Chapter Text
Crowley had been married for almost seven months now.
He had spent so many thousands of years among humans that he’d come to believe – almost as much as they did – that there was some vast difference between the states of Married and Not-Married. Once he and Aziraphale had tied the knot, there had even been an anxious couple of split seconds when Crowley worried if the sex wouldn’t be as much fun anymore, now that it was sanctified and all, but then his trousers had hit the bedroom floor and Aziraphale had done a thing with his tongue that assured Crowley that his brand new husband was still every bit as filthy as he had been when they’d been living in blissful sin.
They had honeymooned in Brighton, Venice, Alpha Centauri, and Milan, then disappeared for a few weeks to a yurt in Outer Mongolia, where they’d enjoyed the luxury of being able to cause a few minor earthquakes. They had even picnicked in the Garden of Eden, albeit in dreams. A couple of months ago they had drifted back to London, because it was nice to come home, and things were very much as they had used to be before they got married. Sure, they were both sporting some new jewellery, and Crowley had acquired a new layer of ineffability by marrying his way onto Heaven’s benefits package, but other than that? Same as before. Aziraphale occasionally wondered out loud if he ought to change the sign on the bookshop now that Crowley was officially the ‘& Co.’ in ‘A.Z. Fell & Co.’ but Crowley – who was still getting used to seeing himself as someone who ran a bookshop – assured him that he was quite happy with being an ‘& Co.’ At least for now.
“It’s fine,” he’d said. “It’s appropriate: where else are you going to find another business partner who can do a physically accurate impression of an ampersand?”
That had been Aziraphale’s cue to purse his lips and remind Crowley that if he must turn into a snake in the bookshop, could he at least restrain himself to doing so when they had customers?
On the whole, though, it was business as usual. They did the same old married couple things they’d been doing anyway, like pleasantly alcoholic suppers at their favourite restaurants, and walks in the park. And a few new ones, like Sunday mornings spent lazing in bed with the newspapers, while Aziraphale dropped croissant crumbs all over the sheets. He still bought print editions. Sometimes Crowley suspected he was addicted to the smell of the ink.
“It’s not the same, reading it off screens,” said Aziraphale, who was lounging in bed wearing nothing but his glasses and bits of the Sunday Times. “And the adverts. There are so many adverts on the online thing.”
“Yeah, that happens,” said Crowley, absently wondering if the cat was shedding again. She seemed to be leaving fur everywhere lately. That or Aziraphale was moulting, which was a personal question he had never actually broached with his husband, now that he thought about it. As a snake Crowley knew the pleasure of a really good shed, but if he wasn’t sure if angels did it. Also if Aziraphale did happen to moult from time to time, Crowley suspected that the results would probably be feathery rather than furry.
Aziraphale divested himself of the Culture Section and picked croissant crumbs out of his chest hair. “It’s very strange,” he said. “And perhaps I’m being paranoid, but so many of those adverts seem unduly personal.”
“Such as?”
“Socks.”
“Socks?”
“Specifically,” said Aziraphale, turning slightly pink. “They reference some kind of…gentlemen’s support hose.”
“Okay,” said Crowley, trying not to sound as intrigued as he felt. “When you say support…?”
“For the lower legs. And wash your mind out with soap and water.” Aziraphale threw back the duvet and lifted a perfect angel foot. “Look,” he said, prodding at a blue vein in his ankle. “Does that vein look suspicious to you?”
“In what way?”
“Prominent. Bulgy. Possibly varicose.”
Crowley squinted at it. It looked normal enough to him, but his benchmark for what feet were supposed to look like was unusual, to say the least. The last time he’d been out-of-sorts – for reasons involving ice-cream and a phantom pregnancy – all the scales had fallen off his feet and clogged the vacuum cleaner. “Looks all right to me,” he said. “Do angels even get varicose veins?”
“I’ve no idea, but you have to admit that I’m getting a bit long in the tooth, dear. And I’ve spent a lot of time on these poor old feet over the past six thousand years.”
Crowley leaned in and kissed Aziraphale’s earlobe. “Yeah, but you’ve also spent a significant amount of time on your arse, and that’s perfect. Dimples and all.”
Aziraphale giggled. “Stop it,” he said, not meaning it in the least.
“Your ankle looks fine to me. It’s not hurting you, is it?”
“No,” said Aziraphale, wiggling his foot. “It’s just strange that I should be worrying about that one vein in my ankle, and then the next thing I know there’s an advert for surgical stockings on the screen.” He eyed Crowley’s tablet with deep suspicion. “It’s as if the thing knows what I’m thinking.”
“Yeah, it sort of does,” said Crowley. “There’s an algorithm. Did you, by any chance, stuff ‘Do I have varicose veins?’ into the magic Google question box at some point?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? Are you sure? Not even when you were having a hypochondriac moment at three o’clock in the morning?”
