A/N: Random Good Omens-ervation of the day: In the novel and the script book, Hastur instructs Crowley to sign the documentation (in accepting the passing over of the antichrist) with his ACTUAL demonic name, not the name by which he asks to be referred. Which means that Crowley once possessed an 'angelic' title and another true 'demonic' title, which we never hear about in either the novel or the show. It would be interesting to know just what demon he was supposed to have been, eh?

Anyhoo, some more reading for you, dear... uh, readers. This update continues directly on from where it left off last chapter. Hope that you enjoy and I shall see you on the flip side!

~X~

~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~

The Grange Estate Nursing Home

"This is the break room." Crowley narrated, opening a door up to show a small room, painted dark blue and sporting a wall mounted kitchen isle, a round table hemmed with a number of well worn chairs and an equally set upon couch shoved up against the far wall. "This is where the staff all make tea and coffee and talk at length about their love lives. Sometimes in graphic detail." Crowley crossed the room to where a refrigerator sat humming about the doldrums of life and opened the door, placing the container with the sandwich inside of it. "I've spent a lot of time lately in there. Talking about you."

"So I gather."

"Everyone agrees that it's your fault, by the way." Crowley supposed that this was hardly likely to be the case after Alice put her dinner experience with Aziraphale across to the rest of the staff. He could envision the collective of women being firmly in the angel's corner after hearing tales of his generosity concerning expensive wine, lobster and the not-glancing-up-of-skirts. Apparently this was the sort of behaviour what went a long way with winning a human woman over.

"That what's my fault, exactly?" Aziraphale remarked, quite unable to keep a frown off of his face at this.

"Oh, they think we're broken up now. That tends to be what happens when human co-dependents haven't seen each other for two months. Living separately, you know."

Aziraphale momentarily spluttered, finding this to just be a little unfair an assessment. "Well, I hardly see how the matter is entirely my fault! I wasn't the one wanting to keep my distance, if you recall that was your request, not mine-"

"Moving on." Crowley breezed past, perhaps a little haughtily Aziraphale observed and kicked a door directly opposite the break room. It opened up to a small outdoor sitting area, presided over by a vine wreathed gazebo, in which a few aged nests clung obstinately to their roosts. "Out here's the gazebo. Staff go there to smoke on break. I've been smoking a bit too lately." He gave Aziraphale a long look over the lenses of his glasses, daring the angel to have a go at him. Aziraphale, much to his better nature, didn't bite. He did not go to all that effort to be here, simply to make matters the worse.

"If that's what you wish to do." He said fairly, which was a response Crowley hadn't appeared to have been banking on. Turning his head away with a slightly disappointed huff, he marched on, gesturing at some fire equipment and laminated signs tacked to the pock marked, likely asbestos riddled walls.

"Here's our fire safety section. In the event of a fire, the carpark is our marshal station. Follow the instructions of the warden. They're the one who gets to wear the spiffy white hard hat. We will need to wheel the oldies out so they don't burn to death. The warden will instruct us on which sections we need to help evacuate."

He went to move on. Aziraphale had anticipated that this was the momentum the demon would continue to maintain if he didn't execute a little forward thinking here and now. He got between Crowley and wherever it was he meant to go strutting off towards next and held out his palm in a universally recognized gesture to hit the brakes.

"Could you please just stop. Just stop. We need to talk. Please, this is... this is ridiculous." He gestured towards the break room; the room he felt he was likely to get just a little of the privacy he so desperately required at this stage. "Just five minutes. Just to put my side across. I believe I'm owed that much."

If one were to ask Crowley why he was making this all so very difficult for Aziraphale, the demon would likely answer that he himself hadn't the foggiest. It was true that he wanted to talk, quite as much as did Aziraphale and wished ever as earnestly for a kind resolution to what had been a terribly unkind couple of months. Why he was being stubborn, he couldn't say. Only perhaps that he was terribly frightened on the inside and that by moving forwards without pause he made it ever the more difficult for that fear to catch up to him.

There was no evading it now. Whatever happened next would happen. The answer, whether it was what he wanted to hear or what he was ever so desperately afraid to hear, was about to be delivered. He steeled himself, feeling much as he imagined a small child might when they are being called out of class to receive a scheduled inoculation. Sloped his way to the break room; the door of which Aziraphale was holding open for him and drifted over to rest against the countertop. He hit the plastic lever on the jug to heat the water; for someone was likely to be wanting coffee at any given moment and then crossed his arms, surveying the angel whom had settled himself in a safe sort of no-man's land beside the old table.

