The Eye's Firmament
Author: app1e_pi
Rating: (Still) somewhere around hard R.
Fandom, Pairing: Good Omens, Crowley/Aziraphale.
Warnings: There be wings in this here fic.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, though the world looks strangely familiar... Anyway. They belong to Gaiman and Pratchett, and I promise I'll tidy them up when I'm finished.
A/N: Finished for the words_fly_up fic challenge. The quote I chose was "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall," from Measure for Measure. And I was completely stuck (this is just a wee bit late, ahem), but I wanted to write a Good Omens story, and... Well, I was poking at this one and it hit me that this is what I wanted to write for that quote. So I finished it up, et voila. This follows straight on from Both Odd and Even. The title is from the same snippet of poetry that provided that title: Many a kiss, both odd and even; / many a glance, too, has been sent / from out the eye's firmament; / Many a jest told of the keys betraying / this night, and locks picked; yet we're not a-Maying. (Robert Herrick, "Corinna's Going a-Maying.")
~*~*~*~
When Crowley woke up, he was cold.
He shivered and burrowed into the mattress, groping for the duvet, eyes determinedly closed. He pawed the mattress, searching, and eventually encountered the duvet. Tightly wrapped around a warm body that had made the dual mistakes of: (a) being in the same bed with a demon, and (b) stealing its covers. Crowley hissed and opened his eyes.
And remembered.
It didn’t exactly calm him, but the creature sharing his bed wasn’t ripped limb from limb. He was just shoved and battered about until Crowley had his fair share 1 of the covers, and the angel was blinking at him, a dazed and rather hurt expression on his soft features.
“I’m cold,” Aziraphale said.
“You stole my covers,” Crowley accused. He peered out at the angel and really hoped his eyes looked particularly menacing. 2
Aziraphale opened his mouth for a moment before a reply seemed to come to him. “I’m sorry?” he offered. And shivered.
Crowley snorted. “You’re always sorry. But I’m the one that woke up freezing my arse off.”
Aziraphale looked down penitently - difficult to do, lying on one’s side, but he managed it - and nodded. “I’ll just go, then,” he said quietly, and Crowley growled.
“Don’t be daft,” he snapped, and sighed heavily, lifting one arm.
Aziraphale looked up at him and smiled - Crowley snorted again, ignoring the small warm spot that seemed to have blossomed somewhere in the region of his belly - and the angel shimmied forward and tucked himself right up against the demon. Crowley let the duvet fall and shoved his face into Aziraphale’s neck, arms snaking about the angel’s waist.
“Next time you want to get all wrapped up in my duvet, don’t leave me on the wrong side of it,” Crowley muttered.
“I won’t.” Aziraphale’s lips pressed to his hair, and Crowley shivered - though he was quite warm now, these bodies were so confusing - as a gentle hand slipped over his side. “Good morning,” Aziraphale said. His fingers curled around the demon’s bare hip, thumb brushing the inward curve of the bone beneath thin skin.
“I’m going back to sleep,” Crowley said into the angel’s collarbone.
“If you like,” Aziraphale said agreeably, and then his hand did something that was more agreeable, and Crowley hissed a little.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“Hmm?” Aziraphale’s voice was as innocent as the dawn.
Dawn on the first day after Eden, Crowley thought sourly. 3 But thinking was getting difficult - “Oh,” the demon breathed, and yes, these bodies were strange, but sometimes they seemed to know just what to do - and sleep seemed rather far away as he arched into Aziraphale’s hand. “That,” he managed after a moment, “what do you think you’re you doing with - nngk - that, that way - oh -”
“This?”
The angel did something that he couldn’t possibly have learned in any book written by an author destined for Heaven, and Crowley groaned agreement.
“Oh, just entertaining myself,” Aziraphale said, only - damn him - slightly breathless. “Since you’re off to sleep again.”
Well, this is just not on, Crowley thought with what little he could still think with. “Maybe I’ll stay awake,” he murmured, and rolled over until he was lying atop the angel.
Aziraphale had hastily moved his hand, and now he lay quiet beneath Crowley, smiling up at him. He looked... angelic, still, somehow, despite the sinful curve of his mouth, his tousled hair, the ruddy flush beneath his all-too-tempting skin. “Awake is fine,” he said.
“No it’s not,” Crowley disagreed. He moved his hips, the sort of motion his Crawly self would have been comfortable with, and was pleased by the way Aziraphale’s eyes fluttered closed. “Awake is just one long series of needs clamouring for attention. Hunger, thirst...” Crowley pressed his hips down for a long, tight moment, and the angel’s lips parted. “Desire...” He relented, going back to the slow rolls of his hips.
