Chapter Text
The seasons turn in the desert like the slick blade of a knife as winter arrives and descends upon the traveling midwives.
Some days the sun beats down without remorse, baking the winter-dry air to a crisp, and on others yet the long-awaited rains come and wash out gurgling gulches into shallow basins as the parched earth finally drinks its fill. By night darkness falls over the sands in a blanket of frigid blackness pinpricked only by icy stars and the distant calls of desert fauna crawling out to lap up beads of sweet water. Crowley watches them by moonlight sometimes, shivering beneath her shroud even as she sits dangerously close to the fire without any worry of being singed by its flames.
Rain or shine, the village women still come to the midwives’ tent to bring their babies into the world. By her own count, Crowley has delivered or assisted in the delivery of three hundred and twenty-seven babies since she began traveling with the midwives. Most of them born alive, some of them not. There have been twelve sets of twins in that figure, and a singular set of triplets wherein only one girl-child came out breathing. Crowley still counts them all, each tiny life worth remembering, no matter how long or short it burned before it snuffed out.
By law of personal immortal nature, she would’ve usually moved on to other ventures or exploits by now. Wiles to sow, sins to reap, the typical fare—but her work with the band of midwives is grounding in its familiarity, and she finds that even though they never stay staked out in one place for longer than a fortnight, her sandaled feet are always willing to follow the motley group of women on roads yet untraveled. In terms of Down Below, Crowley figures it’s a tax writeoff of sorts; as far as Hell knows, her midwifery is about getting demonic tenterhooks on the new lives as soon as they pop out of the womb, and spreading Satan’s handiwork as far as she can through nomadic wanderings. Dodgy checks and balances haven’t failed her yet.
The deeper reality beyond that veneer of truth is: Crowley has grown terribly, awfully fond of the ragtag string of women and girls she travels with. And bringing screaming babies into the world is far more gratifying—albeit, messy—work than flashing ankle at kingpins and pushing around chess pieces in front of hungry warlords.
Really, there’s been no imminent push to question the particular longevity of her unconventional side gig beyond any technical parameters until the evening she looks across the crackling fire and spots a figure in white leathers on the wintry edge of dusk.
Crowley knows who it is before she even sees the meandering goats and their spotted hides. Her heart jumps into her throat, beating hard and fast, and all grumblings about the cold night air leave her as if they were never anything but mere apparition. Heated blood rushes to her extremities and she wants to stand to see him better, but doesn’t dare leap up and prematurely show her hand. The women around the fire eat mutton stew with lumps of bread from their wooden bowls, speaking in low voices, telling stories to the younger girls as others begin to doze. None of them have seen the angel, yet.
The braying of one of the foraging donkeys makes them raise their heads, and it’s clever Abeni—now quickly growing into a young woman and mindful apprentice—who recognizes their approaching guest.
“Ezra!” she calls, leaping up to run through the deepening twilight on her bare feet despite the chastising calls of her mother. Crowley slowly draws herself up and feels a betraying smile tug at the corner of her mouth until her canine tooth glints like a pearl in the firelight.
In the distance, Aziraphale lets out an audible oof as Abeni runs headlong into his arms, but he quickly recovers and doesn’t fumble his shepherd’s staff as he warmly tucks the girl against his side for a fleeting embrace.
“My word, young lady, look how you’ve grown,” he tells her, and then takes a step back to do a gentlemanly sort of demure little bow, indicating that Abeni should lead the way as the goats gradually follow suit. “It would be an honour to break evening bread with such wonderful company, if I only have the blessing from your elder.”
The crone is already waiting at the corner pole nearest the fire when Abeni runs back, breathless and windswept by the desert night. The oldest midwife doesn’t speak, but her rheumy eyes flash over to land on Crowley in a pointed sort of look before she nods her grey head in assent: the kindly goatherd may share their fire and bread, tonight.
Abeni runs back out to relay the message, and Crowley claws a fist in the gauzy wrappings of her headscarf at the base of her throat, foregoing the urge to breathe until she knows Aziraphale has seen her. Friendly recognition blooms across his pale face like an opening night flower, and the power of that look alone would make her drop to her knees if sheer wretchedness and damnation didn’t keep her standing.
The angel quickly gathers a bowl of fresh milk from one of the nanny goats, bringing it with him in offering as he approaches the fire. He greets the elder midwife first, inclining his head to kiss her gnarled hands as he offers the frothy milk, still warm from its source. A few words pass between them, and then Aziraphale comes to Crowley, the ivory skins and leathers he wears over his tunic glowing in the mixed moon and firelight. She takes in the sight of him up close and knows he’s the brightest thing she’s seen other than the sun since they last parted ways a full year before.
