Good Omens (Aziraphale/Crowley)
Title: An Eighteenth-Century Travelogue
Author:
puella_nerdii
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,524
Warnings: implied sex
Prompt: Begging, trapped/stranded
Notes: I'm so, SO sorry about the lateness on this one. Life happens sometimes. Still, I hope the fic pleases the prompter.
Aziraphale no longer caused Crowley's teeth to rot when the angel beamed at him; he wasn't sure if that was a sign of him getting softer or Aziraphale getting harder, although he hoped like hell it wasn't the former. He had a reputation to maintain, after all. Granted, it wasn't much of one these says, judging from the Extremely Dirty Looks the other demons shot him when they all gathered on blasted fens or blighted heaths--or was it the other way around?--but if they found he spent time in the presence of an angel without foaming blood at the mouth, he doubted their opinion of him would be much improved.
That being said, if Aziraphale didn't stop radiating serene calm this bloody second, Crowley was going to punch him in the mouth. Hard.
"Things will turn out for the best," Aziraphale said, shielding his eyes as he stared up at the harsh noonday sun.
"I don't recall you being so cheerful on the ship," Crowley muttered.
"That's because I'm not longer clinging to a rickety old railing for dear life," he replied calmly, kicking at a small pile of sand with the tip of his once-fashionable, now-worn leather shoe. (At least it didn't have a heel. Crowley didn't care what the fashion of the time was; he wouldn't be caught dead in an ankle-breaker like that.) "I think our trip's taken a turn for the better, really."
"Will you stop that?" Crowley snatched up a coconut and aimed it at the angel's luminous curls. Luminous. Here they were, in the middle of some You-Know-Who-forsaken rock in the middle of the Atlantic infested by the least friendly venomous snakes Crowley'd ever had the misfortune to meet, and Aziraphale looked luminous. He, on the other hand, was too distracted by the hordes of insects after his blood to spare any proper thought as to how he ought to appear. And that was another thing--none of them touched Aziraphale. Oh no. They practically curled up in the palm of his hand. Just ate up his little sermons about how they were all the Man Upstairs' creatures. Privately, Crowley agreed with him on that. The Boss wasn't nearly inventive enough these days to conjure up plagues of insects, whereas the Head Honcho had plenty of experience with the rotters.
Insects aside, it had begun benignly enough.
***
"Oh, you know." Crowley drained the last dregs of his pint. "The usual. Below's making me follow this young lord around and tempt him to our side. Tedious as ever. The boy practically farts daisies--"
"Crowley." Aziraphale frowned.
"Well, he does. You sure he isn't one of your people in disguise?"
"Quite."
"Anyway, there has to be a faster way to do all this," Crowley said. "Seeds of doubt take their sweet time growing, you know. You've got to keep watering the bloody things." He rolled his eyes. "What about you?"
"Safeguarding three orphans. Orders from Above." Aziraphale pressed his lips together and showed Crowley a tattered bandage wrapped around his thumb. "The youngest one bit me."
"Children are bastards."
"No, they're legitimate, just orphaned."
"Aziraphale, you're being deliberately obtuse."
"Perhaps," he agreed, closing his eyes slightly. "But--well, I'm beginning to suspect that when they say you can't know His mind, they mean it."
"You know what we need?" Crowley asked the bottom of his tankard. Being glass, it didn't respond to his question. "We need a holiday."
And Aziraphale agreed, after Crowley plied him with enough ale that he forgot to sober up afterwards. He'd muttered something about the restorative powers of the sea or some other such nonsense, which Crowley took as his cue to book the two of them passage on the next ship out of port. They called her the Merry Wanderer, but he couldn't recall seeing a more dismal little ship in his long life; the yellowed sails flapped listlessly in even the strongest of winds, and the ship's wood was the grubby gray color Crowley associated with Mondays and prayer meetings. He was disappointed to discover that the crewmen were not pirates as he'd originally anticipated, merely money-grubbing wastrels. But not, they wanted to make clear, not pirates. A shame. Crowley thought he'd look dashing with an eyepatch.
