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Flesh confounds. Stretches of skin over sinew and muscle, sticking to bone and wrapping the same sorts of loose, morbid, shapes into other shapes. Shapes that can’t change that much. The flexibility of flesh meets (meats) the rigidity of bone.
They can change, can shift, can be different — but they have to break first. Snap. And then it’s different. Looser, but it can’t contain, it can’t expand or deflate, flesh can’t wrap, really, around something it does not fundamentally understand.
Like a teacup trying to contain the ocean’s tides.
On softer days, it might be able to — but once the undulations of anxiety beneath the surface start to swell the water sloshed over the side and pools (if you’re lucky and thought this through it splashed into the saucer).
It can pretend, for a moment, that it was capable of containing the raw power of the tidal pull of the moon, but it can never really. The best thing to do is to find some sort of containment solution as opposed to one singular one (like remembering to use a saucer. Or some sort of coaster at all), or bring the cup away from the table all together.
In Soho, there was the bookshop. A sort of place that could shudder and creak under the weight of things flesh found foreign. Books as padding, as sponges, soaking up excess Love and Care and Grace that leaked from the seams of a body not yielding enough to hold in an Angel.
At the cottage, in a place that sprouted from nothing with the duel-reek-Grace of demon and angel influence, there is nothing. The books are there, but they sit, a little confused and shaken, in a library as opposed to a shop. They forgot their purpose, their goal, their Grace, their Love when they were burned and remade. Aziraphale can’t blame them. The longer Crowley had his Bentley, the more it changed. The more it rippled and purred under a touch, the more it gave and held steady. Not entirely a car, not entirely anything else. Its parts confused, its leather (flesh but not flesh) seats remembering what it was like to breathe.
It hasn’t played Queen since the end-time-that-never-came.
The second option: removal. They picked a place as hidden as one could be. Near enough the shores that the salt-wind would catch in Crowley’s hair as he puttered around the garden-that-shouldn't-be-thriving-so-much, leaves of plants reaching questioning towards something they don’t understand. They drop off before they touch him, too cognizant of what they shouldn’t understand. Far enough that the distant rumble of a passing car makes his skin prickle with something else.
A place no one would bother them, and no one would be bothered as they shuddered out excess bits of themselves every once in a while. Moments when the tidal pull was too strong for the teacup, leaving the table damp and half a continent away, an apple tree sprouting in the middle of a small yoga studio.
Or an empty church crumbling to dust.
They don’t fully shake the sticking flesh, abandon pretense and just be comfortable for a bit. No, Crowley never saw Aziraphale in Heaven and Aziraphale never saw him in the deepest bowels of Hell (not that he thought Crowley would fully abandon his flesh in Hell. Demons rarely did. Something about reminders of agony past).
In the quiet moments, they spotted the inconsistencies, though. Aziraphale would blink and Crowley’s skin was mottled with black and cracked to expose a steaming yellow. Another blink and it was gone. He’d stretch, some mornings, his Essence pushing past the bounds of the physical body, and Aziraphale would catch the claws, the scars, the smoke rolling off his skin for just a moment before he relaxed and went right back to sorts.
Crowley slept. Often. He tried to do it a minimum of five times a week, but Aziraphale often found him doing it a bit more. When he slept was the longest his Essence could unwind. A burned-black claw curled around a black and gold damask pillow (Aziraphale-chosen, Crowley-approved), a pathway of oil-slick scales slithering from the base of his spine up to the nape of his neck, fangs and forked tongues when he yawned.
If the sheets slipped from their place wrapped around him (which they did frequently, if not because Crowley was an incredibly mobile sleeper, but because Aziraphale occasionally peeled them back to drink in the sight), he could see the memory of scars that blink in and out of his sight, the bare feet replaced with scaled hooves, the promise of something worse lurking just beneath the surface.
Even the snake form couldn’t ever contain him.
Aziraphale had never see him at his truest. He’d seen flashes of it, caught glimpses of something lurking just beneath but never quite got the full picture. Not even when he wore his vessel, no then he only had access to the flesh that couldn’t contain Crowley, he looked at it’s weird points (eyes, feet, tongue, back). See the imprint where Crowley, really Crowley tried to burst out. He could imagine it, though, piece it together from the parts of him he was permitted access to.
He knew what angels looked like. He couldn’t imagine Crowley as much different.
Though he still refused the confines of sleep, Aziraphale new there were occasions his own containment shuddered and splashed over. Crowley would stare, eyes blazing over him with some strange combination of want and pain. Too many eyes blinked at once back at him, before sealing shut with a twinge of effort. His mouth had to unseal itself from where receded back into this costume.
Feathers shimmered and flew every which way when he was over-excited in their shared bed. The moments when the whole table rocking threatened to dump the teacup right onto the floor. Shatter the bounds and edges and send them both tumbling out of their own skins.
Crowley hissed and recoiled when Light leaked from the cracks they made in his foundation together. It didn’t burn. Not physically, at least.
The nature of containment within confounding bodies meant that the longer they went without stretching, the worse the itch became, the more focus it required to tamper down their respective natures. As the ocean pulled back to expose the sodden shore, only to crash down upon it again with a righteous fury, Aziraphale’s essence waxed and waned—pushing at the limits whenever he wasn’t entirely focused on reigning it in.
