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Crowley had built up a tolerance to Aziraphale’s secretive, cat-with-the-cream smiles. There was just enough plausible deniability there, a grey area of affection he was comfortable with. Some days Crowley told himself that Aziraphale just looked at everyone like that. He was an angel, he was built to love, he gifted trees and birds and mothers pushing baby carriages with the same expression.
Those days were now decidedly over. It turned out that Aziraphale had been restraining a great deal more than his smiles over the millennia. Now that he had decided he was allowed to, that they were sufficiently safe from Heaven’s gaze, the angel doted.
Crowley was pretending to be disinterested in the candle selection of the boutique they were browsing, when Azirapahale snagged his hand. Crowley nearly jumped out of his skin. The angel must have caught a hint of the anguish in his expression and released him just as quickly.
“So sorry my dear,” Aziraphale spoke very lightly, like the words were just another piece of the polite filler he littered his sentences and hurried off to examine the selection of screen printed tea towels.
Crowley stood there swearing violently to himself. He had to fix this immediately. He couldn’t allow Aziraphale to think he wasn’t wanted. Aziraphale was always wanted. Crowley just wasn’t used to the angel taking him up on that 6,000 year standing offer. And he didn’t particularly feel like going to pieces over this development next to the aisle of decorative mugs and an overeager sales associate.
He bought a cup of tea and a scone while Aziraphale was distracted by a bookshop the next store over (even though he literally owned and lived in a bookshop!) and pressed them into the angel’s hands as a peace offering and surrogate embrace.
“Oh! How kind of you Crowley!”
“S’no problem.” Crowley shoved his hands in his pockets like a surly teenager. He felt the word ‘kind’ like a scarlet letter on his lapel. It burned all the way home.
Maybe it was because Crowley had learned early to root for himself against the headwinds. Affection left him wrong footed. He was the Adversary. The opposition. He wanted to grab the angel by the lapels and demand to know if he really meant it. No take-backsies! He wanted to snarl, if you dither about this, it might break me.
Crowley didn’t know if he could handle such happiness. It was scalding after years of building up resistance to the cold.
He became a snake as soon as they re-entered the bookshop because it gave him a convenient excuse not to make conversation. Aziraphale smiled a little sadly as he set down the shopping bags but didn’t say anything. It felt safer to be in a form which literally could not betray any inadvertent crumpling expression. Sometimes even Crowley’s sunglasses wouldn’t cut it.
He wound himself around one of the bookshelves but felt bereft almost as soon as he was settled. The little distance he had been craving was immediately lonely. Azirphale did fussy and entirely needless things in the kitchen. He used a kettle and a gas stove that needed to be lit with a match, even though he was perfectly capable of miracling himself up a cup of tea. Then he settled into his favorite chair with the worn velvet armrests that had to be continuously patched with different scraps of fabric, evidently taking Crowley’s snake form as a signal that they would be passing a quiet evening, engaged in separate activities.
Crowley stared at the angel unreservedly, since his back was turned. Aziraphale’s white hair was slightly unbrushed and curled up and away from his collar. Crowley wished that he could toy with it, brush it down or muss it further and then realized that technically, there was nothing stopping him.
Nothing but 6,000 years of carefully maintained distance. Nothing but the layers and layers of plausible deniability they had built up between them. It clung to each of them like spider silk, enveloping, almost invisible.
Crowley blinked his big, acid yellow eyes. Fuck it, he thought.
It felt strange, sacrilegious, to cross the lines Aziraphale had drawn around himself. But Crowley soldiered on. He knew it was his turn to be brave. He was aware that if he let things lie, they might do exactly that, and the two of them would remain in their careful truce for who knows how many millennia.
The snake form was a crutch. He nosed his way up Aziraphale’s armchair and allowed himself to shed all his calcified human customs along with his limbs. He wound around the back of the chair and settled as lightly as he could over Aziraphale’s shoulders.
“Thissss alright?” It made Crowley feel drunk, the sibilants sneaking past without his say-so.
Aziraphale was very still for a moment and Crowley wondered if he had grievously miscalculated, if he would be forced to retreat and lick his wounds for another thousand years. So much of their association had been based on a kind of silently agreed upon dry lightheartedness. Crowley had started it, he supposed, with that remark about lead balloons. He wondered, for a soul shriveling moment, whether the Aziraphale, his infinitely polite angel, was simply attempting to spare his feelings. Was enduring him. Then the angel smiled and Crowley could have sworn that all the candles in the room flared.
“Yes of course my dear” Crowley grunted as Aziraphale hoisted him so that the demon was securely wrapped around his chest, “you know you’re - well you’re always welcome.” Aziraphale trailed off a bit at the end, terribly earnest and embarrassed and Crowley tightened around him in some sort of pavlovian response and what a pair the two of them made.
Crowley could hear all the strange pops and gurgles emanating from the angel’s stomach. It sounded like the deep ocean, like the strange songs of whales.The angel’s round fingers stroked their way down his back, careful to only move from head to tail, so as not to upset his scales. Azirapahale roped one hand through Crowley’s coils, the other thumbing the page of his first edition copy of Emma. The absent-mindedness of it nearly did Crowley in - the idea that the angel might reach for him without thinking. It was heady, nearly overwhelming, to finally be treated as a given. And strange, to be so readily handled.
Crowley wasn’t very touchy, as a general rule. The humans, likely sensing something prickly and occult about him, gave Crowley a wide berth. Ditto with animals. He usually relished the way the energy of a crowded bar or subway station became ever so slightly edgier when he entered the room. It made him feel powerful, to be the sour in the milk, the thorn in the side, the miasma in the air.
But Aziraphale held him as though he were worth tucking close, the same way he handled his mugs of cocoa in the mornings, the way he smoothed the worn fabric of his lapel. The feeling was so novel it almost stung and elicited the whispiest of memories, of galaxies spiraling out purple and blue against the blackness of creation. Of knowing with a comfortable surety that he was made of the same sacred matter, back when the universe was whole and no one had been cast out.
Angels didn’t need to breathe, but Aziraphale’s chest steadily expanded and contracted. Crowley could hear a heart beating through the warm wall of flesh and bone. It shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was - Aziraphale was literally immortal, it didn’t matter whether his heart could beat, but Crowley found himself honing in on the rhythm - a snake charmed. You’re here, you’re here, you’re right here.