The sun is different.
Brighter. Larger. Blue.
He says so.
"Yeah, so what?" Crowley shrugs. He is on his stomach, airing his wings after their somewhat eventful experiment which confirmed that yes, the rust-red, iron-laden liquid jutting from the spring is water and yes, it will get you wet.
"Don't you think it's strange, my dear?"
"Compared to what?"
Aziraphale frowns thoughtfully.
"Hmpf," Crowley grunts, worming into the fine white sand with a movement so serpentine it looks for a moment as if he's switched forms, "You're just disappointed it's not shooting rainbows at us," he says with a grin, rising onto his elbows. "What's in a colour, anyway?"
Aziraphale shrugs helplessly. "I just... wish we could see something familiar for a change. It would be... comforting."
"And I really, really want me some James Bond, but that's not happening, angel." Crowley flips onto his back, wings fanning out and spraying Aziraphale with sand all over in the process. He points up. "There," he says. "That cloud up there looks like a duck. Try that for familiar."
Aziraphale obediently cocks his head up. The sky is clear. Deep and immense and with three separate moons and a different shade of blue than what he's used to, but clear.
As a burst of water hits him in the face, it occurs to him that he really should have known better.
He stands up, sputtering indignantly and trying to rub the water out of his eyes. "Really now, my dear-" he begins tersely, fighting to keep his face straight.
"Hey, you were dry. 'Sss hardly what you'd call fair, is it?" Crowley laughs.
Aziraphale begins to answer, but looks at Crowley and stops. A scaled body weaves slowly toward him out of the water, face in a fanged, open-mouthed grin.
He swallows nervously. "Ah, my dear... do you really think you should be..."
Crowley shrugs with a sweeping roll of his coils. "Sssseeems fine." He slinks closer, slowly coiling around the angel and resting a scaled head on his shoulder.
Aziraphale absently runs his finger along the wet scales, between the eyes. He hasn't dared to perform more than tiny miracles since they first landed, giddy and disbelieving and worn out from one close encounter with a gas giant too many. He hasn't felt... His presence since they'd first left Earth, and honestly isn't sure where their power is coming from, now.
Crowley, in his usual uncaring pragmatism, had shrugged and said it was the planet. There may well be some truth to that. It feels... like more of an effort, certainly, more like something they are taking than what is absently given to them, but all the more real for that. And the strangest part is the familiarity of it – it is more difficult, but it doesn't feel strange.
"Maybe we've been doing this all along and just didn't know it," Crowley had said, and Aziraphale, reluctant as he is to embrace his optimism, is inclined to agree.
"What if we die here?" Aziraphale asks suddenly. Crowley twists to look at him, serpentine eyes full of nothing but carefree annoyance.
Crowley tsks, his tongue tickling irritatingly at his ear. "Relax, angel, I'm not letting you go anywhere."
Then, Crowley apparently decides to take advantage of his newfound leverage, and with a muscular twist of his coils heaves them both bodily into the lake.
Aziraphale, now completely wet, resolves that he has nothing left to lose and gives as good as he gets.
"Comessss of having your head up in the cloudssss, angel," Crowley hisses later with an enormous splash, and Aziraphale's laugh freezes on his lips.
Crowley looks at him anxiously, recognising the thousand-yard-stare expression, then sighs and pulls them both back to shore.
He lays them across the sand again, shifts back to his favoured form and raises his wings in a dark tent, blotting out everything but the two of them.
"I've told you, Aziraphale," he says quietly, brushing the wet hair out of the angel's face. "We're fine."
Aziraphale stares at the blood-red water.
He nods.
.
.
.
"Angel, I've found something," Crowley says much later, emerging triumphantly out of the crimson-orange foliage. He comes to a stand in front of him and extends a hand.
Aziraphale looks at the black, dried-looking fruit in the demon's palm.
He wrinkles his nose.
Crowley smiles and theatrically raises his hand and tears the fruit open with a cracking sound. He hands it to Aziraphale again.
Aziraphale frowns thoughtfully, sniffing at the powdery dark brown meat of the fruit. He sniffs again, then looks up at Crowley.
"Cocoa?" he asks.
"Something like it," the demon grins, then tosses it to Aziraphale. "Things are looking up, I'll say. Go on, see if you can figure out what to do with it. I'll go look for more stuff."
"Don't get eaten, dear," Aziraphale mutters dutifully, turning the dry fruit over in his hands.
