on sorting the books.
Eventually, the angel forgets that he is pointedly ignoring Crowley, and begins ignoring him in earnest. It really was rather lucky he’d arrived at the book sale when he had, Aziraphale thinks, flicking through a particularly dusty Apocalypse, the collection had been nothing short of superb. He assesses the volume for wear, tear, and prophetic interest, absently noting the occasional bloodstain and eldritch scribble in the margins, and places it to the side. Pushing his spectacles further up his nose, he reaches into the crate and selects the next acquisition, thoroughly absorbed, as the sky outside darkens and begins to overflow, and the mug of hot chocolate at his elbow grows steadily colder.[1]
He looks up when he runs out of books, and suddenly it’s morning. Crowley must have gone home, he thinks, catching sight of the empty armchair, and a good thing too. Aziraphale is due in Edinburgh in no short order, and he really had better be going.
What with one thing and another, it’s nearly six months before he returns.
It’s a pale spring morning, everything washed out and delicate-looking after a long night of showers, and Aziraphale unlocks the door of the bookshop with the tiniest of relieved sighs. Edinburgh had been, as always, a delight, but Glasgow (also as always) was something of a trial. Next time, he thinks, he’ll let Crowley take Scotland. He hangs up his coat and hat, leaving them to drip soggily onto the hall floor, and wanders through the shop, moving books here and there, running his hands absently along spines, leaving a trail of abandoned paperwork and damp leather satchels in his wake.
He should probably put the stove on. Of course, it’s far warmer here than it was further north, but Aziraphale has been looking forward to the warmth of his own house for approximately five months and twenty-nine days, and after a trip like that? Well, the angel thinks, pushing through the door into the back room and wondering distractedly if he even has any fuel in, he’d certainly earned it.
The second thing he notices is that the room is already warm. The third thing he notices is that the stove is already on.
Both of these observations, though arresting in their way, are immediately superseded by the first thing he notices, which is Crowley, curled up round the stovepipe with his head hanging over the edge.
“My dear,” Aziraphale hisses, scandalised. “What in the-“
“Sh-sh-sh-sh,” Crowley mumbles, flapping a clumsy hand in the angel’s direction. “’M asleep.”
“I can see that,” Aziraphale impatiently, fidgeting with his spectacles. “Why are you doing it here?”
The demon snores at him.
“I mean, surely you haven’t been asleep on my stove since-“
Crowley keeps snoring.
“It’s not as though you don’t have a home to go to -”
The snoring does not stop so much as grow obnoxiously louder.
“So I expect you’ll be going soon,” Aziraphale says, with the air of someone who worries that perhaps their hints are a little too subtle.
The Adversary, satanic hellspawn and all-round bad egg, does not so much as twitch. The snoring goes on.
“Right,” Aziraphale says, flustered, and fumbles for the kettle. “Glad we could get this all sorted out.”
Two days later, Aziraphale walks into the kitchen, spots Crowley on the stove, and stops dead in his tracks.
“Well, really,” he says, and puts the kettle on.
In 1829, Aziraphale catches himself chatting to Crowley while the kettle boils, and leaves without making his tea.
“Hadn’t you better be going?” Aziraphale asks, peevishly, in 1833. “Don’t you have mortals to tempt, or some such?”
The demon grunts in his sleep, and curls himself even tighter around the stovepipe.
In 1857, Crowley starts talking in his sleep. Over the years, Aziraphale makes out a large portion of Henry V and something about dolphins.
“Crowley! Let go of my stove this instant!”
The demon drools at him, silently, and Aziraphale decides to spend 1860 in the Balkans.
“Another one for next door, my dear,” he says, around 1864. “I believe I shall have to put up a sign.”
In 1872, Crowley spends a baffling few months hooked onto the stove by only one leg, and Aziraphale takes to arranging cushions underneath him in an attempt to make the whole spectacle less nerve-wracking to look at.
Halfway through the 1880s, Aziraphale realises that he can’t remember the last time he’d even thought about making Crowley leave. Well, it isn’t as if the dear boy is hurting anyone, he reasons, and the lack of Adversary is doing the world of good for Aziraphale’s status Upstairs. Besides, it’s nice to have someone to talk to, even if that someone never talks back.