"Right. What do you want to say?"

They had beaten about the bush to such a degree the previous night that the metaphorical shrubbery was likely sans but a stitch of a leaf by this stage. Aziraphale was very tired and he had gone to a great deal of trouble in order to bring this all about. The time for splitting hairs was well and truly over.

"Well, what do you suppose I want to say? We need to talk about the-" He realized that he was near about yelling and lowered his voice. Ashamed he might not have been, but that hardly meant that just anyone had a right to hear about their personal business. "- the kiss, of course!"

Crowley's heart gave a kick in his chest what might have put an unborn infant to shame. This was it. If they talked about it, there would be no going back. And though he was a demon who was accustomed to having turned tail throughout most of his six millennia on earth, Crowley was, in that moment, convinced beyond a sliver of a doubt that this was a situation from which he could not and would not run.

He wanted to. The very idea that in but a few moments Aziraphale might very well be lost to him forever was enough to make him feel deathly ill. He thought he might actually vomit, the shakes were so bad. That was precisely why he was keeping his arms crossed. To hide the trembling of his fingers in the crooks of his elbows.

"If you've just dragged me in here to ask me to pretend as though the whole thing never happened," He said, swallowing in what was in fact, a very dry mouth. Acknowledging this would be to set it in stone. A concession of its tangibility. An invitation to address this largely avoided thing they had been dancing on the borders of all these... months? Years? Centuries? "-then don't go and bother. I'm not going to play silly bastards just so as you can go back to sticking your head in the sand."

"That's not what I was going to ask." Aziraphale sighed, pressing his hands together and holding the steeple shape they formed up against his lips. He closed his eyes a moment, marshalling his own fluttering courage. Fighting back those awful, benighted barbs that kept trying to stab, stab, STAB into his mind. Block him at every turn he attempted to take with his emotions. "What I wanted to ask... well, to get some context regards- clarify, really was... your um. Your thoughts, your intentions." So far as Aziraphale could tell, Crowley was staring back at him with a look what was vaguely imperious and bored. It was off-putting, though unbeknownst to him, a very fragile farce. "I... I would assume that... given that you... that we kissed that... that it would mean that you... view our relationship as... being...?"

Crowley couldn't keep the nervous scoff from popping out at this. Like a tickle in his throat he had been unable to prevent from turning into a cough. "What? We really doing this?"

"Doing what?" Aziraphale asked, confused.

"You know what. Classifying it. Like it needs classifying. I know how I feel. You know how you feel."

"Yes, but I rather don't know what it is that you feel." Aziraphale felt that this was a very important distinction to make. "Not entirely. And I don't think that it hurts for us to spell things out. Not if it helps to avoid all this stuff and nonsense in the future."

"You want me to spell it out. Fine. I'll spell it out." Crowley crossed to the fridge, remembering something he had glimpsed earlier when placing his sandwich inside. One of the girls had brought in a cupcake for her morning tea. It was one of those ridiculously overly ornamental things, something which might very well see pride of place in a display window on a rotating pedestal. It was perched on a plate, a plate which dimmed in woeful comparison to the flamboyant baked good settled astride it. Crowley took it from the shelf on which it had been placed and set it down on the table in front of Aziraphale. He gestured to it, as though this in itself was quite enough of an explanation required. "There."

Aziraphale stared at the cupcake, understandably at a loss as to just how he was intended to proceed with the limited amount of direction he had been offered.

"... I can't eat somebody else's cupcake!" He finally blurted out, assuming at long last that for whatever the reason Crowley was trying to make a point about the apple from that day back in the garden; using a cupcake in place of once forbidden fruit. It wasn't a bad interpretation and somewhat on the money, but it was not precisely what Crowley had in mind.

"I'm not giving you the cupcake, I'm using the cupcake to make a point!" Crowley said, frustrated. He pointed to the pretentious little cake; sitting pretty on its plate as though it were the culinary based equivalent of the Duchess of Kent astride a swan shaped pontoon. "Look at this pompous thing. All the swirly pink icing, the little flowers, the silver dots, the colours. All this effort put into something you're just going to grind into a sweet tasting paste between your teeth. Why do you think humans go to all the effort, eh?"