Aziraphale came dangerously close to swearing when he found out. "I agreed that we needed a holiday, not that we needed to sail out of civilized waters!" he hissed, his eyes flashing in the way they usually did only when the safety of one of his oldest manuscripts was at stake.
"Relax, angel." He held up his hand. "One, you put the idea into my head when you mentioned the refreshing salty air and that rubbish--"
"I didn't mean this!"
"Two--" Crowley did his best to drown out Aziraphale, who had now started tapping his neat leather shoes against the planks of the deck. "Two, my people and your people don't have too many operations going on in the western continent. If we keep a low profile, they won't even notice us over there. Three--" The Merry Wanderer listed dangerously to the side, and the angel grabbed the wobbling rail for dear life, shooting Crowley a positively venomous look. "Look," he continued. "We're starting a new trend. We're treading where few have gone before! We won't have to deal with tourists scampering around our ankles."
"And there won't be any proper beds. Or tea. Or books," Aziraphale muttered, crossing his arms once the ship righted itself. "Why are you so eager to get away from it all? You've never been an outdoors de--" He caught himself before he uttered demon in the presence of sailors accustomed to warding off the evil eye with every step they took on their crooked legs. "--fellow. Never been an outdoors fellow."
"Since--" Crowley sighed. "You remember the lord I was supposed to be corrupting?"
The angel nodded, his brows furrowing.
"That boy's mind should have been a garden of doubt. But no. Not even a, a weed of confusion."
"A weed of what?"
"I was being metaphorical."
"And I'm going to be sick." Aziraphale's cheeks acquired an unhealthy greenish tinge.
"Well, I got fed up with waiting. So I might've..." He cleared his throat.
"Crawly," Aziraphale hissed, his eyes bulging. He stopped clearing his throat. Aziraphale almost never referred to him by his old name. "What did you do?"
"It might've been something like...I might've turned him into a toad and tossed him into the Thames."
"You what?"
"I lost my patience, all right? And I've been in enough hot water as it is, so I thought it might be best if I--well, if I went away for a bit. Waited for the others to sort things out while I was gone."
"I fail to see what any of this has to do with me."
Crowley sighed again. It was a good thing the angel had gotten rid of that fiery sword of his. The sea air certainly brought out the worst in him. So much for all the talk of its curative properties. "Well, where's the fun in it if it's just me?"
"I still don't see any fun," Aziraphale said acidly.
"It'll blow over soon. Hopefully. If Down There decides not to carry too much of a grudge about the whole thing." And when he had to hope that his boss's better nature would win out, he knew he might as well start wishing for flying horses and the like.
"You could've taken us somewhere where people bathe," Aziraphale sniffed.
"No I couldn't. They all think it's unhygienic."
"Or somewhere with less rocking. Restoring my equilibrium takes work, you know."
"You can pick the destination next time. All right?"
"As well as the mode of travel," Aziraphale said, looking distastefully at the sea.
"Fine." He squinted and looked at the horizon. Odd. The skies seemed to be getting dark unusually fast.
"...Crowley?"
"Hm?"
"Was that lightning?"
"Can't be," he said absently. "The sky was clear as anything a few minutes back. No natural storm gathers that fast..."
He stopped.
"Crowley?" Aziraphale repeated. His voice had gotten rather high.
Silently, Crowley ran through the list of every curse he knew, starting with apefaced mongrel and ending at zounds. It still wasn't enough to convey what he felt when A Voice spoke through the clouds, rumbling like thunder.
"Who's that?" the angel whispered, nudging Crowley in the ribs a good deal harder than was strictly necessary.
"Not sure--"
The two of you have some explaining to do.
***
"And since we have discerned that the storm was not natural, it must have been engineered by one of our superiors," Aziraphale said. "And as we're both alive, more or less, I doubt it was one of yours. So we'll only be stuck here as long as it takes for us to learn--whatever it is we're supposed to learn."