Aziraphale sucked on his lower lip in thought for a moment. “Oh. Maybe?”
“There you go then,” said Crowley. “That’s all it takes. It’s all part of the algorithm. It makes notes of what you search for and tailors your ads accordingly.”
“It knows what I search for?”
“Yep.”
“Isn’t that a little…intrusive?”
“Oh yeah,” said Crowley. “Extremely. But that’s the miracle of modern technology.”
“And does it…” Aziraphale hesitated and once again turned slightly pink around the edges. “Does it know everything?”
“Not everything, but it definitely knows about the pornography, Aziraphale.”
In Aziraphale, both nurture and heavenly nature had collided to create one of the least convincing liars to ever walk the face of the earth. He could lie unconvincingly without saying a single word, and he did so now, widening his eyes and blinking rapidly in a flustered way that said he had once searched for cream pies – perhaps even with patisserie genuinely on his mind – and subsequently tumbled cheerfully down a pornographic online rabbit hole. “I don’t think I like it,” he said, fluffing invisible feathers. “I think we’ll stick with good old-fashioned print from now on. For all The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom is perfectly revolting, at least it isn’t sentient enough to make sly insinuations about the state of one’s circulation.”
“It’s just technology, angel,” said Crowley, rustling through the newspaper. “Even this was new, once.”
“A long time ago, dear.”
Crowley turned the page and startled. Yes, it had been a long time ago, but a mere blink in the scheme of things, and there – on the page in front of him – was a vivid reminder of those days when the printing press had been young and the humans all seemed determined to leave the fourteenth century behind them where it belonged. And none more so than one particular human.
“Oh, look,” said Aziraphale. “They found a new Leonardo drawing.”
It was a study of hands – one pointing, another outstretched, fingers spread, palm down. Crowley eyed it with scepticism, because if there was one thing he had learned about humans, it was that even the most extraordinary of them were still human. From what he could see the sketch looked too pristine to be from the busy mind of a man who had noticed everything. Leonardo’s margins were full of people who had caught his eye on the street, dick jokes, grocery items, love notes, ruminations on the study of anatomy. He had seldom left a blank space for anything, unless it was for the purposes of composition, and even his blank spaces drew the eye in some way.
“They found it in the collection of an Italian nobleman – attributed, but never confirmed,” said Aziraphale. “Do you think it’s genuine? Apparently it has the distinctive left-handed cross hatching.”
“I don’t know,” said Crowley. “I’m not an art expert. Just going off of pure instinct I’d say no. Doesn’t look messy enough to be the product of his mind.”
“Messy is not a word I would have used to describe the mind of Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Yeah, well. You didn’t know him like I did, did you?”
“Evidently not,” said Aziraphale, with a sudden starchiness that made Crowley wonder how he could possibly be jealous of someone who had been dead for five hundred years. But he was. Aziraphale was weird like that.
There had been something rumbling between them lately, one of those strange, hidden speed bumps that they hit every now and again. Something changing, slowly and subtly, leaving a whiff of ozone on tongues as sensitive as Crowley’s. It was that faint, background scent that reality emitted whenever it was bent or folded, or bruised beyond recognition by the combined power of two entities as ancient as they were. Nothing as big as their regular miracles, like when Crowley’s orgasms would trip all the switches in the fuse box, and sometimes give them reason to run for the fire extinguisher, or when an amorous angel would accidently turn the upstairs hallway into a small rainforest. No, it was just an intermittent background hum, and sometimes Crowley would taste it in the air in the middle of the night, think what now? and roll over to drape himself over the sleeping warmth of his husband.
It was strange, but they were on intimate terms with strange. At least Aziraphale – who had taken a while to get the hang of dreaming – had stopped manifesting things in his sleep, and Crowley – who had taken a while to get the hang of eating – had learned not to mistake the symptoms of lactose intolerance for those of being pregnant with an eldritch abomination. “Marriage is a very human institution,” Aziraphale said. “And we’re not human. It stands to reason that it might take us a while to get to grips with it.”
On Tuesday, or perhaps it was Wednesday, Aziraphale returned to the ever-vexed question of the sign above the bookshop door. “I still think you should be on it,” he said.
“I am on it,” said Crowley, who was lounging on the couch in the back, one eye on a recipe for slow cooker French onion soup and the other on the cat. She’d been shedding up a storm again and he marvelled how she even had any fur left, since most of it seemed to be stuck to his jeans. “I told you – I’m the ‘and Co.’ Besides, you can’t fit ‘Crowley and Fell’ up over the door without making the font too small to read. You’d have to put it over the window or something.”
Aziraphale glanced up from his newest acquisition, a seventeenth century bible so rare that it required the white cotton glove treatment. “Crowley and Fell?” he said. “Oh no. I don’t think that would work. I was here first, after all. It should be A.Z. Fell and Crowley, if anything.”
