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Crowley had drowned before, of course. Most demons were familiar with at least the most common mortal perils. One must needs know the tools at their disposal to most effectively employ them, after all.
Once he had been roiling and reeling in some ichorous pitch in the depths of hell for some long-forgotten slight. It comes to mind now as his lungs seize in his chest; it had felt something like this, hadn't it? He doesn't need his lungs, of course, there is no mortal threat to his corporation but the sensation remains. Breathless, submerged, the whole of his chest and mouth flooded.
There had been a space hollowed out somewhere essential in him, ages and ages ago, before memory, before being. An unkind and careless sort of pit, ragged at the edges and hungry. Bottomless and lightless. It would clench within him sometimes, a desperately snarling throe, hunger pangs for being that knew no hunger.
It was in the drowning where Crowley learned it might never be filled. For he had sunk and sunk, but that pit behind his sternum only gurgled and rushed like a stormdrain, unquenchable.
So, try as he might, Crowley could never rid himself of it, of that empty, yearning, hungering ache. Slippery and clever as the old serpent was, nothing ever really took to see him freed of it. He could drink and eat until it was sated but never satisfied, could sleep away a decade to escape the drybone-splinter gnawing of it. But it always waited, patient as a predator, to again sink its wretched, unknowable teeth into the cosmicstuff of his very being.
He's grown quite good at getting used to things in all his eons. The things he must , the things he can . In walking on a broken bone not properly set, in traversing the incessant tidal change of life without the proper ballast. Easier to ignore the curdling want in his rotten guts, at least, than the bashful, cloying requests of some certain angel.
For millennia he had adapted, had learned to ignore that Love-shaped hole that was punched out of the center of him with all the passively cruel regard of a child with craft paper and scissors. But it twinges now, creaking with rictus and rust and it catches him utterly by surprise halfway to opening the door of the Bentley.
Vertigo crashes through the whole of him, leaves him rattled and disoriented as a songbird in a storm.
He sways suddenly on his feet, bootheels crunching on gravel as his head swims, vision tunneling down until the Bentley suddenly seems to stretch away from him.
Crowley grasps for a handhold, for something to steady himself. The whole of his corporation feels like a glass overfilled to overflowing, then suddenly toppled. He can scarcely keep his footing in the sudden flood, in the roaring sweep of it all. Unsteady on his feet, he wedges the angles of himself against the sturdier plane of his car like he's bracing for an earthquake.
He doesn't need the deep breath he hauls into his lungs, tasting of the morning's fog and potting soil, but he feels more buoyant for it. More ready to ride out the swell. He's always hated that feeling of sinking, of falling—
"Darling?" comes a gentle, coaxing voice from somewhere nearby. A better buoy than any breath of air, and Crowley turns towards it reliably as a flower angling its face to the sun.
Aziraphale waits just behind him. And with his dandelion-puff haloed head crooked at the precise angle between concern and confusion, Crowley can read Aziraphale like a clock. His heart is always plain on his face as the time. It drives Crowley mad, the myriad mundane things his angel's face can do that cut straight to the cosmic quick of him.
He wouldn't change it for the world.
The cottage keys are turned end over end in Aziraphale's hands, fingers restless as he watches Crowley slouch against their car, half crumpled like a piece of paper. Stuck for a moment in that liminal space between thought and action.
The keys vanish into a jacket pocket, a mundane magician's trick, and one of Aziraphale's hands comes instead to land at the crook of Crowley's elbow— perched light as a bird, but the warmth there creeps immediately through despite Crowley's layers. The angel waits beside him as Crowley slumps himself up off the Bentley, one serpentine vertebrae at a time.
The demon blinks at that contact, soft and sure as a whisper that might be shared in the small space between them, before ratcheting himself fully upright. His spine clicks back into place, and he makes a little guttural sound in the back of his throat. An impatient noise, like he's hurrying them along. Like he's not the one who had needed a too-human breather huddled up against the morning-cool paneling of their car.
A spot of warmth at the small of his back blossoms as Aziraphale braces him there, too, gentle as anything. The soft, nurturing promise of an updraft under spread wings, ready to lift, to carry, to float. His corporation flushes with heat suddenly, like a livewire's been threaded through the flesh of it and switched on. The warmth spreads and seeps through his limbs from those two softly anchored points and he doesn't even make a blustering fuss as he lets Aziraphale take his weight, ease him out of that slump against the car. Properly up onto his feet.
Or, their feet, really, as Aziraphale's helps him up only enough so that he might pivot from one hip to the other to lean instead on his angel. The hold at his arm and back firm up as Crowley makes that brief pass through being vertical. He's not a creature meant much to be upright , always more of disposition to lounge and lean.
His own nature be damned, there's a brief spine-wrenching moment where his body doesn't want to let him settle against the angel. Where he feels his bones wrench up like an ornery snake, like his whole spine might try escaping up out his mouth. They've always leaned on one another, century after century, but it's never been such a literal, visible thing before. Never just casually on their drive right outside their cottage.
It's new , like so much else for them these days. And what an impossible thing that is, ageless and eternal as they are. They're working on it, with varying degrees of patience, day to day. But it's so new, is the point, new and indulgent and these mundane everyday epiphanies feel almost like a physical blow when they land.
Crowley is learning that he can lean his weight into Aziraphale here, strong and soft as he is, and the ground won't swallow him– them – up. Nothing will flood his lungs. (Well, sentiment might, but nothing unduly terrible.)
Aziraphale can tell him, 'oh, I do love you' as casually as he pleases, halfway to laughing through whatever argument they had been playing at on their way out their front door, and Crowley doesn't need to reel so completely from it that he crashes into his own car like he's been suddenly smited. Smote?