"And your people always work that logically, do they?" Crowley muttered.
"Well, no." Aziraphale coughed and brushed a few specks of sand from his hair.
"So it's just as likely they'll forget all about us." He aimed a kick at a nearby rock and was rewarded with a throbbing toe for his troubles. "And we can't just move ourselves off this island."
"I tried." Aziraphale closed his eyes and screwed up his face. "We regret to inform you that you are not authorized to perform a miracle of that stature at this time. Please submit forms IA through VII9 if you wish to put forth a motion to overturn this ruling, and collect signatures on documents seventy-one through one hundred and nine."
Crowley winced.
"And you don't dare ask yours, I assume."
"No," he said empathetically.
"Well." Aziraphale looked at a scrubby palm tree a few steps down the shoreline. "It could be worse."
"No people." Crowley flopped onto his back in the sand and squinted at the fluffy clouds. "No alcohol. No animals who don't see me as a source of nutrition. No--no Parisian salons," he added for the angel's benefit. "No late nights at the theatre, no concerts, no books."
Aziraphale whimpered.
"That," he said, his voice quivering, "was unnecessary."
"Misery loves company, angel."
"Yes, well." He plopped in the sand beside Crowley, his lips pursed. "Consider yourself in good company."
Idly, he wondered how long it would take to count all the grains of sand on the beach. He might have enough time to do just that. "Well," he said, "at least we don't need to worry about food."
"I miss food," Aziraphale responded. "I have since you dragged me onto that ship. At this rate, I'm going to forget what bread tastes like when it doesn't have weevils in it."
"Or meat that hasn't gone rancid." Crowley's stomach gave a moan of longing.
"Or -- oh, curses."
"That's the strongest language you can come up with?"
"I needn't lower myself to your level. Even taking present circumstances into consideration." He weighed a rock in his palm and tossed it in the air. He couldn't quite catch it on the way down; Crowley snatched it out of the air before it could thump back into the sand.
"You're already at my level," he said. He tapped the rolling dunes beneath his feet. "We're both on our arses in the sand. We can't really go much lower."
Aziraphale sighed. "I suppose not."
"So what do we do?"
"Well." He laced his thumbs together and tapped his fingers expectantly. "We could look at the clouds?"
"Or we could do something that won't put me to sleep," Crowley retorted.
"What do you suggest?"
He peered over at the angel. Aziraphale was down to his shirtsleeves; his jacket rested beneath him as some sort of makeshift blanket. His sweat-soaked cravat dangled limply around his neck, and bits of grit dotted his cheeks like stubble. He looked better like this, Crowley thought. More real. More like something he could touch.
...not that they were supposed to do that. They'd added that clause into the Agreement after they got stuck in Madrid that one night during the Inquisition. Too risky for both of them. Sure, Hell was all for rebellion, but only if you rebelled in the way they told you to. "Relations with the enemy" put you strictly in persona non grata territory.
"What is it?" Aziraphale asked.
"You've got dirt on your nose." Crowley wet the tip of his thumb and rubbed it against the bridge of Aziraphale's nose. His pale eyelashes trembled a little, but the streak of gray remained where it had been before.
"More moisture." Aziraphale licked his lips, making a coughing sound in the back of his throat. "Er. If you're having trouble getting the smudge off, that is. More moisture helps."
"I think I've got it," Crowley said slowly. He rested his hand on Aziraphale's shoulder and leaned forward, flicking the tip of his tongue against the smudge. The muscles in the angel's shoulder engaged all at once; he curled his tongue back in slowly. "Is that enough?"
"No," Aziraphale whispered. His hand sought the back of Crowley's neck. "It's not."
And they were kissing like they hadn't done in--Crowley'd lost track of how long, but centuries, it had to have been. Eons since Aziraphale's lips had been hot enough to sear his, lifetimes since the angel had used that sweet little tongue of his to rub against the ridge at the top of Crowley's mouth. He nipped the angel's lower lip, just as an experiment, and Aziraphale's hand knotted itself even tighter into Crowley's hair. It was a good thing neither of them needed to breathe, really. They could sit under the sun like this for...he didn't even know how long, just letting the silver flashes of divinity Aziraphale nudged his way soak into his skin and make him hungry, make him crave like he hadn't craved in ages.
