Happy Holidays, thilia!
Title: Their Satanic Majesties Request
For: thilia
From: vulgarweed
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Request: Crowley/Aziraphale, AU - or not? Crowley is a rockstar, Aziraphale is his groupie. Any rating. combined with: UST (resolved in the end), getting-together fic rather than established relationship, angst, humour, smoking, drinking, possessiveness, focus on the romance part of the story, plot AND smut, dirty talk, flirting, witty banter, dub-con, seduction, kissing, first time, manipulative bastard!Crowley (but still sweet, in his way)
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley’s Arrangement stayed in comfortable stasis for a thousand years. It only took one decade to change it forever. (Crowley and Aziraphale do The Sixties--or do The Sixties do them?)
Warnings: Drug use and consensual sex under the influence.
Author’s Notes: Happy Holidays, thilia! I found that making Crowley a rock star was way easier than making Aziraphale a groupie, so I hope that my interpretation of that part of the prompt works for you in some way.
London, 1965: A Hard Day's Night
Swinging London's latest sensation propped his shiny, pointy boots up on a very expensive amplifier and settled in to have himself a pop-star-befitting sulk.
It had all started less than a year ago. Tony Crowley hadn't wanted to be a star, and that was the whole source of the problem. In fact, the whole business had started with a demeaning demonic demotion.
A crossroads demon? Really? That was what Hell wanted him to waste his considerable talents on? One soul at a time, tedious banter and pro forma bargaining, unreadable contracts that he'd nonetheless be forced to read lest some wannabe Daniel Webster should try to get clever?
WE THINK THIS 'MUSIC WITH ROCKS IN' THING WILL BE BIG, CROWLEY. IN FACT, WE'VE SEEN TO THAT OURSELVES. YOU JUST NEED TO, SHALL WE SAY, PICK THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT.
He'd be dealing with pimply tossers driven to the last resort in their desperate quest for what they most lacked-talent. He'd racked his brain for a moment, come up with a few half-remembered folk songs he'd never heard while sober, and finally, at last, dared to ask, "But aren't there sometimes, you know, duels? I can't carry a tune in a bucket."
WE THOUGHT OF THAT, CROWLEY.
And there it was, in his lap, rather painfully. Imported from the States, of course. Not just any guitar, but one that could inspire envy in hundreds of thousands from just one half-cocked twang on a dodgy scrap of tape. A sleek and flawless Fender Stratocaster, 1961, alder body and rosewood neck, in a colour the Americans called "candy-apple red." Not cheap even in the States; in darkest Newcastle you could expect a good honest working lad to have to spend a year pimping his mother for it. A beautiful, impressive object to prop in a corner and no mistake, but Crowley couldn't imagine himself doing much more than that with it.
Except for that distinctly unpleasant dump of knowledge directly into Crowley's head. He didn't even want to touch the strings after that; he suspected he knew exactly what would happen.
He spent weeks not touching it.
It stubbornly refused to gather dust.
No matter what sort of drab and unflattering lighting Crowley tried to throw at it, it always had attractive, tempting highlights and reflections in all the right places. Alder my arse, Crowley thought. That thing was made from the Tree.
He thought about selling it. But he'd have to touch it, and carry it, and take it to a shop. And he'd had enough experience with cursed objects to know that sort of thing never worked. He'd just have to sit there and let it glower, while the classical station he kept trying to turn to on his huge, sleek hi-fi cabinet kept reverting back to the latest head-pounding idiocy from Liverpool.
It had happened by accident, of course, in the stupidest possible way. He'd been having a splendid drunk all by himself, and he'd dropped his glass. And the glass didn't break but instead went rolling away towards the corner, and he'd chased it on hands and knees, with all the litheness and grace of a cat who has suffered several strokes, and reached out for it only to brush his cheek against the silky steel of strings. Which rang out with a silken indignation. By the time Crowley pressed his hand against them to steady the guitar from falling over into his face, they had asserted themselves, and seemed to all but grip his fingers with a sort of eldritch magnetism. The slightest flutter of his rubbery digits made it wail and chirp, notes bent into bluesy eloquence, a hint of a rhythm just waiting to be brought out lurking in the overtones.
Crowley picked it up, fully intending to smash it. But when he woke up a week later, it was lying in bed next to him. And his sleek and huge and expensive hi-fi set was playing nothing but American rhythm-and-blues. This was where most people started learning the devil's music, but Crowley had a more direct line.
***
He'd recorded two singles and played under assumed names on at least two dozen sessions before anyone noticed that, for all the spacious reverb and biting distortion on his guitar, he never actually bothered to plug it in.
The only session player who noticed was a thin, winsome-faced youth with a wicked way with a blues solo, whose first question was actually, "Are you related to Aleister Crowley, by any chance?"
Crowley sighed. It wasn't an uncommon question a few decades ago, but he'd been spared it for a while. "No," he sighed sulkily.
"Pity," said the young man. "Have you at least read Magick in Theory and Practice?"
"No." Best to keep it monosyllabic and not get pretty little Jimmy's hopes up for an actual conversation.
"Oh well. I find his ideas fascinating. Do you have any hash?"
Crowley supposed this was probably where he was supposed to start. "Do you know 'Crossroads Blues?'" he asked, and then winced.
"Of course," said pretty Jimmy, and started to play.
"Er...is there anything you want, kid?" Crowley asked awkwardly.
Jimmy shrugged. "A better amp. My own band with a real singer. Maybe some trousers with a dragon on. A fag if you got one."
Crowley started to get his mouth ready to make the proposition...but Jimmy's playing was getting in the way. A high, sharp, graceful keen, blue notes wrapped around his main line like ribbons on a Maypole. A whump of the tremolo like great wings landing.
Crowley suspected some other, sharper crossroads demon had got to him first. Even if not, Crowley just really had nothing further to add to what the kid could already do.
This particular session, for a fresh-faced folkie with delusions of mysticism, was a crowded one, full of silly ethnic instruments, too many guitarists, and a chamber group led by Crowley’s opposite number, the angel Aziraphale, whom Crowley had mostly managed to avoid successfully since the war.
(The reason for this avoidance had nothing whatsoever to do with fear of Heaven, and everything to do with horrifically inconvenient feelings that Crowley found himself in possession of when he encountered the angel looking uncharacteristically ragged and ruffled and a little bit singed. Lots of people went mad in the Blitz, he told himself. Can’t blame oneself.)
Aziraphale was exactly, completely, the perfect picture of a stuffy old Establishment classical-division record company man, all tweed and disdain and BBC-newscaster RP, and completely clueless about this new and raucous and primitive form of "bebop," just as Crowley might have expected. What Crowley hadn’t quite expected was the long sidelong glances as Crowley tried to beat pretty Jimmy at his own game. Was it because it was a surprise to see him playing guitar at all? Did he suspect Crowley of having a hand in inventing this noise? Or was it just that Crowley’s trousers were so stylishly tight?
In the middle of all of this, Crowley found himself thinking, there was something to be said for tweed. How ridiculous, surrounded by a musical style designed to get as close to pure raw sex as possible without actually putting orgasmic cries on tape, to get bored with all the pretty young things and be transfixed by a dumpy-out-of-style music director. He tried to imagine Aziraphale’s face framed by a ridiculous Beatle hairdo, just to calm himself down a little. It didn’t help, but it did make him want to giggle.