It’s a blustery afternoon in late September, 1893, when Aziraphale breezes into the kitchen, dropping his hat and gloves on the table and making a beeline for the kettle.
“Sorry to have been gone so long, my dear, I heard a rumour that a copy of Agnes Nutter might have surfaced,” he bustles past the stove, reaching out to brush Crowley’s hair gently back out of his closed eyes as he goes, “and I simply had to-“
Aziraphale freezes. His bag clatters to the floor as his brain catches up with his body.
“Right,” he says, opening and closing his hands by his sides, rocking a little on his feet.
“Right,” he says again, more firmly. “That’s quite enough of that.”
Aziraphale bends down, and says, in Crowley’s ear. “Wake up.”
Crowley gives no sign that he has heard, but when the angel potters in the next morning to brew the first tea of the day, the demon is gone.
London, 1943
The sirens start as they’re just edging their way into that stage of drunk where the only thing worse than having another drink would be to stop drinking long enough for the last four hours of drinking to catch up, and Aziraphale sobers with a shudder, and prods Crowley until he does the same. They’ve done this a couple of times, now, been caught at the shop when the bombs start falling, and they go through the motions with weary resignation; Aziraphale collects blankets, Crowley the suitcases (food and layers, that’s the key, Aziraphale discovered early on), and head for the Underground. Of course, everyone else will probably have staked their pitches already, but they might get the stairs, and in any case Aziraphale’s just so tired that a trip Upstairs to wrangle a new body out of Angelic Resources might even feel like a holiday.
They’re lucky, and there’s a spot on the rails at the far end of Platform One. They must have started drinking earlier than Aziraphale had realised, he thinks, with the slightest trace of guilt. But this situation would be more than enough to try the patience of a saint, so it’s hardly surprising that it’s beginning to wear on a principality. Crowley’s taking it hard, Aziraphale thinks, watching the demon set up their spot, demarcating with the suitcase and the edge of the blankets; there’s barely enough space for two there; they’ll be leaning up against the walls with railings in uncomfortable places, no doubt. Aziraphale wonders if he should be grateful that he doesn’t sleep, or whether sleep would while away the long dark hours in something resembling peace.
Crowley looks haggard, almost exhausted. There are dark circles under his eyes, and a slight tremor in his hands that Aziraphale doesn’t remember from before. He’d thought, for a while, that it must be a tremendously busy time for an Adversary, a war, that is; but Crowley has barely left London in months. Maybe years.
He got another commendation, in late ’41. He won’t talk about it. He won’t even tell Aziraphale what it was for. The angel thinks, a heavenly reflex, that kindness is an odd trait for a demon, but by now that’s all it is, a reflex. He knows Crowley better than that.
The night drags on. The bombs get closer, and closer, and begin to pass away. Aziraphale stares at the ceiling and thinks of nothing at all. It’s better that way.
“Incredible, what they’ll sleep through, eh?” A voice says, from beside him, and Aziraphale turns his head. His nearest neighbour is an older woman, with wispy curls tucked beneath an absurdly woolly hat, bundled up in coat, gloves and scarf, with a rug wrapped around her feet. She nods past him, and Aziraphale looks back to see Crowley, fast asleep on his shoulder, one leg crushed awkwardly between his own body and the rail, and a tiny frown creasing the skin between his brows.
“Yes,” Aziraphale sighs, and it’s fond and exasperated and nothing like embarrassed, though it probably should be. But he’s tired, and above them the world is being battered into tiny smoking pieces, and there’s no way he’s waking Crowley now. “Sometimes I think the dear boy could sleep through Armageddon.”
His neighbour laughs, and offers him a vacuum flask of what turns out to be hot, sweet tea. Aziraphale thanks her, and drinks, and passes it back, settling back against the grimy wall of the tunnel with barely a shudder. You can get used to anything, he thinks, and for some reason glances at Crowley, who’s begun to snore, gently, turning his face into Aziraphale’s shoulder. Anything.
