Good Omens slash ficlet
Jul. 12th, 2007 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgreyFound this when sorting through my HDD.
Fandom: Good Omens
Title: Best Laid Plans
Genre: m/m slash
Rating: R
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Summary: Crowley wants to seduce Aziraphale but Aziraphale has plans of his own that could have dangerous consequences.
DISCLAIMER: 'Good Omens' and the characters of Crowley and Aziraphale are the property of Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, who are both very spiffy and talented people, and was originally published by Victor Gollancz. I'm borrowing Crowley and Aziraphale illegally but will hastily wipe them off and return them if anyone notices. This fic is written for fun not profit.
Best Laid Plans
Crowley had been working on his justification for a few days now. No, actually, when he thought about it, he’d been working on it for a few weeks, months, no, ineffable it, centuries. But, there was nothing wrong with just running through it again: He was a demon. It was his job to tempt the unwary and deliver the innocent into sin. Any way he went over it, it seemed watertight to him. Demonic – check. Tempting – check. Unwary – double check. Innocent – triple check. Sin – oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. So, it was not in any way a departure from his demonic brief to – say, attempt to deliver an angel from his virtue via a nice dinner, rather excellent bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and silk-sheeted king size bed; especially if he were delivering aforementioned angel into the sinful pleasures of the immortal flesh. He would only be doing his job. If pressed – or say threatened with hellfire and eternal torment in the pits of Below – he could say that he had only been following orders. You couldn’t get much more Fallen than that.
In preparation, he had not been visiting Aziraphale recently. They had got into the habit of having lunch together, either in the lobbies of the better hotels or – if Aziraphale was choosing – the café at the British Museum. Crowley had dropped out of sight for ten days now and hoped that Aziraphale had been missing him as much as Crowley had been missing… Not that he was missing Aziraphale as such; being a demon it wasn’t very likely that he was going to pine for the company of an angel. Aziraphale was an acceptable companion because he had been around as long as Crowley had, didn’t need some tedious explanation to comprehend exactly how the Spanish Inquisition had looked from the point of view of someone who had – however long before – once been an angel himself, and was a work-in-progress and therefore something Crowley could legitimately enter on his expense account. Buying lunch for an angel was not self-indulgence when you not only had an Arrangement with aforementioned angel but were intending to corrupt him. Eventually.
Which wasn’t to say that Aziraphale wasn’t irritating much of the time. He was. He had a way of making Crowley undo at least part of his best work that was extremely tiresome. Often, Crowley barely had time to enjoy a really good six car pile-up before Aziraphale was there looking at him hard until he found himself giving in and yet another newspaper headline being spawned about miracle escapes and unscathed babies. Crowley thought that if Aziraphale had spent a little more time having to wipe the snot from babies’ noses and breathing in the unspeakable odours of their nappies he would care a lot less about them being turned into infant pancakes into multi-vehicle pile-ups on the M4. But Aziraphale had never really got over exposure to the whole Away in a Manger event and tended to think of babies as small miracles, each one with the potential to do so much good. That was just one of the great gulfs of understanding between them, that Crowley rightly perceived each infant as a potential serial killer, whereas to Aziraphale they were always going to grow up to write symphonies or great novels or discover the next plague-averting batch of penicillin, rather than doing something inventive with a cheese wire. Even showing him baby photographs of the world’s great tyrants hadn’t yet cured Aziraphale of that optimism. Only when they were brought too close to his books did he perceive how unpleasant – and indeed sticky – they truly were.
Crowley looked around the room again. Illuminated manuscript of extraordinary significance and beauty once burned in the library of Alexandria subsequently rescued by a little time manipulation, nicely wrapped. Crowley looked at the wrapping again. Maybe not red paper. He waved a hand and it turned gold. Still a little tart’s boudoir-ish. Silver. Silver was usually safe. And a nice bow. Aziraphale would probably appreciate a bow. Very few things seemed too girly for Aziraphale. Making it all the more remarkable that in all these centuries he’d never…. He thought about Aziraphale wrapped in silver paper, with a bow, and Crowley unwrapping him with his teeth and darting agile forked tongue….
The temperature rose a little, annoying Crowley, who, as someone who had once been a snake, liked to think of himself as cold-blooded in both deed and internal thermostat. And here he was apparently getting as hot and bothered as a mortal contemplating what was, after all, no more than his job. Back to his check list. The wine was room temperature, the chocolates too, and the bedroom just the right temperature that the sheets would seem an optional extra. Everything was in place for some good old-fashioned corruption for which Crowley should receive a commendation, or possibly a visit from Hastur with the leg-breaking equipment. Only time would tell.
***
Aziraphale was not, of course, actually missing Crowley. There was just a vague sense of something absent that he would prefer to be present, a sort of yearning disquiet and sense of displacement and emptiness that had come upon him on the first day that Crowley had failed to turn up and suggest lunch, and that had grown in intensity in the ten days since. To take his mind off that odd sensation he had decided upon the Experiment.
All these years of trying to comprehend mortals, living among them, taking on their shape, and he had never actually been one. He had tried so many times to act just as they did, to make things from scratch, to share the many small inconveniences they suffered, but there was still this chasm of incomprehension that he longed to cross. Having to plug in a kettle to get it to boil, things like that. He had realized that, by an act of will, he could be mortal for a day, not an angel pretending to be one, and perhaps then he might understand them better.
The first flaw in the plan had made itself known to him about five minutes after he Changed. He could no longer unfurl his wings with a thought, and he was, to all intents and purposes, a mortal man, but unfortunately he was still Aziraphale. He still felt the presence of God’s grace in a way that no human being could. He remembered not only how the Garden had looked but the way the dew had sparkled on the petals in the morning. He had held a fiery sword and Spake when men, however hard they tried, could really only ever speak. He couldn’t think like a human when he knew himself to be an angel. He still felt exactly as he had done before, but he was less aware, half-deafened and blinded by his self-imposed mortality. The difference between himself and a human being that he knew how very muffled and inadequate his mortal senses were.
The second flaw had revealed itself at eleven ten precisely when he was sipping a cup of tea and eating a digestive biscuit. In the balance between Good and Evil, he was no longer pulling his angelic weight. Looking out of the window of the bookshop, he saw a cat run under the wheels of a car. Normally a flick of his fingers would have guaranteed its safety, but this time when he flicked his fingers nothing happened. He wondered if perhaps those Above were trying to teach him a lesson about why Angels were angels and Mortals mortal, and that was why they had let his particular metaphysical chemistry experiment take place. The cat had apparently thrown away one of its nine lives to save its skin and had emerged unscathed on the far pavement but it had still left him shaken to be impotent in the face of possible tragedy. He felt naked and vulnerable without even the sensation of his wings. True, they were normally not visible but he could still feel the place where they were waiting to be.
The third flaw revealed itself at three thirty two when he had been feeling that odd lowering of his spirits that always followed yet another lunchtime in which Crowley failed to make an appearance. That was when Hastur and Ligur boiled up from the basement in a sizzle of hellfire and brimstone and looked at him the way small unpleasant boys upon whom demons had worked their wiles too well looked upon flies whose wings they intended to pull off. As he attempted to unfurl his in a dazzling shimmer of angelic power and nothing happened except that his baggy sweater sprang a few more pulled threads, Aziraphale realized that of all the days he had picked to make himself mortal and vulnerable to the whims of pitiless demons, today had been the worst.