"So you’re in the rock racket now, angel?" he asked.
“It pays well, Crowley. And besides, cards on the table here, I was...encouraged to keep an eye on things.”
"On the watch for demonic activity, you mean? Well, now you’ve seen some. Here I am. You can go home now."
"Don’t be silly, Crowley, this is an ongoing commitment now. I thwart your wiles, you know that’s how it works."
"With a BBC string section?"
Aziraphale looked down at his outdated shoes with a little flash of a smile, his cheeks ever-so-slightly pink in the stark lights of the studio. "I used to have quite a good ear for music, I was told, back in the old days. They even made me choir director of the middle three Spheres for a time."
"But that’s nothing to do with rock’n’roll!" Crowley blurted, a little indignant for no reason he could properly explain, except that perhaps he was remembering, if not the very old days, at least a time when Aziraphale’s beloved orchestras could be subversive, and the way the angel had once reacted to the dramatic and terrifying new pieces coming out of Germany. Hair and feathers ruffled, and underneath the affronted conservatism, a certain hidden sense of thrill.
Aziraphale was capable of thrill. That had been a new revelation to Crowley, and it annoyed the scales right off him that the angel wasn’t feeling it now. If not this, then what?
"Not necessarily, no, but I have done some studio work that I think might convey a certain celestial flavour, if I say so myself. It turns out those Beatle lads are quite nice young men, when they settle down to the unglamourous business of putting notes together. Although that manager of theirs is ...rather forward."
Aziraphale’s blush deepened.
Crowley’s irritation spiked into a flash of actual rage.
London, 1966: Dedicated Follower of Fashion
"Ssshhee, it’s like this, Azziraphale. Young people aren’t the same as old people. They just aren’t. They don’t think the sssame. We forget, because....you know, time."
"We were young once, Crowley," Aziraphale said firmly, taking another sip of the sherry he’d managed to produce out of weak lager. The gyrating youths around them, and the racket around them in the club had proved a slight impairment on his miracling skills.
"No, we weren’t. Not like thisss. Cause these..." Crowley gestured limply around him, the ragged lace at his wrists trailing out of the sleeves of his burgundy velvet Nehru jacket, "they’re young....right? Yess. But they’re going to be old. Sssomeday. And they know it. And they say they wanna die before that happenss. But they don’t mean it because they don’t know what it meansss to die. And neither do we. Ssso we’re like them."
"You started out by arguing that we were nothing like them."
"Ssso I win the argument then! I’m ssoo good I can change my own mind."
"I’m sure I had a hand in that somewhere. Didn’t I?"
"No! I don’t need you! I can do this all by myssself. Now I’m up next. Gotta go play. Why are you here again?"
"Reporter for the NME this time, remember?" Aziraphale smirked, patting his notebook smugly. "That’s why I sobered up. Shouldn’t you do, before you go onstage?"
"Fuck no, I can’t possibly do this ssssober. You’re following me. You’re going to make fun of me."
"No, dear. I’m going to make fun of the Rolling Stones."
Crowley took stock of the angel’s attempt to fit into trousers that looked like they’d been scrounged from the trash heap at a sofa factory and sewn together by a tailor who’d been fired from Granny Takes a Trip for constant drunkenness. His gaze may well have lingered a little too long, and he compensated for this by turning away and abruptly striding off, feeling the particular burning, tingling sensation that angel stares can give, all the way backstage where his guitar waited and his band didn’t.
Fine. He was a demon, blessit, and he didn’t need anyone else. He and his guitar launched into a roar of jumpin’ R & B, and his hands went one way and his hips another, and the cigarette dangling from his lips started to set his long silk scarf on fire, and he didn’t care one blessed bit. How easy it would be, unhook the guitar strap, take its scrawny neck in his hands like he was strangling it, and just smash it against the amp, against the wall, against the stage. It’d probably make sparks. It might electrocute him if he were human. It would be so....
Aziraphale was watching him, silver-blue eyes reflecting the stagelights, knees slightly bouncing, lips parted as he tapped a pencil against them, unselfconsciously.
Crowley kept playing, resigned to watching nothing but the fusty angel’s eye movements. It was ridiculous.
His assignment was a seduction of a very specific type, and all he’d succeeded in doing was seducing himself into an embarrassing profession in public, and a completely inappropriate sort of hunger for the exactly wrong being in private.
He’d tried them all. All the young geniuses of the moment had crossed his path, and the only creatures they were interested in meeting at any crossroads were dope dealers, Hindu swamis, and girls with loose knickers.
He resolved he wasn’t going to get through this without seducing something.
London 1968: 2000 Light Years From Home
"Well, the presentation is half the game, really," Crowley sighed.
"What exactly is your game here, Crowley?" Aziraphale said in a horribly fond way.
Here was an exclusive suite high above London, where rock stars and their hangers-on moved about the variously appointed rooms, drinks in hand and birds on arms, in a glazed haze. Crowley had had to retreat when the conversation reached new heights of cosmic absurdity and cotton-candy ambition, and frankly, the heavy haze of pungent, green-smelling smoke had started to make his eyes water and his heart seem to beat strangely, as if it could stop at any time (which it could, and at times had done for years without Crowley so much as noticing), and had he ever really thought about it before?
And he’d turned around and come face to face with that piercing-eyed Marianne, and all he could find himself thinking about was, of all things, a Mars Bar. The tabloids started to move across his mind, and he was about to ask, "but wouldn’t it melt...?"
Crowley had only been a rock star for three and a half years, and already his social skills were falling apart.
But this realisation wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the one that what he felt when he turned again and felt Aziraphale at his elbow, wearing a black leather jacket that would have been stylish on a young man five years ago, and a man of Aziraphale’s apparent age...well, it had no chance of that until the current It Generation aged to that level at least.
"My game," sighed Crowley, leaning far, far back against the low sofa, sprawling across the garish Moroccan pillows. "I’m here for, er, souls."
Aziraphale looked at him strangely. "Is that a new slang for what they used to call ‘pip’ pills? They change so quickly, dear boy, I can’t keep up."
"Souls, Aziraphale. You know, those things that people have that they ought to be protective of and just aren’t? Those things that we’re always supposed to be bargaining for and fighting over?"
"Oh yes, of course. It’s just that everyone I speak with these days is so terribly metaphorical. So you’re doing more...traditional work?" He looked rather alarmed, probably thinking that a direct attack on human souls was definitely the sort of thing he would have to thwart much more vigorously than he was used to doing.
"It’s not like I have a quota. It’s more like, er, I need to be available. To do business. If a person wants to sell or trade, well, it wouldn’t do for the shop to be closed, you understand."
"I don’t, quite, and yet..." Aziraphale reached in the inner pockets of his inherently-awkward black leather jacket and pulled out a deeply-curved briar pipe, and packed it, painfully slowly. One flick of his Zippo imported from America, and Crowley recoiled.
"You can’t smoke that...out of a pipe like that!"
"Of course I can. What on earth is a pipe for? Anyway, I know it’s not strictly tobacco, but it is a good quality herbal product that I know for a fact was brought over from Tangier just last week, and...."