“That’s even more letters,” said Crowley. “And Crowley and Fell sounds better. It’s got a rhythm to it. Falls off the tongue faster. It’s just good marketing.”
“It would be good marketing if I were attempting to sell books, which I am not.”
“Right.” Crowley returned to the mysteries of caramelising onions for a moment, before being distracted by the more pressing puzzle of the cat. He ran his fingers through her fur – which seemed longer and thicker lately – and found that she seemed to be growing an undercoat like a Maine Coon or a Persian. Which was odd, because when she’d first moved in with them she’d just been a regular tortoiseshell moggy. He searched for ‘Why is my cat’s hair getting thicker?’ and discovered there were a myriad of reasons behind it, most of which probably meant that Madam would require a trip to the vet. And that Crowley would require a set of new, extra thick gardening gloves in order to wrangle her into the cat carrier.
“You’re not ill, are you?” he said. “You don’t look peaky to me. Not off your food.”
The cat mrrred in the back of her throat and rolled over on the couch, baring a temptingly fluffy expanse of belly. Crowley knew it to be a trap, and refused to fall for it, at least this time.
“Cat’s shedding again,” he said.
“Mm?” Aziraphale was only pretending to listen. He was absorbed in his new acquisition, his little round glasses slipping down the end of his nose, his lips parted in an absent smile, and the very tip of his tongue caught between his perfect teeth. For sixty centuries – on and off – Crowley had watched him from the shadows, or from behind the cover of dark glasses, and still drank in the sight of him with the same thirst as he had felt in Eden. Aziraphale’s face was endlessly expressive, able to convey worlds of meaning with nothing more than a fluttered lash, a pursed lip, or an arched eyebrow. He glowed with pleasure at the open pages, so that Crowley was torn between the joy of being married to him and the jealous urge to organise a good old-fashioned book burning.
“So what have you got there?” Crowley asked.
“Hm? Oh, this.” Aziraphale carefully turned a page with a gloved hand. “This is one of only four editions of the Sleepy Groats Bible.”
“Sleepy Groats?”
“Yes.”
“Right,” said Crowley, slithering off the couch. “That’s what I thought you said. Do I want to know why it’s called that?”
“Matthew twenty-five,” said Aziraphale. “‘Before him all the nations shall be gathered, and he will separate them from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.’ Only in this particular bible there is an amusing double misprint that means the passage now reads ‘as a shepherd separates the sleep from the groats.’”
“Fuck me.”
“Not now, dear. I’ve got gloves on.”
“I didn’t mean it literally,” said Crowley, moving closer and running a fond hand over Aziraphale’s tweed clad bottom. “Although that now you mention it…”
“Crowley, this is a very old book…”
“Mmm…” said Crowley, who didn’t see what the age of the book had to do with what he was currently doing to the nape of the angel’s neck. He nosed and nuzzled, breathing in the sandalwood scent of Jermyn Street cologne.
“What are you doing?”
“Sniffing you. You’ve still got that New Husband smell. I like it.”
“You’re going to make the place all humid,” said Aziraphale.
“I like humid.”
“Yes, well…old bibles generally don’t.”
“Yeah, but you do,” said Crowley, grinding hopefully against his rear. “We should go somewhere hot and steamy. Somewhere where you don’t even need any other reason to wander around in the nude.”
Aziraphale had turned out to be a surprisingly enthusiastic nudist. Perhaps it was because he’d spent six thousand years cultivating good posture and worrying about being appropriately dressed that – as soon as Crowley had given him license to do so – he had revelled in every opportunity to take off all his clothes and loll around in the buff. Being an angel, he always looked as though he was missing a cloud to lounge on, especially when he went all the way and aired out his wings at the same time.
Today, though, he didn’t take up the invitation. He remained stubbornly clothed, and Crowley was determined to get into the bottom of it. “Why aren’t you stripping off already?” he said. “Are you still sulking?”
“I was never sulking in the first place,” said Aziraphale, closing the bible and carefully returning it to its wrappings.
“Bollocks. I could hear you sulking from across the room.”
“I was not sulking, Crowley.” Aziraphale began to peel off his gloves. “I was just saying – I think you should be on the sign.”
“Noted.”
Aziraphale stiffened, the fingertip of a glove still caught between his teeth. He delicately spat it out and simmered slightly. “Don’t say noted,” he said. “It’s very passive aggressive.”
“Sorry,” said Crowley. “Forgot that was your job.”
“Why are you being like this? It’s just a sign.”
“Yeah. It is. So why are you making such a big deal about it?” said Crowley, and decided enough was enough. He sighed and shook his head. “Is this what we choose to get on one another’s nerves about? Really?”
Aziraphale appeared to relax. “You’re right,” he said, in tones of profound self-disgust. “Quite right. What in the world is wrong with us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re just not suited to trying to run a bookshop together. You know me and books. I don’t even read.”