“You’re still here,” Aziraphale says by way of greeting, eyes sparkling, though he doesn’t reach out to touch or embrace her. “You must have excellent job security.”
“Funny thing, that,” Crowley manages, clearing her throat. “You’re one to talk—the goats still keep you company while you twiddle with your scrolls, eh?”
The angel huffs out a little laugh, but his eyes dart somewhere just beyond Crowley’s left ear so he’s not quite looking into her golden eyes. “It would seem neither one of us wished to return to an occupation of full solitude as quickly as we have in the past,” he says. “I won’t hold it against you if you don’t hold it against me.”
Crowley doesn’t know quite how to interpret that, but she swallows the strange little knot in her throat and nods. “We both know you were chomping at the bit to get over here and thwart a wile or two—can’t ever stay away for long, can you?”
“Never,” Aziraphale says solemnly, planting his wooden staff with one hand but just barely grazing the side of Crowley’s palm with the fingers of his other, still miraculously warm in the frigid night. Something electric shoots up her arm at the contact, and this time the angel catches the corner of her eye for a moment so fleeting Crowley partly wonders if she imagined it. “Where there is wickedness in the world, my dear, I’m afraid I must follow.”
The demon opens her mouth to speak again, but Abeni has returned with a heaping dish of mutton stew and fresh flatbread, and Aziraphale turns to graciously accept it from her with abundant thanks before he settles down to rest his weary feet by the midwives’ fire.
Night deepens until the sky above them is a black veil, and yet none of the local villagers come to bear their children. Crowley sits with her body angled toward the angel, soaking in the sight of him even while he’s preoccupied with exchanging stories with the women and girls about the sights he’s seen on his travels to the west. Bustling markets boasting innumerable oils and spices, gemstones as large as a clenched fist, scrolls the weight and width of a rolled tent skin, and statuesque warriors with skin as dark as ebony with gold wire braided into their hair. The spotted goats mingle about, shooed away from eating in the chest of gathered herbs and tinctures by the frayed brush of a carpet whisk wielded in the old crone’s hand.
The goatherd stays with them until the midwives begin heading to their bedrolls one by one, the mothers tugging their daughters by the hand. Bats zip past overhead and Crowley is the last of them to leave, but only after Aziraphale stands and excuses himself to fetch his satchel and pack where he’d dropped them just outside the fire circle.
“What’s all that mess?” Crowley asks, inclining her head toward the bundle of notched poles and stitched bolt of leather Aziraphale begins untying. “Too bloody late to start up a game of chutes and ladders.”
“A tent, if you can believe it,” he says cheerfully, wrinkling his nose up in a gleeful way that makes Crowley’s stomach do funny things. “As lovely as the starry sky is, I’ve discovered it’s much easier to weather the elements when you have a bit of roof over your head. It only took getting rained on once before I figured that much out.”
Crowley nods, swallowing back any clever retort as she lingers at the canopy’s edge of the birthing tent, fluidly shifting her weight from one foot and the other. “You’ll be here in the morning, then?” she asks, hating the hope hanging onto the final word of that question.
“I hope to rest and water the herd for a night or two before we continue onward,” Aziraphale says plainly, still sorting out the makings of his tent. “There are somewhat urgent matters that need my attention in the near east.”
“Right,” Crowley says, sniffing with a sideways tweak of her nose. “Guess I’ll be seeing you around, angel.”
“Indeed you will,” Aziraphale replies, warmly enough. “My thanks to your matriarch again for giving me her blessing to camp alongside you.”
“As if she had any choice,” Crowley snorts. “They all still talk about you to this very day—you’re like a living legend the little ones beg to hear stories about.”
“I most certainly am not,” Aziraphale says, blushing a brilliant shade of rose.
“Oh, but you are,” Crowley tells him, arching a brow. “I haven’t seen Abeni run that fast in years.”
The darkness doesn’t do much to hide the flush spreading to the tips of Aziraphale’s ears, and he haphazardly gathers his belongings with an exasperated sort of sound. “Well,” he says at last. “You know I don’t encourage idolatry, but I suppose there are far worse things to be, for an angel.”
“Yeah, for sure,” Crowley says, wilting some around the hollow sound of her own laugh. “Tell me about it.”