"Really, Aziraphale? Where did you get it from? What is your game?"
"I am here to keep an eye on the same youths you’re apparently here to corrupt. At any rate, I acquired this from that Brian lad. It seems that he and his mates have hired me to keep an eye on the books."
Crowley hissed, because he couldn’t help it, and accepted the pipe (which was far more in the style of the late Mr. Doyle or the aging Professor Tolkien than that of anyone he’d spoken with in the last decade), and took a drag that spiked his throat. He’d had a witty rejoinder once, but it was lost forever in his coughing.
But eventually he gathered himself. "Do you mean to tell me that you’re the Rolling Stones’ accountant?"
"Oh, it’s not nearly so formal an arrangement as that," Aziraphale demurred. "It’s just that I am given to understand that there’s a terrible history of exploitation in this business. The lads are really quite talented in their primitive way, but only one of them has any sort of head for figures...Anyway, it was thought best to have someone to keep things honest. Unofficially, of course. I do that sort of thing for a lot of the young men. Help keep the numbers balanced, as it were. I was just introduced to a group called The Pink Lloyds or something like that; it was suggested I should just do a few simple calculations on their behalf from time to time in the future, if need be."
Crowley stared at him as if he had grown two more faces (which angels have, in fact, been known to do, but Aziraphale was not actually manifesting that form at the moment). Aziraphale lifted his chin a little defiantly and said, "My contribution is valued, Crowley. And it was quite nice of them to bring this"--he gestured with the pipe--"back from Morocco for me."
Crowley fell back against the couch with a groan. Of course. The best hashish in the world, and it was coming to him via Aziraphale. It made him wonder if perhaps he’d stopped by a crossroads himself on some wild night that he didn’t remember.
The feel of the warm wooden pipe being pressed into his hand was just on the near edge of completely erotic.
"Angel,” he sighed. "Isn’t all this hedonism the least bit disturbing to you?"
"Some of it is rather vulgar," Aziraphale conceded. "But, speaking confidentially of course, I don’t think strict social repression is very good for them either. Something was bound to break. And of course, you and I have seen it break in far, far more upsetting ways than this. No one has lost their head literally."
"Doesn’t it make your job--" Crowley took a deep drag on the mossy-scented hash, "more difficult? I mean, your side doesn’t have a monopoly on ecstasy anymore."
"I don’t suppose we ever did," Aziraphale said.
"I think," Crowley said, convinced that it was the smartest thing that he’d ever said, "that the line between temptation and divine ecstasy is getting thinner all the time."
"My dear," Aziraphale said fondly. "I think you are quite rocked."
"Stoned, Aziraphale. The idiom is ‘stoned.’ I think you’re doing that on purpose."
"Doing what on purpose?" Aziraphale asked, leaning close, dilated and slightly reddened eyes apparently focused somewhere around the intersection of Crowley’s throat and collarbones.
"Being like that," Crowley said, flailing, his hands brushing Aziraphale’s arm. "So square. But...so not square."
"A little more rounded?"
Crowley started to laugh hysterically at this.
But then something that might have been a reptile brain in a creature that wasn’t already reptilian noticed that the music had changed to a deep and slinky electric blues, and for Somewhere’s sake, where did those speaker cabinets come from? It’s like they had a way to generate bass lines that latched up at the base of Crowley’s spine and took it over like some kind of revolting tropical parasite.
The singer was moaning low about wanting, and that was enough to send Crowley’s train of thought careering off its viaduct and right into that odd little place where Aziraphale’s shirt buckled open a little between the buttons and there was a glimpse of creamy peach skin, perhaps with a scattered golden hair here and there, and Crowley was just about this close to licking it. Aziraphale was near enough that Crowley figured his tongue could probably stretch to cover the distance. He was sure the rewards would be more than worth the risk....
Crowley knew at that point that he was, indeed, thoroughly rocked. He’d need a clearer head to make this work, at least at first.
Bethel, New York, USA, August 1969: I Want to Take You Higher
Backstage, in the shadow of the massive scaffolding and the looming rain clouds, Crowley was restless. Shirtless under his fringed suede jacket, his headband periodically slipping down over his eyes and stopped only by his round pink sunglasses, he felt uncomfortable in his own skin, and wished for nothing more than an actual truly private dressing room in which to have a good moult. The tents and trailers were not up to his standards. Thousands of young people had already decided that not only were dressing rooms hopelessly passé, but so was being dressed at all.
Footbridges and catwalks towered high above him; golf carts and motorbikes and huge strapping roadies bustled all around him. The stage looked like something from a science fiction movie that might turn animated and walk away on its huge steel latticework legs. The woman wailing away on it looked like a tiny doll, but the massive, freight-car-sized amplifiers spread her voice out for nearly a mile, and it passed through half a million pairs of ears on the way to oblivion.
Crowley was itchy. Sure, this had become the place to be, and traffic was backed up halfway down to the Bronx (his particular specialty, and it worked just as well here as in London--except that two-thirds of the people stuck in that particular traffic jam were so completely baked that they had no idea how much time was wasting, and their particular brand of almost aggressive hippie happiness almost neutralised the rage of the regular joes and straights just as trapped on the asphalt.) It was still uncomfortable.
That young man was here, the one who’d set his guitar on fire at Monterey. The only one out of the whole lot whose playing could not only ever-so-slightly shame Crowley, but hurt him. It could remind him of his inhumanity and immortality--the only one who could face him in one of those old-fashioned duels over a soul and win. Crowley figured he ought to make a play for that soul, that it was expected -- but there was no point. It was the kind of soul he could never have won, all but predestined to slip through his fingers. It was too good for this world, and doubly so for Crowley’s.
But any sort of morbid reverie he might have wanted to indulge in was soundly interrupted by an unmistakable sort of presence nearby in the aether, one which pop culture had not yet thought to label "a disturbance in the Force."
Aziraphale had given up all pretense to current fashion, thankfully, and looked almost his old leather-patches-on-the-elbows self, except that his hair had been allowed to curl distractingly over his stuffily narrow and unpointed lapels.
"Do I even dare to ask your cover story this time?"
"Safety inspector," Aziraphale said.
Crowley let out a low whistle. "Whoo-eee, are you screwed."
"Well, one of the first things I did was make sure those fences came down," Aziraphale said archly. "Someone could have got crushed."
"That was you?"
"Off the record, yes. There were simple laws of physics involved, after all. You and I can break them, but the children could get hurt."
Crowley sighed. "Just promise me you won’t try to pick up the rubbish afterward. Someone would notice."
"Do you have anything to drink, old pal?" Aziraphale said, and let weariness show on his face.
"Of course I do," Crowley said. If there was anything that wasn’t in short supply backstage, it was liquor....well, there weren’t many things that were in short supply. Besides food and medical supplies and toilets, that is.
Crowley’s allotted "dressing room" was a garish tent parked behind a long RV painted in eye-abusing psychedelic colours, and sitting outside it were two young men opening bottle after bottle of cold beer, wiping the mouths fastidiously, and handing them off to passersby. Aziraphale nodded and smiled at the young man (and tried discreetly to tip); Crowley just flashed his fangs. He was a rock star, after all, can’t go being too harmless-looking.