“You do read. You read all the time. You don’t have to pretend to be cooler than you actually are with me, you know. And besides, reading is tremendously cool.”
Crowley squirmed. “You know you’ve just negated that statement by having it come out of your mouth, don’t you?” he said, wondering for the millionth time how it was that he’d lost his head and his heart to the uncoolest entity in Heaven, Earth and Hell.
“I may not look as nifty as you do in Dolce e Gabanna, my dear,” said Aziraphale, compounding the offence by using the word ‘nifty’. “But I have my moments of occasional swagger. I am, as they say these days, a snack.”
Crowley’s squirm threatened to turn into a full body cringe. And the worst part of it – as always – was that he was still into it. Deeply. Hopelessly. “You’re not a snack, Aziraphale,” he found himself saying. “You’re…you’re a ten course Michelin star tasting menu, with a matching wine flight chosen from some of the rarest and most exclusive cellars on the planet.”
The angel glowed. Neither of them looked their real age, but there could be moments in unforgiving lights when the lines around Aziraphale’s eyes looked deeper than usual, or the line of his jaw not quite as firm as it had once been. Then there were moments like now, when he was lit up with love and his natural element bathed him in such a flattering light that the millennia fell away and he was every bit as beguiling as he had been when they first met and he’d accidentally revealed to Crowley that he was really bad at his job. “Darling,” he said, and wound his arms around Crowley’s neck.
“You know what we should do?” said Crowley, after a long, satisfyingly tongue-swirly kiss.
Aziraphale reached up and removed Crowley’s glasses. “I can think of a few things.”
“We should go on a honeymoon.”
“We’ve had a honeymoon.”
“No reason we can’t have another one,” said Crowley. “I know it was a very short engagement, but it was a six thousand year courtship, and if that doesn’t justify at least five hundred years of honeymoon then I don’t know what does.”
Aziraphale untangled himself and dropped into the nearest chair. “Sounds reasonable. Where should we go?”
“Ah, you’ll like this. Bora Bora.”
“Which is where?”
“Polynesia.”
Aziraphale wriggled happily in his seat. “Oh, the South Seas. How romantic.”
“It is,” said Crowley. “They have these luxury beach huts on stilts over the water, and you have your own private piece of ocean to float around in. And the huts have glass floors, so you can walk on water. I mean, I know you can do that anyway, but I thought you might want to do it the human way for once.”
“Well, there is something to be said for doing some things the human way,” said Aziraphale, who looked as though he had something specific – and dirty – in mind. He reached out, hooked two fingers under the front of Crowley’s belt and pulled him close. “Tell me something…”
“Mmm?”
“Do you think they serve drinks in Bora Bora with those little…”
“…frou frou umbrellas in them?” said Crowley, straddling his lap. “Oh, definitely. I think it might even be illegal to serve drinks without little frou frou umbrellas in them, in Bora Bora.”
“Really?” said Aziraphale, his fingers at work on Crowley’s belt buckle.
“Really. There might even be a law that says you also have to drink them out of scooped out pineapples, or coconut shells, but don’t quote me on that. I don’t claim to be an expert on Polynesian booze law.”
Aziraphale glowed even brighter. And smouldered a bit, too, for good measure. “I’m so in love with you that it’s almost revolting,” he said. “It’s a wonder that we don’t make people sick.”
Things were about get interesting, but then someone made a loud, wheezy – and totally apposite – gagging noise. It was the cat. She was doing that thing again, that full body hurk thing that made the entire back half of her body look enormous for a moment, before it contracted as though squeezed by a giant, invisible fist.
“That cat has no sense of occasion,” said Crowley.
“She’s a cat. I’m not exactly sure what you were expecting.”
Madam hurked a couple more times and disgorged an enormous ball of tortoiseshell hair onto a copy of the Collected Poems of Baudelaire. Her fur looked even thicker, the pale undercoat shining through in ever larger patches. Crowley went over to her and ran a hand over her back. Her bum went up in the air, tail waving like a charmed, fluffy snake. She seemed fine, other than the fur thing. “It’s like she’s licking her own coat off.”
“Again, I think that’s just something that cats do, dear.”
“Maybe,” said Crowley, and there was that odd whiff of static and ozone again, fizzing on the tip of his tongue. He knew that plenty of bookshops had cats, but he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a good idea to take two things that had such a slippery relationship with the laws of physics and put them both together in the presence of an angel and demon, especially since the angel had demonstrated on more than one occasion that he was more than capable of accidentally dreaming whole new sections of the bookshop into existence.
On Friday, Aziraphale announced that he was peckish in a way that only authentic brioche could satisfy, and so they went to Paris. It was easier than it used to be, what with the Eurostar and the absence of severed heads rolling all over the cobbles, although these days they did have to call on the girl next-door and ask if she wouldn’t mind feeding the cat.
