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“And the Lord God said unto the serpent,
Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle,
and above every beast of the field;
upon thy belly shalt thou go,
and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.”
-Genesis 3:14
It's nine years until Armageddon. The antichrist is two and perfectly content with the care of his mother. There’s no point in teaching him the finer technicalities of Satanism when he’s still learning to sort his shapes and his colors. There’s no need to rush. Nanny will come when she comes, and then he’ll be sorting the world into quarters sooner than they can blink.
The only thing left for Crowley to do is wait and tend his garden. The ferns in particular have responded to all this extra attention with what can only be described as abject panic, growing and growing until they’re fully rootbound and so broad they all but swallow the smaller hostas and succulents crowded at their base for protection. It takes a not insignificant portion of his strength for Crowley to free them from their pots.
It’s fine, he thinks. Everything is just fine. They have a plan. It’s fine. It’s going to all work out. It’s fine.
He digs his bare fingers into the tangled root ball of a fern, tearing into it with a sadistic grunt.
Then another.
And another.
He is panting. There is soil scattered all over the smooth concrete floor of his flat. His garden shivers around him, a thousand green, perfect leaves joined together in a chorus of terror.
The sound is, in its own horrible way, soothing.
Crowley calms. Examines his work. He’d gotten a little too carried away dividing one of the ferns, but with time and a careful dispension of hissed insults he’ll have four verdant beauties where before there was only one.
Absently, he lifts one dirt-covered hand to his mouth and sucks each of his fingers clean.
**
“To the world,” he says, champagne flute raised in an offering.
Aziraphale smiles at him. Soft, warm, like Crowley is the dearest thing he’s ever seen. “To the world,” he answers. They clink glasses. They are well practiced in this particular social custom.
Crowley holds his fork like he intends to use it, drifts from champagne to tea to champagne again, expertly making small bites of his own food disappear whenever Aziraphale’s attention is otherwise occupied by his share of the frivolities or his ballotine of duck liver with pears or his platter of exotic and artfully plated fruits. Not too many bites, of course, not so much as to make the farce obvious, but enough to keep with his carefully curated appearance of a meager supernatural appetite. The tea is good. The champagne is very, very good. Aziraphale beams and bubbles and moans decadently into his tournedos rossini and Crowley thinks to himself, this must be what it is to be happy.
“Oh!” says Aziraphale, when dessert has finally been served. Apple and vanilla mousseline for him. An espresso with two fingers of red sambuca for Crowley. “My dear, you simply must try this!”
He holds up a silver spoonful of the cream-pale pudding, close enough that Crowley could reach it with his mouth if he wants to, but far enough that he’ll have to brace himself against the table and lean forward if he does.
The professional in Crowley immediately recognizes it for what it is. It’s a temptation, a tease. The dessert is Aziraphale’s favorite. Crowley is also, he is beginning to suspect, Aziraphale’s favorite. It’s only natural for the angel to want to combine the flavors.
Dutifully, he leans forward to catch the tip of the spoon in his mouth. Aziraphale folds his smooth hand over the nobby back of Crowley’s own and pushes the spoon in past the soft fall of the demon’s open lips. Crowley closes his mouth. Then his eyes. The spoon is withdrawn.
“Well?” Aziraphale asks. “What do you think?”
Crowley presses the mousseline to the roof of his mouth. Feels it sink into the gaps of his teeth. It is cold and thick. He swallows.
It tastes like absolutely nothing at all.
**
After the waters of the Flood recede, all that’s left of the world is smoothed over by a thick layer of mud and silt.
“It will be good for the crops, I suppose,” Aziraphale muses, up to his calves in the stuff and looking less than content about it. He keeps squinting up at the rainbow stretched across the sky, eyebrows scrunched together as if to ask Are you sure this was the right thing to do? All that remains of the world they left behind is the barren tops of trees poking through the sediment. They’ll most likely keep finding skeletons for several more seasons of planting.
Crawly ignores him, too intent on shifting his weight back and forth between his feet, listening to the wet suck of the mud.