Aziraphale sat wiping optional sweat from his forehead with a lacy handkerchief.
"So tell me," Crowley said. "What do you think of them now? This festival’s barely got started, and there have already been at least a hundred screaming, face-peeling bad-trip cases." He took a long drag from his beer. "Ugh. Forgot they drink it cold here. Savages. And clothes are surely poorly made these days, because they seem to fall right off very easily."
"Do you think there’s going to be a riot?" Aziraphale asked, after a long drink of his own. He was looking right into Crowley’s eyes through the rose-coloured glass, to the point where even Crowley could immediately tell that he was really asking, "are you going to start one?"
"Honestly..." Crowley said. "Demon of my word, remember? My hunch is that no, there won’t be. What would be more shocking to the Establishment--if the whole hippie fantasy became a cruel joke...or if it didn’t?"
"They’re already starting to die, Crowley."
Oh right. Brian. "But look at the ones out there who are really beginning to live."
"Are you still on your...mission?"
"Technically yes. But so what? Here I am, at the biggest crossroads in the world at this moment, and none of these half a million people here want anything I have to offer. Except a few hours in bed with me, maybe. Or Roger Daltrey if I’m not available."
"And are you..."
"Experienced?" Crowley grinned. "Not necessarily stoned, but...beautiful?"
"Available?" Aziraphale said.
"Only ssssselectively," Crowley said in a husky voice and moved closer, hands rising to cup Aziraphale’s chin and finally take this game up a notch.
Dusk fell at once, and the sky outside the tent turned to dark blue steel. Lightning blasted the sky. It left behind shivering, shimmering trails of light that slithered.
Crowley felt strange. As he touched his lips to Aziraphale’s, something in his spine went sproiiiiing. Every note he could hear from the glittery funk cast of thousands on the stage stretched and bent, and he saw stars.
He was kissing the wrong mouth, he noticed. Not a difficult mistake to make, as Aziraphale was manifesting several faces. "Angel," he hissed somehow. "You’re showing."
"So are you," said Aziraphale, pulling his lips close again until Crowley could only see one face, and that was a relief. "Being so fresh with your tail like that, you’re rushing things."
A rush. That was certainly it. The last shred of his normal consciousness pointed frantically at the beer bottles, and those grungy hair farmers wiping. Crowley leaned against Aziraphale’s cheek, aimed his thought at the ear. "The tent walls, they’re..."
"Melting, yes." Aziraphale tugged at Crowley’s jacket impatiently, scratching at the scales and feathers underneath.
"We’ve been dosed," Crowley whispered.
"Yes, I think you’re right...you’re glowing."
"I know," Crowley moaned. "I can’t help it."
Aziraphale’s mouth had the texture of silk and seawater and seemed endless, that small stretch of wet softness that a tongue could happily wander around in, undulating like a coy mermaid....
He felt a hand in his hair, and every follicle jumped and tried to grow, to curl around it...
"Crowley...the walls really are melting."
So they were. Stormy air surrounded them. Aziraphale couldn’t give up Crowley’s mouth, and those saucy Oriental-carpet patterns wouldn’t stop dancing in his eyes. Aziraphale’s wings stretched up high above his head, and oh Somewhere, the colours. That skin felt as good as it looked, and it had intense, enticing texture, leading Crowley’s fingers through a labyrinth.
"You’re..."
"Yes," Aziraphale said. "Oh my stars yes."
"Now?"
"Yes." It was as if the rush and the dazzlement had taken away every one of Aziraphale’s words except that one. It was the only one he needed.
The electrical-feeling charge rushed up through the ground and up through Crowley’s flexing spine as he crushed Aziraphale against him and licked the angel’s neck, loving the way Aziraphale’s body jerked as he bit gently. He knew it was pleasure, deep pleasure, he could feel it coursing through him and sent back to Aziraphale in a locked infinity loop, turning different colours and whipping in the wind.
Normally, this was the point where falling to the bed, or the ground, or in this case, the mud pit, would be in order, but Crowley locked into that surge of power in his back, and he and Aziraphale rose. Even the mild pain that the knocking-together of the joints of their wings caused was a delectable sort of sensation when blended with what their hands and mouths were doing, legs wrapped together, wings flying apart.
Hadn’t they been wearing clothes once? And silly ones at that? Crowley thought he saw burning embers of cloth raining gently down to the ground and hissing out in the water-type-of-rain, coming around again on the gee-tar. The guitars below were lifting them up, there was a good wind to get under the wings coming from the amplifier, and a half a million lighters and reefers made a sky full of stars on the ground.
He’d always thought their first time might be kind of human, and awkward, and earthy. Instead, it happened in the air, above a crowd, to the tune of ecstatic psychedelic funk, and it happened when they were a winged serpent and a wheel of flame.
Far below, a Grateful Dead fan from New Jersey said to his friend, "Dunno know why they keep sayin’ not to take the brown acid. I’m gettin’ some great visuals."
***
Crowley and Aziraphale could easily have chosen to get through all three days of peace, love, music, and squalor with no mud on them whatsoever. But they wanted an excuse for a hot shower together in a New York City hotel. And then they needed no more excuses.
Crowley’s guitar sat in a corner, a helplessly silent voyeur. Even unplugged as usual, anyone listening close might have heard an angry hum from the pickups.
Aziraphale and Crowley occupied the bed in a variety of configurations, few of them conducive to conversation. That didn’t stop Aziraphale from holding forth, even with his cock doing a slow-burn dance in Crowley’s throat.
"Honestly, Crowley, you didn’t fail, you just got...caught up in the times. I’m very very certain you’re not the only one...why, who’s to know that the currency you’d trade has any value once the drugs wear off?"
Crowley choked and gurgled in consternation. And since he really didn’t need his mouth to actually talk, he said, "So Jimmy’s new band’s got two platinum albums already. In less than a year. You think that was natural?"
"Oh, who’s to say what’s --oh!--natural--these days? What you’re doing, that’s--"
"Mmm-hmmm?"
"So very unnatural....just the way I like it. Please..."
"Please what?"
"Please...swing your skinny hips up here, boy, I want to do you too."
"At the same time?"
"Yes."
Crowley groaned and did something with his spine that hurt even him for a moment, licking a stripe up Aziraphale’s inner thigh, and completely losing the rhythm he’d started once the head of his cock breached Aziraphale’s lips.
"Don’t stop," Aziraphale said. "Did I say you could stop?"
"N-no," Crowley spluttered, trying to get his composure and sucking Aziraphale back down again, deeper than deep, moving his hips languidly, determined to get one up on his competitor as their streams of pleasure crossed.
***
They say ‘69 was a very good year, and they managed to draw their tangled dance out nearly that long. And the wailing guitars and the marches in the street continued without them.
This is not to say that the influence of Crowley’s guitar was entirely benevolent. Abandoned in a hotel room, like a jilted and irrational lover, it wound up being responsible over the years for a murder, three overdoses, a fatal car crash, an onstage electrocution, many ruined careers, and a lot of truly terrible 70s fusion, before being safely imprisoned in a lucite case in a museum in Cleveland.
~end~
Happy Holidays, thilia, from your Secret Writer!