( Smitten .)
He doesn't need to reel, but he does. Embarrassingly. Trips right over his own two feet and his very nice (faux) snakeskin boots when those words hit his ears, and falls into the side of the car, one hand scrabbling at the car roof and the other coming up to grab up a fistful of his own shirt. Rucking up the smooth, dark fabric over his sternum like he needs the extra space to breathe.
Like he needs to breathe at all.
He'll blame it on his blasted legs, snakes weren't meant to have to navigate the damned things. (It's literally a miracle that his belt buckle doesn't scratch the paint on his sudden trip down, but both the Bentley and the buckle are quite aware that would be a catastrophically bad thing to let happen, and so it simply doesn't happen.)
But, it's new , is the thing. They're learning to swim in this sudden swell of affection they have at last waded into together, drifting hand-in-hand out into the waters of the sea of their love. This sea that they had spent eons desperately, quietly, independently trying to bail by hand so that it would not sink them, drown them. A seabed that could not fathom how it had been kept so empty, to be now so full.
"Crowley, darling," Aziraphale says again, tone fond and worried and right there . Crowley could walk across just that voice with his eyes closed and trust he wouldn't fall. The hand braced at the small of his back slips round the far side of his waist, turning the supportive hold into something halfway to a proper embrace.
"My dear, are you quite alright?"
Predictably, Crowley's reply is monosyllabic, monotone. He fixes the lapel of his coat with a quick snap of his wrists, and finds enough footing in that tiny moment of space he has made for himself to finally look straight at Aziraphale. Posted up at his right, an arm still curled around the demon's waist. Aziraphale gives him a fond squeeze, thumb brushing over the soft, thin-skinned space in the bend of Crowley's elbow.
"Yeah, sure. M'fine, never better, really."
It's the truth, utterly. Even with the floundering and faltering, even with the way he sometimes feels he might discorporate spontaneously on the spot. Never better, all things considered. (The old ego might be a bit bruised, but he's certainly recovered from worse.)
Aziraphale's face goes soft and fond. Crowley feels a bit like he's made of toffee, melting slow and sweet because of the smile on that mouth. The structural integrity of his legs are going to be in further jeopardy if Aziraphale intends to keep looking at him like he hung the moon.
(Some of the stars, sure, but he can't claim credit for the moon.)
Crowley's throat clicks, jaw working a moment before he finds the soft timbre of voice he wants for this little space between them. "I'm fine, angel. Really. S'just a little fall."
Carefully, Aziraphale moves them a shuffle away from the Bentley. Still holding Crowley. Some odd, dear little single-step waltz just for the two of them. When they have a bit of room to maneuver, Aziraphale releases his dearest, leaves him to stand on his own two feet so the angel might, gentlemanly, move to open the driver-side door of the Bentley.
"Catches us off guard sometimes, still, doesn't it?" Aziraphale says kindly. Beatific, full of patience, full of love. Hard won, and dazzling all the more for it. He's so beautiful, positively radiant. Crowley is almost glad they were heading out, that he already has his sunglasses on against the light that must be pouring off his angel.
He can't imagine how he ever got on before all this, feeling that pit in the metaphysical infernal center of him. Can't fathom the impossible cosmic breadth of the love Aziraphale has graced him with, to fill that aching hollow. To smooth and nurture a yawning chasm into a green country, suddenly lush with life and love.
Sometimes it still twinges, something still shifts, and Crowley gets knocked clear off his feet like this. A landslide still settling, some debris still rolling downhill. But Aziraphale plucks him up each time, holds him until they have the right footing and can set off again down this lovely path they're taking together.
They have tickets for a matinee, and they'll be late if they dally too much longer. Well, Crowley never arrives anywhere late when he's the one doing the driving, but the Bentley doesn't seem to have the same va-vroom in it recently. At least when a certain angel is inside. These days there's always a tin of strawberry candies ready on the console, too, forever half full.
Playing favorites. (Not that Crowley can blame it. They've got the same taste in company, after all.)
Getting a foot up on the running board, Crowley prepares to fold his long, lean body down into the car through the door Aziraphale still politely holds open.
And it's so, so easy to press his lips to Aziraphale's cheek as he swings past, ducking into their car. He doesn't drown or fall for it, the earth doesn't split open, the sky doesn't crash down. Blissfully nothing happens at all save a kiss and the happy exhalation of a now-smiling angel. (And, somewhere across the garden beyond earshot of the doting couple, the soft encouraging notes of a nightingale, glad to peep them through this little waltz.)
"It will only come easier and easier in time, I imagine," Aziraphale sighs, knuckles brushing gently over his cheek. Reverent of the affection in a way that makes Crowley want to lean up and do it all over again. "And we've all the time in the world, now, to practice."
Crowley's nose crinkles, knocking back against the car seat as he angles his head to peer out at his partner. An eyebrow creeping up above the sunglass frames.
"Get in the car, angel," he drawls out, all fond toothless annoyance. He has the Bentley started by the time Aziraphale closes the door for him, and the engine purrs extra affectionately for the angel. The passenger door opens in welcome before Aziraphale can even reach for the handle, and closes itself snug behind him as he settles into his seat.
Crowley doesn't even complain about the music Aziraphale chooses for their drive.
Halfway there, Aziraphale takes his free hand. Twines their fingers together and just lets them lie near the gear shift. Crowley doesn't flinch. The way his fingers briefly flex around Aziraphale's paper-callused ones is very much intentional.
They have all the time in the world.
(But they do, at least, make it to the theatre on time.)