***
Crowley was not quite sure why he had brought the bouquet of red roses other than that Aziraphale was fairly girly and girls liked flowers. ‘Girly’ was his current favoured word of choice to describe the angel. It was a little redolent of the playground, unfortunately, but it also could be said with just the right lip curl and forked tongue flicker. There was a time when the word ‘angelic’ would have conjured enough of a sneer. Also ‘virtuous’, ‘good’, and ‘innocent’ but, unfortunately, too long exposure to Aziraphale had diluted some of his ability to sneer at those concepts. Even phrases like ‘dusty bookworm who wouldn’t know how to have a life if one manifested itself in his bathroom playing a tuba’ had lost some of their satisfying sting of late. If he was not very careful ‘angelic’ could even begin to seem like an acceptable thing.
He had the Bentley take him to Aziraphale’s shop, the tape playing ‘Killer Queen’ very loudly as it did so. Moët et Chandon. Probably better than the Cabernet Sauvignon. Crowley waved his hand and back in his apartment the ferns stood up a little straighter, spreading out their greenery nervously while a solid silver ice bucket appeared wrapped around a bottle of vintage champagne. The ice, of course, would not even think about melting, however long it took to persuade Aziraphale to come home with him. The angel was usually fairly manageable. Crowley only had to threaten to set a few passersby on fire if the angel didn’t thwart him where Crowley wanted to be thwarted to get his own way on most days. Of course, Aziraphale usually made him pay for it later, calming domestic tensions that Crowley had been carefully cranking up for days, putting it in the head of a thuggish husband to buy his wife flowers and chocolates on the day when Crowley had fully expected her to snap and crack him around the head with a nice heavy spanner. But that was the nature of the Arrangement. There had to be some give and take.
That was why when Crowley had invented email spam, Aziraphale had countered with keyboards for the blind. Crowley had invented the summer blockbuster and its emphasis on Things Exploding and Aziraphale had persuaded people that they really did want to watch documentaries about penguins. For every Michael Bay there was a Mike Leigh; for every telemarketer an organic farmer. But that had always been the way things were between them. Crowley invented Macdonalds. Aziraphale invented Fair Trade chocolate. Crowley had actually taken credit for the chocolate himself, pointing out to his masters Below that something that appeared to be helping itinerant coffee bean pickers but which actually gave the eater diabetes and heightened blood pressure deserved a commendation at least. Aziraphale had positively pouted when Crowley had crowed over him about that one. Aziraphale looked pretty when he pouted. Which was probably due to him being a girly angel and all that white-winged nonsense. Crowley didn’t believe that looking pretty was necessary for a demon. He believed in looking cool and hot and handsome and terrifying and seductive, not blithering about untidily in tweed, sipping tea, and fussing over first editions.
But, my dear boy, how can you possible hope to be both cool and hot…?
Trust me, Angel, I just can.
Aziraphale hid the prettiness fairly well, of course, it was concealed under a layer of frumpy bad dressing, dust from a bookshop that was never disturbed with cleaning, wire-rimmed spectacles, and far too much tweed. There was also the small matter of his being so hopelessly out of date that he probably thought the waltz was rather daring and would get his pulse raised by a polka. But behind the glass lenses were eyes of a blue that was downright celestial. He was extraordinarily clumsy for an angel and had never learned to glide with serpentine grace, although with his wings unfurled he could be rather…magnificent. In a girly angelic sort of way. Demons were so much more striking with their wings outspread, and golden snake eyes so much more impressive on the old masters. Aziraphale had briefly owned a fiery sword, it was true, and had made a pretty good show of looking all implacable and right wrothly…for about five minutes. The truth was that too many years in the company of humans had corrupted him. But that didn’t mean that a demon shouldn’t take the credit for his corruption.
It wasn’t as if he wanted Aziraphale to fall. Falling was painful; landing even more so. Aziraphale couldn’t possibly manage in all that brimstone and sulphur, it would affect his sinuses, not to mention the screams of souls in torment would be bound to distress him, and before anyone knew it he would be wandering around…There trying to cheer everyone up and do Good. What would be done to Aziraphale by ravening hell-beasts if he were caught trying to ameliorate everyone’s suffering and organize a sing-a-long, or a mobile library for the souls in torment didn’t even bear contemplation. So, no, this wasn’t about making him Fall, this was about Crowley getting a commendation for seducing one of the messengers of Him Upstairs and Aziraphale getting a commendation for really taking one for the team in his efforts to thwart one of the demonic hordes of the Fallen. The way Crowley saw it they would both get a gold star and Aziraphale would get a wake up call about the way things really were between them. Or should be between them if one of them wasn’t an angel who, despite all these millennia of wearing a human form still don’t know how to use all of his body parts.
Crowley had tried enough times to get the angel clued in. He had turned several of his rare first editions into The Joy of Gay Sex, with some extra chapters on angelic-demon interaction, but Aziraphale had always just ‘tutted’ and turned them back without even looking at the pictures, let alone the pop-up version, or the extra-detailed pull out on page 76. That was one of the problems of their relationship. Crowley had spent so many centuries being mildly irritating, that Aziraphale couldn’t tell when he was actually trying to communicate with him as opposed to chipping away at his angelic patience like rainwater on a rock. He had taken Aziraphale to the wrong kind of cinemas, turned his copy of The Sound of Music into Biker Boys Do It Triumphantly, and ‘accidentally’ had them both manifest in a brothel on more than one occasion. In Crowley’s fantasies, of course, Aziraphale usually bought a clue at this point and started to get a little hot under his tweed collar, but Aziraphale had always presumed Crowley was just being obstructive or annoying and had done no more than roll his eyes and change everything back. He had also retaliated by turning Crowley’s porn collection into a three-hundred part collect-and-keep series on fair isle knitting. That, as Crowley had pointed out to him at the time, had been far from angelic behaviour although Aziraphale had insisted he was just trying to expand Crowley’s mind to the myriad possibilities of chunky knitwear.
The Bentley pulled up near the kerb outside the bookshop, which, as usual, had windows so dusty Crowley could barely see through them and a sign saying ‘Closed’ with the kind of emphasis that suggested the shop had never actually been open in living memory. Angelic, Aziraphale undoubtedly was, but welcoming to people who might dare to actually buy his books he was not. Sometimes Crowley liked to molest the corners of a paperback just because. He also enjoyed placing opened books face down so their spines would creak and putting hot mugs on top of their dust covers so they would leave semi-circular stains. It was always enjoyable to watch Aziraphale petting and soothing a book so egregiously treated as if it were a retarded hamster.
The door hastened to open for him before he Did something to it and then the smell hit him. The stench of sulphur and brimstone. The awareness of evil.
“Demonssss….” Crowley hissed. And then another scent caught at his throat. Blood. Human blood. No. Angelic blood.