And he could see Crowley struggle just the same.
Part of all the trouble came because removal (the second option) was a bit more difficult than one could imagine. Taking the teacup from the table just meant risking ruining your floors. A further fall, but not exactly impossible to consider.
If you were fond of food, or cowering under the weighty gaze of a live-in Adversary-Turned-Lover, mistakes were bound to happen.
Aziraphale cracked at a little fruit stall, a woman screaming and recoiling as his attention was drawn too closely to picking a batch of apples for that evening. She dropped right to her knees and prayed, wailing for God’s mercy against the creature bursting with golden light and fire holding a sack of fruit.
It was absolutely mortifying.
At night, when he wasn’t sleeping, Crowley roamed the thick copse of trees. He’d start from the roof and leap down onto one, empty-black wings spread against the infinite darkness stretching above them. If his wings caught, it nearly looked like he was flying.
Aziraphale pretended not to watch. It struck him as rude, improper. Like he was glimpsing into the innermost mechanizations of someone’s soul, like he was learning a secret no one intended for him to know.
Demons couldn’t fly. Their wings can stretch and beat at the air for centuries, but they’re grounded, clipped.
Afterall, if they could fly they wouldn’t have Fallen now would they?
Rumors started to trickle about, ghost stories regarding the two men in the little cottage, surrounded by a garden. Monsters made of darkness and evil live in the woods that come about at night (Crowley), creatures of fire-and-brimstone wreak havoc on those who lie (Aziraphale). Urban legends that only taste marginally like lies. They came about when the men moved in, they’re shaped, vaguely, like the two men in the cottage that no one can remember when it was built or when they moved in or really where it was.
All they remembered was black shapes cutting through the trees, a stench of brimstone, a deep, rattling sensation that their worst nightmares were watching them.
Though that was only if they encountered Crowley. Those who encountered Aziraphale more or less ended up like the woman with the apples. His human vessel shuddered around the twitches of a tightly-packed essence as Aziraphale tried to steady his hands on a teacup. This one not so much holding back a metaphorical tide of the ocean but a nice earl grey.
A blink, and it was steeped in wine. “Oh, dear,” he muttered, as his ears pricked at the sound of sniffing from the living room. Residual celestial energy clings to the air, like fresh-cut grass and a long summer evening. It was hard to hide, especially when a little water-to-wine was only symptomatic of a bigger tremor that spread, reviving whatever rotting disappointments comprised Crowley's compost bin.
“Was that you?” Crowley’s soft footfalls tapped through the doorway, carrying the demon until he was hovering between rooms. Another sniff and a snap (from Crowley, Aziraphale didn’t trust himself to try) and the tea was back to sorts. “We ought to,” his hand waves, noncommittal, through the air, "six thousand years of being crammed into an ill-fitting suit. Surprised it took this long to fall to bits."
"I'm not falling to bits," Aziraphale corrected, collecting his cup and migrating from the counter to the table. "And it's been less for me but a while. I just need…" He trailed off, a stretch cracking his neck and giving a blind man in Cardiff his sight back. "To focus on keeping myself contained."
Focus. That was what they did. Stop focusing and that's when it all fell apart. But, there were other things in the world to focus on as well. Like picking the right bag of apples, or carrying a cup from one place to another, or — a bit later that very night — a body sprawled out in their bed, hands twisting into sheets and crumbling vessels pressing together.
Crowley had rolled on top, sucking bruising kisses into Aziraphale’s skin as they twisted the boundaries of flesh, feeling quite like melding into one another. But different. They’d done that before, they’d had one hand in each other’s bodies—wore them, were them. This was different, something more primal, grappling and raw.
It took all their focus. Crowley broke first.
To return, for a moment, to the metaphor of the teacup and the ocean—it takes quite an amount of focus to carry a still teacup from one place to another without sloshing the water all about. It requires steady hands. If it were already bouncing and tipping and threatening to overflow, it would be much more difficult.
If your hands were not steady, already wobbling and unfocused, it is much harder to control and you are absolutely going to spill it.
Six wings unfurled at once, wafting with them loose feathers that fall and crumble like ash. Crowley’s back arched as he sought completion with claws tearing holes in the bed linens. “Fuck,” he hissed, face pressed against Aziraphale’s clavical. Thin thighs twitched where they bracketed Aziraphale’s hips, gripping him tight for a moment as every muscle in Crowley’s lanky body tensed, fighting part of himself back tooth and nail.
The pressure atop and surrounding Aziraphale was suffocating, and well, that took just a bit too much focus and— “Wait,” Aziraphale grimaced, teeth clenching as he tried to stop what was about to happen. But it was rather like trying to stop the ocean’s waves from tumbling.
Despite all his best efforts, they crashed down without his explicit permission and the flaming wings that sprout around his head, the white blinding, a facsimile of what humans traditionally envision a halo but instead a moment of combustion that lasts for far too long before the two creatures could tear themselves apart long enough to catch an incredibly existential and proverbial grip on themselves.
Couldn’t even shag properly. By the time Crowley got up, he was already dressed, body tight and hair pushed back into its proper swoop.
“Where are you going?” As if Aziraphale didn’t already know the answer. Out. The garden. The trees. To nature, somewhere he could be alone, somewhere he could shake himself out and take deep breaths and stretch. Make more ghost stories.