"Because a good meal is eaten quite as much with your eyes as it is with your lips." Aziraphale gave the otherwise intended automatic response what Crowley had been anticipating. The angel blanched a little upon reaching the end of his recitation, aware that he had walked himself straight into the... well, not so much trap but onto the path which Crowley had otherwise readily paved for him.

"Precisely." Said the clever demon, with an ever more clever smile. "We don't need to eat, Aziraphale. We don't need to drink or sleep for that matter. We do these things because we enjoy them. We could enjoy looking at the aesthetic technique which goes into making a cupcake and never have a real, inherent need to pick it up and take a bite out of it. We could stand here until the cupcake turns to ash and we still won't have starved to death." He lowered his glasses a little, just so as to ensure that his gaze was met. He would not risk taking them off in his workplace but he knew it was ever so important for the angel to see his eyes. "So why do we eat, Aziraphale?"

"Such as you said; because it feels good to do so. It's enjoyable. It makes our time here enjoyable. It's..." The angel gave an ever so slight quirk of his shoulder. There he was; traipsing on down that path, never the wiser to where it might lead but tarrying forth all the same on the sagacious words of an ever more clever demon. "-an experience."

"Yeah. It's an experience. A sensation. We're stuck in this world; we might as well experience what it has to offer." He flicked a finger towards the cupcake. "Well... we're... you, I... both of us... we're... cupcakes."

"Oh, I would never wear that shade of pink." Aziraphale sort of joked, meaning only to lighten the tone a little. It seemed a very strange and entirely far too appropriate thing for him to have been the one to come here with some big plan and for Crowley to all but hijack it. "And you're hardly frilly and sweet."

"Don't be clever. I'm trying to make a point." Crowley said, plainly unimpressed by the angels attempt, in his mind, to subvert the trajectory of what was already an incredibly difficult and frightening conversation. He cleared his throat, breaking eye contact for just a moment, because he could see that the sharpness of his tone had hurt Aziraphale. "Look, I uh... let me just uh... try and get this across, eh?" He cleared his throat again. It was thickening. His voice was catching. Oh shit. "For six thousand years, I've been... looking at you. Metaphorically perched on a plate in front of me. There's no actual... need for me to have ever picked you up and taken a bite out of you. But in not having done so, I feel as though I have... missed out on something of the full experience of knowing you. To look is one thing. To taste is another. You need both with which to have the full experience."

Aziraphale considered then just what these words meant in conjunction to the moment that the two of them had shared in the Bentley. A kiss, in so few words was an attainment. Much like the biting of the apple. To accrue the very thing that you wanted between your lips was an ageless one.

It was one which Aziraphale understood far too well.

It had always been his weakness.

"I... I see your point." He murmured, a flush lighting itself to the rise of his cheeks. Crowley might have been phrasing himself rather the more elegantly at that moment, but his face was the evidence otherwise of his reticence and he too had gone a rather soft, fetching shade of pink. It was more the obvious around his throat and he was aware of the heat, glancing his palm off of it before rubbing his fingers up behind his neck. Rolling his head so unnecessarily he was starting to resemble a puppet on a loose string.

"I think what it boils down to, is that this is quintessentially no different to that apple all those years ago. You asked me why I was eating it." He glanced back towards Aziraphale, knowing that this was a tremendous ask; to cast one's mind back so many thousands of years. He hadn't forgotten it, true but that shouldn't have suggested such a moment was ingrained upon the lines of Aziraphale's memories with much the same permanence. "You remember what I said in return?"

"Because you wanted it." Aziraphale replied, without hesitance and it was quite enough to make Crowley feel a little weaker in the knees. He hadn't forgotten. All those years and he still remembered.

"That's right. And I want you, just the same as I wanted that apple." He shelved his embarrassment, for it was far too late to attempt to protect himself now and let something else instead creep in. That self-same desire what took control of him that night in the Bentley. Which had insisted on the angel's lips. "To both look at you and to sink my teeth into you."

For Aziraphale this was every inch the conundrum that he had been expecting. The words embarrassed him somewhat, for he was a modest creature and such abrupt, passionate exchanges were hardly in keeping with the decorum he had thus maintained over his thousands of years on earth. But what welled up inside of him, more the ravenous and emphatic still was that very feeling he had surrendered to in the time of the garden. That feeling of being desperately thirsty, and starving, of a tongue resting cracked and dry and unsated between the cradles of his teeth.