"I thought we'd said..." Crowley began.
"Well, I suppose if two people originally make a contract, or an addendum to said contract, and then both parties agree--oh, it's extenuating circumstances. Exceptions can be made. Rules rearranged." Aziraphale squeezed his eyes shut. "Don't make me beg."
His lips curled back. "Now that's a tempting offer."
"Crowley, don't you dare."
He settled on his back in the sand and propped his hands under his head. "Don't I dare do what?"
"You know what. This is infantile."
Crowley dug his elbows into the sand and pushed his back off the ground, resting his weight on his forearms. "Come on. Just do it."
Aziraphale crossed his arms. "Now who's begging?"
He sighed. "All right. Just--you're not going to fetch that fiery sword of yours and kill me if I--?"
"No." And with that, Aziraphale's hands scrabbled over the front of Crowley's shirt, pulling him in. When he sank his teeth into the lobe of Aziraphale's ear, the angel shuddered against him violently. Had he bitten too hard? He couldn't taste any blood in his mouth, and Aziraphale's blood had a distinctive taste. It was almost like quicksilver, tangy and brilliant.
"The darkness," Aziraphale murmured, his lips pressing into Crowley's neck. "That's all. I hadn't touched it in a long time."
He only let threads trickle through after that, teasing currents of corruption to nip at the edges of the brilliance shrouding Aziraphale like a cloak. And the angel returned the favor, letting tiny spools of radiance unwind slowly in Crowley's mind until everything under the sun seemed outlined in fire--everything, the trees and the beach and Aziraphale sliding on top of him and it burned just right.
They collapsed as the sun scorched its way past the halfway mark in the sky.
"So," Crowley murmured. "Not such a bad vacation, then?"
Aziraphale tweaked Crowley's nose. "I've had worse."
Author:
puella_nerdii
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 2,524
Warnings: implied sex
Prompt: Begging, trapped/stranded
Notes: I'm so, SO sorry about the lateness on this one. Life happens sometimes. Still, I hope the fic pleases the prompter.
Aziraphale no longer caused Crowley's teeth to rot when the angel beamed at him; he wasn't sure if that was a sign of him getting softer or Aziraphale getting harder, although he hoped like hell it wasn't the former. He had a reputation to maintain, after all. Granted, it wasn't much of one these says, judging from the Extremely Dirty Looks the other demons shot him when they all gathered on blasted fens or blighted heaths--or was it the other way around?--but if they found he spent time in the presence of an angel without foaming blood at the mouth, he doubted their opinion of him would be much improved.
That being said, if Aziraphale didn't stop radiating serene calm this bloody second, Crowley was going to punch him in the mouth. Hard.
"Things will turn out for the best," Aziraphale said, shielding his eyes as he stared up at the harsh noonday sun.
"I don't recall you being so cheerful on the ship," Crowley muttered.
"That's because I'm not longer clinging to a rickety old railing for dear life," he replied calmly, kicking at a small pile of sand with the tip of his once-fashionable, now-worn leather shoe. (At least it didn't have a heel. Crowley didn't care what the fashion of the time was; he wouldn't be caught dead in an ankle-breaker like that.) "I think our trip's taken a turn for the better, really."
"Will you stop that?" Crowley snatched up a coconut and aimed it at the angel's luminous curls. Luminous. Here they were, in the middle of some You-Know-Who-forsaken rock in the middle of the Atlantic infested by the least friendly venomous snakes Crowley'd ever had the misfortune to meet, and Aziraphale looked luminous. He, on the other hand, was too distracted by the hordes of insects after his blood to spare any proper thought as to how he ought to appear. And that was another thing--none of them touched Aziraphale. Oh no. They practically curled up in the palm of his hand. Just ate up his little sermons about how they were all the Man Upstairs' creatures. Privately, Crowley agreed with him on that. The Boss wasn't nearly inventive enough these days to conjure up plagues of insects, whereas the Head Honcho had plenty of experience with the rotters.