Aziraphale’s eyes flash up to meet hers through the fading firelight. “Crowley,” he starts. “You know I didn’t mean anything of the sort—”
“Save it, angel,” Crowley says, disappearing behind the tent flap with a pointed snap of her fingers. “Good night.”
When Aziraphale takes a deep breath and opens his eyes again, he finds that his modest dwelling has been perfectly erected a stone’s throw away from the midwives’ tent. When he goes to curiously poke his head inside, his satchel and his scrolls are already laid out with his bedroll and blanket, simply waiting for him like they’d been there all along.
Crowley wakes before daybreak with the fragrant smell of herbal tea in her nose.
She doesn’t want to pull her feet from the warmth of her bedroll, but sits up anyway and loosely winds her scarf around her hair. She yawns and stretches before she stands, deeply satisfied with the succession of aligning pops that crack along her spine. She miracles away the rank taste in her mouth, rubs a finger over her teeth, and then ties her sandals onto her feet before walking out across the sands to find Aziraphale boiling his morning brew in a copper pot above a small cookfire.
“Early riser, eh,” Crowley says, standing back a bit to wait and see if he’ll invite her to sit.
“I don’t often indulge in sleeping as a habit,” Aziraphale says, and then makes a gesture with one hand for her to settle on the rug beside him. “The bedroll is merely a place to rest and get out of the elements, as it were. I see you had a quiet night business-wise.”
“Won’t last long,” Crowley says, still rubbing some of the sleep from her eyes as she sits cross-legged on the woven carpet. In the greyness of rising daylight, she appraises the magnitude of things with which Aziraphale has set up his small camp, including a portable ink and brush set and a metal contraption that resembles an elaborate sundial. “How the hell do you fit all this into that wee Mary Poppins bag of yours?”
“By faith and a little nimble convincing,” Aziraphale says indulgently, producing two enameled cups from the aether. “Do you still take your tea with a spot of honey?”
“Are bears Catholic?” Crowley snorts, silently pleased with how the angel has remembered such a small, inconsequential detail about her preferences. “Load me up with the good stuff.” Funnily, she’s already feeling warmer before Aziraphale even passes the steaming cup into her hands.
They sit in companionable silence, watching as the goats and their kids slowly stand from where they’d bedded down near a cluster of boulders beneath a rock face not too far away. Aziraphale delicately blows on his tea and clears his throat. “Have you—heard any word on young Esther, since you last parted ways?”
“No,” Crowley says, drinking her dark brew and not caring that it nearly scalds her throat. “Thought it’d prolly be best to put all that behind me.”
“Ah,” Aziraphale says, nodding solemnly. “For the best, of course.”
Crowley doesn’t add anything, though she watches the angel’s pretty pink lips as he goes to sip from his enameled cup. The visceral memory of his mouth at her breast slices through her with the swiftness of a lance, and she physically shudders where she sits, a little ghost of air escaping her own parted lips.
“Are you still cold, my dear?” Aziraphale asks, eyes sliding sideways. “I could lend you my blanket for a spell.”
“No need,” Crowley croaks, taking another gulp of hot tea. “M’fine.”
Aziraphale fully turns his head to gaze at her, and the weight of those eyes makes her resolve begin to crumble. Even after the paltry year they’ve been apart. Even after all the dark desert nights she’s spent trying to push everything so deep below the rippling surface of herself, into a place where it would not emerge again.
“You don’t seem fine,” he says. “You look a touch peaky, truth be told.”
She’s been bleeding by the moon for the past eleven months by a personal choice she herself still doesn’t fully grasp the finer minutiae of, but Crowley doesn’t mention this. If Aziraphale can smell the muted iron scent hanging around her now that the cycle is coming to a close, he doesn’t seem keen to utter it aloud.
“Look,” she says, swallowing thickly. “We never—talked, before. About what happened, uh. Between you and me. Last time we crossed paths.”
Aziraphale blinks several times, then slowly nods. He sets his tea to one side and looks up at her again just as the sun’s outermost rim crests on the horizon. “What would you like to discuss?” he asks.
She wasn’t expecting him to be open to this conversation so quickly, and the abruptness of it makes her fumble. “I—I don’t rightly know,” she rambles, fingers curling and twisting in her black robes. “It’s just, I reckon I need to know the truth of the thing,” she adds. “If that was something you wanted, uhm—being close like we were? If it was…real.”
Crowley swallows again, almost painfully, and stares into the fire while the angel’s stormy eyes linger on her face with such profound attention that she can feel them.