“None of which we need pay attention to if we choose,” Aziraphale said, albeit with a hitch in his voice. His eyes were open again, the same colour as the sky outside: pale and clear and depthless. His hands came up, smoothing down Crowley’s back, and he scritched with his manicured fingernails, just below the demon’s shoulder blades, so that Crowley shivered and sighed.
“Hmm,” Crowley said. “Shall I stop, then?” He lowered his head and bit at Aziraphale’s collarbones.
Another breathless chuckle, and: “No, I’ve become rather attached to the needs of the body,” Aziraphale said. “Eating, drinking a nice red.” His hands were soft and warm, palms slightly damp, and they slipped lower to cup and knead. “I could easily become attached to this, as well. It’s quite satisfying, in its way.”
Crowley agreed.
He lifted himself and mauled the angel about again, until Aziraphale lay on his belly. “Just a moment,” the angel said, and Crowley sat up to let him adjust... things. “Yes, that’s better,” Aziraphale said, lying prone again. “Thank you.”
Crowley lowered himself, straddling the angel’s upper thighs. “Last night,” the demon began. He ran his hands over Aziraphale’s back in looping patterns, spelling words in languages no human had ever read. Lust, he wrote. “You’re bound to get in trouble,” he said. “For that matter, I’ll probably get in, erm, hot water, too. You won’t want to keep on.”
Aziraphale was smiling, Crowley could tell, though the angel’s face was mostly pressed into the pillows. “I had no idea you wanted to,” Aziraphale said. His fingers, half-covered by the duvet, twitched and curled, and Crowley knew the word the angel had written onto the linen with one fingertip: Passion.
“I don’t resist temptation well,” Crowley said. Lasciviousness, he wrote, watching the curves and angles of the word flicker and dissipate over smooth skin; he pushed his thumbs up the line of Aziraphale’s spine, then splayed his hands and dug his thumbs into that spot, the itchy place where Aziraphale’s wings would sprout, if he manifested them.
Aziraphale’s finger spelled out a word in the sheets as he groaned quietly: Generosity. “I’m afraid I’m rather weak that way, as well,” he sighed into the pillows. His body stretched and settled into the mattress again. “Goodness, that feels lovely,” he said. “Do you mind...?”
Crowley dug his thumbs in again. “No,” he said.
The transformation was too subtle and quick to see, though Crowley knew it, as it were, from the inside out. The demon moved his hands lower, bracketing the powerful tendons that had bloomed from beneath Aziraphale’s skin. There were feathers everywhere suddenly, and he sputtered and couldn’t help a laugh as Aziraphale exhaled and shifted his wings, spreading them to the sides to drape over most of the bed, rustling as the angel shifted and moved until they were comfortable.
Crowley leaned down to mouth at Aziraphale’s neck, distracted, on the way, by how perfectly this fit certain portions of his anatomy against Aziraphale’s. “You need grooming,” he said, and bit down. Aziraphale shuddered and went still, taut beneath the demon but for the minutest of tremors. Violence, Crowley wrote with his tongue, and although his eyes were closed, he read the word Aziraphale spelled in the restless shiver of his wings, in the arch of his neck and the curve of his back: Surrender, Aziraphale wrote.
“Where are your wings?” the angel asked.
Crowley opened his jaw and laid his head on the angel’s back, nose almost touching one wing. He thought for a moment, and sighed as his plumage stretched out beside and above his body. His wings fluttered and then settled over Aziraphale’s.
“Why are they black?” the angel asked curiously.
Crowley opened his eyes and looked at them from where he lay: the glossy jet contrasted quite nicely with Aziraphale’s white feathers. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I just always thought they would be. Should be.”
He sat up, though not before he’d ground his aching erection against the cleft of Aziraphale’s (rather lovely) bottom. “Turn over,” he said, as persuasively as he knew how. He knelt and moved back, trying to keep out of the way as the angel obeyed, wings everywhere. There was a crash or two as lamps and vases were tumbled from their places, and Aziraphale was nicely pink by the time he settled onto his back.
“So sorry,” he said. He folded his hands on his chest and gazed down to where Crowley knelt motionless between his thighs, as though waiting.
Crowley kept his face blank; fear was making him want to shake, but he wouldn’t let it. He lowered his eyes, instead, and ran his hands over Aziraphale’s legs.
“Would you let me hurt you?” he asked in a low voice.
Aziraphale was quiet, and when his voice came at last, it was barely audible. “You won’t,” he said.