His breathing has gone fast and shallow. He manifests his wings, flaps them in an attempt to rid himself of the excess energy. The humans are on the far side of the mud plain, far enough that none will be able to see.
He can’t do it with Aziraphale right here, standing not quite close enough to touch with mud staining the hem of his white robes and wearing such a fucking earnest expression of consternation.
“Crawly?” He can feel the angel turn that manifestation of quiet, dismayed concern in his direction. “Are you all right?”
He can’t, he can’t. He absolutely shouldn’t.
Crawly bends forward at the waist, thrusts two clawed hands into the cool mud with a groan of longing. He squeezes both into tight fists. Feels the mud squelch out through the gaps between his fingers.
So many terrible things have happened these past forty or so odd days and nights.
His mouth is wet, wet.
“I’m fine,” he pants. “Absolutely peaches and cream, angel.” His weight pushes his forearms deeper beneath the surface until he’s sunk nearly to the elbow. His wings flap in a half-hearted attempt to find balance.
The angel frowns, clearly puzzled. “Dear boy,” he says. “Are you quite sure you—?"
Crowley tucks his wings away, lets his full weight carry him forward in a shallow, graceless belly-flop. He’s a snake well before he hits.
The mud swallows him whole. He opens his mouth and lets it.
**
They are drunk on Crowley’s hard leather sofa. The darkest of red wine. The whitest of Italian calfskin. It’s a danger Crowley wouldn’t take with anyone else in the whole wonderfully wretched wide world.
The bottle is empty when Crowley goes to pour himself another glass. He whines pitifully at the injustice of it all.
“Here,” says Aziraphale, “Allow me.” He rises from the couch with the stiff formality of a man volunteering for the firing line. Crowley admires the angel’s control as he makes a more or less straight path to the kitchen. Admires the pull of his slacks tight around his thighs as he moves with holy purpose. His eyes drift closed.
When they open again, Aziraphale has returned, bearing a fresh bottle of Syrah. Already uncorked.
“A godsssend,” Crowley slurs, tilting his empty glass forward in offering. “Tha’s what you are.”
Aziraphale laughs as he pours the black wine. His white teeth are stained dark where they press together. “Is there anything else I can get you, while I’m up?”
Crowley shakes his head, brings the glass up to his lips. It’s a good vintage. Smokey notes of blackberry, pepper, and rich, dark earth. He gestures vaguely in the direction of the kitchen. “There’s stuffed olives in the fridge if you’d like some.”
Aziraphale makes a pleased little sound low in his throat that makes it clear he would like some, thank you so very much, and vanishes from sight once more. Crowley loses himself in the soft, happy noises of the angel rummaging through the sparse but decadent contents of his refrigerator, pushing aside the bottles of microbrews and his collection of sparkling and mineral waters to find the jar of Haldiki olives Crowley has kept hidden there for exactly this occasion.
“Crowley?” Aziraphale’s voice echoes slightly off the concrete walls. “What sort of cheese is this?”
Crowley frowns. Sets down his glass. Starts rearranging his limbs in preparation for standing. “Don’t have any cheese, angel.”
Aziraphale appears in the doorway, then, carrying a small crystal candy dish piled high with olives in one hand and a long tube wrapped in wax paper in the other. The paper has been partially peeled back, exposing the marbled redwhite surface of something that might be a hard cheese, might be a salami or some other summer sausage, but definitely, definitely isn’t.
“Oh,” Crowley says.
He can feel his pupils contract.
“That,” Crowley says. “It’s…”
His stomach gives a heavy lurch, like he’s swallowed a stone. Saliva floods his mouth.
“Fertilizer. For the plants.”
Aziraphale deposits the crystal dish on the coffee table and pops two of the olives into his mouth. Waggles the wax-wrapped lump of clay like a question. “You keep it in the icebox?”
Crowley feels his lips working around several possible explanations. “It’s imported.”
His fingers twitch at his sides. He wants to grab it away, to strike it from the angel’s smooth, golden hand. He struggles to control his breathing. “Can you—”
Give it to me. Cut me a slice. Turn around. Leave. Pleasedon’tpleasedon’t leave.