“Nothing about our last encounter was a farce, if that’s what you’re asking,” Aziraphale says quietly. “I never would have offered to help ease your pain and suffering if I didn’t wish to.”
“But did you only do it because of the whole suffering bit?” Crowley says, hating herself even as the brittle words tumble from behind her teeth. “Like some form of divine benediction so graciously bestowed upon something so damned.”
Aziraphale’s mouth wavers just the slightest bit before it sets into a firmer line. “We aren’t safe,” he says in a strained voice. “We may never be safe in any true sense of the word. But I would’ve hoped—foolishly prayed, even—that you’d know by now…some of what I feel.”
Crowley’s breath leaves her, and her heart seems to stagger to a dying crawl as time ceases to exist around them.
“I’m always afraid of what my words may betray by speaking aloud,” Aziraphale admits a few moments later, hushed voice shaking just a little. “But what I feel for you, I feel for no other. And it’s certainly never been derived from a place of pity.”
Crowley can’t manage to speak, but she draws her hand from within the folds of her dark robe and holds it outward, into the open air between them. Aziraphale takes it without pause, pressing a warm thumb into the heart of her palm, which she quickly closes around like a stolen treasure.
Aziraphale raises her hand and bows his head to brush a kiss against her freckled knuckles. Civilizations could collapse around them and Crowley would be deaf and blind to it all. Stars could collide in the sky above and she would still not pull away from the angel’s touch.
Until a voice is calling her name from the midwives’ tent, sharp and urgent in the frosty morning air. “Antonia, come quickly! A maiden has come—the shoulders are caught, and we need your nimble hands.”
Crowley stands so abruptly that her tea tips over onto the sand, fingers wrenching from Aziraphale’s grasp. She swears a foul word, clutching the hand Aziraphale had kissed against her breast as if it were burned by something sacred.
“Shoulder dystocia,” she murmurs, golden eyes looking slightly crazed as dawn spills over them in a brightening arc, seeing but unseeing at the same time. “They don’t usually make it without proper interference.”
Aziraphale nods and carefully rights her toppled cup. “Go,” he urges. “You know where to find me, should you need me.”
Crowley steels herself, turns away from the angel’s campfire, and all but flies toward the sound of murmuring, panicked voices beginning to gain volume in the birthing tent. The hand Aziraphale kissed tingles with something warm even as she maneuvers and presses on the laboring mother’s body and silently wills the pelvis concealed within to widen ever so slightly, just enough to let the baby through, just enough that they both may live.
There is blood, and pain, and screaming enough to bring the cloudless desert sky down, and Crowley isn’t so sure her wretched plea has been answered until there is a moment of swift relief and the squalling baby tumbles forth into her hands. The midwives wipe the tiny boy off and hand him to his ashen-faced mother, who will never have another child get stuck in the birth canal for all her mortal days yet to come, if only because Crowley has made sure of it.
If there was a nearby angel involved in the matters of such a silent miracle, well. Nobody could ever say for sure.
Crowley doesn’t return to Aziraphale’s camp until night has nearly fallen.
Thunder rumbles somewhere to the darkening west where toppling black clouds huddle shoulder to shoulder against the horizon, pushing the promise of a storm their way. The midwives eat their supper with a quickness and go to unroll the cured hide flaps of the long tent, securing them in place with strips of leather and woven jute so rain won’t blow inside where they work or rest.
There is a village woman staying the night with them, still up and restlessly walking with Abeni and her mother in the early stages of labor. She seems to be in good, if slightly anxious spirits—this is not her first birth, the midwives have learned, but all others who came before this child had not lived more than a few days at most. Crowley suspects the woman may not deliver until much later in the night or the wee hours of the morning at best, and quickly ladles some stew into a bowl and fills the loose edge of her scarf with a handful of ripened figs that she carries out to Aziraphale.
It seems the angel is just settling in himself after having corralled the goats under a rocky overhang cut into the nearest cliffside. Crowley doesn’t know how he managed to convince the wily beasts to stay there to weather the storm, but they seem content enough to lie down under their serendipitous shelter and boredly chew ruffage and thorns. The pair of donkeys that pull the midwives’ cart silently join them after their own dinner of grain, sensing that the natural umbrella will keep them safe and dry overnight as well.
“It’s going to start pissing down kittens here in about half an hour,” Crowley says as she walks up and hands over the stew without further preamble. “What’d you tell those goats to keep them all bunched up together like that?”
