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Aziraphale snuggled closer to Crowley, the bed’s vast comfort seeming to hold them together. Crowley’s Mayfair flat was seeping grey in the morning light, just hinting at the rising sun beyond its drawn curtains, a world that, for a little while longer at least, could be ignored. Aziraphale’s arms pulled Crowley to his chest, warm and heavy. He sighed from behind closed eyes.
“Oh, Crowley. How I’ve longed to hold you like this.” His hand found Crowley’s, threading their fingers together. “Do you remember that time in Wessex, when we were trapped in that shelter together? Even then, I wanted nothing more than to hold you like this— I thought of suggesting we huddle for warmth, but that would’ve been a bit of a thin pretext, wouldn’t it, considering neither of us really needs to be warm. Maybe if some of the other knights had been around I might’ve gotten away with it… or!” Aziraphale laughed, stirring the hairs at the back of Crowley’s neck. “When I opened the shop, and you were coming by to celebrate. I was working up the courage— well, maybe it hadn’t even gotten quite that far, but I was certainly thinking about how I might invite you to come upstairs and join me in the flat that evening, when Gabriel came along. Of all the times for him to barge in! And you’d brought chocolates, too. It made me wonder.”
Aziraphale buried his face in Crowley’s hair, breathing deep of the earthy, salt-tang scent of him. How often had he imagined doing this, of Crowley allowing it? Of being permitted, by both himself and the demon that was the subject of his yearning, to transgress the invisible barriers that kept them apart, kept them from knowing each other in the ways that humans do; bodily, at the end of fingertips, with hair against faces, skin on skin. Aziraphale’s lips formed themselves into a kiss on Crowley’s nape. He squeezed his hand.
“I promise never to wonder again. Never to doubt your love because oh, my dear, dearest darling, I love you. I always have, even if I couldn’t quite work out how to say it. But I see how you always said it, in every way that mattered. You are… you are everything that matters.” Aziraphale kissed Crowley’s neck again, disentangling his fingers to bring them up, brushing his knuckles against Crowley’s cheek. Beyond the curtains, a bird was singing. Aziraphale laughed, chuckling breathily into Crowley’s shoulder. “I suppose it’s telling me it’s time to get up. Do you suppose I could persuade it to give me five more minutes?”
Aziraphale moved carefully, manoeuvring himself out from behind Crowley, who shifted over onto his back in Aziraphale’s absence. Aziraphale sat back on his heels, folded knees resting against Crowley’s side. He clicked on the bedside lamp, and looked down at Crowley, eyes shining golden-bright in the light; golden-bright and beautiful, so achingly beautiful that Aziraphale could hardly think how he’d ever failed to tell Crowley so.
He could drown in those eyes, and now wished he would; wished they could make him forget the iron-grey streaks that now ran like the veins of a leaf beneath Crowley’s skin, make him forget how still the chest beneath the resting heel of his hand was, make him forget how the eyes themselves stared sightlessly, how he’d arrived too late to prevent whatever infernal calamity had ripped Crowley from the slowly cooling body beside him. If he could disappear into those eyes, Aziraphale thought, he would be content. Instead, he reached out with gentle thumbs to draw the papery eyelids down over them. With his eyes closed, he might have been sleeping, or he might not have been Crowley at all. Only a body.
“If you’ve survived this, if they’ve got you somewhere, Crowley, I swear, I’ll find you. And if you haven’t…” Aziraphale scrubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, voice cracking on his oath, “…there’ll be Hell to pay.”