“It’s funny how grown up that feels,” said Aziraphale, when they were strolling hand in hand through the Louvre.
“Grown up?” said Crowley. “You do know that between us we’re older than the collective age of all of the paintings in this room, right?”
“Yes, I know that. I’m aware it’s an odd sentiment, at our age, but it’s…well…it’s grown up – having something to take care of in that way.”
“Yeah, just be thankful it’s not a kid.” They approached a denser crowd, and Crowley knew without referring to the tour guide what the people had come to see. Her. The headache. The painting he could never get right.
“Do you want to see?” said Aziraphale.
Crowley shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got one at home. Unless you want to? Compare the smiles?”
“Oh, no. Such a crowd. Reminds me of when this place used to be a palace. Do you remember? Louis the Fourteenth and his high heeled shoes? Red soles and red heels, like yours. Always amuses me how these things roll back around.”
They wandered on through the Denon Wing, pausing here and there when Crowley remembered the banker or warlord who had commissioned this particular Crucifixion or that Adoration of the Magi. “Ah, that good old Renaissance religious hustle,” he said. “Poison your relatives, strangle your wife, make your money through murder and usury, but pour some money into an artist’s pocket for a nice religious masterpiece and earn yourself some time off in Purgatory.”
“Ye-es,” said Aziraphale, peering into Veronese’s huge, swarming Wedding at Cana. “You know, I think I remember this one.” He leaned closer to read the plaque. “Commissioned by Benedictine monks in Venice, to adorn their new refectory. In their new monastery. Which was built by Palladio.”
“The Palladio?”
“Was there any other?”
Crowley whistled. “So this was in the new dining room? It’s…a lot, isn’t it? Very busy. Expensive, I expect.”
“Yes.”
“And after they’d dropped all that cash having one of the world’s greatest architects build them a new monastery. What was that bit in the Bible about the camel and the eye of the needle again?”
“Well, it’s like you say,” Aziraphale said, moving on. “That old religious hustle.”
“Yep. Splash the cash for God. Doesn’t work, by the way.”
“No, I know.”
“Lot of Medicis in Hell, and look how much religious art they commissioned. We ended up with the full set – all four Popes.”
Aziraphale frowned. “Four?”
“Yeah.” Crowley counted them off on his fingers. “Leo the Tenth, Clement the Seventh, Pius the Fourth, and Leo the Eleventh.”
“Leo the Eleventh? I don’t remember him.”
“Well, you wouldn’t. He was only pope for twenty-seven days.”
“Oh. I see. One of those.”
“Yep,” said Crowley. “That’s gerontocracy for you. Elect a doddery senior citizen to the papal throne and watch himself sneeze himself to death less than a month later. Still, kept the Curia and the candlemakers busy, didn’t it?”
“Just as well,” said Aziraphale. “The devil made more than enough work for idle hands back in those days. No offense, of course.”
“None taken. Actually, I’m flattered that you noticed.”
Aziraphale stopped in front of a painting. A Leonardo, The Madonna of the Rocks. It was one of a pair, a matched set. The other one was in the National Gallery in London, where the two of them often spent lazy afternoons roaming through the Titians and Botticellis, Crowley sneaking peeks at the sketch books of the ever-present art students from nearby St. Martin’s. They came to copy the masterpieces and to learn to draw what they saw, and Crowley always looked over their shoulders whenever he could, just in case there was somebody there who might have had an eye quite like his. But there never was. Nobody had an eye quite like Leonardo’s.
“Well, would you look at that?” Aziraphale said.
“At what?”
“The hands. Doesn’t that look like that sketch they found the other day?”
Sure enough, it was. The Virgin’s hand was held, outstretched and foreshortened, above the head of the baby Jesus, who sat beside an angel who was pointing to the figure of an infant John the Baptist. The angel’s hand was long fingered and delicate, and the androgynous face was framed by the swirling curls that Leonardo had always loved to paint. Five hundred years and Crowley could still feel the light tug on his scalp, a lock of his hair curled around a paint stained finger. Don’t ever cut your hair, Tonio.
“Same pose and everything,” said Aziraphale. “Although I have to say it doesn’t look much like Uriel.”
“No,” said Crowley, miles and centuries away. Hands reaching up to remove his glasses. Finding himself caught in a beam of curiosity so bright it had to be heavenly, or infernal. But it was neither. It was human. Just human.
“The foreshortening really is remarkable,” Aziraphale was saying. “So lifelike. It’s as though his eyes worked differently to other people’s. Better.”
“Yeah.”
“What was he really like?”
Crowley swallowed. His sinuses ached, for some reason. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Human.”
It was an inadequate explanation for all the things Leonardo had been, but in that moment it was all he had. And Aziraphale seemed to sense his feelings, because he slipped his hand into Crowley’s and said, “Extraordinary things, humans.”