His wings unfurled before he had finished the thought and he charged into the back room on a sulphur gust of hellish rage. Information threw itself at him like a penitent begging for mercy. Hastur and Ligur, and Aziraphale held down between them, their naked victim bleeding from a dozen vicious claw wounds and burns, many of them in the shape of demonic symbols that would cause him the maximum pain, his angelic essence so reduced it was a single spot of brightness in the centre of his being. He hadn’t made any attempt to turn into his angelic form, no wings, just a nude human body, the floor covered in torn fragments of blood-stained tweed. His glasses were shattered on the floor, their wire frames twisted. Hastur was still holding one of the broken lenses and had been using it to cut a burning sigil into Aziraphale’s chest.
Crowley uttered a snarl so demonic that Hastur, of all demons, dropped the piece of glass. Rage lifted him up into the air and Crowley hovered over them wings beating. “Get away from him, you sulphur breathing scum!”
“You don’t tell us what to do!” Ligur shouted, but the waves of demonic fury emanating from Crowley seemed to be unnerving him all the same. Even Hastur looked far less smug and satisfied than could normally have been expected.
“Torturing angels is what we do by order of Himself,” Hastur snapped.
Crowley brandished a piece of parchment glowing with the writhing sigils of demonic script. “I have the paperwork!” he snarled. “Ssssigned in triplicate. He’sss mine.” The parchment had not existed a moment ago, of course. Given a few days Crowley could have forged a permit for the Corruption of an Angelic Body by Means Dark, Dastardly and Demonic that would have passed most inspections, but fuelled by pure unadulterated demonic rage he had created one so perfect that he would have dared Beezelbub himself to find a flaw in it. He took off his sunglasses so they could see the glow of his serpent eyes, tongue flickering out to taste the blood on the air as he hissed: “He’sss my angel. He belongsss to me.”
Hastur took one look at the seal Crowley had transfixed to the parchment and paled in fear. He backed away from the bleeding angel at once. “Nobody told us. He changed. We felt it. Turned human. How were we to know you were going to corrupt him?”
“Because I filed it with the Demonic Hall of Records and you should have checked the paperwork! Seduction of, Angel of other than the tenth choir, formally submitted by Crowley, AJ, faithful servant of the lower realms!”
“The paperwork is never where it’s meant to be!” Ligur whined.
“I bet you didn’t even look in the filing cabinets!” Crowley retorted. “Now, look at him! It’s going to take more than a gypsy violin and some crème caramel to get him corrupted now, isn’t it? Do you know how many millennia I’ve been setting this up? Get out of my dimension and don’t ever come back!” The rage was still so raw, a blast of demonic fire flowing through his veins, that it was no lie at all to roar out at them all that savagery and hatred. They recoiled from it as if he were a spray of holy water, cringing away from his bared teeth and glowing yellow eyes. Then, at last, they were gone in another crackle of smoke and sulphur, and he was cradling Aziraphale’s tortured body in his arms.
He said his name gently and Aziraphale’s eyelashes fluttered and the absurdly blue eyes gazed up at him. Crowley waited for him to flinch in fear because after torture by two sadistic demons, the arms of another demon must be the last place in which Aziraphale wanted to find himself, but Aziraphale gave a little smile of relief and said: “I knew you’d come.” As he passed out again, Crowley wondered what he should be the most upset about – an angel having all that trust in his eyes when he looked at him or that spasm of entirely undemonic emotion he’d felt when he beheld it.
He let his wings shrink back out of sight and lifted Aziraphale up into his arms, carrying him through the crunch of broken glass and suck and slurp of spilled blood out of the dusty interior of the shop and into the Bentley.
***
Traffic was shoved unceremoniously out of his way; so were roundabouts and inconveniently sharp bends as the Bentley screamed back towards Crowley’s flat so fast that its tyres smoked. The apartment building also took care to widen its doorways so that no part of Aziraphale was scraped as Crowley marched implacably through; stairwells groaning as they stretched themselves a foot wider to accommodate the angel’s bare toes. No one saw them, of course. Crowley was still in a red mist of possessive fury and would have fried any human on the spot who had even thought about seeing Aziraphale all naked and mortal. He was still seething from the horror of seeing those other demons touching his angel as if Aziraphale were any other messenger of…Him. The only demon allowed to torture Aziraphale was Crowley and he didn’t do it with broken glass and burning sigils, he did it by paperback abuse and malicious damage to library books. That was the only kind of torment to which Aziraphale should be subjected and even then it was usually considered polite to buy him lunch afterwards.
The locked door to Crowley’s flat hastily unlocked itself and sprang open in the manner of a guard standing to attention as Crowley swept into the room. The stereo, either suicidal or just very flustered, began playing the fourteenth century lute music that Crowley had selected earlier for Aziraphale’s seduction. The gaze Crowley turned upon it was awful indeed but Aziraphale saved it from instant incineration by opening his eyes again and murmuring: “I always liked this tune.”
Crowley placed him on the bed, holding Aziraphale’s head up until he could slip an Egyptian cotton pillow beneath it – the bed had very sensibly changed itself from black silk to something the angel would find more fitting. The handcuffs that Crowley had been keeping under the pillow in case he got really lucky or Aziraphale got really drunk – so drunk he couldn’t remember how to sober himself up – hastily scuttled out from under the pillow and took refuge under the bed.
Laid out on Crowley’s bed, the angel looked much smaller than he should have done. Even if he had still been maintaining human form, his wings would have been occupying a space of which only Crowley and Aziraphale were aware, yet they were disconcertingly missing and his angelic essence had shrunk to the point where it was something that Crowley could barely sense. To all intents and purposes Aziraphale was…human.
The demon looked in horror at the wounds all over Aziraphale’s soft pale body. “Angel, what were you thinking?” he demanded.
Aziraphale looked up at him again. “Please, dear boy, don’t be angry…”
“I’m not ‘angry’, I’m furious! You must have been out of your mind, playing at being a human like that!”
“I just wanted to know how it felt.” Aziraphale closed his eyes, clearly exhausted with the pain of so many bleeding and smouldering wounds. Some of them were still sizzling quietly as the sigils glowed spitefully.
“How did it feel?” He was curious, despite himself.
A shudder ran delicately through Aziraphale’s bleeding body. “Powerless, almost deaf, almost blind, sensing so little of the world around me, and – very, very painful.”
“I’ll do what I can.” He kept waiting for Gabriel or Raphael or one of the other sanctimonious killjoys from Upstairs to turn up, waving a fiery implement, and demanding that Aziraphale discorporate himself for dabbling in mortality without a proper licence. But he wasn’t sure how much he, as a demon, could do to help. The first aid kit was not going to be enough here. The marks Hastur and Ligir had burned into Aziraphale’s flesh were still eating their way into his angelic essence, causing him so much pain he would never be able to heal himself, even supposing he had the strength left to turn himself back into an angel. Shivering inside at the prospect of what he was going to have to do, Crowley nevertheless picked up Aziraphale and carried him into the bathroom, where he propped him up in the shower. “I’ll be right back.” Pressing a kiss to the angel’s forehead seemed somehow perfectly natural.
He fetched the first aid kit and very gingerly lifted down the bottle of holy water, donning his special Chernobyl reactor strength gloves before he cautiously unstoppered it. Holding the terrifying stuff out in front of him, he leant into the shower and poured some of the sizzling purity of it onto those demonic marks. A thin wail rose from Aziraphale’s skin as the sigils were counteracted. Crowley coughed, trying not to choke on the appalling odour of sanctity that filled the air, but kept pouring. The holy water was washing the demonic wounds away at any rate. He could feel his fingers trembling with fear even as he sloshed the liquid onto the squirming sigils, but the burning marks were disappearing and Aziraphale was giving little gasps of relief as each one vanished.