Crowley leaned forward, still kneeling, and watched his own hands carefully as they wandered over Aziraphale’s pale, smooth chest. Pink nubs of nipples, hardening as he rubbed his thumbs roughly over them, and the angel’s stomach, soft under his palm. His navel - and why not? Crowley thought 4 - and a narrow line of hair below it, leading downward to Aziraphale’s erection, flushed and wanting, unafraid.
“I think it hurts, the first time,” Crowley said. He wrapped his hand carefully around Aziraphale and finally looked up at his face. “I could,” he began, and had to stop and force himself on. “I could let you… to me. First.” The words felt foreign, stranger than all the languages of Earth, and yet Crowley spoke them. He couldn’t not, somehow.
Somehow.
Aziraphale smiled. “My dear.” He pushed himself onto one elbow and touched Crowley’s face, and it burned, just as it had the night before. In the thin light of morning Crowley couldn’t hide his flinch, but he didn’t break their gaze. “Not at all. You won’t hurt me.”
Crowley felt his face redden, and drew his hand along silky skin and hardness. “I’ll do my best,” he said, and swallowed.
“Do your worst,” the angel suggested, lying back and pushing his hips up into Crowley’s fist. “You’re quite good at that.”
Crowley grinned.
Later, Aziraphale trembling in his arms, Crowley couldn’t summon up a grin or even a smile; he was frightened, roused, burning more certainly than he ever had in Hell, and he held himself motionless, waiting for the angel to still, waiting for that look of pained concentration to smooth from Aziraphale’s face.
“I’m fine,” Aziraphale said faintly. His fingers skittered an inch down Crowley’s back, and he swallowed, then opened his eyes: darker now, the colour of the sky before rain. “Please,” he said. “Please, Crowley.”
Crowley looked away, then, wondering what was showing in his own gaze. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he admitted, and that felt strange, to admit it.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Aziraphale said. Crowley looked back at him. “Much,” the angel amended. He almost smiled. “It doesn’t hurt much, and -” Aziraphale sighed, eyes fluttering closed, body relaxing slightly - “I don’t want you to stop. I want to.” He blushed, and Crowley watched the red stain of it on his cheeks and neck, fascinated, aroused. “I want to feel you. Ehm. Feel you.” Come, the angel couldn’t say it, but Crowley heard it almost as clearly as if he had. The angel’s hands clutched briefly at Crowley’s back, just below his pinions, and then released, still shaky. Crowley’s hips twitched forward.
“I should have known,” he muttered. “Should have known you’d be a blessed masochist.” He wanted it to sound scathing, hated himself when it came out breathless. “Ah, bless,” he said. His forehead fell forward, pressing to Aziraphale’s breastbone as he bent over him, and Crowley began to move.
This is why humans act like fools, he thought as it grew, as it strengthened: this rush and race, the hard, dull thump of blood through his veins and the tight, crushing grip of Aziraphale’s body upon his own, around him. The rising heat in his belly, his mouth open against Aziraphale’s chest. His hands, fisted in the linens beside the angel’s head; and his arms, locked, muscle and tendon etched in hard lines as he held himself up, as his hips moved mindlessly, thoughtlessly toward something: completion, or the illusion of it. Thighs heavy and full, the ridge of Aziraphale’s erection tight between their bodies, distracting, maddening.
He lifted his head, straining forward blindly, and heard Aziraphale pleading, it seemed:
“Please, please, please,” the angel was whispering.
He clutched at Crowley’s back, fingers curling, gripping the base of Crowley’s wings, black as night, as sin, outspread over them both like shadows. Aziraphale’s own wings had risen, flexed outward, stretched to their full breadth.
Crowley thought perhaps he should stop. Maybe that’s what Aziraphale wanted, maybe it was what he pled for: “please, please, Crowley, please,” he was panting now. But Crowley was so close, and if he could just, if he could just -
Aziraphale arched upward and he gripped Crowley’s wings tight, painfully, as his whole body shivered and convulsed, as wet warmth spilled suddenly between them. And there it was, the thing Crowley’s body had wanted so much: Here it was, blinding and overwhelming just as it had been once before, only more so, with the angel all around him, clasping him with hands and wings and body, wrapped around him like a vine as Crowley shook and cried out into Aziraphale’s neck.
“Bless,” he moaned, and let it finish.
He came back to earth, sticky and hot, feathers plastered to his sweaty skin, Aziraphale’s body hot and clinging.
“Chr - I mean. Are you all right?” The demon pushed himself up onto his elbows again.
Aziraphale’s face was pink and damp, and Crowley couldn’t read his expression at all. “I’m fine,” the angel said, and at least his voice was his own, if faraway.