They moved on, leaving Crowley shaken. Another one of those invisible speed bumps, only this time he was still feeling the vibrations hours later. He was alone, sipping Scotch under the sloped ceiling of a perfectly Parisian hotel room in the Latin Quarter. Aziraphale had taken himself off to soak his feet and worry about his veins in the bath, and for once Crowley didn’t follow, worried that his strange mood would turn contagious and ruin the nice time they were supposed to be having. Besides, Paris was as good a place as any to be moody. The sky was iron grey and from his perch on the window seat Crowley had a good view of the scaffolded hulk of Notre Dame. It had been a hell of a fire, but the old lady was still standing, and Crowley still remembered seeing that picture on Twitter – of the cross shining beneath the burned out roof, and the humans had called it a miracle, because they were idiots like that. Not that he was in any position to judge, because he was exactly the same kind of idiot, determined to see light at the end of the tunnel, even if they were the lights of an oncoming train. And then there had been the beehives on the cathedral roof. Somehow the bees had survived the fire, and he remembered that, too, because there could have only been one being in the universe responsible for such a miracle, and Crowley remembered thinking that’s it – I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to have to tell him how I feel. Maybe when the world is about to end I can finally say the words.
And now they were here, with Aziraphale humming like a honeybee in the bathtub, little snatches of mumbled song – Key Largo, Montego, baby why don’t we go – telling Crowley that he’d really taken that mental picture of Bora Bora to heart. Crowley looked at the rings on his finger – the plain gold band and the winged one that had been an improvised engagement ring – and realised he was beyond hope. Or beyond hopeless. He was a disaster of a demon. He was supposed to be a loveless nihilist, but he didn’t have it in him. Never had. Maybe he’d been made all wrong on purpose, once as an angel who asked too many questions, and then as a demon who seemed designed to dance in the light of the absurdly buoyant creature currently singing The Beach Boys in the hotel bathroom.
Aziraphale had stopped singing. Crowley sank deeper into his drink and listened to the water drain away, then Aziraphale emerged, wrapped in a hotel dressing gown and drying the inside of his ear with a cotton bud. “The water pressure’s not bad in there,” he said. “Last hotel in Paris we stayed in it was like sending the water a written invitation every time you turned the tap on. Then you had to wait for several hours while it decided to RSVP. Do you remember?”
“Yep,” said Crowley, who didn’t, and didn’t care about the water pressure, because he was too busy enjoying the view. Aziraphale had settled on the side of the bed to rub lotion on his feet. His fingers made sloppy, suggestive noises as he worked the complimentary body lotion between his toes, and the scent of the goo drifted to Crowley’s sensitive nostrils and set several of his senses – and body parts – on end. Aziraphale’s hair was damp, the curls as tight as those of the angel in the painting. The white towelling robe had come open, revealing the inside of one thigh all the way up to the pink bulge of his balls. He obviously felt Crowley staring, because he pursed his lips and turned prim, the way he often did before getting gleefully filthy.
“And how many of those have you had?” he said, nodding to the glass in Crowley’s hand.
“Just the one.”
“Double or triple?”
Crowley pounced. He landed on top of Aziraphale, pinning him to the bed. The robe was all the way open now, and Aziraphale’s body was warm, bath-flushed, completely sexy. “Stop pretending to be pious,” said Crowley, grinding his hips. “I know you’re not.”
Aziraphale couldn’t help himself. He kept right on trying to look like he disapproved, even though he now had a boner all the way up to his belly button and was merrily grinding right back. “You smell like whisky,” he said, his fingers in Crowley’s hair.
Crowley leaned down, buried his nose in his neck and breathed him in. “Mmm…and you smell like grapefruit,” he said, kissing his way down over a collarbone. “And honey.” He bit gently on a nipple, making Aziraphale’s breath catch. “And cream.”
“Really? How on earth did I manage that?”
“I expect it’s the lotion.” Aziraphale was trying to get at him, but his fingers were too slippery. Crowley reached down, unbuckled and unbuttoned and took it out for him, and Aziraphale grabbed the about-to-spill bottle and tipped it – perhaps by accident – over the tops of his thighs.
“Can you really smell all of those things?” Aziraphale said. He bit his lip and – no, not an accident at all – pressed his thighs together and pulled his cock and balls up, directing Crowley to the slick space beneath them.
“Yep.” Crowley pushed, and shuddered. The lotion was still cold, but Aziraphale was warm behind the chill, soft between his thighs and hard where he butted up against Crowley’s stomach. “And more…there’s a…” Oh, getting warmer already. “…slight whisper of bergamot in the background…”
“…mmm…”
“…base notes of musk…” How was this so good? His arse seemed to have developed a mind of its own already, impelling him deeper into the tight, slippery space. “…strong breath of angel cock…oh no, wait…that’s you, isn’t it?”