For: thilia
From: vulgarweed
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Crowley/Aziraphale
Request: Crowley/Aziraphale, AU - or not? Crowley is a rockstar, Aziraphale is his groupie. Any rating. combined with: UST (resolved in the end), getting-together fic rather than established relationship, angst, humour, smoking, drinking, possessiveness, focus on the romance part of the story, plot AND smut, dirty talk, flirting, witty banter, dub-con, seduction, kissing, first time, manipulative bastard!Crowley (but still sweet, in his way)
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley’s Arrangement stayed in comfortable stasis for a thousand years. It only took one decade to change it forever. (Crowley and Aziraphale do The Sixties--or do The Sixties do them?)
Warnings: Drug use and consensual sex under the influence.
Author’s Notes: Happy Holidays, thilia! I found that making Crowley a rock star was way easier than making Aziraphale a groupie, so I hope that my interpretation of that part of the prompt works for you in some way.
London, 1965: A Hard Day's Night
Swinging London's latest sensation propped his shiny, pointy boots up on a very expensive amplifier and settled in to have himself a pop-star-befitting sulk.
It had all started less than a year ago. Tony Crowley hadn't wanted to be a star, and that was the whole source of the problem. In fact, the whole business had started with a demeaning demonic demotion.
A crossroads demon? Really? That was what Hell wanted him to waste his considerable talents on? One soul at a time, tedious banter and pro forma bargaining, unreadable contracts that he'd nonetheless be forced to read lest some wannabe Daniel Webster should try to get clever?
WE THINK THIS 'MUSIC WITH ROCKS IN' THING WILL BE BIG, CROWLEY. IN FACT, WE'VE SEEN TO THAT OURSELVES. YOU JUST NEED TO, SHALL WE SAY, PICK THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT.
He'd be dealing with pimply tossers driven to the last resort in their desperate quest for what they most lacked-talent. He'd racked his brain for a moment, come up with a few half-remembered folk songs he'd never heard while sober, and finally, at last, dared to ask, "But aren't there sometimes, you know, duels? I can't carry a tune in a bucket."
WE THOUGHT OF THAT, CROWLEY.
And there it was, in his lap, rather painfully. Imported from the States, of course. Not just any guitar, but one that could inspire envy in hundreds of thousands from just one half-cocked twang on a dodgy scrap of tape. A sleek and flawless Fender Stratocaster, 1961, alder body and rosewood neck, in a colour the Americans called "candy-apple red." Not cheap even in the States; in darkest Newcastle you could expect a good honest working lad to have to spend a year pimping his mother for it. A beautiful, impressive object to prop in a corner and no mistake, but Crowley couldn't imagine himself doing much more than that with it.
Except for that distinctly unpleasant dump of knowledge directly into Crowley's head. He didn't even want to touch the strings after that; he suspected he knew exactly what would happen.
He spent weeks not touching it.
It stubbornly refused to gather dust.
No matter what sort of drab and unflattering lighting Crowley tried to throw at it, it always had attractive, tempting highlights and reflections in all the right places. Alder my arse, Crowley thought. That thing was made from the Tree.
He thought about selling it. But he'd have to touch it, and carry it, and take it to a shop. And he'd had enough experience with cursed objects to know that sort of thing never worked. He'd just have to sit there and let it glower, while the classical station he kept trying to turn to on his huge, sleek hi-fi cabinet kept reverting back to the latest head-pounding idiocy from Liverpool.
It had happened by accident, of course, in the stupidest possible way. He'd been having a splendid drunk all by himself, and he'd dropped his glass. And the glass didn't break but instead went rolling away towards the corner, and he'd chased it on hands and knees, with all the litheness and grace of a cat who has suffered several strokes, and reached out for it only to brush his cheek against the silky steel of strings. Which rang out with a silken indignation. By the time Crowley pressed his hand against them to steady the guitar from falling over into his face, they had asserted themselves, and seemed to all but grip his fingers with a sort of eldritch magnetism. The slightest flutter of his rubbery digits made it wail and chirp, notes bent into bluesy eloquence, a hint of a rhythm just waiting to be brought out lurking in the overtones.
Crowley picked it up, fully intending to smash it. But when he woke up a week later, it was lying in bed next to him. And his sleek and huge and expensive hi-fi set was playing nothing but American rhythm-and-blues. This was where most people started learning the devil's music, but Crowley had a more direct line.
***
He'd recorded two singles and played under assumed names on at least two dozen sessions before anyone noticed that, for all the spacious reverb and biting distortion on his guitar, he never actually bothered to plug it in.
The only session player who noticed was a thin, winsome-faced youth with a wicked way with a blues solo, whose first question was actually, "Are you related to Aleister Crowley, by any chance?"
Crowley sighed. It wasn't an uncommon question a few decades ago, but he'd been spared it for a while. "No," he sighed sulkily.
"Pity," said the young man. "Have you at least read Magick in Theory and Practice?"
"No." Best to keep it monosyllabic and not get pretty little Jimmy's hopes up for an actual conversation.
"Oh well. I find his ideas fascinating. Do you have any hash?"
Crowley supposed this was probably where he was supposed to start. "Do you know 'Crossroads Blues?'" he asked, and then winced.
"Of course," said pretty Jimmy, and started to play.
"Er...is there anything you want, kid?" Crowley asked awkwardly.
Jimmy shrugged. "A better amp. My own band with a real singer. Maybe some trousers with a dragon on. A fag if you got one."
Crowley started to get his mouth ready to make the proposition...but Jimmy's playing was getting in the way. A high, sharp, graceful keen, blue notes wrapped around his main line like ribbons on a Maypole. A whump of the tremolo like great wings landing.
Crowley suspected some other, sharper crossroads demon had got to him first. Even if not, Crowley just really had nothing further to add to what the kid could already do.
This particular session, for a fresh-faced folkie with delusions of mysticism, was a crowded one, full of silly ethnic instruments, too many guitarists, and a chamber group led by Crowley’s opposite number, the angel Aziraphale, whom Crowley had mostly managed to avoid successfully since the war.
(The reason for this avoidance had nothing whatsoever to do with fear of Heaven, and everything to do with horrifically inconvenient feelings that Crowley found himself in possession of when he encountered the angel looking uncharacteristically ragged and ruffled and a little bit singed. Lots of people went mad in the Blitz, he told himself. Can’t blame oneself.)
Aziraphale was exactly, completely, the perfect picture of a stuffy old Establishment classical-division record company man, all tweed and disdain and BBC-newscaster RP, and completely clueless about this new and raucous and primitive form of "bebop," just as Crowley might have expected. What Crowley hadn’t quite expected was the long sidelong glances as Crowley tried to beat pretty Jimmy at his own game. Was it because it was a surprise to see him playing guitar at all? Did he suspect Crowley of having a hand in inventing this noise? Or was it just that Crowley’s trousers were so stylishly tight?
In the middle of all of this, Crowley found himself thinking, there was something to be said for tweed. How ridiculous, surrounded by a musical style designed to get as close to pure raw sex as possible without actually putting orgasmic cries on tape, to get bored with all the pretty young things and be transfixed by a dumpy-out-of-style music director. He tried to imagine Aziraphale’s face framed by a ridiculous Beatle hairdo, just to calm himself down a little. It didn’t help, but it did make him want to giggle.