Crowley was frozen there, looking down at him. He felt a drop of perspiration slide down his back, more sweat pooling in the crooks of his knees. 5 “I don’t want to hurt you,” Crowley said again, and it was becoming less jarring, that admission. He felt his erection softening, and slid backward a few inches, slipping out of Aziraphale’s body.
“Vulnerasti cor meum,” Aziraphale said, but his face was no longer remote, and he smiled, small and certain, as he brushed Crowley’s hair from his forehead. “I’m not hurt,” he added.
“I’m not your sister or your bride,” Crowley blurted.
“I should say not,” Aziraphale replied, and Crowley struggled to keep his eyes open as gentle fingers trailed down his cheek, as the angel’s thumb left an imprint on his lips. But his next words were no jest, murmured just at the limits of inhuman hearing: “Thou hast wounded my heart.”
“...No,” Crowley whispered, and lowered his head to kiss Aziraphale.
Maybe this was the price.
Perhaps these kisses were the coin the demon must pay in, and this strange, horribly awkward tenderness, and the admission, again and again, to the angel and to himself, that Crowley could not, would not harm Aziraphale. Perhaps there were currencies - Crowley thought, suspected, possibly remembered in some part of him that had once worn different wings - that disobeyed the laws of economics and commonsense. Currencies that didn’t demand and take, grab and push and rend.
Crowley kissed Aziraphale, and paid his coin fully, finding more to spend than he might have imagined.
They stopped to breathe, 6 and the angel sighed into Crowley’s mouth. “I don’t want to move.”
“You’re a comfy pillow,” Crowley said, as if considering it. “Must be all those cream teas.”
Aziraphale smiled and ran his hands down Crowley’s back, then back up and into his hair. “Tea sounds lovely. In a minute, though.” He craned his neck and pulled Crowley’s head down to his own.
Of course they had to move, eventually - there are only so many moments one can stand to have feathers stuck to one’s sweaty skin, no matter how many slow, delirious, wicked, holy kisses one indulges in.
They ended by sitting up beside one another in the bed, wings tucked away and shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. Crowley had drawn the duvet over their knees, and conjured a tray of fresh fruit from somewhere - somewhere warm, though not at all infernal. Crowley kept inching the tray closer to himself, but Aziraphale was less generous than was his usual wont when it came to strawberries and cream, and so the tray stayed equally balanced upon the angel’s left knee and the demon’s right.
“Do you know, that phrase has been translated in about four ways,” Crowley said, not bothering to wait until he was finished chewing before speaking.
“And those are just the common translations,” Aziraphale agreed. He reached for a steaming teacup, one of a pair which had suddenly appeared on the bedside table.
“You’re slipping,” Crowley said. “Sloth, angel. You should have got up and made that tea the hard way.” A pointed finger and a quick glare at the innocent table, and when Aziraphale guiltily put the teacup aside again, there was a circle of lace waiting for it, and another beneath Crowley’s cup.
“Doilies?” the angel said mildly.
Crowley glared, this time at Aziraphale rather than his errant furnishings. “I could have used a book, you know. I don’t want heat rings on my table.”
Aziraphale looked down, hiding his amusement. 7 “You’re quite right, my dear,” he said. “What’s your favourite translation?” the angel asked a moment later.
“I’ve always liked the Douay-Rheims,” Crowley said. “...The one you said.”
“Ravished, stolen, captured, wounded.” Aziraphale licked a bit of cream from his fingers, and the demon wondered if perhaps breakfast shouldn’t end sooner, rather than later. “It’s all very dramatic, isn’t it?”
“What?” Crowley said stupidly, and Aziraphale paused, and looked at him with a clear, unwavering gaze.
“Well,” the angel said, and carefully lifted the tray and turned to deposit it beside the teacup (and the doily). “Perhaps it is a bit dramatic, at that.”
He turned back to Crowley, smiling, and Crowley thought, as he slid lower upon the pillows, that yes, it was all a bit dramatic, despite how simple it all was, too.
He opened his arms and pulled the angel down.
________________________________________________
1Every last stitch.
2They didn’t. The paisley duvet he was peering out from under ensured that.
3And he should know.
4The first versions hadn’t had belly buttons; Crowley had been rather repelled (and then somewhat fascinated) when he discovered where they came from.
5It felt weird. On the current scale of weirdnesses, though, Crowley was pretty much willing to overlook it. For now.
6They didn’t have to, of course, but their bodies seemed to associate breathing with these kinds of activities, and Crowley was feeling extremely tolerant of what his body wanted at the moment; he thought Aziraphale was feeling the same way, probably.