“Fuck me.” Aziraphale scrambled to push Crowley’s t-shirt out of the way: it kept slipping down and getting in the way of his attempts to rub himself off against Crowley’s belly. Crowley pulled it off, tossed it aside and went for it, too horny and needy to do anything else. Everything was sticky and sloppy and Aziraphale wasn’t even trying to slow him down, panting along in time with Crowley’s thrusts. When Crowley bent his head to kiss and fuck at the same time, Aziraphale let out a throaty moan that tripped the switch in the centre of Crowley’s brain and then it was all happening, all at once and too fast. He’d barely finished coming the first time before Aziraphale sought out the tip of his tongue with his own and fed him a second orgasm, one of those rushing golden waves of celestial ecstasy that sometimes threatened to set fire to his spine from the inside. Crowley cried out and tried to withdraw before it got too much, and his come splattered all over Aziraphale, so that when he went down to take his revenge he tasted himself on Aziraphale’s cock. The angel loved to make a mess, and he’d definitely done that. The insides of his thighs were wet and Crowley was drowning in the scents of lotion and lust as he sucked. Aziraphale arched, pushing himself deeper into Crowley’s mouth, grabbed a handful of his hair and whispered – “…darling, yes, yes, darling, love…oh my, oh, oh, ohhh…” He came as if he, just like Crowley, had been surprised by the speed of it all, and Crowley teased him, swallowing him down and licking him clean until he flinched.
Satisfied, Crowley released him, letting him subside. He rested his head against the furred pillow of Aziraphale’s belly, and lay there for a long while, letting Aziraphale play with his hair. Outside it had started to rain, turning the sound of tyres on the Paris streets into a wet hiss. Night was falling and the lights were coming on, and while the rumbles beneath Crowley’s other ear said that his husband was definitely thinking of dinner, Aziraphale seemed to sense that Crowley was feeling brittle and simply let him lie there. When he stretched the light caught the glaze of come that Crowley had left on the inside of his soft, white-striped inner thigh, and Crowley reached out to touch it, if only to remind himself that he’d been there.
“Sticky,” said Aziraphale, in a half-asleep voice, and then – with that fluting note of half-complaint that was all him; “And I’ve just had a bath, too.”
Crowley pressed his thumb into the flesh, so that the dried liquid cracked like old varnish. “You can have another one.”
“I’ll wrinkle up like a scrotum.”
“A clean scrotum, though.”
Aziraphale’s belly shook with a faint laugh. “Oh yes. Immaculate.”
Crowley cupped him in his hand, feeling the shape of the balls, vulnerable in their insubstantial bag of skin. “Can an angel’s ball sac be anything but immaculate?” he said. “Celestial testicles…I don’t know.” He ducked his head to kiss them, then kissed the shaft of Aziraphale’s cock, soft and short in repose. He kissed his navel and the patch of golden hair above his heart, up to his lips and the tip of his nose and his fluttering lashes. He was suddenly conscious that he was wearing far too many clothes, and that he needed to be as naked as Aziraphale was, all the better to bury himself in the touch of him, the smell of him, the warm, squishy girth and softness of him. Aziraphale hummed with pleasure as they kissed and snuggled, vibrating at his perfect pitch like a string plucked just right. His fingers curled in Crowley’s hair, and when he looked up the streetlight caught on the ends of his eyelashes, turning Crowley’s poor, oversensitive heart to molten goo all over again. Perhaps it was because Crowley had presided over so many of such wishes in his long career, but sometimes he couldn’t help looking at Aziraphale and thinking what’s the catch? Where was the dirty trick, the price he’d have to pay for such this, because there had to be one for such complete, unrelenting bliss.
Aziraphale saw the wet glitter in his eyes and reached up, stroking Crowley’s lower eyelid with the pad of his thumb. “What’s got into you?”
Crowley swallowed hard. “I don’t know. Paris makes me sentimental. And I’m old.”
“You and me both, dear. There’s no fool like an old fool, after all.” Aziraphale curled a hand around the nape of Crowley’s neck, pulled him down and licked up the sudden tears. “Can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
“I told you, I don’t know.” Crowley sighed, wiped his eyes with the back of his arm and flopped back on the bed. “Maybe I’m pregnant again.”
“Darling, you weren’t pregnant the last time. You were just…”
“…what? Emotionally unstable?”
“Well, I was going to say ‘lactose intolerant,’” said Aziraphale. “But yours is actually nearer the mark.”
“Thanks,” said Crowley, taking no pleasure in being right. Part of him had almost hoped that putting a ring on it might have somehow calmed him down a bit, made him a bit more sedate and…husbandly. And it hadn’t. He was still the same hot mess of roiling feelings that he’d always been.
“Is it him?” asked Aziraphale, in a thin, probing sort of way that immediately put Crowley’s guard up.
“Who?”
“Leonardo. I know he was your friend.”
Crowley sat up. “Demons don’t have friends,” he said. “Not human ones.”