Aziraphale accepts the hot meal and produces his own spoon from the aether with a slightly wonky flourish of his right hand. “They’re far more intelligent and self-preserving than you’d give them credit for,” he says, lips twitching. “But I suppose you have spent more time around common crows than any actual goats…”
“Oh, come off it,” Crowley snorts, flopping down onto the rug by Aziraphale’s small fire. She takes one of the figs and bites into it with a dour face. “We don’t need to go bringing up all that again.”
“So sorry, silly of me to even mention it,” Aziraphale says, getting a spoonful of broth and bringing it to his lips. “Just one of my dearest memories of you, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” Crowley grumbles, pitching the stem of her fig into the orange flames. “Of course. Rub it in, tell me how bright, shiny, and undemonic everything I bloody do is—it’ll make such a big difference, won’t it.”
Aziraphale smiles knowingly and takes another modest bite of stew. “That knowledge remains carefully guarded between myself and Bildad the Shuhite,” he says. “Couldn’t ever leave a spot of goodness on your dark and nefarious reputation.”
“Absolutely not,” Crowley grunts. “You’re a shit influence and terrible at thwarting wiles.”
Aziraphale rests his bowl on one knee at this, looking slightly wounded. “Do you really mean that?” he asks.
“Nah,” Crowley says, in the same moment her eyes flash over and she holds a lazy finger to her curled lips. “You could thwart me any time you’d like, f‘course.”
Aziraphale’s complexion darkens in the stormy dusk, cheeks stained the color of red plums. “And you are a foul temptress and a fiend,” he says without much heat, just as the first sprinkling raindrops begin to dapple into the sand around them.
Thunder groans again, closer than it was before, but neither angel nor demon move from their places near the fire. The falling droplets grow heavier and begin to sizzle in the flames. Crowley could make the fire burn into eternity and beyond but doesn’t raise her hand to save it. She should stand and run to the midwives’ tent to find shelter from the oncoming storm, but her legs won’t seem to take her there.
“I must depart at first light,” Aziraphale says abruptly. “Once the storm has passed and the goats have fully rested, that is.” Crowley already knew as much but doesn’t ask why he’s suddenly repeating this information. Part of her knows, she thinks—deep down, simmering in the hull of her belly. There is something there, something unspoken, extended like the hand she’d wordlessly given him to kiss that morning.
“Off on one of your little holy crusades, eh?” Crowley croaks. Lightning pierces the distant sky, lighting it up with the bruised lilac of crushed hyacinth and violet. The cold rain is beginning to dampen their clothing and they merely let it.
“Something like that,” Aziraphale sighs, watching her through the descending dark as the fire slowly begins to die. “Hands are never truly idle where heaven’s higher agenda is concerned.”
When the sky thunders this time it feels like it’s broiling directly on top of them. The rain begins coming in sheets that hit them with the ferocity of a wet slap, and Crowley’s blood races through her vessel, thrilling in the unknown and unseen as her hair whips around her face in the storm. The bits of Aziraphale’s linen robe not covered by protective leathers are fully transparent now, stuck flush to his creamy skin. Crowley stares at the keyhole bit tied below his collarbones, the roundness of supple flesh and the sprinkling of chest hair there, and wonders what unknowable sweetness she would taste if she sucked the desert rainwater from the fibers alongside his warm body heat.
The fire goes out with a dying hiss, a paltry curl of steam rising up into the newborn night, and suddenly the freezing rain and darkness is all around them without even the starlight to see by.
“Come with me, quickly,” Aziraphale says, standing at long and terrible last before reaching a hand down to Crowley. “You’ll catch your death cold, staying out here for even a moment longer.”
Crowley grips the angel’s forearm and finds herself drawn up against his body—and then, disbelieving with how her feet don’t touch the ground, seems to be either carried or whisked by miraculous intervention through the flaps of Aziraphale’s tent until they’re both sprawled beneath the oiled skins, soaked but otherwise safe from the water beating down overhead.
Crowley peels a wet curl from her cheek and looks up at Aziraphale unwinding the soaked turban from his hair by the diffused light of a small glass orb inexplicably shining in one corner of the tent. He folds the head wrap in sections over his palm, and then sets the soggy garment to one side. They both look up at the same time, breathing slightly hard. Their legs are tumbled together and Crowley tries not to focus on the scorching place where Aziraphale’s bare calf touches her wet ankle.
“We look like a couple of drowned rats, you and I,” she snorts, mopping rainwater from her face. She looks down at her scrawny figure now outlined by the shape of her sopping wet shift and pulls a face at the ungainly jut of her hip bones and modest chest. “S’pose I’m a little worse for wear between the two of us, but that’s nothing exactly new.”