London, Christmas Eve
The occasional flake of snow is drifting tentatively down outside, bright against the dark. The wind is icy but frail, and even with all the cracks and crevices in the bookshop walls it’s not so much wailing as half-heartedly complaining. Nevertheless, it’s dark enough and cold enough out that the bookshop feels cosier by comparison, a warm and glowing haven against the winter night. There’s a fire crackling cheerfully in the grate, the fairy lights are twinkling as they glint off all the ornaments dancing on the tree in the corner, and the only sounds to be heard are the beginnings of the kettle’s whistle, snatches of song from distant carollers, and, drifting up from somewhere around Aziraphale’s knee, the faintest sound of snoring. The angel sighs, and looks down at the Adversary, whose feet are draped over the back of the sofa, one snakeskin shoe dangling from the end of a toe. He has one arm flung over his face, and one stretching down to the floor, and he’s pressed against Aziraphale from knees to shoulders, albeit in the opposite direction.
The thing is, he worked it out. It’d been fomenting in his head for most of the eighteenth century, after that thing with the wulver and the chimneystack, but the great nap of 1811-1893 inclusive confirmed his suspicions. Comfort doesn’t have anything to do with where Crowley sleeps, or at least, comfort as applied to humans, or human-shaped entities. It’s probably a serpent thing, Aziraphale thinks, remembering the Tree; all sleeping positions are comfortable sleeping positions when you’re that flexible, one assumes. Warmth, on the other hand...
Actually, that’s probably serpentine too, isn’t it, the angel realises. Cold-blooded, etc. He’s sure he saw something about it on the television, one of those nature documentaries that Crowley’s so reluctantly fascinated by, and there’s a perfectly adequate padded bench thing by the radiator, and a thick rug by the fire. Neither are where Aziraphale would pick for a nap, if he ever indulged in such things, but they’re right up Crowley’s alley. And yet, here he is. Upside down on the sofa at the angel’s side, face pressed up against his knee. It makes no sense.
The demon stirs, and Aziraphale goes back to his book, and pretends not to have been staring.
“Aren’t you bored yet?”
“Hmm?” Aziraphale says, eyes fixed on the typeface.
“Bored,” says Crowley, arm still over his face.
“Of what, my dear?” the angel says, and reaches for his tea.
“That page. You’ve been reading it for about twenty minutes.”
Aziraphale pretends not to hear the smirk in Crowley’s voice. And, with far less success, that he’s not flustered.
“Well, my dear, it’s a rather obscure little passage –“
“What’s the first line?”
“Erm,” Aziraphale says, at a loss, and glances down to check. Crowley’s hand shoots out, and snatches the book away before Aziraphale can read more than a word.
Crowley’s face is quietly gleeful, and Aziraphale cuts him off before he can do more than open his mouth.
“Aren’t you dreadfully uncomfortable like that?”
“Like what?” Crowley says, momentarily derailed.
“All,” Aziraphale makes a wavy sort of gesture in Crowley’s direction, and scowls when the demon simply smirks and holds the book even further away. “Upside down and folded up. It can’t be good for you.”
“I don’t know,” Crowley says, distractedly. “It’s working out for me so far.” He holds the book above his face, and squints up at the page.
Aziraphale stares at him, the long line of his neck, the sharp edges of his face, half-shadowed by the book, the way his eyelashes flutter, long and dark against his skin, and when Crowley glances up at him he isn’t quick enough to look away.
There’s silence, in which the fire crackles and the wind has built up to a howl, and yet somehow both seem so very far away, and Aziraphale’s mouth is suddenly very dry.
“Crowley,” he begins, but the demon is standing up, far too easily for someone whose feet were in the air not seconds before, straightening his jacket, and offering Aziraphale a hand.
“C’mon, angel,” he says, when Aziraphale has stared at it blankly for about a minute (or five, or twenty, the angel isn’t quite sure), “you must be tired, if that old thing’s giving you so much trouble.” His voice is teasing, but there’s something hiding beneath the surface, something tense.
The angel blinks up at him, and Crowley sighs, and seems to shrink into himself a little. “It’s…” his tongue flicks out, an old, Before-time habit, and still as far from human as the rest of him is, as the rest of Aziraphale is, inside. “You have a perfectly good bed upstairs. Take a nap. Indulge a bit.”
Crowley isn’t looking at him.
“Can’t hurt, right?” he shrugs, and his hand starts to drop.
Aziraphale grabs at it, frantically, and the demon starts, his head snapping round.
“I think perhaps,” the angel says, very calmly, although everything seems very loud, all of a sudden, “you may be right, my dear.”
