Crowley stared.

Aziraphale said, "Er. I'm sorry."

Crowley took off his dark-tinted glasses with a very shaky hand. And stared some more, just for good measure.

"Er. Really, I didn't know what you would like. I still owe you over the Titanic - would've been awful if that drafted treaty between Austria-Hungary and the States had made it to New Amsterdam."

Crowley's mind rejected the concept of an angel - even Aziraphale - doing anything worthy of his staring, and grasped at the new subject with frantic desperation. "It's York. New York. The Yanks changed it."

"Ah? Really?" asked Aziraphale, whose grasp of current events was limited to developments in printing technologies and budding new religious sects. "Happened recently, did it?"

"In the last two hundred years," Crowley said with offhanded disinterest.

"Right. Jolly good. Well, I owed you, and it would look bad to put in the report that I was indebted to a - a recovering delinquent..."

"I'm not recovering. Not even convalescing." Crowley brought his glasses back up to his face, gathering himself once more. "It's fine, really. It'll do. Perfectly fine. Yes." Despite his best efforts, Crowley's mouth went dry again as he focused on the thing Aziraphale had given him.

Aziraphale rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know much about these things, but the man said that it was catching on." He looked at the papers that a very confused salesman had drawn up with the full intention of making Aziraphale sign away much more of his soul than the papers actually attested to. "Looked like the kind of thing you would like. Also came in white," he offered hopefully.

Crowley was walking a slow, reverent circle, but paused to glower at the angel.

"Er. But I thought that you would like black better. Yes."

Crowley now dared to touch it. It felt solid. He pushed on it a little, and it stoically pushed back. Certainly felt real, too.

"You do like it, though?" asked Aziraphale anxiously.

Crowley breathed, "Yeah. It'll... even us out nicely."

Aziraphale wasn't sure - he hadn't quite got the hang of reading expressions, and Crowley hadn't quite got the hang of showing them.

It wasn't until the next time he saw Crowley, ten years later, driving a prefectly maintained decade-old Bentley, that he understood that Crowley had liked the gift.