He pretended not to notice Crowley’s gait, the way he paused and shook out a leg, body still trying to right itself. “Out.” Of course. It was always out. He was going out, he was going to menace his marigolds or coil around a treebranch.
“You don’t think we should—” The house-shudder of a slamming door behind the serpent cut him off. “Talk about it?”
Clearly not.
Aziraphale didn’t bother re-dressing, at least not at the moment. He closed his eyes (all of them, he could rather suddenly see the whole room and it was always a touch disorientating when it happened) and focused on inch-by-inch stitching himself back together.
Deep breath in, reminding his hair it needed to stay hair. Deep breath out, his feet must be feet, despite the fires that lick at him from the inside, begging, begging, to be released. Focus. Focus.
On the stretch and yield of soft skin, of the rigidity of bone that lurks beneath the wraps of muscle and sinew. Deep breath in. Somewhere, far away, Aziraphale felt the quiet snap of a tree branch falling onto a car. Too far to have been under Crowley’s feet but too certainly him to not have been him. Somewhere, closer, his fingertips burned with the need for fullness.
Completion of a different sort.
A deep breath pushed out from the bottom of lungs too deep for this human form.
It felt, oddly, calm. For just a moment. Confident that he wouldn’t explode out of his clothing, tearing through the fabric with his wings or burning it to a crisp under holy fire, Aziraphale dressed and puttered back out to fix himself something to nibble.
He was there, chewing thoughtfully on a slice of the apples he’d purchased (well, he left the appropriate amount of money. The woman simply wouldn’t calm down), when Crowley returned. His pants streaked with mud, his hands and face absolutely filthy.
All the proper signs of a crash landing.
Demon’s can’t fly, Aziraphale thought to himself sliding out the little plate piled high with carefully cut apple slices. Crowley glanced down at it, eyes flickering for a moment to Aziraphale. “Really?” He asked.
Doesn’t stop them from trying, though .
“It’s the season,” Aziraphale defended, taking the plate back. “Just because one of us thought up some tricks with apples doesn’t have to ruin the whole lot for the rest of us.”
All it earned him was a grunt and the scrape of chair legs over the floor. By the time he sat, Crowley was pristine once more.
“You’re back in one piece,” he noted, those bony fingers slipping into Aziraphale’s line of sight and snatching away a slice despite having been offered already.
“As are you,” he replied, not commenting on the theft. Not much unlike Crowley, now was it? It was better that way, anyway, that he was acting his proper self. “Am I correct in presuming you don’t wish to discuss it any further?”
“Just had to stretch.” The apple crunched beneath Crowley’s teeth. Aziraphale tried not to let the sound rattle something inside him loose. Just because they didn’t finish what they’d been doing before. Near enough, but not quite all the way. Never reached the end bit.
Aziraphale carefully chose his words, lined them all up in the proper way, then reviewed them a few times before swallowing a chunk of apple that stuck in his throat. It settled heavy in his stomach, burning a bit the whole way down. “You didn’t have to leave to do it. People are getting concerned about the demon in the woods.”
The sounds of chewing ceased, and Aziraphale’s eyes flickered up for a brief moment to try to read Crowley’s expression. He’d put his sunglasses on before he’d left. He hadn’t taken them off.
Didn’t make it impossible, Didn’t even really make it harder. Just different.
“Why would I do that here?” he asked, chair creaking under the shifting weight as he leaned back.
Aziraphale took a moment to look up, the over, checking all the corners of the house as if he’d find some sort of answer there. “You live here,” he offered. “It’s not like I am going to say anything about it.”
“Anything about what?”
“About you and your,” now it was getting awkward. Aziraphale looked over properly, finding Crowley chewing on the inside of one cheek. “Form. You haven’t seen mine and I haven’t seen yours but, well, you do at least know generally speaking what I must look like.”
Fundamentally, all angels really looked an awful lot the same. Crowley paused with the other half of his apple slice right against his lips. It looked incredible obscene. Aziraphale couldn’t watch. More deliberative chewing. “I suppose I could envision it. If I wanted to. Doesn’t mean I want to see it, angel.”
“It won’t hurt you.”
“You don’t know that.”
A furrow appeared between Aziraphale’s brows. A little frown matching the one on his lips. “I do, Crowley. You’re not human you can’t go blind.”
The floor and chair screech as Crowley pushed off. “You don’t want to see me.”
But he did. He really, really did. They’d seen each other a hundred ways, snakes and demons and angels. They’d seen each other wearing the opposite bodies, seen each other bared and vulnerable and raw and in love and terrified. But they’d never really seen each other.
Not without pretense, not without masks.
Only glimpses. Aziraphale pondered this as he finished the apple slices, collecting the plate and the mostly-full teacup to bring to the sink. He washed and dried and debated the final few swallows of now-cool liquid.
Taking a deep breath, he poured it into the basin.
You don’t want to see me.
Presumptuous of him. Aziraphale made his way back to the bedroom, where all the bedding had been commandeered to swath the demon in a cocoon of feathers and silk. He was already properly out, so Aziraphale did what he always did and sat and watched.
As ever, he made a point to be gone by the time Crowley woke. He wasn’t exactly fond of the angel watching over him as he slept. Always made a bit of a deal about it. Back into the library he went, at least for Crowley to get himself ready for the day.