“None of that now, my dear,” Aziraphale gently murmurs. He shrugs out of his sewn sheepskins and then leans slightly forward into Crowley’s space to begin pulling the leather laces on his waterlogged sandals. She becomes abruptly aware of the distinct scent of their bodies mingling in this tight space—desert rain, the faint spiciness of dark tea, damp linen, the oil and animal tallow rubbed onto the flaps of the tent to make them repel water. There is an undercurrent of her own clean iron scent there if she breathes in deep and holds it against the roof of her mouth, but the trace of blood is so faint she doesn’t think the angel can sense it.
Aziraphale goes to remove his other sandal from a pale foot and stalls for a half-second before he pulls it free. His pert nose twitches to one side and he blinks before looking up at Crowley, and in that singular heartbeat of a moment she knows she’s been found out.
“Are you hurt?” Aziraphale asks, making a small show of looking at her exposed forearms and calves. “I don’t see any blood.”
“It’s not where you can see it,” Crowley hisses, quickly withdrawing her legs and folding them back close against her body. “And it should be mostly finished with by now for the month, but such is my sodding luck.”
Aziraphale stares at the side of her face for a painfully long span of time that seems to last eons. There’s a sense of gravity in that benevolent stare, a sense of knowing that makes her feel as if she’s been expertly skinned and had her translucent flesh stretched and staked out to cure beneath the beating sun.
“I,” Aziraphale begins, and then closes his mouth for a beat before his gaze flits away to look at nothing. “I never knew you bled like Eve.”
“I didn’t,” Crowley rasps. “Not for a long time—not by nature, anyway. It was a choice. One that you aren’t allowed to question me about or offer to heal, by the way.”
Aziraphale quietly sighs and looks back up at her again. “I wasn’t going to ask,” he says, swallowing tightly. “To heal that, at least.”
Crowley feels an incredulous laugh wing up out of her like a startled bird. “What’s ailing me this time?” she asks, reaching up to claw at her sodden veil hanging limply against her front. “There’s nothing left for you to fucking heal.”
Aziraphale leans in closer, his face held only the careful breadth of two hands from her own, and merely presses through the strands of hair and strips of cloth still plastered to Crowley’s throat and chest like scarlet seaweed. His index finger lightly touches the discernible shape of her breastbone, and she simply sits there and lets him with her heart dashing itself to death underneath.
“But there is,” he says softly before pulling his hand away again. “Just here.”
Crowley tries to snarl but makes a withered sort of sound in the back of her throat instead. “You idiot,” she whispers, shaking all over now with cold and wrath and the blinded oblivion of her own despair. “You doddering old fool of an angel. How the hell do you think you’re going to heal that?”
“By holding you,” Aziraphale says, terribly simply. “If you’d let me.”
She stares him down, shivering with the full-body intensity of an ancient yearning that could swallow her whole. What she feels for the angel has outlasted millions of human lifetimes, and yet the possibility of cracking her blackened heart open enough to grant her own wish could very well end her. It could end them both, Crowley thinks.
She grits her teeth and holds herself tightly while the water continues to endlessly drum overhead. “I’m unclean,” she says. It could mean a variety of things; Crowley lets Aziraphale come to his own conclusions. “You couldn’t—you can’t.”
“And we are not mortal creatures beholden to the arbitrary laws of men,” Aziraphale says, even though he keeps a respectful distance. “It…it doesn’t matter to me, that you bleed. Bodies on this earth have done so since the beginning of humanity.”
Crowley’s eyes glimmer like golden coins in the shadows. His answer is too diplomatic for her liking—too sanitized, too distant from the core of their truths. “Ask why I choose to do it, then,” she rasps. “Ask me why I only started after I gave up the child and you left.”
Aziraphale watches her for a moment, wringing his hands for lack of anything else to fidget with. “You told me not to question you about it,” he says quietly.
“I never said that you weren’t allowed to ask why, only that you couldn’t question my decision,” Crowley says. “So go ahead, angel. Ask me.”
He looks physically pained, caught between Crowley’s burning stare and the bawling storm just outside the small tent they’re huddled in. “Why do you bleed?” he whispers.
“Because I hadn’t in all the time that came before, after I willed it away,” she tells him, trembling as she rips her wet shroud from her head. “But after I gave the baby away, that night we spent under the bloody stars, I—I thought about it, and why I wanted to suffer that burden,” she babbles, feeling slightly crazed. “I needed to suffer it, angel. To remember what it was and where it came from.”