I just can’t bear to have you watch.
“—wrap it back up, please. ’Sss no good if it dries out.”
Aziraphale chases down the olives with a long swallow of the dark Syrah. Gives Crowley a mock salute. “Will do, old boy.” His journey to the kitchen is less steady, this time.
Crowley chews fretfully at the meat of his palm and waits for him to come back.
**
The wind smells of salt here. He and Aziraphale are standing on the back step of a cottage in the South Downs, staring out over an overgrown tangle of weeds and flower beds left to grow wild.
The garden is a complete ruin. The cottage itself is not much better. They have seen half a dozen more modern properties with properly upkept foliage this week alone. Their realtor’s patience is growing short. Crowley suspects she is only showing them this place as a warning.
Aziraphale squeezes his hand tight, looks up at him with a sea-grey glimmer of joy that tells Crowley they will look no further.
Crowley prods at the turf with the sharp toe of a snakeskin boot, but the grass is too thick to judge what might lie beneath.
**
Aziraphale has left the kitchen’s back window open. A cool spring breeze drifts into the cottage, and the soft, steady plinking of Chopin’s Nocturns, Op. 9 drifts out again.
It will take more than a year’s worth of seasons to fully bring this garden back to order, but that's fine, that's good, even, Crowley thinks. They are relearning how to live without always counting downwards. Instant, miraculous gratification has its place, and that place is not here.
He cuts. He uproots. He digs into the earth, aerating, overturning. He furrows out a patch for vegetables, for herbs. The sun is hot against his back, and he allows himself the indulgence of sweating. There is dark soil ground into his skin all the way up to his shirtsleeves.
When Aziraphale calls him in for teatime, Crowley dutifully stoops over the cracked mudroom sink and lathers his hands and forearms with a slick bar of yellow soap. There’s a small brush on the edge of the sink for the stubborn bits of dirt that cling to the creases of his nailbeds. He scrubs and he scrubs until all the beautiful black earth is ringing the bottom of the white basin, until the splashing water has washed it down the drain.
By the time he joins Aziraphale at the table, he has mostly stopped shaking.
**
“Aziraphale…” Crowley’s voice is thin and ragged. His eyeballs feel hard and hot in their sockets. He can’t remember the last time he blinked. His left hand is wrapped desperately between the soft folds of the angel’s waist. His right hand is trapped between his own hips and the teasing slickness of the bedsheets. He digs into his own folds with trembling fingers, circling harder, harder, faster. His mouth is a ruin of the angel’s wet slick.
“You’re filthy! You’re so, sssssssso…”
He trails off, breath wheezing in his chest.
He is so full of love he could burst with it.
“What,” prompts Aziraphale in a voice dark as fresh potting soil. “What am I, Crowley?” He buries his fingers in Crowley’s sweat-lank curls. Pulls with steady, unyielding pressure until his skin blotches red with climax.
“Dirty,” he whimpers into the clean skin of Aziraphale’s upper thigh. “Dirty dirty dirty dirty…”
His hips jerk. Once. Twice. He has only few a shuddering moments to catch his breath before he’s guided back into the warm join of his angel’s legs.
“Hmm…” Aziraphale stretches, one bronzed arm flung over his head, a living testament to decadence perched on a throne of dark pillows. He stares down at him through a fan of white lashes, the coolness of his gaze betrayed by the wicked curl of his red, swollen mouth. “Lick me clean, then, why don’t you?”
**
They’ve been in and out of each other’s pockets for most of the last decade, pressed close pit to flank for centuries upon millennia longer than that, closer than any two agents of opposing factious had any right to be. But this, this is something completely different. Something that burns within Crowley in a way that is old and horribly familiar, a way that promises both comfort and a hard pain in his belly that he cannot pass.
He does not know how much longer he can hide it.
**
“I wish you would at least try some,” says Aziraphale.
There’s a worn fondness in his exasperation, soft and familiar as a well-pilled throw, but something more troublesome glints in the corners of his eyes. He looks even dustier than usual, a fine coating of flour haloing the tips of his snow-pale curls, the bared hair of his forearms, the high points of his face. Only his manicure-smooth hands are clean, the mess left behind on the damp tea towel flung casually over his shoulder.