7Very poorly, Crowley thought.
Rating: (Still) somewhere around hard R.
Fandom, Pairing: Good Omens, Crowley/Aziraphale.
Warnings: There be wings in this here fic.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, though the world looks strangely familiar... Anyway. They belong to Gaiman and Pratchett, and I promise I'll tidy them up when I'm finished.
A/N: Finished for the words_fly_up fic challenge. The quote I chose was "Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall," from Measure for Measure. And I was completely stuck (this is just a wee bit late, ahem), but I wanted to write a Good Omens story, and... Well, I was poking at this one and it hit me that this is what I wanted to write for that quote. So I finished it up, et voila. This follows straight on from Both Odd and Even. The title is from the same snippet of poetry that provided that title: Many a kiss, both odd and even; / many a glance, too, has been sent / from out the eye's firmament; / Many a jest told of the keys betraying / this night, and locks picked; yet we're not a-Maying. (Robert Herrick, "Corinna's Going a-Maying.")
~*~*~*~
When Crowley woke up, he was cold.
He shivered and burrowed into the mattress, groping for the duvet, eyes determinedly closed. He pawed the mattress, searching, and eventually encountered the duvet. Tightly wrapped around a warm body that had made the dual mistakes of: (a) being in the same bed with a demon, and (b) stealing its covers. Crowley hissed and opened his eyes.
And remembered.
It didn’t exactly calm him, but the creature sharing his bed wasn’t ripped limb from limb. He was just shoved and battered about until Crowley had his fair share 1 of the covers, and the angel was blinking at him, a dazed and rather hurt expression on his soft features.
“I’m cold,” Aziraphale said.
“You stole my covers,” Crowley accused. He peered out at the angel and really hoped his eyes looked particularly menacing. 2
Aziraphale opened his mouth for a moment before a reply seemed to come to him. “I’m sorry?” he offered. And shivered.
Crowley snorted. “You’re always sorry. But I’m the one that woke up freezing my arse off.”
Aziraphale looked down penitently - difficult to do, lying on one’s side, but he managed it - and nodded. “I’ll just go, then,” he said quietly, and Crowley growled.
“Don’t be daft,” he snapped, and sighed heavily, lifting one arm.
Aziraphale looked up at him and smiled - Crowley snorted again, ignoring the small warm spot that seemed to have blossomed somewhere in the region of his belly - and the angel shimmied forward and tucked himself right up against the demon. Crowley let the duvet fall and shoved his face into Aziraphale’s neck, arms snaking about the angel’s waist.
“Next time you want to get all wrapped up in my duvet, don’t leave me on the wrong side of it,” Crowley muttered.
“I won’t.” Aziraphale’s lips pressed to his hair, and Crowley shivered - though he was quite warm now, these bodies were so confusing - as a gentle hand slipped over his side. “Good morning,” Aziraphale said. His fingers curled around the demon’s bare hip, thumb brushing the inward curve of the bone beneath thin skin.
“I’m going back to sleep,” Crowley said into the angel’s collarbone.
“If you like,” Aziraphale said agreeably, and then his hand did something that was more agreeable, and Crowley hissed a little.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“Hmm?” Aziraphale’s voice was as innocent as the dawn.
Dawn on the first day after Eden, Crowley thought sourly. 3 But thinking was getting difficult - “Oh,” the demon breathed, and yes, these bodies were strange, but sometimes they seemed to know just what to do - and sleep seemed rather far away as he arched into Aziraphale’s hand. “That,” he managed after a moment, “what do you think you’re you doing with - nngk - that, that way - oh -”
“This?”
The angel did something that he couldn’t possibly have learned in any book written by an author destined for Heaven, and Crowley groaned agreement.
“Oh, just entertaining myself,” Aziraphale said, only - damn him - slightly breathless. “Since you’re off to sleep again.”
Well, this is just not on, Crowley thought with what little he could still think with. “Maybe I’ll stay awake,” he murmured, and rolled over until he was lying atop the angel.
Aziraphale had hastily moved his hand, and now he lay quiet beneath Crowley, smiling up at him. He looked... angelic, still, somehow, despite the sinful curve of his mouth, his tousled hair, the ruddy flush beneath his all-too-tempting skin. “Awake is fine,” he said.
“No it’s not,” Crowley disagreed. He moved his hips, the sort of motion his Crawly self would have been comfortable with, and was pleased by the way Aziraphale’s eyes fluttered closed. “Awake is just one long series of needs clamouring for attention. Hunger, thirst...” Crowley pressed his hips down for a long, tight moment, and the angel’s lips parted. “Desire...” He relented, going back to the slow rolls of his hips.