"So you’re in the rock racket now, angel?" he asked.
“It pays well, Crowley. And besides, cards on the table here, I was...encouraged to keep an eye on things.”
"On the watch for demonic activity, you mean? Well, now you’ve seen some. Here I am. You can go home now."
"Don’t be silly, Crowley, this is an ongoing commitment now. I thwart your wiles, you know that’s how it works."
"With a BBC string section?"
Aziraphale looked down at his outdated shoes with a little flash of a smile, his cheeks ever-so-slightly pink in the stark lights of the studio. "I used to have quite a good ear for music, I was told, back in the old days. They even made me choir director of the middle three Spheres for a time."
"But that’s nothing to do with rock’n’roll!" Crowley blurted, a little indignant for no reason he could properly explain, except that perhaps he was remembering, if not the very old days, at least a time when Aziraphale’s beloved orchestras could be subversive, and the way the angel had once reacted to the dramatic and terrifying new pieces coming out of Germany. Hair and feathers ruffled, and underneath the affronted conservatism, a certain hidden sense of thrill.
Aziraphale was capable of thrill. That had been a new revelation to Crowley, and it annoyed the scales right off him that the angel wasn’t feeling it now. If not this, then what?
"Not necessarily, no, but I have done some studio work that I think might convey a certain celestial flavour, if I say so myself. It turns out those Beatle lads are quite nice young men, when they settle down to the unglamourous business of putting notes together. Although that manager of theirs is ...rather forward."
Aziraphale’s blush deepened.
Crowley’s irritation spiked into a flash of actual rage.
London, 1966: Dedicated Follower of Fashion
"Ssshhee, it’s like this, Azziraphale. Young people aren’t the same as old people. They just aren’t. They don’t think the sssame. We forget, because....you know, time."
"We were young once, Crowley," Aziraphale said firmly, taking another sip of the sherry he’d managed to produce out of weak lager. The gyrating youths around them, and the racket around them in the club had proved a slight impairment on his miracling skills.
"No, we weren’t. Not like thisss. Cause these..." Crowley gestured limply around him, the ragged lace at his wrists trailing out of the sleeves of his burgundy velvet Nehru jacket, "they’re young....right? Yess. But they’re going to be old. Sssomeday. And they know it. And they say they wanna die before that happenss. But they don’t mean it because they don’t know what it meansss to die. And neither do we. Ssso we’re like them."
"You started out by arguing that we were nothing like them."
"Ssso I win the argument then! I’m ssoo good I can change my own mind."
"I’m sure I had a hand in that somewhere. Didn’t I?"
"No! I don’t need you! I can do this all by myssself. Now I’m up next. Gotta go play. Why are you here again?"
"Reporter for the NME this time, remember?" Aziraphale smirked, patting his notebook smugly. "That’s why I sobered up. Shouldn’t you do, before you go onstage?"
"Fuck no, I can’t possibly do this ssssober. You’re following me. You’re going to make fun of me."
"No, dear. I’m going to make fun of the Rolling Stones."
Crowley took stock of the angel’s attempt to fit into trousers that looked like they’d been scrounged from the trash heap at a sofa factory and sewn together by a tailor who’d been fired from Granny Takes a Trip for constant drunkenness. His gaze may well have lingered a little too long, and he compensated for this by turning away and abruptly striding off, feeling the particular burning, tingling sensation that angel stares can give, all the way backstage where his guitar waited and his band didn’t.
Fine. He was a demon, blessit, and he didn’t need anyone else. He and his guitar launched into a roar of jumpin’ R & B, and his hands went one way and his hips another, and the cigarette dangling from his lips started to set his long silk scarf on fire, and he didn’t care one blessed bit. How easy it would be, unhook the guitar strap, take its scrawny neck in his hands like he was strangling it, and just smash it against the amp, against the wall, against the stage. It’d probably make sparks. It might electrocute him if he were human. It would be so....
Aziraphale was watching him, silver-blue eyes reflecting the stagelights, knees slightly bouncing, lips parted as he tapped a pencil against them, unselfconsciously.
Crowley kept playing, resigned to watching nothing but the fusty angel’s eye movements. It was ridiculous.
His assignment was a seduction of a very specific type, and all he’d succeeded in doing was seducing himself into an embarrassing profession in public, and a completely inappropriate sort of hunger for the exactly wrong being in private.
He’d tried them all. All the young geniuses of the moment had crossed his path, and the only creatures they were interested in meeting at any crossroads were dope dealers, Hindu swamis, and girls with loose knickers.
He resolved he wasn’t going to get through this without seducing something.
London 1968: 2000 Light Years From Home
"Well, the presentation is half the game, really," Crowley sighed.
"What exactly is your game here, Crowley?" Aziraphale said in a horribly fond way.
Here was an exclusive suite high above London, where rock stars and their hangers-on moved about the variously appointed rooms, drinks in hand and birds on arms, in a glazed haze. Crowley had had to retreat when the conversation reached new heights of cosmic absurdity and cotton-candy ambition, and frankly, the heavy haze of pungent, green-smelling smoke had started to make his eyes water and his heart seem to beat strangely, as if it could stop at any time (which it could, and at times had done for years without Crowley so much as noticing), and had he ever really thought about it before?
And he’d turned around and come face to face with that piercing-eyed Marianne, and all he could find himself thinking about was, of all things, a Mars Bar. The tabloids started to move across his mind, and he was about to ask, "but wouldn’t it melt...?"
Crowley had only been a rock star for three and a half years, and already his social skills were falling apart.
But this realisation wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the one that what he felt when he turned again and felt Aziraphale at his elbow, wearing a black leather jacket that would have been stylish on a young man five years ago, and a man of Aziraphale’s apparent age...well, it had no chance of that until the current It Generation aged to that level at least.
"My game," sighed Crowley, leaning far, far back against the low sofa, sprawling across the garish Moroccan pillows. "I’m here for, er, souls."
Aziraphale looked at him strangely. "Is that a new slang for what they used to call ‘pip’ pills? They change so quickly, dear boy, I can’t keep up."
"Souls, Aziraphale. You know, those things that people have that they ought to be protective of and just aren’t? Those things that we’re always supposed to be bargaining for and fighting over?"
"Oh yes, of course. It’s just that everyone I speak with these days is so terribly metaphorical. So you’re doing more...traditional work?" He looked rather alarmed, probably thinking that a direct attack on human souls was definitely the sort of thing he would have to thwart much more vigorously than he was used to doing.
"It’s not like I have a quota. It’s more like, er, I need to be available. To do business. If a person wants to sell or trade, well, it wouldn’t do for the shop to be closed, you understand."
"I don’t, quite, and yet..." Aziraphale reached in the inner pockets of his inherently-awkward black leather jacket and pulled out a deeply-curved briar pipe, and packed it, painfully slowly. One flick of his Zippo imported from America, and Crowley recoiled.
"You can’t smoke that...out of a pipe like that!"
"Of course I can. What on earth is a pipe for? Anyway, I know it’s not strictly tobacco, but it is a good quality herbal product that I know for a fact was brought over from Tangier just last week, and...."
