Chapter 6 seemed to pack quite a punch for some of you... poor angel. What's next for him?
Well, I think you'll like this chapter a lot! The "ship" is moving full steam ahead now! *shiver*
Dive in, and enjoy!
SEVEN
Aziraphale walked back and forth in the space between the bed and the window, and wrung his hands over all of the unanswered questions he faced. His breath was coming in short spurts, and he was holding back from panicked weeping…
"Oi," said a voice.
The angel stopped pacing, and turned toward the sound. Crowley's head was leaning in through the door.
"Crowley," he sighed.
"I couldn't sleep," said the demon. "Just wondered if, erm, you'd be up for a chat, or something. Or watching a film?"
Aziraphale smiled softly and moved a little bit closer. "Thank you, Crowley. Yes, I would like some company during the… transition."
Crowley smiled, and stepped inside the bedroom. To Aziraphale's surprise, he shut the door behind him.
"You saw through that, eh?" asked Crowley, not actually very surprised.
"Yes," Aziraphale confirmed. "But I appreciate the attempt at a ruse."
"You okay?"
The angel's instinct was always to say, "Yes! Absolutely! Tip top! Tickety-boo!" or some such doddery twaddle.
But tonight, he just couldn't say those things, and even if he could, there was nowhere to hide.
"No. No, I'm not," he confessed, his voice breaking.
"But you will be," Crowley assured him, once again. As he said, this, he moved closer to the angel, who retreated like a cornered animal. It was not the first time, of course – Crowley was used to this reaction.
The pacing began again. Crowley could see quite clearly that the angry stalking of earlier had now been replaced with a shuffle of fret and terror.
"I've been in here, all alone, torturing myself. Oh, God," he breathed, leaning his head back to look at his own personal abandoned sky. "There's so much I don't know! There's so much that, even you, Crowley, can't tell me. Sorry to say, but it's true!"
"I know," Crowley conceded, sitting down on the bed where Aziraphale had been parked just a little while ago.
"And just knowing that I'll be all right in the end, it's not good enough," Aziraphale continued. "The unknown is what's crushing me just now. As much as I don't fancy a flaming lake of sulfur, just knowing for sure that it's what's coming, and not something much, much worse… even that would be reassuring."
"I'm sorry, angel," said Crowley. "I wish I could be of more help, but I've never heard the same falling story twice."
"There will be so much to learn! So many new things to get the hang of! I won't know how to behave. I won't know how to react to my thoughts and urges."
"What?"
"Like, just now, when you asked if I was okay, my involuntary reaction was to say 'Oh, yes, old man. I'm absolutely topping today! Tip-top, couldn't be better!' But what demon says rubbish like that? Shouldn't I be learning how to brood? I've never brooded in my life! Or is it brod? Damn it, I don't even know how to talk about it! The closest I've come is a really deep pout. With my lip out. And cocoa."
"Aziraphale…" Crowley sighed.
"No, don't Aziraphale me, just now, Crowley, because I'm quite, quite, serious. I don't know anything."
"You know plenty," Crowley protested, getting to his feet once again. "Stop pacing – you're making it worse."
"Do demons not pace? Do they not fret this much?"
"Demons fret," Crowley said. "You've seen me fret something awful. But this isn't helping."
"Crowley, I've always been the nice one. I've always been the good one. And yes, I've had my transgressions because the Almighty created me imperfectly. She created all of us imperfectly. I gave into temptation plenty of times, and I incited temptation almost as many times. I've been weak. I've indulged, I've allowed myself to feel…"
"Yes. All of those things are okay. Normal."
"They're not okay for an angel. But no matter, now. What I'm saying is, with all of that, you know, I've never actually hurt anyone. Not really. I've never been really bad. I've never ruined anyone's life, or directly caused violence. I've never done a favour for you without accompanying it with a blessing. Never!" Aziraphale said, now with tears falling, his pace growing more and more agitated. "And now? I'm to become…."
"I know, I know," Crowley said, trying to catch his companion mid-stride.
"Now I'm to be come the opposite, Crowley! The opposite of everything I've ever been! And you'd think after six thousand years of watching and learning, and spending time with you, I'd know what that means, but I just don't! I don't!" He actually stopped moving, stood in the middle of the floor, and cried out those words, while pounding on his thighs in frustration.
"Okay, okay," Crowley whispered, now finally able to get his hands on the angel. He actually wrapped his long arms around Aziraphale's shoulders tightly, pulled him close, and whispered in his ear, "I know… it's okay. I'm here with you. I can't fix it, but I'm here. I know it's frightening… I'm sorry I can't do more."