“None of which we need pay attention to if we choose,” Aziraphale said, albeit with a hitch in his voice. His eyes were open again, the same colour as the sky outside: pale and clear and depthless. His hands came up, smoothing down Crowley’s back, and he scritched with his manicured fingernails, just below the demon’s shoulder blades, so that Crowley shivered and sighed.
“Hmm,” Crowley said. “Shall I stop, then?” He lowered his head and bit at Aziraphale’s collarbones.
Another breathless chuckle, and: “No, I’ve become rather attached to the needs of the body,” Aziraphale said. “Eating, drinking a nice red.” His hands were soft and warm, palms slightly damp, and they slipped lower to cup and knead. “I could easily become attached to this, as well. It’s quite satisfying, in its way.”
Crowley agreed.
He lifted himself and mauled the angel about again, until Aziraphale lay on his belly. “Just a moment,” the angel said, and Crowley sat up to let him adjust... things. “Yes, that’s better,” Aziraphale said, lying prone again. “Thank you.”
Crowley lowered himself, straddling the angel’s upper thighs. “Last night,” the demon began. He ran his hands over Aziraphale’s back in looping patterns, spelling words in languages no human had ever read. Lust, he wrote. “You’re bound to get in trouble,” he said. “For that matter, I’ll probably get in, erm, hot water, too. You won’t want to keep on.”
Aziraphale was smiling, Crowley could tell, though the angel’s face was mostly pressed into the pillows. “I had no idea you wanted to,” Aziraphale said. His fingers, half-covered by the duvet, twitched and curled, and Crowley knew the word the angel had written onto the linen with one fingertip: Passion.
“I don’t resist temptation well,” Crowley said. Lasciviousness, he wrote, watching the curves and angles of the word flicker and dissipate over smooth skin; he pushed his thumbs up the line of Aziraphale’s spine, then splayed his hands and dug his thumbs into that spot, the itchy place where Aziraphale’s wings would sprout, if he manifested them.
Aziraphale’s finger spelled out a word in the sheets as he groaned quietly: Generosity. “I’m afraid I’m rather weak that way, as well,” he sighed into the pillows. His body stretched and settled into the mattress again. “Goodness, that feels lovely,” he said. “Do you mind...?”
Crowley dug his thumbs in again. “No,” he said.
The transformation was too subtle and quick to see, though Crowley knew it, as it were, from the inside out. The demon moved his hands lower, bracketing the powerful tendons that had bloomed from beneath Aziraphale’s skin. There were feathers everywhere suddenly, and he sputtered and couldn’t help a laugh as Aziraphale exhaled and shifted his wings, spreading them to the sides to drape over most of the bed, rustling as the angel shifted and moved until they were comfortable.
Crowley leaned down to mouth at Aziraphale’s neck, distracted, on the way, by how perfectly this fit certain portions of his anatomy against Aziraphale’s. “You need grooming,” he said, and bit down. Aziraphale shuddered and went still, taut beneath the demon but for the minutest of tremors. Violence, Crowley wrote with his tongue, and although his eyes were closed, he read the word Aziraphale spelled in the restless shiver of his wings, in the arch of his neck and the curve of his back: Surrender, Aziraphale wrote.
“Where are your wings?” the angel asked.
Crowley opened his jaw and laid his head on the angel’s back, nose almost touching one wing. He thought for a moment, and sighed as his plumage stretched out beside and above his body. His wings fluttered and then settled over Aziraphale’s.
“Why are they black?” the angel asked curiously.
Crowley opened his eyes and looked at them from where he lay: the glossy jet contrasted quite nicely with Aziraphale’s white feathers. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I just always thought they would be. Should be.”
He sat up, though not before he’d ground his aching erection against the cleft of Aziraphale’s (rather lovely) bottom. “Turn over,” he said, as persuasively as he knew how. He knelt and moved back, trying to keep out of the way as the angel obeyed, wings everywhere. There was a crash or two as lamps and vases were tumbled from their places, and Aziraphale was nicely pink by the time he settled onto his back.
“So sorry,” he said. He folded his hands on his chest and gazed down to where Crowley knelt motionless between his thighs, as though waiting.
Crowley kept his face blank; fear was making him want to shake, but he wouldn’t let it. He lowered his eyes, instead, and ran his hands over Aziraphale’s legs.
“Would you let me hurt you?” he asked in a low voice.
Aziraphale was quiet, and when his voice came at last, it was barely audible. “You won’t,” he said.