Staring at a fruit, forbidden and lovely and all too suited to meet each and every one of those long denied but ever so perilously aching needs.

"Crowley, please..." He murmured, flustered as was to be expected, though not entirely out of embarrassment, which was not at all to be expected. The demon couldn't be certain of such a thing, as these were emotions that the angel was not practiced in and therefore quite unfamiliar to the person what knew him best of all to comfortably interpret.

"You're the one who wanted it spelt out. Let me spell it out." He needed to lay it all on the line now. Go for broke. And not just because his boss would soon get to wondering just where in the Heaven the two of them had sauntered off to. "Conversation is all well and good but there are times where I just want to be... closer to you. Closer than a gaze or a... smile. I worry that you feel such a thing is sinful, that it somehow denounces the inherent value of what it is that we share. But we are well beyond the point where a primitive means of conveying a more simple expression of feeling applies, angel."

Aziraphale wasn't quite certain when he would be able to speak. He felt ever so vulnerable, so touched and so... relieved. Crowley was saying all those very things what Aziraphale himself had been feeling, had been wondering. Feelings so strong, so replete with love, with passion that simply sitting beside one another, sharing a glancing eye contact was so grossly inadequate, so infuriatingly stunted that it ached. They felt the same way; their struggle was a shared one, much as it had always been.

"If anything we're just... finding a means by which to attain more from what it is that we feel for each other." Crowley was saying and his words made form of the dense fog of confusion what had taken up residence in Aziraphale's mind for so long. It all seemed a little clearer somehow and the barbs within his mind were numbed by it. "Taking that first bite. It should be okay to touch. Touch isn't just about selfish gratification. I mean, conversation can be fake and cheap. As can kissing, as can... sex. There's no difference, not when it comes down to brass tacks."

"Well, I..." He wasn't sure why he was stuttering. It was making sense, all of it. He was glad for it. And yet...

"Answer me honestly. Please." Aziraphale lifted his gaze in response to Crowley's summons. He was looking at him over his glasses again. He appeared far the more defenceless than he had thus far. "Did you... enjoy the kiss?"

Aziraphale hesitated a moment. This was his own hurdle, giving those feelings some sort of hard edges. Picking apart the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle from all the other conflagrating portions what had been set within the box to confuse him. Age old constraints, prejudices and fears rose up sharply inside of him. And a stranger one, yet. That his entire relationship with Crowley, one that had sustained them rather the satisfactorily for the past six thousand years, was about to change forever.

"Yes." He said softly, the word imparted much as a painful whimper. His fingers pinched in so tightly about their counterparts that his deftly filed nails left their marks upon corresponding knuckles. One of Crowley's brows lifted to form what might be considered a near perfect question mark upon the page of his face.

"Really? Because it seems like you would have enjoyed having sharpened bamboo driven up underneath your toenails more."

"I just... it feels... wrong to take... to take..." He looked away now, that self styled shame welling up inside of him. "-pleasure in something that I am attaining primarily for my own benefit. At your expense."

Crowley tilted back his head, casting the groan of his irritation towards the ceiling.

"Oh, that's the biggest load of horse trollop. This is the sort of heavy handed celestial guilt what's tripping you up at days close." He jabbed one of his fingers, now near entirely void of tremors down so hard onto the kitchen bench that he just about jarred the blessed thing. "You seem to be stuck on the idea that physical touch is somehow inherently sinful. But so much of love is a shared experience. Is it any more sinful than your sitting at a table enjoying a mouthful of cake while I sit there and wait for you to finish it?" Aziraphale's features wrenched themselves out of the deep castigation into which they were heavily drenched and shifted instead to encapsulate something what might be considered contrarily thoughtful. This had obviously made some sense to him; as food based comparisons so often did. "At the very least, a kiss is something we can both enjoy together. It's an act of love, not the sort of transient pleasure you get from passing a block of chocolate over your tongue. Seems less selfish, when you think about it, really." He sniffed, glancing back towards the vainglorious little cupcake. " I mean, you're the one who reads the books; you should know that not all touch is rooted in sex. And even if it is, what the Heaven does it matter? What sin is there in enjoying the physical; enjoying one another's touch? Sex can be romantic. It can be soft and wholesome and loving and inclusive, I'm sure."