"Crowley," the angel groaned pitifully, as his own arms grasped at Crowley's back, and squeezed. "I don't know what to do."
"There's nothing to do," Crowley said. "Just remember you're not alone."
Aziraphale sighed, and dared to rest his forehead against Crowley's shoulder. There was a long pause, and when he spoke again, he almost had control. "I've never really been alone, have I?"
"No," Crowley said, now daring to stroke the back of Aziraphale's hair. He used his entire palm, and all five fingertips. It was a wholly new sensation for both of them.
In six thousand years, this was their first hug.
It was to be a night of many firsts.
Crowley allowed his hand to slide back round to the front, to his companion's cheek and jaw. He pulled slightly away and placed his free hand on the other cheek. To say that he felt quite moved would have been an laughably understated. Just in these few slow-motion moments of staring at those soft, angelic lips, at closer quarters than ever before, he felt so moved as to press forward with his own. And his heart could have displaced entire mountains.
Those lips. Those angelic, expressive lips. He fixated on them almost against his own will, and it wasn't the first time. Crowley had watched them wrap themselves around countless delectable treats, pull back thousands of times to reveal a dazzling smile, and move deftly against each other as the angel expounded on one thing or another. Over the years, Crowley had allowed himself only a handful of times to imagine how they would feel pressed to him, in a kiss like this one, or moving down his neck, or nipping against his chest and stomach, maybe even pursed taut and pulling up and down on other parts of him…
For the most part, he'd tried hard to keep those little imaginings under lock and key. The fallout on him physically and emotionally was, more often than not, just too much. And, he tended to hate himself afterwards, as though he had horribly blasphemed. And so, fantasies about Aziraphale had been relegated as an exceedingly rare extravagance that he paid for with more physical exertion than was probably reasonable, followed by hot, intense tears, all of which had been known to result in weeks of sleep, shirking of duties, and semi-long-term avoidance of the angel himself. As such, he had not indulged, since well before Antichrist's birth. Even with the Apocalypse nigh, and even with the angel asleep across the hall.
But, the flush of love he felt, as he realised that the angel was not resisting, was not feigning to be appalled, and was, in fact, nervously tugging at his tee-shirt and returning the kiss, that was quite familiar. It was something he had felt in varying degrees of intensity for, literally, Time Immemorial. He had long-since acknowledged and embraced it, all the while knowing, damn it, that the angel could not be pushed.
Crowley was pushing a bit now, he knew, but he'd had the patience of Job, and this night was threatening to break them both… though, perhaps in different ways. It was killing him to see Aziraphale so nearly crushed, and as such, his own control was floundering. He had loved this magnificent creature for as long as anyone in existence could remember, and in a time of this much driving panic, this much sorrow and fear, shouldn't his role be to turn the trajectory of this night toward joy?
Let's seek joy together, Aziraphale, he wanted so badly to say, and it was the perfect moment for it. He could whisper it desperately into his ear…
He opted instead for the nonverbal translation, and he tilted his head to the right, pulled tighter, and pressed his tongue against Aziraphale's lips. The angel very willingly let it in. Mouths gaped wider, then smaller, trying to catch one another. Tongues undulated against each other. Aziraphale's fingertips dug into Crowley's chest, looking for purchase. And then, there was the crystalline sound that almost became the coup de grâce in this little battle with himself to which Crowley was clinging quite tenuously. It was the sound of a sigh – or was it a breathy moan? It was a sound that he had only ever heard Aziraphale make when he'd tasted the perfect crêpe, or the freshest sushi, or the fullest-bodied wine… and now, the most exquisite kiss.
And it made everything clench and harden throughout Crowley's already fairly tightly-coiled body, both below the waist and above.
Which he found, in spite of himself, terrifying.
If he could barely hold himself together for weeks after merely fantasising about being with Aziraphale, what would the recovery time be, after actually being with Aziraphale?
It might be a daft question, but it was worth asking... wasn't it?
His mouth clung and didn't want to stop. His body tingled against the angel's eager, clumsy fingertips. His cock was hard. His rationality had all but shut down. Everything within him screamed seize the moment! Seize this joy!
But he pulled back, and it took everything he had. He went against every instinct he had as a demon, and balked from what he really, really wanted. Life with Aziraphale had always been something of an exercise in restraint, and thank Somebody he'd spent years practicing, because this was viciously difficult.
His hands were still on the angel's cheeks and jaws, but his eyes were now far enough away to study the lovely, beatific face. He swallowed hard, gathered himself, and asked, "All right?"
Aziraphale smiled. "I'm better than all right."