Crowley leaned forward, still kneeling, and watched his own hands carefully as they wandered over Aziraphale’s pale, smooth chest. Pink nubs of nipples, hardening as he rubbed his thumbs roughly over them, and the angel’s stomach, soft under his palm. His navel - and why not? Crowley thought 4 - and a narrow line of hair below it, leading downward to Aziraphale’s erection, flushed and wanting, unafraid.
“I think it hurts, the first time,” Crowley said. He wrapped his hand carefully around Aziraphale and finally looked up at his face. “I could,” he began, and had to stop and force himself on. “I could let you… to me. First.” The words felt foreign, stranger than all the languages of Earth, and yet Crowley spoke them. He couldn’t not, somehow.
Somehow.
Aziraphale smiled. “My dear.” He pushed himself onto one elbow and touched Crowley’s face, and it burned, just as it had the night before. In the thin light of morning Crowley couldn’t hide his flinch, but he didn’t break their gaze. “Not at all. You won’t hurt me.”
Crowley felt his face redden, and drew his hand along silky skin and hardness. “I’ll do my best,” he said, and swallowed.
“Do your worst,” the angel suggested, lying back and pushing his hips up into Crowley’s fist. “You’re quite good at that.”
Crowley grinned.
Later, Aziraphale trembling in his arms, Crowley couldn’t summon up a grin or even a smile; he was frightened, roused, burning more certainly than he ever had in Hell, and he held himself motionless, waiting for the angel to still, waiting for that look of pained concentration to smooth from Aziraphale’s face.
“I’m fine,” Aziraphale said faintly. His fingers skittered an inch down Crowley’s back, and he swallowed, then opened his eyes: darker now, the colour of the sky before rain. “Please,” he said. “Please, Crowley.”
Crowley looked away, then, wondering what was showing in his own gaze. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he admitted, and that felt strange, to admit it.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Aziraphale said. Crowley looked back at him. “Much,” the angel amended. He almost smiled. “It doesn’t hurt much, and -” Aziraphale sighed, eyes fluttering closed, body relaxing slightly - “I don’t want you to stop. I want to.” He blushed, and Crowley watched the red stain of it on his cheeks and neck, fascinated, aroused. “I want to feel you. Ehm. Feel you.” Come, the angel couldn’t say it, but Crowley heard it almost as clearly as if he had. The angel’s hands clutched briefly at Crowley’s back, just below his pinions, and then released, still shaky. Crowley’s hips twitched forward.
“I should have known,” he muttered. “Should have known you’d be a blessed masochist.” He wanted it to sound scathing, hated himself when it came out breathless. “Ah, bless,” he said. His forehead fell forward, pressing to Aziraphale’s breastbone as he bent over him, and Crowley began to move.
This is why humans act like fools, he thought as it grew, as it strengthened: this rush and race, the hard, dull thump of blood through his veins and the tight, crushing grip of Aziraphale’s body upon his own, around him. The rising heat in his belly, his mouth open against Aziraphale’s chest. His hands, fisted in the linens beside the angel’s head; and his arms, locked, muscle and tendon etched in hard lines as he held himself up, as his hips moved mindlessly, thoughtlessly toward something: completion, or the illusion of it. Thighs heavy and full, the ridge of Aziraphale’s erection tight between their bodies, distracting, maddening.
He lifted his head, straining forward blindly, and heard Aziraphale pleading, it seemed:
“Please, please, please,” the angel was whispering.
He clutched at Crowley’s back, fingers curling, gripping the base of Crowley’s wings, black as night, as sin, outspread over them both like shadows. Aziraphale’s own wings had risen, flexed outward, stretched to their full breadth.
Crowley thought perhaps he should stop. Maybe that’s what Aziraphale wanted, maybe it was what he pled for: “please, please, Crowley, please,” he was panting now. But Crowley was so close, and if he could just, if he could just -
Aziraphale arched upward and he gripped Crowley’s wings tight, painfully, as his whole body shivered and convulsed, as wet warmth spilled suddenly between them. And there it was, the thing Crowley’s body had wanted so much: Here it was, blinding and overwhelming just as it had been once before, only more so, with the angel all around him, clasping him with hands and wings and body, wrapped around him like a vine as Crowley shook and cried out into Aziraphale’s neck.
“Bless,” he moaned, and let it finish.
He came back to earth, sticky and hot, feathers plastered to his sweaty skin, Aziraphale’s body hot and clinging.
“Chr - I mean. Are you all right?” The demon pushed himself up onto his elbows again.
Aziraphale’s face was pink and damp, and Crowley couldn’t read his expression at all. “I’m fine,” the angel said, and at least his voice was his own, if faraway.