It had been their routine since they sprouted their cottage and moved their things into the place. They do what they do and they don’t discuss what they don’t discuss. Simple. They were actually quite good at not discussing what they didn’t wish to discuss. They’d been not-discussing things for years.
This struck Aziraphale as one of those things they did not discuss. As much as it infuriated him, making him turn the pages of his forgetful books a little too quickly. They haven’t yet remembered the art of being stable around him, of ignoring if he dripped cocoa onto them or lost crumbs amidst their pages. Before the burning, they were good, conscientious little things. Careful to please Aziraphale knowing he’d treat them well.
These ones didn’t, they hadn’t learned yet. The page tore, just faintly, at the edges.
“Poor thing,” he said, repairing it with a little twitch of his fingers. Of course, he’d always know. But Crowley wasn’t up to ask him to do it. Deciding to give the book a respite, he replaced it and skipped his fingers over others, wandering over collections of Alfred de Vigny poems, some Hugo, a much well-loved copy of the un-performed Cromwell until they ran right off the edge.
In the kitchen, Crowley clanged about. A surefire sign he was up and trying to do something generally kind in replacement of a simple apology for being a bit of a prick. Heaving a sigh up from his heels, Aziraphale headed out to meet him and, chiefly, to save his kitchen from the un-trained and gangly limbs of a man who hadn’t cooked since someone invented the notion of paying someone else to cook for them.
He’d gotten as far as starting the coffee when Aziraphale took over, letting him grump his way to the table and examine his hands. There was a fair bit of picking, some chewing of nails. Neither one discussed it, like they frequently did.
They didn’t need caffeine in the mornings just like they didn’t need sleep or to eat. It had become one of those things, where a morning didn’t feel quite like a new day unless Aziraphale was holding a warm mug between his hands, sipping at it, tasting the various notes of whatever new blend Crowley decided they were trying.
“Anything special this morning?” Aziraphale asked as he examined the bag.
Crowley hummed around the thumb he gnawed at. “No, haven’t been thinking about it.”
So the same as before. It wasn’t bad then, and Aziraphale presumed it wouldn’t be bad now. He went about the motions, something comforting in following through and making himself something with his own hands as opposed to just snapping it into existence. The sound of the coffee hitting the cavernous bottom of the cup was absolutely deafening in the eerie morning silence.
“Have a good sleep?” Aziraphale tried to break it, or at least press on the edges, but last night’s frustrations chewed at him instead.
And clearly at Crowley as well, who didn’t answer the question and instead elected to fixate on the bowl of apples sitting plainly in the middle of their kitchen table.
“Would you like me to slice you one?”
Again, unanswered. Aziraphale was beginning to think he wasn’t listening.
“Crowley?” Not so much as a twitch. Absolutely not listening. Caught up in a world, in memories Aziraphale didn’t know.
It was a few more moments, ticked down by a clock Crowley had brought from his flat, until the demon pulled back, looking over. “Sorry, what?”
“Nothing, dear.” Aziraphale slid him his coffee. “You sleep well?”
“Yeah. Fine.” Crowley gave one of his dismissive sniffs, and Aziraphale felt something around them start to wobble. Not on any physical plane but more a metaphysical, existential, sort of wobble. Like something was about to change, and perhaps, not for the better. Or perhaps for. He didn’t know and he didn’t like it so much. Crowley reached a hand out, plucking an apple from the bowl. “Did you buy these?”
Aziraphale worried for a moment Crowley had heard about the woman. “I did.”
“We have a whole tree in the garden, wasn’t any need to go out and buy some. Just,” he wagged a hand towards the door. “Pick them.”
His cheeks heated just a touch. It wasn’t as though he hated the idea of picking an apple from a tree, it just set off certain memories was all. The kind he wasn’t too terribly fond of. Luckily Crowley didn’t press the subject, instead letting it drop with an unceremonious roll of his eyes.
Perfect place for Aziraphale to upset whatever sort of not-discussing-it-discussion they were having by immediately and promptly discussing it. “Last night,” he started.
Crowley growls and puts the apple back, leaning back in his chair. “We’re not discussing this, angel. It was a little loss of control and really, nothing bad happened. Think I might’ve started a small fire in Oxford but really, no one got hurt. There’s no need for us to see each other.”
“But isn’t there?” Aziraphale pleaded back, eyes roaming the woodgrain. “You...cracked, and then I did. And it keeps happening. We need to...depressurize. The both of us. It makes no sense that we’d not do it together.”
“It makes no sense that we need to do it together.” The counterpoint came effortlessly. “Aziraphale when was the last time you saw, really saw a demon. Lucifer, out on the airbase? That wasn’t even his true form that was just a facade he put on as to not scare the kid.”
Not scare the—oh that is an issue resoundingly for later. “I don’t care, Crowley—I don’t understand why you’re making such a fuss—”
“Oh why I’m making a fuss?” He snapped back, his tongue tripping over the s’s of the last word. Good, now he was upset. Aziraphale hated making him upset. “I’m not the one making a fuss, you’re making a—a—you’re the one making the row here, not me. If it weren’t for all the people I’d go off into the garden and depressurize myself now.” The last set of s’s was a bit hard for him, Aziraphale winced in sympathy.
And a bit in shame. “I just want to see you,” he confessed, after a moment.