"Shall I stay with you?" Crowley asked, dropping his hands to his sides.
"Yes, please. Midnight is…" Aziraphale swallowed hard. "All too near."
"All right. Let me go turn off the telly in my room, and I'll be right back," Crowley said, practically choking on the words.
He ducked out of the bedroom, and went back into his own. He shut the door momentarily, and fell back against it with a cathartic groan.
It didn't occur to him to use any supernatural wile to force his body to stop vibrating everywhere, and his erection back into submission. Probably, mostly because his body wasn't the thing the most acutely torturing him just now – it was his heart, and his mind was a close second. No magic in Heaven or Hell could quell the love bubbling to the surface, the excitement, the overwhelming urge to run back into Aziraphale's room and gush over the kiss they had shared.
So, he took an inordinately long time to "turn off the telly" before returning to the lightly-decorated room across the hall, with his wits a bit more (though not completely) intact.
When he arrived, the clock on the night table read 11:35, and the angel was waiting for him, predictably, on the right side of the bed, with the covers pulled up to his chest. He lay on his back, staring contemplatively at the ceiling, with his hands folded over his middle.
This was how Crowley had found him a number of times in Tadfield, at the inn, while they were waiting for time to repair itself. They'd spent that fortnight sharing a bed, with relative calm, partially because they usually weren't in the bed at the same time for very long. But, mostly, it had been because they had dismissed at the start the possibility of any joy-seeking, as Aziraphale had asked Crowley, once again, to be patient, and had even explained why.
But tonight, no such dismissal had been made. Although, Aziraphale seemed content to pretend, at least with this little tableau, that there was no difference between the sharing-a-bed scenario then, and the sharing-a-bed scenario now.
Aziraphale turned his head and smiled at him rather serenely, and Crowley lifted the covers and slid into bed on the left.
Aziraphale switched off the lamp at his side by snapping his fingers, this triggered a night light to come on, and the two of them lay in a golden-tinged darkness. For about ten minutes, they were still, both afraid to move or speak or even fall asleep.
At long last, it was Aziraphale who broke the silence. "Crowley?"
"Mm?"
"I'm still scared. But having you here is helping a great deal. So, thank you."
"You're welcome, angel."
"I know you'd rather just be asleep and…"
"There's nothing I'd rather be doing."
"All the same."
Crowley turned over on his side, and propped his head on his hand over a crooked elbow. "You've got to get it out of your head that you're being a bother. Haven't we already acknowledged that you're staying here, in my flat, for a reason? A reason not related to having your own flat redone?"
"I suppose so."
"And you've known me for six thousand years – have you ever seen me do anything I didn't want to do, if I wasn't ordered to?"
"No. Well, except miracling Hamlet into a hit. And making that shepherd come home to his wife, back in Bristol after the…"
"…yeah, after Scarlet Vera. Whoa, now, she was a firecracker."
"Indeed. And… I've seen you do other things like that."
"Those things were for you. Favours for you. I wanted to do them for you. Just like I want to enjoy food with you, and I want you to live here, and I want to listen in the middle of the night when you've had a prophetic nightmare, and I want to be here. In your bed."
Aziraphale shifted his eyes to the left, to meet those of the demon. "To be with me while I… fall."
"Yes, that too."
"Having to wear oven mitts whilst helping me remove holy texts from my book shop…"
"Wanted to do that. And I also wanted to order you new sets of HazMat gear, and watch you eat Baklava, and…"
They both fell silent after that.
Aziraphale turned his head to the right, and checked the time. "Ten minutes to go."
"Stop doing that," Crowley said. "It won't help. Just live in the moment."
"I'm a creature of the past. My future is about to change. How can I just be in the moment?"
"Well… like this," Crowley said. And even though he knew it was dangerous for his personal sanity, because of the unstable precipice he'd been standing on ever since ripping himself away from that kiss, he placed his head on the pillow, then reached out for Aziraphale's right hand, and he tugged.
Aziraphale was surprised, but he took the hint, and rolled to the left. Crowley guided that right arm around his own waist, and wrapped his left around Aziraphale's shoulders. And for about a minute, they just held each other. Body-to-body, soul to soul, breath to breath. Both had to take a few moments to acclimate to the electricity this caused, and calm the veritable lightning storm in their minds and bodies.
"Would you like to hear about more things I did, because I wanted to?" Crowley asked, after a few beats.
"Yes, tell me."
Well. Now, I know you're having thoughts and feelings just now! Let me know what they are!
Come on, review! I know you want to! ;-) Don't let the crickets back in!
You're a wonderful audience, and thanks so much for reading. *hugs*