Insects aside, it had begun benignly enough.
***
"Oh, you know." Crowley drained the last dregs of his pint. "The usual. Below's making me follow this young lord around and tempt him to our side. Tedious as ever. The boy practically farts daisies--"
"Crowley." Aziraphale frowned.
"Well, he does. You sure he isn't one of your people in disguise?"
"Quite."
"Anyway, there has to be a faster way to do all this," Crowley said. "Seeds of doubt take their sweet time growing, you know. You've got to keep watering the bloody things." He rolled his eyes. "What about you?"
"Safeguarding three orphans. Orders from Above." Aziraphale pressed his lips together and showed Crowley a tattered bandage wrapped around his thumb. "The youngest one bit me."
"Children are bastards."
"No, they're legitimate, just orphaned."
"Aziraphale, you're being deliberately obtuse."
"Perhaps," he agreed, closing his eyes slightly. "But--well, I'm beginning to suspect that when they say you can't know His mind, they mean it."
"You know what we need?" Crowley asked the bottom of his tankard. Being glass, it didn't respond to his question. "We need a holiday."
And Aziraphale agreed, after Crowley plied him with enough ale that he forgot to sober up afterwards. He'd muttered something about the restorative powers of the sea or some other such nonsense, which Crowley took as his cue to book the two of them passage on the next ship out of port. They called her the Merry Wanderer, but he couldn't recall seeing a more dismal little ship in his long life; the yellowed sails flapped listlessly in even the strongest of winds, and the ship's wood was the grubby gray color Crowley associated with Mondays and prayer meetings. He was disappointed to discover that the crewmen were not pirates as he'd originally anticipated, merely money-grubbing wastrels. But not, they wanted to make clear, not pirates. A shame. Crowley thought he'd look dashing with an eyepatch.
Aziraphale came dangerously close to swearing when he found out. "I agreed that we needed a holiday, not that we needed to sail out of civilized waters!" he hissed, his eyes flashing in the way they usually did only when the safety of one of his oldest manuscripts was at stake.
"Relax, angel." He held up his hand. "One, you put the idea into my head when you mentioned the refreshing salty air and that rubbish--"
"I didn't mean this!"
"Two--" Crowley did his best to drown out Aziraphale, who had now started tapping his neat leather shoes against the planks of the deck. "Two, my people and your people don't have too many operations going on in the western continent. If we keep a low profile, they won't even notice us over there. Three--" The Merry Wanderer listed dangerously to the side, and the angel grabbed the wobbling rail for dear life, shooting Crowley a positively venomous look. "Look," he continued. "We're starting a new trend. We're treading where few have gone before! We won't have to deal with tourists scampering around our ankles."
"And there won't be any proper beds. Or tea. Or books," Aziraphale muttered, crossing his arms once the ship righted itself. "Why are you so eager to get away from it all? You've never been an outdoors de--" He caught himself before he uttered demon in the presence of sailors accustomed to warding off the evil eye with every step they took on their crooked legs. "--fellow. Never been an outdoors fellow."
"Since--" Crowley sighed. "You remember the lord I was supposed to be corrupting?"
The angel nodded, his brows furrowing.
"That boy's mind should have been a garden of doubt. But no. Not even a, a weed of confusion."
"A weed of what?"
"I was being metaphorical."
"And I'm going to be sick." Aziraphale's cheeks acquired an unhealthy greenish tinge.
"Well, I got fed up with waiting. So I might've..." He cleared his throat.
"Crawly," Aziraphale hissed, his eyes bulging. He stopped clearing his throat. Aziraphale almost never referred to him by his old name. "What did you do?"
"It might've been something like...I might've turned him into a toad and tossed him into the Thames."
"You what?"