Aziraphale was still covered in wounds, of course. Although there had been something vaguely scientific in the sigil inscribing, much of the attack had evidently consisted of the old fashioned underworld practice of ‘giving an angel a good kicking’ and their clawmarks were all over Aziraphale’s ribs, many of which they seemed to have broken and his left arm was painfully twisted out of shape. He was also bruised and cut in a dozen places where they had evidently smacked him around just because he wasn’t capable of fighting back.
“You have to promise me you’ll never do this again,” Crowley scolded as he held the empty bottle of holy water at arm’s length and dropped it into the pedal bin. He shook the gloves off after it, very relieved to let the lid slam down on the deadly liquid and the gloves that had touched it. Turning the shower dial to ‘warm’ he let the not-in-any-way-holy water pour down over Aziraphale who gasped and whimpered as it stung his many cuts.
“I promise, I promise…” Aziraphale managed breathlessly. “But I was just so curious….”
“You’re not here to empathize with them. You’re here to thwart me from tempting them. So, no more of that nonsense.”
He finished washing off all of the holy water then wrapped Aziraphale in the miraculously soft and fluffy white bath towel that hastily leapt into his arms, thinking how curiously light he seemed without the weight of his invisible wings. He had never realized how airy and insubstantial human beings were. He carried him back to the bed – the sheets had, of course, changed themselves for clean ones while he was in the bathroom, and he laid him down on it very gently, then opened the first aid kit. He had no idea if a demon could heal an angel. It really made no sense that he could do so, but Aziraphale couldn’t heal himself while he was still human and he wasn’t going to have strength enough to change back while so wounded.
Looking at Aziraphale he wondered that he had ever thought about trying to change their relationship. All thoughts of sweaty nakedness had receded. He just wanted Aziraphale to get his angelic form back and putter about in his bookshop, subtly putting off customers and enjoying his first editions. This was his only friend and the thought of being without him was so uniquely painful that he would honestly have preferred evisceration. He reached out and took Aziraphale’s right hand in his left, interlacing their fingers – Aziraphale automatically tightened his grip in response – then he thought about how much Aziraphale meant to him, how fond he had become of him, that was how much had come to like or rather…oh to There with it…how much he loved him….
At once he felt it, the glow of what he had once been flowing into Aziraphale; the healing essence of an angel, however fallen, the pure golden strength of love. Aziraphale gasped and twisted, spine arching, not in pain but in something that looked remarkably close to…ecstasy. Crowley concentrated on thinking pure loving thoughts of friendship but it wasn’t easy with Aziraphale arching ever more extravagantly as the wounds healed all over his body. When the towel burst into flame and turned into not ash but white petals, Crowley was only mildly surprised. And then Aziraphale’s angelic essence came rushing back, Crowley felt the weight of it flowing into him even as he tightened his grip on his hand, and then Aziraphale’s wings were springing out as his arm straightened itself, his skin taking on a pale golden glow that was entirely lickable…er…admirable. But the purity of his love was possibly somewhat tainted now and he reluctantly released his hand, still looking, though, as Aziraphale arched again, and his no doubt still-human genitalia blossomed into burning awareness of every cell of his angelic body.
Crowley felt something ripple through his own body as he beheld Aziraphale’s, a warmth like the best old brandy ever sipped, and he could not have looked away if a messenger from Below had been threatening him with a burning pitchfork. There was a moment when Crowley just drank him in, his angelic beauty briefly undisguised and then Aziraphale’s eyes opened and he looked down at himself – and particularly at his erection – and said in some embarrassment. “Oh dear…”
“Don’t apologize,” Crowley told him. “I’m just glad to see you’re…yourself again.”
Aziraphale looked at him in confusion, blue eyes blinking curiously. “Crowley, is there any particular reason why you’re naked? And why your wings are out?”
Crowley looked down at himself and realized that his genitalia had evidently felt the need to make its presence known too, and was straining towards Aziraphale’s like a divining rod to water. “No reason,” he muttered, hastily lowering his wings and thinking himself back into some clothes. “Just…showing some solidarity.”
“Very solid,” Aziraphale murmured in fascination. “Positively…weighty.”
Crowley hastily added a long coat as he realized that his shirt wasn’t quite concealing that uncomfortable bulge in his leather trousers. “Size isn’t important.”
Aziraphale gazed up at Crowley’s face with an expression in his eyes that an angel should surely never wear when beholding a demon. “You saved me.”
Crowley sat down on the bed, unable to look anywhere else for the moment and not quite able to find the words to order all that skin and those faintly undulating white wings covered up. He didn’t meet his eyes. “If you hadn’t been acting like such an idiot I wouldn’t have needed to.”
“But the point is you did.” Aziraphale sat up with far more than his usual grace, his wings still shivering faintly, not unlike the way a human body shivered with the aftershocks of…
Crowley swallowed hard. “Don’t you think you should put some clothes on, Angel?” he demanded as harshly as he could. “You’ll catch your death.” One of his hands seemed intent on straying towards a long leg and a smooth thigh.
Aziraphale blinked in rather adorable confusion. “I’m immortal. Again. Thanks to you.”
Again with the thanks, and the looking out of the big eyes and the persistent nudity! “Demon, remember?” Crowley said through gritted teeth. “Riddled with baser urges.”
The wings gave another shivering little flicker and the angelic erection showed no sign of subsiding. “You saved me with…”
Crowley sprang to his feet, realizing that his wings were out once more and he had once again accidentally shed his clothes. “You know what? You are a girl. A total girl. Because with everyone else it’s porn or alcohol or both but, no, not them, they’re the only subsection of a species since the first thingummys crawled out of the whatever…”
“Amoeba?” Aziraphale offered helpfully. “Ocean? Although, I think it is rather futile to not be a Creationist when one is technically a creature of the higher or lower realms, don’t you? I mean we were there right after, in the Garden…”
“Yes, thank you, I do remember. I’m just saying that women are the only species in any dimension, angelic or demonic, who are turned on by being told ‘I…’” There was that word again. “I mean by someone telling them…”
“I love you.” Aziraphale wrapped an arm around Crowley’s neck and kissed him on the lips with a mouth that was soft and delicious and yet not at all girly. It was, in fact, wholly angelic.
“You’re an angel,” Crowley muttered. “You love everyone.”
“You don’t.” Aziraphale gazed into his eyes in a happy shiny nauseating kind of way that Crowley knew should make him want to be violently ill and yet somehow made him feel all warm and…tingly. “But you do love…”
“Yes, all right, I admit it. You don’t need to keep banging on about it.”
Crowley realized that an even more effective way to silence his angel – and there was no way now in which Aziraphale was not entirely ‘his’ – was to kiss him, quite hard, on that angelic mouth, and did so, with a passionate tenderness that made his insides simultaneously curdle with embarrassment and squirm with pleasure. And then to do it again, lots more times, until their wings were entwined and so were their bodies and he discovered that angels did indeed taste like honey and ambrosia, and that when he held his angel in his arms to kiss him all the better, he smelt of lavender and the first fall of new spring rain.