Crowley does find more 'stuff'. He returns hours later with sand all over him, holding an armful of shells, some of them stained a dark, gleaming red, the others a slate, matte blue. He refuses to explain, instead grabbing Aziraphale by the elbow and pulling him away.
Aziraphale is taken to a flat span of the beach. The warm white of the sand has been disturbed by a mess of dark grey where Crowley has dug into it and reached the deeper layers. A little to the side, the darker sand has been arranged in ordered patches and smoothed over carefully.
Crowley gestures for Aziraphale to follow, then walks over to the chequered pattern on the sand, sits down cross-legged on the opposite end. He drops the shells in a heap to the side of him, then begins carefully placing them on the patches.
Aziraphale slowly sits down opposite, watching in fascination.
Some time later, Crowley lifts a small red shell and slides it one tile further, smiling like he'd just gotten away with robbing a candy store.
"Your move," he says snidely and sits back.
Aziraphale laughs and reaches for a small blue shell.
Half-way through the game, a furry creature bursts out of the grass near him, its leathery wings lifting it swiftly into the air in a serpentine motion.
Aziraphale flinches but doesn't lose the smile.
.
.
.
Aziraphale doesn't sleep.
Before... Before everything, he had considered it beneath him. Virtue is ever vigilant, after all, and all that drivel.
And After... well.
He'd tried it, back on that first day when they'd touched down and Crowley was laughing and all about new experiences. Aziraphale had agreed and let Crowley treat it like a ceremony, make him a cushion of soft leaves, as close to a bed as he could come up with on such short notice.
When night came, Crowley had curled up in the warm sand and muttered 'good night' and watched the angel surreptitiously while Aziraphale had closed his eyes and focused on keeping still.
He'd been convinced nothing would happen, but he was wrong.
First had come a soft, warm drowsiness, not unlike the embrace of downy wings.
But the moment he'd felt oblivion creeping in, felt himself slipping into nothing, cold and silence and the cage all over again, he'd jolted upright and torn to his feet, eyes wide and shaking all over.
Crowley hasn't brought it up again.
But Crowley also sleeps religiously, especially since he claims it helps him restore his power.
Which means that every once in a while, Aziraphale spends the night awake, alone, and waiting. He stares at the sky, inventing constellations and nestling them safely into his mind, while Crowley mutters softly in his sleep somewhere in his line of sight.
It means watching.
And listening.
Crowley hasn't spoken much of what happened – for him. The one time Aziraphale had tried to ask, he'd muttered something like 'our side won' and then 'prisoners' and then 'executions' and then ' wait, that looked like a squirrel, did you see it, I'm sure it was a squirrel', and Aziraphale had left it at that.
What if you wake up and it's all gone? Aziraphale wonders sometimes, when he thinks about sleeping. Crowley assures him it isn't like that.
Watching him now, he almost wishes it were.
Crowley starts flailing some three hours before dawn, muscles clenching and limbs tensing against the sand. Then he starts to whimper, body twisting.
Aziraphale frets and shifts closer, but the last time he'd tried to lay a calming hand on his shoulder, he'd ended up being kicked half-way across the beach before either of them knew what was happening.
"Crowley," he calls softly, then repeats, louder.
It has no effect.
By the time Crowley starts gasping and shuddering, then sobbing – horrible, broken little sounds – Aziraphale decides that enough is enough and swiftly crosses the distance and lowers himself to his knees in the sand.
"Crowley," he says again and pulls the demon close, wrapping his arms and wings around him, holding him still even as the demon gives a muffled scream and startles awake.
Crowley is frozen stiff for a moment, breath held. "Sh sh shhhhh," Aziraphale mouths into his ear, and all at once, Crowley melts, relaxing against him with a shuddering breath and twisting his limbs around him like the serpent he is while pressing his face into Aziraphale's shoulder and breathing, simply breathing.
Aziraphale doesn't know what, precisely, had happened back there – he knows, objectively, that they got off easy, that it's nothing short of a miracle that they're here, together, safe and away from it all – but in moments like this he only feels tired.
He wonders with a silent chuckle if sleeping would help.
He doesn't know how long they hold each other like this – he doesn't know anything, truth be told. He has stopped thinking, his mind focused only on the gentle caresses he strokes onto Crowley's arms, the tiny circles he rubs into his back, and the way Crowley responds and relaxes just a bit more with each soothing touch.