"Really, Aziraphale? Where did you get it from? What is your game?"
"I am here to keep an eye on the same youths you’re apparently here to corrupt. At any rate, I acquired this from that Brian lad. It seems that he and his mates have hired me to keep an eye on the books."
Crowley hissed, because he couldn’t help it, and accepted the pipe (which was far more in the style of the late Mr. Doyle or the aging Professor Tolkien than that of anyone he’d spoken with in the last decade), and took a drag that spiked his throat. He’d had a witty rejoinder once, but it was lost forever in his coughing.
But eventually he gathered himself. "Do you mean to tell me that you’re the Rolling Stones’ accountant?"
"Oh, it’s not nearly so formal an arrangement as that," Aziraphale demurred. "It’s just that I am given to understand that there’s a terrible history of exploitation in this business. The lads are really quite talented in their primitive way, but only one of them has any sort of head for figures...Anyway, it was thought best to have someone to keep things honest. Unofficially, of course. I do that sort of thing for a lot of the young men. Help keep the numbers balanced, as it were. I was just introduced to a group called The Pink Lloyds or something like that; it was suggested I should just do a few simple calculations on their behalf from time to time in the future, if need be."
Crowley stared at him as if he had grown two more faces (which angels have, in fact, been known to do, but Aziraphale was not actually manifesting that form at the moment). Aziraphale lifted his chin a little defiantly and said, "My contribution is valued, Crowley. And it was quite nice of them to bring this"--he gestured with the pipe--"back from Morocco for me."
Crowley fell back against the couch with a groan. Of course. The best hashish in the world, and it was coming to him via Aziraphale. It made him wonder if perhaps he’d stopped by a crossroads himself on some wild night that he didn’t remember.
The feel of the warm wooden pipe being pressed into his hand was just on the near edge of completely erotic.
"Angel,” he sighed. "Isn’t all this hedonism the least bit disturbing to you?"
"Some of it is rather vulgar," Aziraphale conceded. "But, speaking confidentially of course, I don’t think strict social repression is very good for them either. Something was bound to break. And of course, you and I have seen it break in far, far more upsetting ways than this. No one has lost their head literally."
"Doesn’t it make your job--" Crowley took a deep drag on the mossy-scented hash, "more difficult? I mean, your side doesn’t have a monopoly on ecstasy anymore."
"I don’t suppose we ever did," Aziraphale said.
"I think," Crowley said, convinced that it was the smartest thing that he’d ever said, "that the line between temptation and divine ecstasy is getting thinner all the time."
"My dear," Aziraphale said fondly. "I think you are quite rocked."
"Stoned, Aziraphale. The idiom is ‘stoned.’ I think you’re doing that on purpose."
"Doing what on purpose?" Aziraphale asked, leaning close, dilated and slightly reddened eyes apparently focused somewhere around the intersection of Crowley’s throat and collarbones.
"Being like that," Crowley said, flailing, his hands brushing Aziraphale’s arm. "So square. But...so not square."
"A little more rounded?"
Crowley started to laugh hysterically at this.
But then something that might have been a reptile brain in a creature that wasn’t already reptilian noticed that the music had changed to a deep and slinky electric blues, and for Somewhere’s sake, where did those speaker cabinets come from? It’s like they had a way to generate bass lines that latched up at the base of Crowley’s spine and took it over like some kind of revolting tropical parasite.
The singer was moaning low about wanting, and that was enough to send Crowley’s train of thought careering off its viaduct and right into that odd little place where Aziraphale’s shirt buckled open a little between the buttons and there was a glimpse of creamy peach skin, perhaps with a scattered golden hair here and there, and Crowley was just about this close to licking it. Aziraphale was near enough that Crowley figured his tongue could probably stretch to cover the distance. He was sure the rewards would be more than worth the risk....
Crowley knew at that point that he was, indeed, thoroughly rocked. He’d need a clearer head to make this work, at least at first.
Bethel, New York, USA, August 1969: I Want to Take You Higher
Backstage, in the shadow of the massive scaffolding and the looming rain clouds, Crowley was restless. Shirtless under his fringed suede jacket, his headband periodically slipping down over his eyes and stopped only by his round pink sunglasses, he felt uncomfortable in his own skin, and wished for nothing more than an actual truly private dressing room in which to have a good moult. The tents and trailers were not up to his standards. Thousands of young people had already decided that not only were dressing rooms hopelessly passé, but so was being dressed at all.
Footbridges and catwalks towered high above him; golf carts and motorbikes and huge strapping roadies bustled all around him. The stage looked like something from a science fiction movie that might turn animated and walk away on its huge steel latticework legs. The woman wailing away on it looked like a tiny doll, but the massive, freight-car-sized amplifiers spread her voice out for nearly a mile, and it passed through half a million pairs of ears on the way to oblivion.
Crowley was itchy. Sure, this had become the place to be, and traffic was backed up halfway down to the Bronx (his particular specialty, and it worked just as well here as in London--except that two-thirds of the people stuck in that particular traffic jam were so completely baked that they had no idea how much time was wasting, and their particular brand of almost aggressive hippie happiness almost neutralised the rage of the regular joes and straights just as trapped on the asphalt.) It was still uncomfortable.
That young man was here, the one who’d set his guitar on fire at Monterey. The only one out of the whole lot whose playing could not only ever-so-slightly shame Crowley, but hurt him. It could remind him of his inhumanity and immortality--the only one who could face him in one of those old-fashioned duels over a soul and win. Crowley figured he ought to make a play for that soul, that it was expected -- but there was no point. It was the kind of soul he could never have won, all but predestined to slip through his fingers. It was too good for this world, and doubly so for Crowley’s.
But any sort of morbid reverie he might have wanted to indulge in was soundly interrupted by an unmistakable sort of presence nearby in the aether, one which pop culture had not yet thought to label "a disturbance in the Force."
Aziraphale had given up all pretense to current fashion, thankfully, and looked almost his old leather-patches-on-the-elbows self, except that his hair had been allowed to curl distractingly over his stuffily narrow and unpointed lapels.
"Do I even dare to ask your cover story this time?"
"Safety inspector," Aziraphale said.
Crowley let out a low whistle. "Whoo-eee, are you screwed."
"Well, one of the first things I did was make sure those fences came down," Aziraphale said archly. "Someone could have got crushed."
"That was you?"
"Off the record, yes. There were simple laws of physics involved, after all. You and I can break them, but the children could get hurt."
Crowley sighed. "Just promise me you won’t try to pick up the rubbish afterward. Someone would notice."
"Do you have anything to drink, old pal?" Aziraphale said, and let weariness show on his face.
"Of course I do," Crowley said. If there was anything that wasn’t in short supply backstage, it was liquor....well, there weren’t many things that were in short supply. Besides food and medical supplies and toilets, that is.
Crowley’s allotted "dressing room" was a garish tent parked behind a long RV painted in eye-abusing psychedelic colours, and sitting outside it were two young men opening bottle after bottle of cold beer, wiping the mouths fastidiously, and handing them off to passersby. Aziraphale nodded and smiled at the young man (and tried discreetly to tip); Crowley just flashed his fangs. He was a rock star, after all, can’t go being too harmless-looking.