The End
Fandom: Good Omens
Title: Best Laid Plans
Genre: m/m slash
Rating: R
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Summary: Crowley wants to seduce Aziraphale but Aziraphale has plans of his own that could have dangerous consequences.
DISCLAIMER: 'Good Omens' and the characters of Crowley and Aziraphale are the property of Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, who are both very spiffy and talented people, and was originally published by Victor Gollancz. I'm borrowing Crowley and Aziraphale illegally but will hastily wipe them off and return them if anyone notices. This fic is written for fun not profit.
Best Laid Plans
Crowley had been working on his justification for a few days now. No, actually, when he thought about it, he’d been working on it for a few weeks, months, no, ineffable it, centuries. But, there was nothing wrong with just running through it again: He was a demon. It was his job to tempt the unwary and deliver the innocent into sin. Any way he went over it, it seemed watertight to him. Demonic – check. Tempting – check. Unwary – double check. Innocent – triple check. Sin – oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. So, it was not in any way a departure from his demonic brief to – say, attempt to deliver an angel from his virtue via a nice dinner, rather excellent bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and silk-sheeted king size bed; especially if he were delivering aforementioned angel into the sinful pleasures of the immortal flesh. He would only be doing his job. If pressed – or say threatened with hellfire and eternal torment in the pits of Below – he could say that he had only been following orders. You couldn’t get much more Fallen than that.
In preparation, he had not been visiting Aziraphale recently. They had got into the habit of having lunch together, either in the lobbies of the better hotels or – if Aziraphale was choosing – the café at the British Museum. Crowley had dropped out of sight for ten days now and hoped that Aziraphale had been missing him as much as Crowley had been missing… Not that he was missing Aziraphale as such; being a demon it wasn’t very likely that he was going to pine for the company of an angel. Aziraphale was an acceptable companion because he had been around as long as Crowley had, didn’t need some tedious explanation to comprehend exactly how the Spanish Inquisition had looked from the point of view of someone who had – however long before – once been an angel himself, and was a work-in-progress and therefore something Crowley could legitimately enter on his expense account. Buying lunch for an angel was not self-indulgence when you not only had an Arrangement with aforementioned angel but were intending to corrupt him. Eventually.
Which wasn’t to say that Aziraphale wasn’t irritating much of the time. He was. He had a way of making Crowley undo at least part of his best work that was extremely tiresome. Often, Crowley barely had time to enjoy a really good six car pile-up before Aziraphale was there looking at him hard until he found himself giving in and yet another newspaper headline being spawned about miracle escapes and unscathed babies. Crowley thought that if Aziraphale had spent a little more time having to wipe the snot from babies’ noses and breathing in the unspeakable odours of their nappies he would care a lot less about them being turned into infant pancakes into multi-vehicle pile-ups on the M4. But Aziraphale had never really got over exposure to the whole Away in a Manger event and tended to think of babies as small miracles, each one with the potential to do so much good. That was just one of the great gulfs of understanding between them, that Crowley rightly perceived each infant as a potential serial killer, whereas to Aziraphale they were always going to grow up to write symphonies or great novels or discover the next plague-averting batch of penicillin, rather than doing something inventive with a cheese wire. Even showing him baby photographs of the world’s great tyrants hadn’t yet cured Aziraphale of that optimism. Only when they were brought too close to his books did he perceive how unpleasant – and indeed sticky – they truly were.
Crowley looked around the room again. Illuminated manuscript of extraordinary significance and beauty once burned in the library of Alexandria subsequently rescued by a little time manipulation, nicely wrapped. Crowley looked at the wrapping again. Maybe not red paper. He waved a hand and it turned gold. Still a little tart’s boudoir-ish. Silver. Silver was usually safe. And a nice bow. Aziraphale would probably appreciate a bow. Very few things seemed too girly for Aziraphale. Making it all the more remarkable that in all these centuries he’d never…. He thought about Aziraphale wrapped in silver paper, with a bow, and Crowley unwrapping him with his teeth and darting agile forked tongue….
The temperature rose a little, annoying Crowley, who, as someone who had once been a snake, liked to think of himself as cold-blooded in both deed and internal thermostat. And here he was apparently getting as hot and bothered as a mortal contemplating what was, after all, no more than his job. Back to his check list. The wine was room temperature, the chocolates too, and the bedroom just the right temperature that the sheets would seem an optional extra. Everything was in place for some good old-fashioned corruption for which Crowley should receive a commendation, or possibly a visit from Hastur with the leg-breaking equipment. Only time would tell.
***
Aziraphale was not, of course, actually missing Crowley. There was just a vague sense of something absent that he would prefer to be present, a sort of yearning disquiet and sense of displacement and emptiness that had come upon him on the first day that Crowley had failed to turn up and suggest lunch, and that had grown in intensity in the ten days since. To take his mind off that odd sensation he had decided upon the Experiment.
All these years of trying to comprehend mortals, living among them, taking on their shape, and he had never actually been one. He had tried so many times to act just as they did, to make things from scratch, to share the many small inconveniences they suffered, but there was still this chasm of incomprehension that he longed to cross. Having to plug in a kettle to get it to boil, things like that. He had realized that, by an act of will, he could be mortal for a day, not an angel pretending to be one, and perhaps then he might understand them better.
The first flaw in the plan had made itself known to him about five minutes after he Changed. He could no longer unfurl his wings with a thought, and he was, to all intents and purposes, a mortal man, but unfortunately he was still Aziraphale. He still felt the presence of God’s grace in a way that no human being could. He remembered not only how the Garden had looked but the way the dew had sparkled on the petals in the morning. He had held a fiery sword and Spake when men, however hard they tried, could really only ever speak. He couldn’t think like a human when he knew himself to be an angel. He still felt exactly as he had done before, but he was less aware, half-deafened and blinded by his self-imposed mortality. The difference between himself and a human being that he knew how very muffled and inadequate his mortal senses were.
The second flaw had revealed itself at eleven ten precisely when he was sipping a cup of tea and eating a digestive biscuit. In the balance between Good and Evil, he was no longer pulling his angelic weight. Looking out of the window of the bookshop, he saw a cat run under the wheels of a car. Normally a flick of his fingers would have guaranteed its safety, but this time when he flicked his fingers nothing happened. He wondered if perhaps those Above were trying to teach him a lesson about why Angels were angels and Mortals mortal, and that was why they had let his particular metaphysical chemistry experiment take place. The cat had apparently thrown away one of its nine lives to save its skin and had emerged unscathed on the far pavement but it had still left him shaken to be impotent in the face of possible tragedy. He felt naked and vulnerable without even the sensation of his wings. True, they were normally not visible but he could still feel the place where they were waiting to be.
The third flaw revealed itself at three thirty two when he had been feeling that odd lowering of his spirits that always followed yet another lunchtime in which Crowley failed to make an appearance. That was when Hastur and Ligur boiled up from the basement in a sizzle of hellfire and brimstone and looked at him the way small unpleasant boys upon whom demons had worked their wiles too well looked upon flies whose wings they intended to pull off. As he attempted to unfurl his in a dazzling shimmer of angelic power and nothing happened except that his baggy sweater sprang a few more pulled threads, Aziraphale realized that of all the days he had picked to make himself mortal and vulnerable to the whims of pitiless demons, today had been the worst.