Crowley stares at the loaf of bread cooling on the counter, fat and glazed gold and only slightly singed at the furthest edges. Steam rises up from the thick slices Aziraphale has cut for each of them. The angel had burnt his fingers in his impatience. Crowley loves him desperately for his greed.
The little kitchen smells of yeast and the warm sun of late summer. The white heart of the bread is bubbled with small holes, a delicate construct of lace that looks like it would melt at the finest of touches.
Crowley folds thin arms over his bony chest. His stomach is a hard, round lump at the center of him, weighing him down. Anchoring him to the earth.
There is a hole in the garden, hidden deep within the protection of the thorniest rose bushes, a foot and a half wide and almost twice as deep. Not so deep that his straining fingers can’t reach, but getting there, slowly but surely.
The topsoil here is thin but loam-dark, giving way to a thick crust of white chalk. And beneath that, beneath that…
“I’m not,” he says. Slow. Careful. The rest of it sticks in his throat.
Smooth grey clay, cold and firm between the squeeze of his fingers, breaking easily under the slightest pressure of teeth.
He swallows, swallows. Tries again.
“I’m not…”
**
The demon Crawly does not know what to do with this hunger.
It fills her thoughts. Burns within her hotter than the fires of hell. Wets her mouth each time she glimpses the wide bank of a river, the trickle of a stream, the shallow filth of a storm puddle.
In the first days outside of the Garden, things had been easier. The white, wind-blown sands held no secret temptations. None that she had not planted there herself, anyways.
More people living closer together means the old ways of hunting and gathering no longer provide enough sustenance for the whole. The humans move to a silt plain. They press tiny seeds into the earth with the pragmatic efficiency that comes from knowing they will die if they do not plant enough. They carve channels from the nearby river to bring water to their crops. The harvest is plentiful. They eat. They mate seed with seed. They plant. There are more humans now, living and breathing and loving and dying all packed in tight and cozy.
Crawly crouches at the edge of an irrigation ditch and shoves fistful after fistful of gleaming mud into her mouth. The hunger is not sated. The mud is gritty, sour. Tinged with the black manure the humans use to feed their hungry plantings. She weeps bitterly.
A shadow falls over her, long and wavering in the hot afternoon sun. She releases the mud from her hands in an instant, bony fingers reaching up to cross over her face, her yellow eyes. There’s slop cold and dark all around her mouth, wet-thick and rank as old blood.
A woman stands on the far crest of the ditch, head cocked and belly heavy with pregnancy. Her eyes are black ponds flanked by banks of pale grey soil. They are not unkind.
She holds out her hand. Gestures for Crawly to climb out of the ditch. To follow.
She leads her down the long line of the irrigation ditch, towards the direction of the flat brown river. As they walk, she tells Crawly stories of her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother and her aunties and her sister and her sister’s sister-in-law. Crawly does her best to match her slinking steps to the woman’s careful waddle. Their bare feet leave paired footsteps in the soft, sun-dried earth.
They come to the river itself. The woman turns left, leading Crawly further and further until they reach a place where the bank has crumbled in on itself, exposing a short cliff of layered redwhite clay. There are other women there, some with swollen bellies of their own, wide, flat-brimmed reed baskets at their feet. They scoop up the clay with their hands, pack it into neat, round balls, and press them into thick cakes no bigger than their palms.
The woman calls out a greeting, which is answered in a cheerful chorus. She bends over the nearest basket, plucks up two of the redwhite cakes, and holds one out to Crawly.
She looks, Crawly realizes with a start, exactly like her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. Exactly like Eve.
“Here,” she says. She does not blink as she stares deep into her yellow eyes. “Take it. Eat.”
Crawly hesitates, but only for a moment. Guilt brings the packed earth to her lips, but it is the hunger that sinks into it with her fangs, deep, deep, deep.
The clay is cold, and crisp, and sweet.
So very, very sweet.