Crowley gave another heaving, rattling, sigh. “Aziraphale, you don’t.”
The sympathy and shame melted in an instant, thawing out a patch of annoyance that Aziraphale immediately latched to. “Do not tell me what I want or do not want, Crowley. I’m not some fledgling or a human child. I know what I want and what I want is for us to be able to actually look at each other. To—to know each other.”
Across the table, Crowley’s jaw clicked shut. He sniffed again, reaching into his breast pocket and withdrawing a pair of sunglasses. Aziraphale tried, he really tried, to not feel the hot stab between his ribs as Crowley slipped them on, obscuring his brilliant, expressive, beautiful, eyes. “Fine.” He pushed off from the table. “Look all you like, I’ll be in the garden.”
###
That was the last Aziraphale saw of Crowley for the entire day. He puttered about, read some poetry, made tea, watched the door every few moments, waiting for Crowley to saunter back in, stretch out on the chaise lounge near the fire and pretend they hadn’t had another disagreement that morning.
He didn’t, however. The day flitted on to dusk, the right through into night. Having not seen Crowley now for some time, Aziraphale set the Melville aside and brought himself up to his feet. It wasn’t exactly strange for the demon to not come home until late, but it was strange for him to give no alert that he wouldn’t be.
Every since the fire, the Bently, the bookshop, they’d been much better about telling where someone was. Crowley didn’t like not knowing where Aziraphale was, and frankly Aziraphale wasn’t fond of the idea of not knowing where Crowley was.
So, when he checked every nook, cranny, and shrub of the garden and found it lacking Crowley’s scent, he was more than a touch concerned. Worrying his pinky ring, Aziraphale did another sweep, shuddering out a few more of his eyes in an effort to make sure he really could see it all.
And in the dimness, with the cold-cast of a slivered moon being the only illumination, he let himself pulsate a bit with celestial Light.
Of course he still couldn’t find him. Worry setting in under his skin, a place where as of late there had been very very little room, Aziraphale started down towards the shore. He caught the scent of fire and Love and a hint of tobacco at the next wind, settling the thrumming of his heart enough that he could make his way a bit more confidently.
Crowley was there, a dark smudge against the black water and grey-cast beach. One hand was in his pocket, his shoulders back as his sunglasses pointed out over the horizon. There was a faint trail of smoke, an ember of light both like and unlike the stars at once.
For a moment, an instinctive disdain for the smell of cigarette smoke nearly overrode his concern. He choked down the immediate desire to chastise him in favor of softly approaching. “Planning on coming home this evening?” Aziraphale asked, trying his best to not sound as tetchy as he was feeling.
Crowley stubbed out the cigarette onto his own thumb. One of the benefits of being a demon, fire rarely hurt. He pocketed it, a bit too conscientious a demon to litter. “I am, eventually, angel. Just wanted to think a bit.”
“You weren’t in the garden.”
“Didn’t want the plants to see me thinking.” Ah, but of course. Aziraphale quieted down a bit, watching the back of his head as Crowley stayed eerily still. “I won’t look like you think I would,” Crowley offered, asked.
Aziraphale grappled for the appropriate response. “I have no Earthly idea how you would look. You were right, I’ve never seen a demon at its most true. Just the lot that comes up every now and again. The....rotting ones.” He thought, for a moment, stared at the edge of Crowley’s ear and tried to imagine him as one of those pustilant creatures. Skin peeling, eyes black, bits sort of dangling off. It didn’t come, it all looked wrong. “You’re not like them, are you?”
The jokes hover around Crowley, and Aziraphale could see a few biting ones sort of lining up. “No,” he landed on, after a bit. Not even a joke or a barb. He must’ve really been reeling. Crowley tilted his head back, looking at Aziraphale. “I don’t. But they don’t really look like that either. That’s just the leakage. And in part, I think, choice.”
There’s a moment and Aziraphale took it, approaching him slowly, like he might bolt at any moment, until they’re standing side by side, watching the waves rolling in and out against the star-pocked void.
Crowley broke the tension first again. “Listen, Aziraphale. I’m touched, really, that you want to do this but, it’s bad enough that you, y’know , me. Getting to see me any further just solidifies what I am and then either you leave because you realize that, or,” he made a gesture with his hand, like a dive. “Boom. And I can’t have that.” He sniffed, one of those I’m-not-going-to-express-my-feelings sniffs. “Either one.”
His breath robbed from him by the notion, all Aziraphale could make was a noise of displeasure and disbelief. “Firstly, love, Crowley. I love you and secondly if I Fall — which I have no intention of doing, nor do I believe I will — it would be entirely of my own doing. Something that I did, a choice that I made. And whether or not I’ve seen your true form is entirely—it’s irrelevant. I love a demon, Crowley it doesn’t matter what you look like if it was something that She would’ve deemed Fall-worthy she would’ve done it already.”
Crowley’s nose scrunched and he let slip a few of those debatings, considering, noises. “‘M not saying you have a point.”
“Has this been what you’ve been so twisted up about, dear? Me?”
The scowl and silence said it all. He reached out, and curled his fingers around Crowley’s. The demon responded in kind, all of Aziraphale’s eyes turning and watching as his own burning-white flames inch their way down to his fingertips. “You are so smart,” Aziraphale echoed, remembering their fight on the steps outside the shop. “How someone can be so smart, and yet so stupid is beyond me.”