"I lost my patience, all right? And I've been in enough hot water as it is, so I thought it might be best if I--well, if I went away for a bit. Waited for the others to sort things out while I was gone."
"I fail to see what any of this has to do with me."
Crowley sighed again. It was a good thing the angel had gotten rid of that fiery sword of his. The sea air certainly brought out the worst in him. So much for all the talk of its curative properties. "Well, where's the fun in it if it's just me?"
"I still don't see any fun," Aziraphale said acidly.
"It'll blow over soon. Hopefully. If Down There decides not to carry too much of a grudge about the whole thing." And when he had to hope that his boss's better nature would win out, he knew he might as well start wishing for flying horses and the like.
"You could've taken us somewhere where people bathe," Aziraphale sniffed.
"No I couldn't. They all think it's unhygienic."
"Or somewhere with less rocking. Restoring my equilibrium takes work, you know."
"You can pick the destination next time. All right?"
"As well as the mode of travel," Aziraphale said, looking distastefully at the sea.
"Fine." He squinted and looked at the horizon. Odd. The skies seemed to be getting dark unusually fast.
"...Crowley?"
"Hm?"
"Was that lightning?"
"Can't be," he said absently. "The sky was clear as anything a few minutes back. No natural storm gathers that fast..."
He stopped.
"Crowley?" Aziraphale repeated. His voice had gotten rather high.
Silently, Crowley ran through the list of every curse he knew, starting with apefaced mongrel and ending at zounds. It still wasn't enough to convey what he felt when A Voice spoke through the clouds, rumbling like thunder.
"Who's that?" the angel whispered, nudging Crowley in the ribs a good deal harder than was strictly necessary.
"Not sure--"
The two of you have some explaining to do.
***
"And since we have discerned that the storm was not natural, it must have been engineered by one of our superiors," Aziraphale said. "And as we're both alive, more or less, I doubt it was one of yours. So we'll only be stuck here as long as it takes for us to learn--whatever it is we're supposed to learn."
"And your people always work that logically, do they?" Crowley muttered.
"Well, no." Aziraphale coughed and brushed a few specks of sand from his hair.
"So it's just as likely they'll forget all about us." He aimed a kick at a nearby rock and was rewarded with a throbbing toe for his troubles. "And we can't just move ourselves off this island."
"I tried." Aziraphale closed his eyes and screwed up his face. "We regret to inform you that you are not authorized to perform a miracle of that stature at this time. Please submit forms IA through VII9 if you wish to put forth a motion to overturn this ruling, and collect signatures on documents seventy-one through one hundred and nine."
Crowley winced.
"And you don't dare ask yours, I assume."
"No," he said empathetically.
"Well." Aziraphale looked at a scrubby palm tree a few steps down the shoreline. "It could be worse."
"No people." Crowley flopped onto his back in the sand and squinted at the fluffy clouds. "No alcohol. No animals who don't see me as a source of nutrition. No--no Parisian salons," he added for the angel's benefit. "No late nights at the theatre, no concerts, no books."
Aziraphale whimpered.
"That," he said, his voice quivering, "was unnecessary."
"Misery loves company, angel."
"Yes, well." He plopped in the sand beside Crowley, his lips pursed. "Consider yourself in good company."
Idly, he wondered how long it would take to count all the grains of sand on the beach. He might have enough time to do just that. "Well," he said, "at least we don't need to worry about food."
"I miss food," Aziraphale responded. "I have since you dragged me onto that ship. At this rate, I'm going to forget what bread tastes like when it doesn't have weevils in it."
"Or meat that hasn't gone rancid." Crowley's stomach gave a moan of longing.
"Or -- oh, curses."
"That's the strongest language you can come up with?"
"I needn't lower myself to your level. Even taking present circumstances into consideration." He weighed a rock in his palm and tossed it in the air. He couldn't quite catch it on the way down; Crowley snatched it out of the air before it could thump back into the sand.
"You're already at my level," he said. He tapped the rolling dunes beneath his feet. "We're both on our arses in the sand. We can't really go much lower."