Aziraphale isn't thinking except for the most distant recognition of what he, an angel, knows of comforting, and what the best way to approach Crowley would be. He's always been a very tactile creature, he now realises – obvious, in retrospect, from the way he stretched across the sheets when sleeping or caressed the steering wheel of the Bentley or shook Aziraphale's hand at the end of the world. Tactile, touch-starved – attention-starved, really, the most unfortunate quality for a demon. As Aziraphale knows all too well, they don't give hugs in Hell.
Crowley is quiet now, hanging on to Aziraphale bonelessly, as if for dear life, and breathing evenly, if a touch too fast. Aziraphale presses a feather-soft kiss into his hair, then another on his brow, and feels Crowley's lashes flutter softly against his neck. Crowley makes a noise then, for the first time, a faint hum of contentment, and leans in against his lips just a bit. Aziraphale keeps dabbing a soft kiss here and there, moving across Crowley's face in a sort of slow, migrating nuzzle, with all the awareness of one drowsy animal nipping gently at another.
It is nothing but a steady back-and-forth of touch and response, so absent-minded and unthinking and casual, as if they've been doing it for thousands of years, that by the time Aziraphale notices he's kissing Crowley on the mouth, it is only because it feels slightly more wet than the rest of his face should be.
For a moment he leans back slightly, puzzled in that uncertain way of someone who suspects that they've crossed a line but can't seem to remember where they drew it.
"Angel," Crowley breathes, the breath tickling and cooling his still-moist lips. He, too shifts back slightly, blinking at him slowly like someone coming out of hibernation.
"Yes?" Aziraphale says, feeling an odd absence of excitement or nervousness or any feeling at all that isn't a lethargic Well, what?
"We're not in Kansas anymore," Crowley says slowly, with distant conviction.
"I didn't know you'd read that book," Aziraphale says with faint surprise, and Crowley laughs softly.
"'Sss not what I mean, angel."
"What do you mean?" Aziraphale asks quietly. Crowley takes a moment to seek out his eyes before continuing.
"I mean it... means things, when you do that. You can't just do it willy-nilly, it's not something you do just for greeting or like a... a handshake anymore now. It means things."
Aziraphale is silent for a moment.
"Things like what, pray tell?" he asks, slowly and calmly.
Crowley looks back at him, calculation all but flitting across those golden eyes. Aziraphale knows what he's thinking. Crowley could tell him that the kiss has meant a great many things over the millennia.
Aziraphale knows. He was there.
Crowley knows that, too, so he doesn't bother to say it. He knows that what Aziraphale asked is not a query for information, it is not rhetorical – it is a challenge.
Aziraphale stares into his eyes and sees uncertainty and it makes something stir painfully inside him.
He knows two things for a fact:
One: They have known each other for thousands of years.
Two: Crowley has spent thousands of years believing that he doesn't deserve to be loved.
It shouldn't be possible for those to go hand-in-hand, but they do.
Well then. That, at least, is something he can still change.
His gaze fixed on Crowley, Aziraphale slowly leans in, and keeps his eyes wide open every inch of the way.
He watches his reflection in the gold, slit-pupiled eyes, sees something like pain flash across them.
With great deliberation, he presses his lips to Crowley's – slow, symbolic, closed-mouthed and nearly formal.
He holds his gaze a moment longer – until Crowley makes a soft sound and his lips begin to move against his. Then, and only then, does he allow his eyes to drift closed.
Some time later, they break apart and look at each other.
In a moment of clarity, it occurs to Aziraphale that very little has changed, and it is reassuring – they haven't been missing that much, after all. It also occurs to him that the nightmare problem could be solved easily, trivially even, by simply never spending another night more than a wingspan away from each other, ever again. It seems foolish that it didn't occur to him sooner – you'd think they'd have learned something about that by now.
"We could have a look at the humans tomorrow," Crowley says quietly, his face relaxed and happy and vaguely distant with thought.
Aziraphale nods. "Yes, I reckon we're ready to face them now, my dear," he agrees, then slowly takes Crowley's face in his hands.
The kiss has meant a great many things over the years. A kiss of loyalty, a kiss of devotion. A kiss on the hand, of respect – on the feet, on the ring, of subservience and awe. A kiss between children, one of innocent affection. The kiss of a parent, of assurance. A kiss between lovers, one of passion. A kiss between newly-weds, one of promise. A kiss between foes, of reconciliation and peace. A kiss between enemies before a battle, of forgiveness and clean slates. A kiss of friendship, of faith, of ritual.
A kiss as a greeting.
"Hello, Crowley," Aziraphale whispers, and kisses him again.