And I thought about what would happen if I tempted you, and you planted a child inside me because I bled, is what she does not say. The words snare fast behind her teeth, almost audibly clacking into the enamel. Crowley immediately knows they aren’t to be shared, aren’t to be pulled from the soft hollow places behind her rib cage and laid out like raw organs for sacrificial offering, and swallows them back with a staggering wave of nausea that makes her eyes water.
She cannot lose what Aziraphale has offered in this profane treaty, under this torrential downpour, in this small tent that smells of spiced tea and animal skins. He cannot know the full scope of what she’s ever hoped for—it would frighten him, and make him flee to the ends of the earth where she could not bring herself to follow.
And the angel must mistake her glassy-eyed nausea for unshed tears, because he presses his lips together and reaches out a comforting hand, laying it against her forearm in gentle benediction. The heat of his palm sears her without pain, making her stomach flip into freefall.
“Oh, Crowley,” he says. “You can’t carry all of the world’s suffering on your shoulders like this. Not alone—not forever.”
“Yeah, well, just sit back and watch me,” Crowley sneers, and then laughs even as the real tears start to well and stream down her face. She gulps around a painful, hiccuping sob, and decides in that moment to take up the angel’s offer and whatever else he may be willing to give her. She needs it, like a fired cautery knife on a bleeding wound, like a salve on a burn—desperate with the strange grief of it all, scrabbling for any scrap of relief she can claw from him.
“Hush,” Aziraphale says gently, reaching to push a lank section of hair behind her ear before letting his hand fall to the hunched shape of one shoulder. “Don’t think about those things. I’m here with you, now.”
“So bloody well hold me, then,” Crowley croaks, practically thrusting herself into his arms until their clammy bodies are flush through damp clothing. Aziraphale takes it in stride, though, gripping her with a gentle fierceness and bringing the fingers of his right hand to touch just under her chin, wet with warm tears rather than cold rainwater.
Crowley breathes in haggard little gasps, lungs rattling with residual sobs. Thunder clamors out a warning overhead and she ignores it, blinking through what paltry light that strange little glass orb provides as she looks up into Aziraphale’s eyes. His lids are lowered just a tad, and his fair lashes almost glitter in their translucence. He only closes them when he leans in to find Crowley’s mouth for a chaste brush of a kiss, and then she can’t see anything anymore as she squeezes her own eyes shut and succumbs to the delicate blessing of his mouth.
This isn’t their first kiss, but it feels just as drugging and potent as the first one. Crowley curls her clawed hands in the wet fabric of Aziraphale’s long tunic and pulls him in harder, closer, not stopping until her chest is sandwiched against his own and he’s cradling the back of her tangled head to keep her neck from bowing backward. Their noses crush together as she sucks against the angel’s soft lower lip, delighting in the curious warmth of the surprised little sound he makes high in his throat, only for her.
“Darling,” Aziraphale says, somewhere against the corner of Crowley’s mouth. “You’re trembling.”
“M’cold,” Crowley half-lies, wanting to push her icy hands inside the angel’s tunic to press against his soft sides, as white as buffed marble. She wonders if her damned hands would leave black marks on the beautiful expanse of him and feels something warm clench in her core at the thought of marking the angel. “Wet clothes, y’know—tends to kill a poor bastard faster in the winter.”
“Let me dry them for you,” Aziraphale says, and the last thing Crowley wants is to stay hidden within the endless folds of her black shroud.
“Don’t,” she says, thumb curving along the fine contour of his scapula, gentle and imploring as she stalls to find her threadbare courage. “We—ngh, we’d warm up faster without them.”
Aziraphale pulls back just enough to find her eyes again, bright and questioning. It takes everything Crowley has to meet his gaze, but she does, and holds it until he breaks through the silence first, one strong hand still cupped at the base of her skull. “How would you have me hold you, Crowley?” he asks, skimming a thumb behind the flushed shell of her left ear.
The gentleness in his voice cuts through her like a spearpoint, a precise but staggering blow with such carefully wielded weight behind it. The kind of final wound that would pin a mortal body into the ground until it died there. Crowley groans and almost reaches to touch below her left breast, just to feel the wet warmth of fresh blood welling there, but she knows there’s nothing to touch but her thumping pulse. Aziraphale’s eyes never once leave her face.
“I don’t want there to be any clothes between us when you hold me,” Crowley hisses into the tiny sliver of space nestled between them. For a moment the rain comes down impossibly harder, and the wind howls around the tent shielding them from the storm. “I don’t even want the air to come between you and I, tonight.”