Crowley leaned over, cheek to Aziraphale’s shoulder, carefully avoiding the white-fire eyes that blinked out at him, “What if you leave? I am absolutely nightmarish, you know.” He squeezed the fire shaped like Aziraphale’s hand. It gave more, but stood firm.
“I doubt it. I stayed by your side through the mustache you had in the 70’s, dear . Talk about nightmarish.”
The laugh that came was a bit watery, but neither of them commented on it. “You’re depressurizing then, are you?” Crowley asked, tilting his head up a bit. He’d given up on trying to contain the gold to just an iris. He let them overflow, color swelling out to glow in the low light. Brilliant, beautiful.
Aziraphale didn’t have the restraint to not lean in and kiss him. Something sweet and soft and much like all the other kisses they’d shared. “A bit,” he admitted, the warm light rolling off his wings as they shuddered free. All six of them stretch out, beyond what just he typically lets seep from his pores. “Would you like to join me?”
The hesitation said more than Crowley would ever admit, as he turned to face Aziraphale properly, leaning back and drinking him in before nudging forward for another kiss. This one much longer, much deeper. Aziraphale could taste something bitter and sharp on Crowley’s tongue, a sort of adrenaline-mixed-with-panic as clever fingers slot along his cheek, Aziraphale’s eyes shifting out of the way.
The more he let himself slip from the confines of this confounding, unyielding flesh the less corporeal he became. Space meant nothing, shapes meant nothing. A blink and something that was there wasn’t, a blink and something that wasn’t was. A blink and he could be nothing and everything. A blink and he could be scattered, spots in the distance amongst the stars. Nothing but dust to backdrop the crashing waves.
But to do that would mean Crowley’s cool fingertips wouldn’t brush the flames that licked out from his hairline.
Slowly, Aziraphale began to unstitch himself there on the beach, only pausing when Crowley growled, fingers flexing at the edges of Aziraphale’s still-slightly-there face. “Hold it,” he said and Aziraphale felt something deep inside him twitch with anxiety. Too much? Must be too much, too much at once.
For a moment, he worried that this was actually rather offensive. That Crowley would see the Ethereal Essence laid before him and recall what he once was, would remember all the pains of Heaven. That this would trigger something unpleasant inside him.
“Inside, angel,” Crowley said, after a few steadying breaths (his fingers were turning black, lengthened from just the skinny appendages into the beginnings of proper claws. He hissed over the word inside, his teeth sharp and far too long when he smiled. “I don’t want to share this.”
Of course, they were beyond walking by this point. All it was was a blink, and they were inside — not even tracking sand.
There was a reason, in the bible, that angels announced themselves by shouting Be Not Afraid. And that was because humans had all the reason in the world to be afraid. As Aziraphale slowly stripped out of the mortal shell, he felt the pulses of nerves that crawled up and down the length of himself.
The first time they made love, that second day of the rest of the world, Aziraphale had felt the same thing boiling around in his stomach as Crowley painstakingly stripped off his clothing. As absurd as it sounded, the thundering concern that Crowley would decide, belated, that he didn’t find Aziraphale’s vessel appealing, echoed and rushed into his ears. That Crowley would decide, once and for all, that Aziraphale really wasn’t worth all the Effort of the Effort.
Of course, that had been an absurd notion quickly put to bed by the press of Crowley’s lips over far more of Aziraphale’s body than any other previous lover had done.
That feeling, those nerves and that twitch of fear, was nothing compared to the way Aziraphale’s entire being shuddered as he came apart beneath Crowley’s careful hands. “That’s it,” the demon purred, as Aziraphale blinked back the sudden disorientation that came with sprouting eyes over wings stretched out for the first time in a very long time. They unfurled around the crown of his head, from his back, stretching out further than the boundaries of their little bedroom.
They passed, effortlessly, through walls, beating softly as Aziraphale’s vessel was fully consumed by the power of Aziraphale’s essence.
Not entirely physical, not entirely not — for the first time since before She let the fish grow lungs, Aziraphale was Himself. Entirely.
He stretched, almost wishing he had a mouth through which to sigh. Would’ve felt nice, he’d think. It felt incredible...better than incredible. He felt so entirely, completely, whole.
He describe him would be like to describe the ragged edges of the universe. He was both there and not in the same moment, an ever-shifting, ever-changing burst of flame in the general-shape of everything and nothing at one. White-gold fire burned beneath and around his wings, from his hands, his feet, he was comprised of a thousand eyes, of Love, and Energy, and Power at once.
Crowley’s hands fell away as Aziraphale’s own there-not-there touch came to cup his cheek. Let go. He didn’t speak it so much as he impressed it, the two eyes in the center of his there-not-there face closed as he stroked down the line of Crowley’s cheek.
“I can’t,” it was desperate, pleading. The demon dropped to his knees, and for the first time since they left the beach he realized Crowley had abandoned his sunglasses. “Aziraphale.”
Please. He followed him down, twitching wings made of Holy Vengeance and Wrath and Love wrapped around him, engulfing Crowley in the burning-unburning blaze. I won’t let go.
He wouldn’t force him, Aziraphale knew he could. He could clench his hands around Crowley’s waist, pull him forward and yank his Essence from his vessel, he could strip away the layers until he was exposed, raw, and there. Sate his curiosity with brute force and demands.
