Aziraphale always had strange dreams the night of the winter's first snow.
Snow fell softly and silently outside, but when it touched the ground it became slick and slushy and dirty. Oddly enough, the snow managed to stay bright white, at least for a few hours, around at least one block in Soho containing an antiquarian bookshop specialising in peculiar Bibles.
Snow made Aziraphale content.
One could say it radiates.
Aziraphale went all-out for displays of beauty, and first snowfall was no exception. He closed the shop early (the most obvious but least diverting way to prevent customers from making purchases) and stood in the window for a long time, looking out. He watched and glowed in the diffused light of street lamps, and turned off the lights in his shop to see through the glass better. Chilling electric thrills ran up his spine and ended in crackles behind his eyes; the scents of his shop, of dust and age and tired wood and books that can't be opened, were all heavier and more real, no longer background sensation.
He longed to spread his wings. He thought that if he could do that, the electric tingle would travel all the way down to the tips, and all the feathers would turn to lamp-light and snow.
Everything dreams, whether it sleeps or not, and while there may be some debate concerning the degree to which Aziraphale could achieve the latter, there was no doubt he was engaged in the former.
Quite intensely, as it turns out.
The angel had withdrawn from his window-perch and sprawled, neatly, across a modest brown couch that materialised despite his mild protestations (No, no, no need to—just a touch tired—oh well, might as well) in the back room. He hadn't meant it to, but the snow swirled around and around in his mind's eye until he settled in a state of blankness and rest that allowed the vague half-shapes of dreams to creep around him, and into his skin.
He dreamed in drifts of whiteness and darkness, sharpness and ambiguity.
It started with breathing.
The snow was falling inside and every breath was a shot of beauty. It tingled and tickled its way down his breast, so that he felt every particle lapping in and out of him, strung on by some invisible tension. He lifted his arm and extended one finger, and watched the snowflakes dance around it like a halo. This made him happy.
His wings were bothering his back, fidgeting and waiting to spring free. He longed to keep his arm still in the snowy air, bobbing in waves of soft cold crystals, but the itching of his wings became unbearable so that the couch melted underneath him (which never really was a couch anyway, it was the shop counter and there were yarn God's-eyes and paper snowflakes hung from his toes and fingers and the stack of Bibles that had pillowed his head until they dissolved into owls' feathers and snow).
The winter air breathed kindly around him, and it never occurred to him that the cold should be bothersome.
The dream unfolded to include scent.
The shop smell was gone with the counter and the yarn God's-eyes tickled his nose so he tried to sneeze but found himself unable. He found the most satisfactory solution was burying himself deeper in the deep, deep, deepening drift of snow and pretty. The taste of the air down there was undeniably fresh and cool. He spread his arms beside him and his wings below him, parting the ocean of winter easily, and every surface of his body drank.
There was a bell. The door to the shop was opening (it was remarkable that there was a door left at all) and a shadow crossed Aziraphale. The darkness warmed him, and suddenly everything around him was slick and uncomfortable unless the shadow mixed it. The angel huddled in the shadow like a cat might sluggishly draw itself along the floor in the pool of sunlight from a window. He wanted to be closer to the warm darkness, he wanted to sink into it and tumble it down with him into the heap of winter night.
He reached out and grasped.
The shadow materialised in a familiar shape, very familiar, though the angel's mind fought against recognition. Somehow, that would end the dream, and he only wished to spiral further into it, though the part of him that wanted this was the part that only came out on the night of winter's first snow.
The shadow was substantial and had a familiar voice and smile. The angel contented himself with this familiarity-without-recognition, and sank into the sensations of the other creature who had entered his dream as he would sink into a fine hot bath. He held the shadow close and his hands stroked great white wings that spread above the two of them; the shadow had wings as well. Aziraphale was not sure if the shadow was himself, or if he was the shadow, or if the shadow was another part of him. He could almost feel what the other creature felt in the sounds he was making in response to the angel's gentle stroking upon his wings. Everything was very confusing. Could this other angel just be a part of himself, then?
The dream intensified, then. Aziraphale needed to become closer to the warm dark being; he nuzzled a neck that had become apparent, and the dark one who was pale beneath moaned and drew closer. That is good, Aziraphale thought. Closer.
The shadow was becoming paler; he still blocked the light upon Aziraphale, so that their shades mingled and became one. It was difficult to ascertain what was the shadow and what was the light as they moved together. Aziraphale was not aware of details; there was the hot, longing rubbing of skin, and hands on wings, stroking, and lips on throats and faces and breath combining and an urgent need to destroy that which was between them until all barriers were lost and they were spinning down, down, down into some oblivion deeper than dreaming, something ecstatic and divine and shameful all at once.
He was never close enough. He tried, as they sped away, to cling to the other one. It would crush him to be without the other one. The other one was not other; the shadow was his light and the visitor was his home. In the frenzy of his departing dream, Aziraphale expended all that he had to hold on.
Still, the dream left as all dreams leave eventually.
That morning, Aziraphale opened the shop for another day of avoiding business, and came dangerously close to selling several items in his distraction. He was sure the dream had meant nothing. He could barely remember the frantic rush of sensuality of the dream in the glaring daylight of a new winter.
But when Crowley came to the shop, and entered smelling like cold air and snow, and breezed in like the cool brightness and smiled like the warm darkness, Aziraphale recognised him, and excused himself for the afternoon on business, and tried not to linger on the touch of the fallen angel's gloved hand on his shoulder, brushing his neck.
It was surely a trick of his senses, lulled as they were by winter's first snow.