"Is that something you may... want?" Aziraphale closed his eyes, pulling himself together. This was an important question to ask. To ascertain. To... prepare himself for. "To... to make... love?"

Crowley knew entirely well that this above all was going to shake the angel, but they had come too far now for him to sugar coat his desires. "... Yeah. I uh... I do. Yeah." He said, giving a small, somewhat helpless smile. He felt very exposed in admitting to this; as though he were laying bare the naked bonds of his spirit and trusting that all its stretch marks, rolls and imperfections were not about to be laughed at. "To be honest, none of this has ever been off the table for me, angel. I'm not human; it's not like I've been panting after it for six thousand years. But I wouldn't have said no if you'd jumped on me that very first day in the garden. Would have given it a go, at least."

"Well I hardly think that was going to happen!" Aziraphale exclaimed, taking the time to look offended by the wanton suggestion. "You may be handsome but I do have my standards!"

Crowley chuckled, for the outrage was every bit as charming as it ever was. "You know what I mean. I would be comfortable with being with you in whatever form it is that you wished for it to take. ...Or, so I thought. It's just..." He jutted his lips off to the side and grunted. "I dunno... guess I just always thought that if... one day we didn't have Heaven or Hell to worry about...If you were in fact the master of your own making... Suppose I just assumed that it was them what was the reason you never wanted to get much closer. But they still weigh heavy on you, don't they?" He quirked a fingertip towards the ceiling. "Old HQ. Or maybe it's not so much that. A part of me thinks that you're afraid."

"I am afraid." Aziraphale admitted. It was a time now for truth. Even if the truth was not altogether flattering, or brave. It was honest and if there was one person in all the known worlds with whom he ought be honest, it was incontestably Crowley. "I know that it is foolish. And awful. And unfair. Because what I feel for you should be more than enough to make the rest of it seem simple, but-"

"You're afraid that giving yourself over to me would damn you."

And there it was. The splinter in his mind what Aziraphale could never so much as bear to give form. He had skirted about this one, explored every other reason for his hesitation, his fears. But this was... it was the big one. It was the cruel one. The age old prejudice. It was where the word 'fraternizing' had come from. And 'I am a great deal holier than thou'. The 'You's' instead of the 'We's'. All the cruellest, most conceited, defiant and defensive things what he might ever have felt and directed towards Crowley in his more impassioned of moments.

"It's not that I'm consciously afraid-" Another distinction he thought ever so important to make clear. Crowley once again surprised him in demonstrating in turn just how insightful, intelligent and caring he was, by saying in response:

"- just something inside of you, lurking at the rear of your mind."

"Like a splinter." Aziraphale said, using the word he felt best described it. He took up the knuckles of his right hand, banged them lightly, yet with some fervency against the side of his head. "Like a sodding splinter made from steel that I just can't seem to pry out."

"They threw you out, angel." Crowley was giving him that same sad look he had that night on the bus stop bench. When he had gently reminded the angel that his bookshop had, at least in the reality from which they had just emerged, burned down. The one which made Aziraphale every so often feel as though the demon were in fact ages older, wiser and more patient and knowledgeable than he himself.

"I know."

"It's all over. They don't care what you do anymore. They don't care what we do. We could go and get hitched at the Sydney Mardi Gras wearing five foot tall fruit hats and chocolate sauce bikini's and they wouldn't give two hoots."

"I know, I understand all that, I do." Aziraphale said, trying even as he did to not imagine himself wearing a chocolate sauce bikini and a five foot tall fruit rimmed hat. Those were two things much more suited to a summers afternoon; chocolate sauce in a bowl and fruit on skewers ready to be dipped. Not assembled into some bizarre Carmen Miranda-esque culinary garment to be paraded about for all and sundry to goggle at. "All I ask is for you to acknowledge is that I have this fear. Regardless of how pointless it is, how offensive and hurtful it is. I don't want this fear. I want to be shot of it but I just can't seem to shake the damned thing. The feeling is so very strong at times!"

"Stronger than what you feel for me?" Crowley asked, the slightest hitch to his voice. The look on his face and the sadness which touched itself to the borders of his tone were enough to wrench Aziraphale firmly out of the confusing cluster of emotions swirling about inside of him and instil some much needed clarity.