Aziraphale sat wiping optional sweat from his forehead with a lacy handkerchief.
"So tell me," Crowley said. "What do you think of them now? This festival’s barely got started, and there have already been at least a hundred screaming, face-peeling bad-trip cases." He took a long drag from his beer. "Ugh. Forgot they drink it cold here. Savages. And clothes are surely poorly made these days, because they seem to fall right off very easily."
"Do you think there’s going to be a riot?" Aziraphale asked, after a long drink of his own. He was looking right into Crowley’s eyes through the rose-coloured glass, to the point where even Crowley could immediately tell that he was really asking, "are you going to start one?"
"Honestly..." Crowley said. "Demon of my word, remember? My hunch is that no, there won’t be. What would be more shocking to the Establishment--if the whole hippie fantasy became a cruel joke...or if it didn’t?"
"They’re already starting to die, Crowley."
Oh right. Brian. "But look at the ones out there who are really beginning to live."
"Are you still on your...mission?"
"Technically yes. But so what? Here I am, at the biggest crossroads in the world at this moment, and none of these half a million people here want anything I have to offer. Except a few hours in bed with me, maybe. Or Roger Daltrey if I’m not available."
"And are you..."
"Experienced?" Crowley grinned. "Not necessarily stoned, but...beautiful?"
"Available?" Aziraphale said.
"Only ssssselectively," Crowley said in a husky voice and moved closer, hands rising to cup Aziraphale’s chin and finally take this game up a notch.
Dusk fell at once, and the sky outside the tent turned to dark blue steel. Lightning blasted the sky. It left behind shivering, shimmering trails of light that slithered.
Crowley felt strange. As he touched his lips to Aziraphale’s, something in his spine went sproiiiiing. Every note he could hear from the glittery funk cast of thousands on the stage stretched and bent, and he saw stars.
He was kissing the wrong mouth, he noticed. Not a difficult mistake to make, as Aziraphale was manifesting several faces. "Angel," he hissed somehow. "You’re showing."
"So are you," said Aziraphale, pulling his lips close again until Crowley could only see one face, and that was a relief. "Being so fresh with your tail like that, you’re rushing things."
A rush. That was certainly it. The last shred of his normal consciousness pointed frantically at the beer bottles, and those grungy hair farmers wiping. Crowley leaned against Aziraphale’s cheek, aimed his thought at the ear. "The tent walls, they’re..."
"Melting, yes." Aziraphale tugged at Crowley’s jacket impatiently, scratching at the scales and feathers underneath.
"We’ve been dosed," Crowley whispered.
"Yes, I think you’re right...you’re glowing."
"I know," Crowley moaned. "I can’t help it."
Aziraphale’s mouth had the texture of silk and seawater and seemed endless, that small stretch of wet softness that a tongue could happily wander around in, undulating like a coy mermaid....
He felt a hand in his hair, and every follicle jumped and tried to grow, to curl around it...
"Crowley...the walls really are melting."
So they were. Stormy air surrounded them. Aziraphale couldn’t give up Crowley’s mouth, and those saucy Oriental-carpet patterns wouldn’t stop dancing in his eyes. Aziraphale’s wings stretched up high above his head, and oh Somewhere, the colours. That skin felt as good as it looked, and it had intense, enticing texture, leading Crowley’s fingers through a labyrinth.
"You’re..."
"Yes," Aziraphale said. "Oh my stars yes."
"Now?"
"Yes." It was as if the rush and the dazzlement had taken away every one of Aziraphale’s words except that one. It was the only one he needed.
The electrical-feeling charge rushed up through the ground and up through Crowley’s flexing spine as he crushed Aziraphale against him and licked the angel’s neck, loving the way Aziraphale’s body jerked as he bit gently. He knew it was pleasure, deep pleasure, he could feel it coursing through him and sent back to Aziraphale in a locked infinity loop, turning different colours and whipping in the wind.
Normally, this was the point where falling to the bed, or the ground, or in this case, the mud pit, would be in order, but Crowley locked into that surge of power in his back, and he and Aziraphale rose. Even the mild pain that the knocking-together of the joints of their wings caused was a delectable sort of sensation when blended with what their hands and mouths were doing, legs wrapped together, wings flying apart.
Hadn’t they been wearing clothes once? And silly ones at that? Crowley thought he saw burning embers of cloth raining gently down to the ground and hissing out in the water-type-of-rain, coming around again on the gee-tar. The guitars below were lifting them up, there was a good wind to get under the wings coming from the amplifier, and a half a million lighters and reefers made a sky full of stars on the ground.
He’d always thought their first time might be kind of human, and awkward, and earthy. Instead, it happened in the air, above a crowd, to the tune of ecstatic psychedelic funk, and it happened when they were a winged serpent and a wheel of flame.
Far below, a Grateful Dead fan from New Jersey said to his friend, "Dunno know why they keep sayin’ not to take the brown acid. I’m gettin’ some great visuals."
***
Crowley and Aziraphale could easily have chosen to get through all three days of peace, love, music, and squalor with no mud on them whatsoever. But they wanted an excuse for a hot shower together in a New York City hotel. And then they needed no more excuses.
Crowley’s guitar sat in a corner, a helplessly silent voyeur. Even unplugged as usual, anyone listening close might have heard an angry hum from the pickups.
Aziraphale and Crowley occupied the bed in a variety of configurations, few of them conducive to conversation. That didn’t stop Aziraphale from holding forth, even with his cock doing a slow-burn dance in Crowley’s throat.
"Honestly, Crowley, you didn’t fail, you just got...caught up in the times. I’m very very certain you’re not the only one...why, who’s to know that the currency you’d trade has any value once the drugs wear off?"
Crowley choked and gurgled in consternation. And since he really didn’t need his mouth to actually talk, he said, "So Jimmy’s new band’s got two platinum albums already. In less than a year. You think that was natural?"
"Oh, who’s to say what’s --oh!--natural--these days? What you’re doing, that’s--"
"Mmm-hmmm?"
"So very unnatural....just the way I like it. Please..."
"Please what?"
"Please...swing your skinny hips up here, boy, I want to do you too."
"At the same time?"
"Yes."
Crowley groaned and did something with his spine that hurt even him for a moment, licking a stripe up Aziraphale’s inner thigh, and completely losing the rhythm he’d started once the head of his cock breached Aziraphale’s lips.
"Don’t stop," Aziraphale said. "Did I say you could stop?"
"N-no," Crowley spluttered, trying to get his composure and sucking Aziraphale back down again, deeper than deep, moving his hips languidly, determined to get one up on his competitor as their streams of pleasure crossed.
***
They say ‘69 was a very good year, and they managed to draw their tangled dance out nearly that long. And the wailing guitars and the marches in the street continued without them.
This is not to say that the influence of Crowley’s guitar was entirely benevolent. Abandoned in a hotel room, like a jilted and irrational lover, it wound up being responsible over the years for a murder, three overdoses, a fatal car crash, an onstage electrocution, many ruined careers, and a lot of truly terrible 70s fusion, before being safely imprisoned in a lucite case in a museum in Cleveland.
~end~
Happy Holidays, thilia, from your Secret Writer!