Disclaimer:Characters are not mine.


Surrender
sugahcat

It had been a good night so far. A meal at the Ivy had been followed up by a bottle or five of good wine at a nearby (and very classy) bar and now Crowley and Aziraphale had staggered into St. James Park. Sensible people might have been afraid of coming into the park after dusk but the kind of dangers they worried about would hardly be something to concern an angel and a demon, no matter how drunk they were.

Somehow they managed to get to their usual bench near the duck pond and sat heavily upon it. Crowley was aware of Aziraphale looking over at him for a long moment before bursting into a fit of giggles. Crowley looked over at him, eyebrows raised inquisitively.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing," Aziraphale answered, trying to stifle more giggles without success.

Paranoia crept over Crowley and he looked down at himself to see if he had perhaps spilled wine down himself before his alcohol-addled brain realising that Beaujolais would not show up against his black shirt. He could not see anything else that the angel could be laughing at.

"Oh no, dear boy, it's not you," Aziraphale giggled once more, wiping a tear of laughter from a perfectly blue eye. "That is to say, not really. I was just imagining..."

"Imagination? You? I don't believe it. Angels don't have imagination," Crowley muttered irritably.

"Now, now, there's no need to be mean."

Crowley sighed. Demon he may be but he tried not be mean to Aziraphale if he could help it. Sitting back, he looked up at the sky. It was a wonderfully clear night and a few stars were visible in the expanse of blue velvet above, twinkling softly. It was quite beautiful, really; he had to admit - albeit grudgingly - that when it came to design, God knew what he was doing. Crowley loved the twenty-first century, but one thing he missed in these modern times was the stars. Back in days long gone, the sky had been full of stars and the plane of the galaxy had glittered stunningly against the darkness. These days, especially in London, it was rare when more than a few dozen stars were visible in the whole sky.

Casting his mind back through the centuries, Crowley remembered a night not unlike this one; he and Aziraphale had been on the outskirts of the town they had just been staying at, the last of the mead they had purchased at the inn in a bottle in Crowley's hand. They had got as far as the edge of the woods when their ability to co-ordinate both legs had failed them and they had come to the conclusion that it would be a better idea to sit. That night, too, Crowley had ended up staring at the sky and marvelling at the stars. There had been thousands of them visible in the darkness, as though someone had spilt flour over black cloth, and the grandiose beauty put him in quite an odd mood. Looking over at the angel he had secretly felt that no matter how beautiful the starlight was, Aziraphale outshone it. Not his physical body, of course - it had been rather drab and unassuming at the time - but his aura, his true self. A strange desire had risen in the demon, one he had felt before and since and had continually forced down.

That need surfaced once more tonight as he looked from the sky to the angel sat next to him; Crowley wanted to kiss him. He swallowed, feeling uncomfortable, trying to make the urge vanish. Perhaps it was the drink, or perhaps it was that he had struggled to smother the desire since before time began; either way, it was proving impossible for him to suppress it once more.

"Angel?" He asked, his voice sounding strained.

"Demon," Aziraphale replied, giving a rather sultry, drunken smile.

"What were you imagining?" Crowley's voice asked, seemingly with no input from his brain, which was still reeling from that smile.

Aziraphale looked at him for a long while, starlight reflected in his eyes. Reaching over, the angel removed Crowley's sunglasses.

"That's better; I want to look at you properly. Your eyes are quite lovely, you know." Crowley didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything. Again the two of them sat in silence until Aziraphale answered the question slowly. "I was imagining... I was imagining what your reaction would be if I kissed you." Crowley blinked as his mind imploded at the admission. "I've thought about it before," he continued, "but I never had the courage to do it. The consequences-"

"Screw consequences," Crowley interrupted urgently, leaning close to Aziraphale. Now that he knew Aziraphale wanted it, possibly as much as he did, he was not about to let excuses get in their way. "We didn't bother about consequences when we averted the damned Apocalypse, so I'm not about to bother about them now."

Leaning closer still, he could feel Aziraphale's warm, pointless breath on his face. He hesitated for one more instant before closing the space between them and touching Aziraphale's lips softly with his own. The moment their lips touched, Crowley knew that this would change everything. Desires that had been held in check since for millennia had been surrendered to and nothing could be the same again.

For right now, however, Crowley didn't care about any of that. Whatever would happen later, would happen; they would deal with it when it came to pass. All he cared about was that after so very long, he was kissing his angel under the stars and Aziraphale was kissing him back; all that mattered was right now.