But he couldn’t, he’d never so much as dare. Instead, he waited, holding his beloved in an embrace that transcended the boundaries of physical limits. Transcended flesh.
Slowly, breath by breath and stitch by stitch, Crowley bared himself—teeth clenched and gritted. Like it was painful.
If Aziraphale’s wings were big, they were nothing compared to Crowley’s. They unfurled at their truest size with a breeze of cinder and smoke, dwarfing Aziraphale and extending far beyond the physical reaches of the bedroom. His fingers turned to ragged claws, gripping at the ever-shifting boundaries of Aziraphale’s form.
Aziraphale had gone slowly, exposed himself inch by inch, but Crowley dug all in at once, getting it over with in the same way someone might get into a pool. Carefully or all at once. Yellow eyes gleamed up at him from soot-black scaled skin. Both more and less physically manifest than Aziraphale, he was there, but his edges blurred and smoked and crumbled constantly, like he was shaking ash off himself. He cracked, in places, down his chest, the deep gleam of sulfur glowing out from the places his form failed to hold together during the Fall.
Where once he might’ve had a halo of wings, all that were left where rough horns, jagged and stained a wine-red.
Where Aziraphale was Fire and Wrath, Crowley was a comet that burned too fast in the atmosphere. The aftermath of a wildfire, the hardened lava after the eruption. He pulled himself out of a lake of boiling sulfur, shook out wings that would never again taste the crisp-clean air, and opened eyes that continued to burn, eyes that never stopped burning.
Aziraphale’s hand fell to his shoulder, past what appeared to be the edges of him to stroke down one of the hundreds of scars that cut in perfectly straight, short, lines over his body, his chest, his face, his neck. He didn’t need to count to know exactly how many there were.
Two eyes watched him, filled with fear. The other ones closed forever, sealed shut so he could never look for Her with them again.
See? Crowley’s voice, rough and heavy, echoed around them. Told you so, angel.
Aziraphale pulled himself down, touch shimmering up from Crowley’s shoulder, up past his throat, to where his jaw would be. Still not as bad as the mustache.
It’s hard to kiss, to reassure with a loving press of lip to lip, so Aziraphale did the next best thing, his wings stretching to wrap around him, as infernal swaths of darkness engulf him back. He pressed his forehead against Crowley’s, taking a moment to hold him there, to let every last eye close and feel the ghosting edges of his Essence snaking around his own.
He touched the edges of Crowley’s self, tracing his flame-based touch along every inch of the scaled, burned flesh. He traced the cracks, the seams, the edges of him that came apart and were forced back together again. Every place he stroked with the appropriate reverency, every beautiful inch of Crowley, every place he’d tried to hide—Aziraphale did what he absolutely thought impossible, what he thought was beyond what he could do, and he fell so easily further in love.
For a moment, it felt perfect, like a sort of completeness that Aziraphale could never articulate. And then, he felt Crowley.
They melded, edges rolling and rocking together, a careful touch passing through the visible and physical and feeling deep inside the fundemental Essence of one another. The coolness first felt like a breeze, like something half-comforting amongst the heat of their embrace, but soon it overwhelmed. Aziraphale gasped, as much as what he was could gasp, as he felt all the anguish of Hell at once.
Felt every bit of him he’d tried to hide with fancy clothes and smarmy grins and biting remarks. All the things he swallowed by tormenting his plants and chased with bottles of red. Everything he tried to numb, to acclimate to.
A windswept void, barren of Light and Love inside the fire-cracked Essence before him. Oh, my dear, he heard himself say, reaching further even as Crowley tried to recoil.
Angel.
It was a warning, something tentative and unsure as Aziraphale dragged his touch through the blackness before him. Empty and thick and heavy, like the tar-thick mess after flames have gutted a home. He twined around Crowley, every inch of his fire and flame seeking the ice and darkness as he took into himself a sense of nothingness, an empty void where Light and Love used to be.
Let me, he echoed, pressing his cheek to Crowley’s, sliding them as close together as they can be, more parts of them becoming one, filling each other, taking each other into themselves. Oil and water, they’d joked. But there’s no body to explode. Nothing could fail to contain them if there was nothing to contain.
Aziraphale reached the tendrils of his celestial Light as far into the emptiness, the hollowed reaches where God’s Light used to reside, where Love used to conquer everything. Things the Fall robbed him of. Crowley gasped, claws finding the root of one of Aziraphale’s wings. God, well, not God in this moment — Aziraphale really tried not to think of Her during things like this. Either way, he hoped beyond hope that Crowley could feel it.
Eyes squeezing shut, he pressed further, reaching deeper and deeper, melding them together — filling the icy voids inside him with nothing but Love. It wasn’t God’s, no Aziraphale couldn’t make Crowley feel that, but he could make him feel the full-force of Aziraphale’s love for him. The depth of it, the rawness, the burning-heat of six thousand years of loving him, filling all the places where Crowley stopped thinking he could ever feel Love again. Feel me, he told him. I’ve got you, Crowley. Let go.
I can, it feels—Aziraphale.
That was all it took, the angel’s Fires burning brighter and searing hotter as he filled Crowley to the breaking point, fitting every inch of Love and Light as he could, filled the voids, the emptiness, the cracks in his skin. Everything about this beautiful, incredible, wondrous creature he was permitted to hold.