***
Crowley was not quite sure why he had brought the bouquet of red roses other than that Aziraphale was fairly girly and girls liked flowers. ‘Girly’ was his current favoured word of choice to describe the angel. It was a little redolent of the playground, unfortunately, but it also could be said with just the right lip curl and forked tongue flicker. There was a time when the word ‘angelic’ would have conjured enough of a sneer. Also ‘virtuous’, ‘good’, and ‘innocent’ but, unfortunately, too long exposure to Aziraphale had diluted some of his ability to sneer at those concepts. Even phrases like ‘dusty bookworm who wouldn’t know how to have a life if one manifested itself in his bathroom playing a tuba’ had lost some of their satisfying sting of late. If he was not very careful ‘angelic’ could even begin to seem like an acceptable thing.
He had the Bentley take him to Aziraphale’s shop, the tape playing ‘Killer Queen’ very loudly as it did so. Moët et Chandon. Probably better than the Cabernet Sauvignon. Crowley waved his hand and back in his apartment the ferns stood up a little straighter, spreading out their greenery nervously while a solid silver ice bucket appeared wrapped around a bottle of vintage champagne. The ice, of course, would not even think about melting, however long it took to persuade Aziraphale to come home with him. The angel was usually fairly manageable. Crowley only had to threaten to set a few passersby on fire if the angel didn’t thwart him where Crowley wanted to be thwarted to get his own way on most days. Of course, Aziraphale usually made him pay for it later, calming domestic tensions that Crowley had been carefully cranking up for days, putting it in the head of a thuggish husband to buy his wife flowers and chocolates on the day when Crowley had fully expected her to snap and crack him around the head with a nice heavy spanner. But that was the nature of the Arrangement. There had to be some give and take.
That was why when Crowley had invented email spam, Aziraphale had countered with keyboards for the blind. Crowley had invented the summer blockbuster and its emphasis on Things Exploding and Aziraphale had persuaded people that they really did want to watch documentaries about penguins. For every Michael Bay there was a Mike Leigh; for every telemarketer an organic farmer. But that had always been the way things were between them. Crowley invented Macdonalds. Aziraphale invented Fair Trade chocolate. Crowley had actually taken credit for the chocolate himself, pointing out to his masters Below that something that appeared to be helping itinerant coffee bean pickers but which actually gave the eater diabetes and heightened blood pressure deserved a commendation at least. Aziraphale had positively pouted when Crowley had crowed over him about that one. Aziraphale looked pretty when he pouted. Which was probably due to him being a girly angel and all that white-winged nonsense. Crowley didn’t believe that looking pretty was necessary for a demon. He believed in looking cool and hot and handsome and terrifying and seductive, not blithering about untidily in tweed, sipping tea, and fussing over first editions.
But, my dear boy, how can you possible hope to be both cool and hot…?
Trust me, Angel, I just can.
Aziraphale hid the prettiness fairly well, of course, it was concealed under a layer of frumpy bad dressing, dust from a bookshop that was never disturbed with cleaning, wire-rimmed spectacles, and far too much tweed. There was also the small matter of his being so hopelessly out of date that he probably thought the waltz was rather daring and would get his pulse raised by a polka. But behind the glass lenses were eyes of a blue that was downright celestial. He was extraordinarily clumsy for an angel and had never learned to glide with serpentine grace, although with his wings unfurled he could be rather…magnificent. In a girly angelic sort of way. Demons were so much more striking with their wings outspread, and golden snake eyes so much more impressive on the old masters. Aziraphale had briefly owned a fiery sword, it was true, and had made a pretty good show of looking all implacable and right wrothly…for about five minutes. The truth was that too many years in the company of humans had corrupted him. But that didn’t mean that a demon shouldn’t take the credit for his corruption.
It wasn’t as if he wanted Aziraphale to fall. Falling was painful; landing even more so. Aziraphale couldn’t possibly manage in all that brimstone and sulphur, it would affect his sinuses, not to mention the screams of souls in torment would be bound to distress him, and before anyone knew it he would be wandering around…There trying to cheer everyone up and do Good. What would be done to Aziraphale by ravening hell-beasts if he were caught trying to ameliorate everyone’s suffering and organize a sing-a-long, or a mobile library for the souls in torment didn’t even bear contemplation. So, no, this wasn’t about making him Fall, this was about Crowley getting a commendation for seducing one of the messengers of Him Upstairs and Aziraphale getting a commendation for really taking one for the team in his efforts to thwart one of the demonic hordes of the Fallen. The way Crowley saw it they would both get a gold star and Aziraphale would get a wake up call about the way things really were between them. Or should be between them if one of them wasn’t an angel who, despite all these millennia of wearing a human form still don’t know how to use all of his body parts.
Crowley had tried enough times to get the angel clued in. He had turned several of his rare first editions into The Joy of Gay Sex, with some extra chapters on angelic-demon interaction, but Aziraphale had always just ‘tutted’ and turned them back without even looking at the pictures, let alone the pop-up version, or the extra-detailed pull out on page 76. That was one of the problems of their relationship. Crowley had spent so many centuries being mildly irritating, that Aziraphale couldn’t tell when he was actually trying to communicate with him as opposed to chipping away at his angelic patience like rainwater on a rock. He had taken Aziraphale to the wrong kind of cinemas, turned his copy of The Sound of Music into Biker Boys Do It Triumphantly, and ‘accidentally’ had them both manifest in a brothel on more than one occasion. In Crowley’s fantasies, of course, Aziraphale usually bought a clue at this point and started to get a little hot under his tweed collar, but Aziraphale had always presumed Crowley was just being obstructive or annoying and had done no more than roll his eyes and change everything back. He had also retaliated by turning Crowley’s porn collection into a three-hundred part collect-and-keep series on fair isle knitting. That, as Crowley had pointed out to him at the time, had been far from angelic behaviour although Aziraphale had insisted he was just trying to expand Crowley’s mind to the myriad possibilities of chunky knitwear.
The Bentley pulled up near the kerb outside the bookshop, which, as usual, had windows so dusty Crowley could barely see through them and a sign saying ‘Closed’ with the kind of emphasis that suggested the shop had never actually been open in living memory. Angelic, Aziraphale undoubtedly was, but welcoming to people who might dare to actually buy his books he was not. Sometimes Crowley liked to molest the corners of a paperback just because. He also enjoyed placing opened books face down so their spines would creak and putting hot mugs on top of their dust covers so they would leave semi-circular stains. It was always enjoyable to watch Aziraphale petting and soothing a book so egregiously treated as if it were a retarded hamster.
The door hastened to open for him before he Did something to it and then the smell hit him. The stench of sulphur and brimstone. The awareness of evil.
“Demonssss….” Crowley hissed. And then another scent caught at his throat. Blood. Human blood. No. Angelic blood.
His wings unfurled before he had finished the thought and he charged into the back room on a sulphur gust of hellish rage. Information threw itself at him like a penitent begging for mercy. Hastur and Ligur, and Aziraphale held down between them, their naked victim bleeding from a dozen vicious claw wounds and burns, many of them in the shape of demonic symbols that would cause him the maximum pain, his angelic essence so reduced it was a single spot of brightness in the centre of his being. He hadn’t made any attempt to turn into his angelic form, no wings, just a nude human body, the floor covered in torn fragments of blood-stained tweed. His glasses were shattered on the floor, their wire frames twisted. Hastur was still holding one of the broken lenses and had been using it to cut a burning sigil into Aziraphale’s chest.