Aziraphale sighed. "I suppose not."
"So what do we do?"
"Well." He laced his thumbs together and tapped his fingers expectantly. "We could look at the clouds?"
"Or we could do something that won't put me to sleep," Crowley retorted.
"What do you suggest?"
He peered over at the angel. Aziraphale was down to his shirtsleeves; his jacket rested beneath him as some sort of makeshift blanket. His sweat-soaked cravat dangled limply around his neck, and bits of grit dotted his cheeks like stubble. He looked better like this, Crowley thought. More real. More like something he could touch.
...not that they were supposed to do that. They'd added that clause into the Agreement after they got stuck in Madrid that one night during the Inquisition. Too risky for both of them. Sure, Hell was all for rebellion, but only if you rebelled in the way they told you to. "Relations with the enemy" put you strictly in persona non grata territory.
"What is it?" Aziraphale asked.
"You've got dirt on your nose." Crowley wet the tip of his thumb and rubbed it against the bridge of Aziraphale's nose. His pale eyelashes trembled a little, but the streak of gray remained where it had been before.
"More moisture." Aziraphale licked his lips, making a coughing sound in the back of his throat. "Er. If you're having trouble getting the smudge off, that is. More moisture helps."
"I think I've got it," Crowley said slowly. He rested his hand on Aziraphale's shoulder and leaned forward, flicking the tip of his tongue against the smudge. The muscles in the angel's shoulder engaged all at once; he curled his tongue back in slowly. "Is that enough?"
"No," Aziraphale whispered. His hand sought the back of Crowley's neck. "It's not."
And they were kissing like they hadn't done in--Crowley'd lost track of how long, but centuries, it had to have been. Eons since Aziraphale's lips had been hot enough to sear his, lifetimes since the angel had used that sweet little tongue of his to rub against the ridge at the top of Crowley's mouth. He nipped the angel's lower lip, just as an experiment, and Aziraphale's hand knotted itself even tighter into Crowley's hair. It was a good thing neither of them needed to breathe, really. They could sit under the sun like this for...he didn't even know how long, just letting the silver flashes of divinity Aziraphale nudged his way soak into his skin and make him hungry, make him crave like he hadn't craved in ages.
"I thought we'd said..." Crowley began.
"Well, I suppose if two people originally make a contract, or an addendum to said contract, and then both parties agree--oh, it's extenuating circumstances. Exceptions can be made. Rules rearranged." Aziraphale squeezed his eyes shut. "Don't make me beg."
His lips curled back. "Now that's a tempting offer."
"Crowley, don't you dare."
He settled on his back in the sand and propped his hands under his head. "Don't I dare do what?"
"You know what. This is infantile."
Crowley dug his elbows into the sand and pushed his back off the ground, resting his weight on his forearms. "Come on. Just do it."
Aziraphale crossed his arms. "Now who's begging?"
He sighed. "All right. Just--you're not going to fetch that fiery sword of yours and kill me if I--?"
"No." And with that, Aziraphale's hands scrabbled over the front of Crowley's shirt, pulling him in. When he sank his teeth into the lobe of Aziraphale's ear, the angel shuddered against him violently. Had he bitten too hard? He couldn't taste any blood in his mouth, and Aziraphale's blood had a distinctive taste. It was almost like quicksilver, tangy and brilliant.
"The darkness," Aziraphale murmured, his lips pressing into Crowley's neck. "That's all. I hadn't touched it in a long time."
He only let threads trickle through after that, teasing currents of corruption to nip at the edges of the brilliance shrouding Aziraphale like a cloak. And the angel returned the favor, letting tiny spools of radiance unwind slowly in Crowley's mind until everything under the sun seemed outlined in fire--everything, the trees and the beach and Aziraphale sliding on top of him and it burned just right.
They collapsed as the sun scorched its way past the halfway mark in the sky.
"So," Crowley murmured. "Not such a bad vacation, then?"
Aziraphale tweaked Crowley's nose. "I've had worse."