"No. Absolutely not." He had been firm with Crowley many a time throughout their six thousand year acquaintance. Never had he been quite so firm as this very moment. "There is nothing stronger which exists inside of me than what I feel for you. I wouldn't be standing here, otherwise."

The words had pleased, surprised and embarrassed Crowley a little. A demon, ever so practiced in portraying a calm and cool demeanour was set to biting his lip like a schoolgirl who had seen the Yes circled on her 'Do you like me - Yes or No' slip after having it passed back to her by the boy she fancied. Crowley felt similarly overcome and he glanced away, trying without much success to pull himself together. He was suddenly and acutely at odds with his body and ever so much aware that the modicum of control he had been enjoying in this situation had been systematically routed in just this one succinct and loving statement alone.

"Wasn't expecting that."

"No, I can tell." Aziraphale was concerned about the icing melting on the cupcake and so he took it upon himself to return the baked good to the fridge. Now that it seemed Crowley's point had been proven. "You know, this all rather begs the question that if you are in fact so keen for us to incorporate a physical aspect to our relationship, why you felt the need to run away the other night after you kissed me."

"Because you started kissing me back. And I thought that's probably what I wanted." Crowley sighed, chewing at a corner of his lip. This was all... very real all of a sudden. "Then I realized I wanted it just a little too much. And you probably wanted it a whole lot less than I did."

"What do you mean?" Aziraphale asked, closing the fridge and returning to his unconsciously designated post beside the table. He was still holding onto the work uniform and had been the entire time they'd been talking. It seemed strange that he hadn't yet set it down. As though it were serving as some manner of... shield.

"Don't be stupid. We both know what I mean. The second you... parted your lips..." Crowley sounded a Heaven of a lot cooler than how he was actually feeling. There was sweat popping out on the back of his neck like voles erupting from holes in an otherwise perfectly groomed front garden. "I wanted you more than anything I ever wanted in all my life. Enough that I could have hurt you, if only it meant that I could consume you. Enough to take a bite out of your very soul." He was really wishing he carried a handkerchief now. This was more the likely about to turn into an unsightly stain down the back of his work shirt. "Knew I had to stop. There's more than that to it, of course. But that was enough. I've spent six thousand years trying to protect you, Aziraphale. Never thought I'd have to go and protect you from myself, but there you go. Ain't irony a bitch, huh?"

"What... what did you suppose was going to happen if you... if you didn't pull away?"

"Something I'm quite sure you're not ready for." Crowley said, wondering even as he said it whether he was in fact any more the ready for such a... thing than the angel. He might have been a demon, but that meant zilch so far as sex was concerned. "Believe it or not Aziraphale, I'm no better with any of this stuff than you are. I'm just better at accepting it. I've been okay with being at arms length all these years. There were fences in place. Rules, boundaries, reasons, permissions, un-permissions. But those aren't there any more. I can't stop thinking of the freedom it brings. The possibilities. Having you not at arms length but within fingers reach..." He held up a hand, spread his fingers apart just enough so as to stare at Aziraphale between them. Dropped it back into the safe crook of his elbow. "It scares me. It scares me that I want it for the wrong reasons. I like tempting you. I like the fact that you're an angel, I'm a demon and that I can talk you around to things. I talked you into the Arrangement. I talked you into taking that first bite of food. But I don't want to talk you around to this. Not this. I don't want to try to convince you of things that you don't, a hundred percent, feel at ease with. That you don't want."

"But I do want you." Aziraphale said quietly and it was an admission enough to near cripple the both of them in one fell swoop.

"Don't say that." Crowley said. That small flush of hope was so strong, so much more the temptation than any he himself might ever have offered. He wanted so desperately for it to be within reach.

"Why?" The angel asked, who had felt himself very courageous in speaking up. For voicing what it was that he was truly feeling, in spite of all those awful celestial barbs driving themselves tooth and nail into his gentle soul.

"Because we both know it's not true. Just like in the car the other day. Kissing me because you thought that was what I wanted you to do. Because that's what an angel should do. Make others happy, even at the expense of themselves. Isn't' that right?"

Aziraphale had been thinking this very thing, it was true. Blessed moments before he had genuinely started to take enjoyment in the act for himself. Crowley was aware of that, to some degree. They knew each other too well at times.