Crowley uttered a snarl so demonic that Hastur, of all demons, dropped the piece of glass. Rage lifted him up into the air and Crowley hovered over them wings beating. “Get away from him, you sulphur breathing scum!”
“You don’t tell us what to do!” Ligur shouted, but the waves of demonic fury emanating from Crowley seemed to be unnerving him all the same. Even Hastur looked far less smug and satisfied than could normally have been expected.
“Torturing angels is what we do by order of Himself,” Hastur snapped.
Crowley brandished a piece of parchment glowing with the writhing sigils of demonic script. “I have the paperwork!” he snarled. “Ssssigned in triplicate. He’sss mine.” The parchment had not existed a moment ago, of course. Given a few days Crowley could have forged a permit for the Corruption of an Angelic Body by Means Dark, Dastardly and Demonic that would have passed most inspections, but fuelled by pure unadulterated demonic rage he had created one so perfect that he would have dared Beezelbub himself to find a flaw in it. He took off his sunglasses so they could see the glow of his serpent eyes, tongue flickering out to taste the blood on the air as he hissed: “He’sss my angel. He belongsss to me.”
Hastur took one look at the seal Crowley had transfixed to the parchment and paled in fear. He backed away from the bleeding angel at once. “Nobody told us. He changed. We felt it. Turned human. How were we to know you were going to corrupt him?”
“Because I filed it with the Demonic Hall of Records and you should have checked the paperwork! Seduction of, Angel of other than the tenth choir, formally submitted by Crowley, AJ, faithful servant of the lower realms!”
“The paperwork is never where it’s meant to be!” Ligur whined.
“I bet you didn’t even look in the filing cabinets!” Crowley retorted. “Now, look at him! It’s going to take more than a gypsy violin and some crème caramel to get him corrupted now, isn’t it? Do you know how many millennia I’ve been setting this up? Get out of my dimension and don’t ever come back!” The rage was still so raw, a blast of demonic fire flowing through his veins, that it was no lie at all to roar out at them all that savagery and hatred. They recoiled from it as if he were a spray of holy water, cringing away from his bared teeth and glowing yellow eyes. Then, at last, they were gone in another crackle of smoke and sulphur, and he was cradling Aziraphale’s tortured body in his arms.
He said his name gently and Aziraphale’s eyelashes fluttered and the absurdly blue eyes gazed up at him. Crowley waited for him to flinch in fear because after torture by two sadistic demons, the arms of another demon must be the last place in which Aziraphale wanted to find himself, but Aziraphale gave a little smile of relief and said: “I knew you’d come.” As he passed out again, Crowley wondered what he should be the most upset about – an angel having all that trust in his eyes when he looked at him or that spasm of entirely undemonic emotion he’d felt when he beheld it.
He let his wings shrink back out of sight and lifted Aziraphale up into his arms, carrying him through the crunch of broken glass and suck and slurp of spilled blood out of the dusty interior of the shop and into the Bentley.
***
Traffic was shoved unceremoniously out of his way; so were roundabouts and inconveniently sharp bends as the Bentley screamed back towards Crowley’s flat so fast that its tyres smoked. The apartment building also took care to widen its doorways so that no part of Aziraphale was scraped as Crowley marched implacably through; stairwells groaning as they stretched themselves a foot wider to accommodate the angel’s bare toes. No one saw them, of course. Crowley was still in a red mist of possessive fury and would have fried any human on the spot who had even thought about seeing Aziraphale all naked and mortal. He was still seething from the horror of seeing those other demons touching his angel as if Aziraphale were any other messenger of…Him. The only demon allowed to torture Aziraphale was Crowley and he didn’t do it with broken glass and burning sigils, he did it by paperback abuse and malicious damage to library books. That was the only kind of torment to which Aziraphale should be subjected and even then it was usually considered polite to buy him lunch afterwards.
The locked door to Crowley’s flat hastily unlocked itself and sprang open in the manner of a guard standing to attention as Crowley swept into the room. The stereo, either suicidal or just very flustered, began playing the fourteenth century lute music that Crowley had selected earlier for Aziraphale’s seduction. The gaze Crowley turned upon it was awful indeed but Aziraphale saved it from instant incineration by opening his eyes again and murmuring: “I always liked this tune.”
Crowley placed him on the bed, holding Aziraphale’s head up until he could slip an Egyptian cotton pillow beneath it – the bed had very sensibly changed itself from black silk to something the angel would find more fitting. The handcuffs that Crowley had been keeping under the pillow in case he got really lucky or Aziraphale got really drunk – so drunk he couldn’t remember how to sober himself up – hastily scuttled out from under the pillow and took refuge under the bed.
Laid out on Crowley’s bed, the angel looked much smaller than he should have done. Even if he had still been maintaining human form, his wings would have been occupying a space of which only Crowley and Aziraphale were aware, yet they were disconcertingly missing and his angelic essence had shrunk to the point where it was something that Crowley could barely sense. To all intents and purposes Aziraphale was…human.
The demon looked in horror at the wounds all over Aziraphale’s soft pale body. “Angel, what were you thinking?” he demanded.
Aziraphale looked up at him again. “Please, dear boy, don’t be angry…”
“I’m not ‘angry’, I’m furious! You must have been out of your mind, playing at being a human like that!”
“I just wanted to know how it felt.” Aziraphale closed his eyes, clearly exhausted with the pain of so many bleeding and smouldering wounds. Some of them were still sizzling quietly as the sigils glowed spitefully.
“How did it feel?” He was curious, despite himself.
A shudder ran delicately through Aziraphale’s bleeding body. “Powerless, almost deaf, almost blind, sensing so little of the world around me, and – very, very painful.”
“I’ll do what I can.” He kept waiting for Gabriel or Raphael or one of the other sanctimonious killjoys from Upstairs to turn up, waving a fiery implement, and demanding that Aziraphale discorporate himself for dabbling in mortality without a proper licence. But he wasn’t sure how much he, as a demon, could do to help. The first aid kit was not going to be enough here. The marks Hastur and Ligir had burned into Aziraphale’s flesh were still eating their way into his angelic essence, causing him so much pain he would never be able to heal himself, even supposing he had the strength left to turn himself back into an angel. Shivering inside at the prospect of what he was going to have to do, Crowley nevertheless picked up Aziraphale and carried him into the bathroom, where he propped him up in the shower. “I’ll be right back.” Pressing a kiss to the angel’s forehead seemed somehow perfectly natural.
He fetched the first aid kit and very gingerly lifted down the bottle of holy water, donning his special Chernobyl reactor strength gloves before he cautiously unstoppered it. Holding the terrifying stuff out in front of him, he leant into the shower and poured some of the sizzling purity of it onto those demonic marks. A thin wail rose from Aziraphale’s skin as the sigils were counteracted. Crowley coughed, trying not to choke on the appalling odour of sanctity that filled the air, but kept pouring. The holy water was washing the demonic wounds away at any rate. He could feel his fingers trembling with fear even as he sloshed the liquid onto the squirming sigils, but the burning marks were disappearing and Aziraphale was giving little gasps of relief as each one vanished.