He pushed further, further, Essence pulsating with Light and Fire and Love, pleading with Crowley to let himself feel it, to let himself accept what is being freely given. To just let himself be loved. Loved with no constraint, no boundary, no caveats or exceptions.
When he accepted it, when he broke open that iced-over and frozen depth that Crowley kept so well hidden, so well concealed.
In the same moment, stars stream down from the sky, an unexpected meteor shower that would boggle astronomers for decades to come. A star, somewhere far beyond the realm of human knowledge, collapsed and was reborn and collapsed again, the tides changed, the Earth itself shivered as trees burst from the crust and burned away to dust in the same moment.
It echoed across the continent, across the ocean, across the world — in the same moment the atmosphere exploded in an incredible, euphoric, sense of Goodness followed immediately by a wash of Dread to cancel it out. Lights burned out and re-lit, the Earth cracked open and sealed shut.
Miracles abound in a shockwave of intertwined Celestial and Infernal energies.
Wrapped in flaming white and void-coal black wings, Aziraphale’s hand pulled Crowley closer, wrapping impossibly further into him. I love you, he whispered, as much as he could whisper.
Crowley’s claws pressed through Aziraphale’s shivering edges of his form, twitching into the heat of his Essence to make Crowley croon something low and tender. It’s not words that could be translated, not something that made it to human words or thoughts.
They stay like that for a while, Aziraphale finding it a bit too difficult to want to detangle himself from Crowley quite yet. He wanted him to feel this, feel full and complete and loved, for as long as they both live. To make sure there were no more dark parts of him, no parts that Aziraphale couldn’t light.
But, eventually, time forced them apart, with tender touches and bumps of parts and parts. Crowley tightened his wings around Aziraphale, letting him drag his flaming touch through the feathers again and again while Crowley dragged the oil-slick scales of his cheekbone down the length of Aziraphale’s throat.
Their corporeal natures of their bodies returned, bit by bit, with much less effort than ever before. And slowly, like redressing after a long night with a loved one you’re not ready to part with, they stitched themselves back together. The teacups sat empty on the drying rack, no oceans left to contain.
Aziraphale frowned a bit, once Crowley slithered himself onto the bed, looking more loose-limbed and serpentine than before.
“What?” He asked, slitted eyes staring back up where Aziraphale was still hovering around the bed.
“Nothing,” he replied, sitting near where Crowley sprawled. “I miss it already.”
The old serpent tipped onto his side, thin-fingered hand finding Aziraphale’s chest to scratch over the hairs there. “Now that you’ve had a break you’re tired of this body? You can’t stay in your true form for good, angel, the humans get a bit nervous around that. Even when you shout at them not to be afraid. Fat lot of good that does.”
Aziraphale tilted his head down, burying his nose in the mused mop of hair he found. “I miss your form.”
Crowley grunted, fingers stilling for a moment before moving up to smooth over Aziraphale’s shoulder, one leg sliding up over his hips to properly cuddle up to him. “Don’t your lot frown on lying?” He asked.
“I am an angel, I do not lie, Crowley.” Their love...spreading had caused quite a fallout of feathers. Aziraphale plucked up one. It wasn’t so much black as it was absolutely lightless. The color of nothing at all. He spun it around in his fingers. “I tried to…” he raised a hand to comb through the firey locks, looking down where Crowley coiled around him, nice and tight. “Make you feel me.” He set the feather on the side table, someplace safe.
“I did. You were inside me, inside all of me,” Crowley breathed, hooking an ankle around Aziraphale’s, as though he had any intention of leaving. “I felt your Love in every inch of my Essence.” Breath puffed against his chest for a beat. “Pretty weird if you ask me.”
“Good weird or bad weird,” Aziraphale asked, tilting Crowley’s chin up. Those liquid eyes stared at him, churning with emotions that Aziraphale knew he would never be able to fully comprehend. His own nerves twisted up at the idea that Crowley hadn’t enjoyed that.
“It was,” forked tongue darted out to wet his lips. “Good. Yeah. I never...I didn’t think I could feel that again.”
Aziraphale’s hand settled on Crowley’s back, tracing up and down the slick patch of scales that stuck to his skin. “Would you ever,” he hesitated, looking down at the top of Crowley’s head once more. “Want to feel it again?”
“Now? It’s nearly morning, angel, and you lit up the whole shore last night before we even made it back inside.” Crowley shifted so he was nearly entirely sprawled over Aziraphale’s chest. “Don’t think I didn’t hear about the apples, try going into town to find some new coffee and all anyone’s talking about is some woman seeing God at an apple stall.”
“It was an accident.” Aziraphale started, before muttering his mouth closed and huffing a quick sigh through his nose. He glanced up, as if God could help him before looking back down, remembering quite quickly where they were. “And not now, Crowley. Sometime in the future. If you’d like.”
“Yeah,” Crowley said with a sniff, sounding very much on the edge of sleep. “I think we should. Depressurize and all. Better for the both of us.”
It sounded, superficially, like a brush-off. But six thousand years gave Aziraphale a bit more insight. He smiled, a tug at the corner of his lips, as Crowley fell asleep against him.
He watched him, through the night, and listened to the far-distant beat of waves against the shore.