"Yes, it's true that I want to make you happy but that is not the whole reason that I kissed you back." Aziraphale said, adding just a little more of that firm candour to his voice. "What I am trying to tell you, if you would desist with being so stubborn for just one moment is that... I want it too."

Crowley's glasses had dropped a little lower on the bridge of his nose. It hadn't been intentional. This was ever so telling to Aziraphale. The demon was never one to present a dishevelled façade. Most every movement was predetermined, fraught with great design and intent. It was how most effective temptations were executed, of course. This lapse, slight as it might seen in the eyes of others, was gargantuan in Aziraphale's.

"I want to be... closer." Said the angel. It took a great deal of strength, of courage to say this. But it warmed him. It warmed him the more to see the lines in Crowley's face soften, for the tension to ease down out of shoulders he probably wasn't even the aware of his having hiked up so high as they were. "It's just... these walls that are inside of me... Heaven's fingernail... It scratches, every time I... I try to explore this."

"It hurts you?" Crowley asked, genuine concern making its mark in his face now. He hadn't even considered that the struggle Aziraphale was experiencing might in fact have been a physical one quite as much as it was a mental, spiritual and emotional one.

"Yes. It does. But I want you to know that that pain has nothing to do with what I feel for you. Whatever this is, it is something that is congruent in the makeup of what makes an angel an angel. It is through no fault of your own." He squared up. He couldn't remember the words that he had been planning to say; not entirely. But he knew full well what it was that he wanted to say. The words he wished he had said the previous night, when Crowley had been standing in the doorway; all but begging for him to take that first step.

"I am not and never have been ashamed of you, Crowley. The very thought that you could be going through life believing such a thing is more painful than that infinitesimal scratching against my soul." Warmth flooded his face as Crowley first tilted his head back and then down, pushing his glasses out of the way of his hand to press his fingers against his eyes. His shoulders shuddered with silent sobs, fought ever so hard to contain but unable to temper down. "I adore you, my dear. I absolutely, unequivocally adore you. I am prouder of you with every day that passes and prouder still that I am the person to whom you have invested ever so much of your time and your life and your heart. Please don't ever doubt that. Any weakness of character I might exhibit is not at all a reflection of my feelings for you. There is nothing stronger than that."

Crowley was unable to respond for quite some time. He was much too overwhelmed, far too relieved to put anything into words. He pursed his lips and looked away, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. The sight was astonishing to Aziraphale. He had never before seen Crowley cry. The tears were a new thing. They were pure and crystalline and more beautiful than anything he could ever remember seeing. A demon's tears... Wrought from sadness of relief, of love...

Crowley for his part felt as though an industrial clamp had been eased from about the cage of his chest. He had little idea as to just how much pain, how much tension he'd been holding onto those last few months. The fear that Aziraphale would not have felt the same. Would have awkwardly advised that something deeper, something physical was not anything of which he was interested and further denominate that bond which they so obviously shared. The relief was staggering. So much so, that the demon hadn't been aware of the fact that he had been crying. Well... he was aware but more to the point was that he was not aware of his usual need to veil such things.

And it wasn't crying. Not really. A couple of little tears. Nothing to write home about.

"Shit." He nonetheless cursed, thinking it a very good thing that this hadn't happened whilst he was still working for hell. Dropping your emotional bundle in front of an angel would have been cause for any number of violent ribbings. "Stupid bastard. What the Heaven do you go and say to something like that?"

"You don't need to say anything." Aziraphale took a measured breath and slowly placed the bundle of clothes down on the nearby table. His heart thundered through its next however so many beats, leaving him feeling strangely dizzy. "It's... it's going to take some time but... I mean to work on it. To break down those walls so that the... the scratching... doesn't hurt so much."

"I don't want you hurting, angel." Crowley said, utilizing his thumbs now so as to scoop out the last of the tears from the bags beneath his eyes. Shoot. His poor human body really wasn't getting enough sleep. "I didn't even think that-"

"It's all right." Aziraphale smiled. He took a step. The step resonated. He took another and then another still. It was perhaps only seven or so steps to close the gap what rested between both himself and Crowley but each of them sounded out just as resolutely and as deeply as the tolling of an ancient bell. Seven small steps to bring close an immeasurable and cavernous distance, what might have transcended further still than the very most remote of distant stars.