Aziraphale was still covered in wounds, of course. Although there had been something vaguely scientific in the sigil inscribing, much of the attack had evidently consisted of the old fashioned underworld practice of ‘giving an angel a good kicking’ and their clawmarks were all over Aziraphale’s ribs, many of which they seemed to have broken and his left arm was painfully twisted out of shape. He was also bruised and cut in a dozen places where they had evidently smacked him around just because he wasn’t capable of fighting back.
“You have to promise me you’ll never do this again,” Crowley scolded as he held the empty bottle of holy water at arm’s length and dropped it into the pedal bin. He shook the gloves off after it, very relieved to let the lid slam down on the deadly liquid and the gloves that had touched it. Turning the shower dial to ‘warm’ he let the not-in-any-way-holy water pour down over Aziraphale who gasped and whimpered as it stung his many cuts.
“I promise, I promise…” Aziraphale managed breathlessly. “But I was just so curious….”
“You’re not here to empathize with them. You’re here to thwart me from tempting them. So, no more of that nonsense.”
He finished washing off all of the holy water then wrapped Aziraphale in the miraculously soft and fluffy white bath towel that hastily leapt into his arms, thinking how curiously light he seemed without the weight of his invisible wings. He had never realized how airy and insubstantial human beings were. He carried him back to the bed – the sheets had, of course, changed themselves for clean ones while he was in the bathroom, and he laid him down on it very gently, then opened the first aid kit. He had no idea if a demon could heal an angel. It really made no sense that he could do so, but Aziraphale couldn’t heal himself while he was still human and he wasn’t going to have strength enough to change back while so wounded.
Looking at Aziraphale he wondered that he had ever thought about trying to change their relationship. All thoughts of sweaty nakedness had receded. He just wanted Aziraphale to get his angelic form back and putter about in his bookshop, subtly putting off customers and enjoying his first editions. This was his only friend and the thought of being without him was so uniquely painful that he would honestly have preferred evisceration. He reached out and took Aziraphale’s right hand in his left, interlacing their fingers – Aziraphale automatically tightened his grip in response – then he thought about how much Aziraphale meant to him, how fond he had become of him, that was how much had come to like or rather…oh to There with it…how much he loved him….
At once he felt it, the glow of what he had once been flowing into Aziraphale; the healing essence of an angel, however fallen, the pure golden strength of love. Aziraphale gasped and twisted, spine arching, not in pain but in something that looked remarkably close to…ecstasy. Crowley concentrated on thinking pure loving thoughts of friendship but it wasn’t easy with Aziraphale arching ever more extravagantly as the wounds healed all over his body. When the towel burst into flame and turned into not ash but white petals, Crowley was only mildly surprised. And then Aziraphale’s angelic essence came rushing back, Crowley felt the weight of it flowing into him even as he tightened his grip on his hand, and then Aziraphale’s wings were springing out as his arm straightened itself, his skin taking on a pale golden glow that was entirely lickable…er…admirable. But the purity of his love was possibly somewhat tainted now and he reluctantly released his hand, still looking, though, as Aziraphale arched again, and his no doubt still-human genitalia blossomed into burning awareness of every cell of his angelic body.
Crowley felt something ripple through his own body as he beheld Aziraphale’s, a warmth like the best old brandy ever sipped, and he could not have looked away if a messenger from Below had been threatening him with a burning pitchfork. There was a moment when Crowley just drank him in, his angelic beauty briefly undisguised and then Aziraphale’s eyes opened and he looked down at himself – and particularly at his erection – and said in some embarrassment. “Oh dear…”
“Don’t apologize,” Crowley told him. “I’m just glad to see you’re…yourself again.”
Aziraphale looked at him in confusion, blue eyes blinking curiously. “Crowley, is there any particular reason why you’re naked? And why your wings are out?”
Crowley looked down at himself and realized that his genitalia had evidently felt the need to make its presence known too, and was straining towards Aziraphale’s like a divining rod to water. “No reason,” he muttered, hastily lowering his wings and thinking himself back into some clothes. “Just…showing some solidarity.”
“Very solid,” Aziraphale murmured in fascination. “Positively…weighty.”
Crowley hastily added a long coat as he realized that his shirt wasn’t quite concealing that uncomfortable bulge in his leather trousers. “Size isn’t important.”
Aziraphale gazed up at Crowley’s face with an expression in his eyes that an angel should surely never wear when beholding a demon. “You saved me.”
Crowley sat down on the bed, unable to look anywhere else for the moment and not quite able to find the words to order all that skin and those faintly undulating white wings covered up. He didn’t meet his eyes. “If you hadn’t been acting like such an idiot I wouldn’t have needed to.”
“But the point is you did.” Aziraphale sat up with far more than his usual grace, his wings still shivering faintly, not unlike the way a human body shivered with the aftershocks of…
Crowley swallowed hard. “Don’t you think you should put some clothes on, Angel?” he demanded as harshly as he could. “You’ll catch your death.” One of his hands seemed intent on straying towards a long leg and a smooth thigh.
Aziraphale blinked in rather adorable confusion. “I’m immortal. Again. Thanks to you.”
Again with the thanks, and the looking out of the big eyes and the persistent nudity! “Demon, remember?” Crowley said through gritted teeth. “Riddled with baser urges.”
The wings gave another shivering little flicker and the angelic erection showed no sign of subsiding. “You saved me with…”
Crowley sprang to his feet, realizing that his wings were out once more and he had once again accidentally shed his clothes. “You know what? You are a girl. A total girl. Because with everyone else it’s porn or alcohol or both but, no, not them, they’re the only subsection of a species since the first thingummys crawled out of the whatever…”
“Amoeba?” Aziraphale offered helpfully. “Ocean? Although, I think it is rather futile to not be a Creationist when one is technically a creature of the higher or lower realms, don’t you? I mean we were there right after, in the Garden…”
“Yes, thank you, I do remember. I’m just saying that women are the only species in any dimension, angelic or demonic, who are turned on by being told ‘I…’” There was that word again. “I mean by someone telling them…”
“I love you.” Aziraphale wrapped an arm around Crowley’s neck and kissed him on the lips with a mouth that was soft and delicious and yet not at all girly. It was, in fact, wholly angelic.
“You’re an angel,” Crowley muttered. “You love everyone.”
“You don’t.” Aziraphale gazed into his eyes in a happy shiny nauseating kind of way that Crowley knew should make him want to be violently ill and yet somehow made him feel all warm and…tingly. “But you do love…”
“Yes, all right, I admit it. You don’t need to keep banging on about it.”
Crowley realized that an even more effective way to silence his angel – and there was no way now in which Aziraphale was not entirely ‘his’ – was to kiss him, quite hard, on that angelic mouth, and did so, with a passionate tenderness that made his insides simultaneously curdle with embarrassment and squirm with pleasure. And then to do it again, lots more times, until their wings were entwined and so were their bodies and he discovered that angels did indeed taste like honey and ambrosia, and that when he held his angel in his arms to kiss him all the better, he smelt of lavender and the first fall of new spring rain.
The End
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