Crowley was frozen there, looking down at him. He felt a drop of perspiration slide down his back, more sweat pooling in the crooks of his knees. 5 “I don’t want to hurt you,” Crowley said again, and it was becoming less jarring, that admission. He felt his erection softening, and slid backward a few inches, slipping out of Aziraphale’s body.
“Vulnerasti cor meum,” Aziraphale said, but his face was no longer remote, and he smiled, small and certain, as he brushed Crowley’s hair from his forehead. “I’m not hurt,” he added.
“I’m not your sister or your bride,” Crowley blurted.
“I should say not,” Aziraphale replied, and Crowley struggled to keep his eyes open as gentle fingers trailed down his cheek, as the angel’s thumb left an imprint on his lips. But his next words were no jest, murmured just at the limits of inhuman hearing: “Thou hast wounded my heart.”
“...No,” Crowley whispered, and lowered his head to kiss Aziraphale.
Maybe this was the price.
Perhaps these kisses were the coin the demon must pay in, and this strange, horribly awkward tenderness, and the admission, again and again, to the angel and to himself, that Crowley could not, would not harm Aziraphale. Perhaps there were currencies - Crowley thought, suspected, possibly remembered in some part of him that had once worn different wings - that disobeyed the laws of economics and commonsense. Currencies that didn’t demand and take, grab and push and rend.
Crowley kissed Aziraphale, and paid his coin fully, finding more to spend than he might have imagined.
They stopped to breathe, 6 and the angel sighed into Crowley’s mouth. “I don’t want to move.”
“You’re a comfy pillow,” Crowley said, as if considering it. “Must be all those cream teas.”
Aziraphale smiled and ran his hands down Crowley’s back, then back up and into his hair. “Tea sounds lovely. In a minute, though.” He craned his neck and pulled Crowley’s head down to his own.
Of course they had to move, eventually - there are only so many moments one can stand to have feathers stuck to one’s sweaty skin, no matter how many slow, delirious, wicked, holy kisses one indulges in.
They ended by sitting up beside one another in the bed, wings tucked away and shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. Crowley had drawn the duvet over their knees, and conjured a tray of fresh fruit from somewhere - somewhere warm, though not at all infernal. Crowley kept inching the tray closer to himself, but Aziraphale was less generous than was his usual wont when it came to strawberries and cream, and so the tray stayed equally balanced upon the angel’s left knee and the demon’s right.
“Do you know, that phrase has been translated in about four ways,” Crowley said, not bothering to wait until he was finished chewing before speaking.
“And those are just the common translations,” Aziraphale agreed. He reached for a steaming teacup, one of a pair which had suddenly appeared on the bedside table.
“You’re slipping,” Crowley said. “Sloth, angel. You should have got up and made that tea the hard way.” A pointed finger and a quick glare at the innocent table, and when Aziraphale guiltily put the teacup aside again, there was a circle of lace waiting for it, and another beneath Crowley’s cup.
“Doilies?” the angel said mildly.
Crowley glared, this time at Aziraphale rather than his errant furnishings. “I could have used a book, you know. I don’t want heat rings on my table.”
Aziraphale looked down, hiding his amusement. 7 “You’re quite right, my dear,” he said. “What’s your favourite translation?” the angel asked a moment later.
“I’ve always liked the Douay-Rheims,” Crowley said. “...The one you said.”
“Ravished, stolen, captured, wounded.” Aziraphale licked a bit of cream from his fingers, and the demon wondered if perhaps breakfast shouldn’t end sooner, rather than later. “It’s all very dramatic, isn’t it?”
“What?” Crowley said stupidly, and Aziraphale paused, and looked at him with a clear, unwavering gaze.
“Well,” the angel said, and carefully lifted the tray and turned to deposit it beside the teacup (and the doily). “Perhaps it is a bit dramatic, at that.”
He turned back to Crowley, smiling, and Crowley thought, as he slid lower upon the pillows, that yes, it was all a bit dramatic, despite how simple it all was, too.
He opened his arms and pulled the angel down.
________________________________________________
1Every last stitch.
2They didn’t. The paisley duvet he was peering out from under ensured that.
3And he should know.
4The first versions hadn’t had belly buttons; Crowley had been rather repelled (and then somewhat fascinated) when he discovered where they came from.
5It felt weird. On the current scale of weirdnesses, though, Crowley was pretty much willing to overlook it. For now.
6They didn’t have to, of course, but their bodies seemed to associate breathing with these kinds of activities, and Crowley was feeling extremely tolerant of what his body wanted at the moment; he thought Aziraphale was feeling the same way, probably.
7Very poorly, Crowley thought.