Crowley watched him, those large eyes growing more the luminous by the moment. His Adams apple rose and fell as he swallowed. Whilst words had been parried, the demon had felt himself, much as always, incontestably in control. Now that it was motion what carried forward and not tarrying of tongues, he was uncertain as to just what grip he might have maintained upon the wheel.

He could feel it being gently guided out from underneath the hold of his metaphorical fingers and into those instead of Aziraphale, who was savouring every moment; eyes softly shining as he reached down and took Crowley's glasses, placing them onto the bench beside them. They were close now. Very close. Crowley's hand was still poised much as it had been when the glasses had been pinched between his fingers. Aziraphale's own hand sought to fill the gap.

"It's quite all right." The angel whispered, pressing his fingers up between those of the demon's. Their palms touched, thumbs grazed and caressed like lovers come together. Pushing back against the awful barbs what might otherwise have held him at bay, Aziraphale glanced his palm over Crowley's cheek, permitted himself that lovely flush of desire what came with the brushing of those exquisite cheekbones and twined his hand about the back of the demons neck. He felt the short hairs there at attention; the down which might have been soft if not for the razor what kept it short.

They did not come together with great and abrupt passion, but softly and slowly, their lips meeting with a tenderness which lacked nothing of the depth of feeling at its foundations.

The joining was yet enough to sunder those last remaining vestiges of uncertainty and the draw became tighter still; Crowley's arm finding purchase about Aziraphale's shoulders and bringing their bodies in flush and warm and wanting. Their fingers, poised still by their side, wove their own dance; entwining, twisting and stroking, like a pair of amative snakes stowed together in a basket long secreted from the light of day. The barbs panged at Aziraphale fiercely and he countered this by projecting deeper still into the physical; the very new and very fine feeling of lips meeting, of breaths deepening, of the pressured caress of hands and thighs and everything else in-between.

As Crowley parted his lips to take yet another indulgent sup of his own, Aziraphale seized the opportunity for which he had been waiting and glanced his tongue into the gap made briefly between their heated mouths. He remembered Crowley having done so that first time they had kissed in his car and he had wanted to be the one to do so now; to reassure the demon that it was okay. That he truly did want this quite so much as he did.

Crowley pulled back slightly when he felt the darting touch of Aziraphale's tongue. His lips parted still, not so far removed that one could suggest he had in fact broken the kiss but was uncertain as to how to proceed. Aziraphale once more reminded himself that this was not just new to him, but to both of them.

"It's okay." He softly murmured, sliding his hand back around and brushing over the rise of Crowley's cheek. Placed a feather light kiss to his lips; once, twice, three times. Between those soft and reassuring points of contact, he whispered: "Part your lips, my darling. It's okay. Trust me..."

Crowley did of course trust him and so he parted his lips, allowing Aziraphale's tongue to enter his mouth. Both moaned softly at the deepening of their kiss; a kiss quite extraordinary in its own right to serve as the highest intensity of pleasure either had ever cause to experience. It was a little awkward still, as they were new to it but the touch of one another's tongues was sensual and intimate and spoke a thousand words more than all the millions they had otherwise exchanged throughout the passing of the ages.

Aziraphale put his hand to the sway in Crowley's back. It had been an instinctual thing but the pleasure he derived from cupping that decadent indent, from tracing the inlay what prefaced the curve of his buttocks was wonderful. He pressed his palm in harder, took Crowley's bottom lip between his own and drew on it. The demon murmured; gave what sounded to be the softest of whimpers.

It roused something in Aziraphale; the understanding that they were both, in that very moment, awakening to the shared sensation of mutually discovered pleasure, caught up entirely with the attainment of one another. He pulled Crowley harder to him, slid the lengths of their tongues together, felt the demons fingers ghost throughout the tangles of his hair, the softly brokered utterance of his name spoken between heated breaths.

There existed nothing in this moment but the two of them, a kiss so many a thousand years in the making and the distant clicking of the breakroom door as it swung open behind them.

~X~

A/N: If I was caught doing that in my workplace, I would most definitely be fired. (Shrugs) Oh well. That's a problem for another chapter, ay? ;)

If you have any questions or thoughts on the piece, feel free to ask and or share. Hope that you enjoyed and I shall see you back shortly for the following updates!

Until next time, do take care of yourselves beautiful people!

With all my infernal love,

~Madammortis~ xxx ooo