He stands up, putting only the barest weight on Crowley’s hand, and Crowley steps forward, slightly, as though he can’t quite help it, as though even the slightest pull is too much. His eyes are still wide, surprised or frightened or – but his voice is dry, even sardonic, when he says “What just happened? Did the principality, the ethereal being, the very angel of the eastern gate, admit that I might be right about something? That’s got to be, what, the first time in about two thousand years?”
“Hardly, my dear,” the angel says, lightly. “I admit that you might be right at least once a century or so. If not more. Tinsel was certainly one of your better ideas.”
This startles a laugh out of Crowley, but the motion seems to remind him that they’re still holding hands. He freezes.
Aziraphale looks at him, very seriously.
“It’s alright, my dear,” he says, quietly. “It’s alright.”
London, After
Aziraphale (there’s no other word for it) wakes up. The bed he bought under the vague, slightly worried apprehension that they were something that humans had, and therefore he should probably have one, is, against all expectation, really quite comfortable. He feels strangely, delightfully heavy, as if sleep has settled on him (and through him, drugging his limbs into laziness) like a thick and cosy blanket. Everything is soft, and warm, and slightly fuzzy at the edges, which Aziraphale thinks maybe he should be worried about, except that he’s too warm and too comfortable for such prickly little thoughts to reach him. He opens his eyes, and sees white sheets, rumpled into waves with little blue valleys, glowing in the pale morning light as it creeps through the blinds.
The angel tilts his head, and feels something tickling his nose. Craning his neck, he tries to spot the offender, but the attempt is arrested by his chin hitting the top of someone’s head.
Crowley.
Perhaps the warm and pleasingly restrictive heaviness is not, in fact, a side-effect of taking one’s first nap in around six millennia. Aziraphale stretches, slightly, so he can look down at the demon without waking him. Crowley’s head is snug against his chest, arms tucked neatly along his sides, as though to politely detain him. His face is utterly peaceful. Beautiful, Aziraphale thinks, and knows a brief moment of insecurity. He’s not a catch, by human standards, he’s very well aware. He’s pudgy, and old-fashioned, and a tiny bit obsessive. He doesn’t really understand emotions, not the way Crowley does, with feelings as instinctive as existing; genuinely felt, rather than observed from a little way off. He doesn’t see the appeal of all that messy writhing that humans seem to think is crucial to the functioning of healthy relationships (although it seems Crowley doesn’t, really, either. So maybe that’s alright). And he knows, he sees now, far clearer than he did before, all the ways in which he hurts Crowley, casually, without thinking, with assumptions and carelessness and un-angelic self-centredness. He wants to get this right.
But Crowley’s here. He doesn’t need to be, after all; there are plenty of other warm places in London, even in the bookshop, if all he needed was heat. But the demon is here, wrapped around the angel, and seems only to be refraining from clinging out of some strange subconscious expression of manners. A wave of, of something, of euphoria, of affection, something strong and light and warm and dizzying floods Aziraphale from head to toe to hidden wingtip, and he almost laughs when he gives it a name.
Aziraphale loves him.
Crowley stirs, and Aziraphale barely notices, love so overwhelming he can hardly breathe-
“Mmph, m’awake-“ he mumbles into Aziraphale’s shirt, fingers tightening at his sides. Aziraphale doesn’t respond.
“Whazzama’er,” Crowley says, blearily, reaching up a hand and patting around until he reaches the side of Aziraphale’s face. He rubs a thumb over Aziraphale’s cheekbone, a sweeping, soothing motion. Aziraphale retrieves a hand from under the covers, and catches Crowley’s, lacing their fingers together and holding on, gently. “Angel?” Crowley asks, puzzled, still half-asleep, and Aziraphale relaxes. He leans down, and kisses Crowley on the top of his head. “It’s alright, my dear,” he says. “We’re alright.”
Aziraphale wriggles down under the blankets (including the living, breathing demonic one), and wraps his arms around Crowley, laying a hand between his shoulder-blades and another round his hip, and strokes, slowly, mindlessly. Crowley tucks his face into Aziraphale’s neck with another incomprehensible string of half-hummed sounds, and the angel feels lips brush the skin where his neck meets his shoulder. He could get used to this, this sleeping business, he realises.
Like so many other things down the long years since the Garden, it’s greatly improved by the company.
[1] Some things never change.