“Why not?” Aziraphale said, but Crowley pretended not to hear and escaped to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He went to clean up a bit, and as he did so he caught sight of himself in the mirror, raising a hand to brush his hair out of his face. It was his right hand, the ringless one, and there was something about it, some knotty delicacy that put him in mind of Leonardo. Some painters only see the expression in the face, but there are stories in every attitude of the hands and body. And your hands? They speak volumes.
Oh shit. Why not? Aziraphale had said, and the answer was simple, and brutal. Because they died. Because humans died, and it would never, ever be fair.
He gave himself a hard mental shake – snap the fuck out of it, Anthony – and sought refuge in the practical. “Are we going out to dinner tonight or what?” he called, through the closed bathroom door.
There was a pause. “Uh…oh. Did you want to? I thought we could order room service.”
Yeah, that worked. Room service spoke directly to Aziraphale’s laziest instincts, and Crowley could only encourage him, especially since he had no particular inclination to get dressed or go out again. He wriggled out of his jeans and opened the bathroom door, stark naked. “Suits me. I’m not dressed for dinn…what are you doing?”
It was obvious what Aziraphale was doing. He was doing a thing that almost everyone did these days, but it was fucking weird, because it was Aziraphale doing it. It was like strolling into the old Roman Senate and catching Julius Caesar smoking a cigarette. Aziraphale was sitting up in bed, bare chested, glasses reflecting the glow of the screen in front of him, and both thumbs busy. Texting.
Aziraphale was texting…?
“I am sliding into someone’s DMs,” he announced, making the whole situation even more bizarre.
Crowley sidled over the bed. “Is this real?” he said. “Or am I having a stroke?”
Aziraphale gave him one of those over-the-glasses looks that were supposed to go with old Bibles, not iPhones. Crowley had bought him the thing in the hopes that he’d learn how to use it, but he hadn’t, until now. “It’s just technology, Crowley,” he said. “You said so yourself.”
“Yes, I know,” said Crowley, and spotted a little blue bird reflected in Aziraphale’s glasses. “But whose DMs are you sliding into? And since when did you have social media.”
“I’m on Twitter now,” said Aziraphale, looking pleased. “I have three hundred followers. I think I might be quite good at it.”
Crowley didn’t have the heart to tell him. Besides, it wasn’t exactly the most pressing matter right now. “Yes, but whose DMs, angel?”
“A professor of art history,” said Aziraphale. “I’m sure they’ve noticed it already, but I thought it would be helpful to point out that the new Leonardo sketch looks an awful lot like a study for the hands of the Virgin and the angel in the Madonna of the Rocks.”
“Whatever,” said Crowley, slithering into bed beside him. “Show me your tweets. Immediately.”
“You make it sound very rude.”
“It could be.” Crowley kissed his shoulder and tried to sneak a peek. “How dirty are your tweets?”
“Not dirty at all,” said Aziraphale. “Immaculate, I should say. Cleaner than my ball sac, in fact.”
“Show me.”
Aziraphale sighed and surrendered the phone.
A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
Fun fact – there is no proper name for the backs of the knees.
A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
Having consistently fed the ducks in St. James’s Park for some considerable length of time, can now confirm that they favour Hovis (brown), and doubly so if there’s a bit of Marmite involved!
A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
Hovis always puts me in mind of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, but that’s the dreadful power of advertising, I suppose. Orwell’s rattle of a stick in a swill bucket.
A.Z. Fell @angelofsoho
Husband has discovered how to make chimichurri sauce. Quite delicious and so much fun to say!
“Amazing,” said Crowley. “Just…amazing.”
“Am I doing it right?”
“You’re…doing it your way,” said Crowley. “Which is perfect, because it’s yours.”
The apprehension melted from Aziraphale’s face faster than frost under a blow torch. “Oh, darling,” he said. “Do you really mean it?”
“Of course I do. And congratulations – the inside of your head is even more peculiar than I ever imagined, even that time when I wandered in there and caught you playing chess with a bee.” Crowley scrolled down through the tweets and spotted the Leonardo sketch among them. Yes, he could see it now – Aziraphale was right. There was the hand of the Virgin Mary, outstretched in a blessing, and the pointing finger of the angel, with a…wait, what was that? It was a splotch of dark shadow on the pad of the index finger, extending a good halfway past the first joint. “Was that there before?” he said. “The shadow. I never noticed it before.”
“No, it was always there,” said Aziraphale. “Has the art historians in a bit of a tizzy, apparently. They can’t decide if it’s just some artefact of ageing, or whether Leonardo did it on purpose. And what it means if he did. If it was Leonardo, of course.”
“It was,” said Crowley, with a whole new certainty.
“Crowley, do you know something about this?”
“Yeah.” Crowley pointed his right index finger and peered back and forth between it and the drawing. Aziraphale’s eyes widened. “I think I do.”