Aziraphale’s fingertips slowly unravel from the back of Crowley’s neck, sliding down the knobby vertebrae of her spinal cord where she’s hunched against him. He seems lost somewhere else for a moment, somewhere distant despite their physical closeness, but doesn’t take long to come back to her.
“How long have you wanted this?” he asks, leaving the rest hanging unspoken upon the cool air. With me.
“Forever,” Crowley tells him, croaking out the raw truth because she’s come too far to lie. “For as long as I knew it was something I could want.”
Aziraphale nods, hand settled in the gentle divot above her hip. “I wish I could give you more,” he murmurs, head slightly turned away—in shame or grief, Crowley isn’t sure. “More than these solitary lives we lead in this place.”
“Just give me tonight,” Crowley whispers, taking his face between both palms in some wretched mimicry of prayer. “Please, angel. I’ve never wanted anybody but you.”
Aziraphale’s eyes are wet when he looks up at her again. The sight makes Crowley’s lower lip tremble, and the tender spot in the back of her throat ache something terrible. She tries to smile for him, but it hurts too much, so she leans in and presses their lips together again. The taste of salt from his falling tears should burn her sinner’s mouth with raw divinity, but doesn’t.
“I would’ve waited even longer, for you,” Aziraphale says, bowing their foreheads together. “I hope you know that.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Crowley says, shaking her head. “We don’t—don’t gotta say anything out loud.”
“Not with as many words,” Aziraphale sadly agrees, and then skims his thumb over her shoulder, taking the edge of her robe with it until the damp fabric falls down her arm and drops into the crook of her elbow. The garment reveals Crowley’s left breast, pale and pebbled around the rosy nipple. She isn’t engorged and leaking milk like the last time Aziraphale touched her there, but he bows his head and kisses the small swell of her chest anyway.
She makes a broken sound at the contact, pushing her fingers through Aziraphale’s hair as his nose skims across her sternum and he carefully tugs the other shoulder of her garment until it falls like the other. He takes her nipple in his mouth, with a deep enough latch that she can feel the wet heat of his curled tongue. There’s nothing to give, and yet he palms and strokes her as he licks and kisses her there, like it might make the milk drop down if they only hoped hard enough.
When Crowley growls and slowly tips backward she brings Aziraphale with her, halfway sprawled over her lower body. He runs his hands up her bare sides, fingers barely catching along the grooves of her ribs as he touches her. It’s maddening in its sensuality but it’s still not enough, and Crowley feels the place between her legs throb obscenely when the angel’s upper thigh grinds against her mound.
“Get your ruddy shift off,” Crowley says, mindlessly tugging at some of the fabric at Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Lay with me like men and women do. I’ll make the bleeding stop, it’s hardly anything at all now, it won’t be a bother—”
“I don’t mind it,” Aziraphale says, raising his head to peer at her through the dim light before he pushes himself up on his forearms. “If you’re bleeding as Eve did, I suppose I shall be like Adam?”
“Yeah, that works,” Crowley says, swallowing tightly. “Have you ever made any effort…?”
“Once or twice,” Aziraphale admits, sitting back to begin pulling his linen shift up over his legs and bottom until it’s gathered just below his waist. “Out of curiosity, to see if I had a preference.”
“And?” Crowley breathes, fingers straying to undo the sash at her own waist as she watches Aziraphale carefully pull his garment over his head.
“I found I quite like both for their own reasons, but not enough to keep anything permanently installed over the millennia,” Aziraphale says, setting his clothing to one side. His skin glows white by the light of that orb, full of its opalescent secrets. “I’ll gladly break my fast for you tonight.”
When he moves this time to reach for her, there is indeed a cock hanging between his plush thighs nestled in a thatch of golden curls, not massive but by no means modest. It’s not yet cut in the ways of the kingdom’s people, but its sheath has already drawn back over the flushed head as the length begins to harden. Aziraphale’s belly is there, too, well-muscled along his sturdy sides but with a pleasant softness at his front that Crowley wants to feel against her.
Her mouth floods at the sight of his bare vessel, even as her long-fingered hands shake with the sash of her robe. Aziraphale is there, coming to her rescue for once, and kneels between the open sprawl of her knees to deftly undo the simple knot there. He raises his eyes to hers, silently waiting for affirmation, and then gently peels open the waist of her shift like he’s opening the wings of a great black bird.
The boiled rag is fastened between Crowley’s thighs, knotted and held in place by a circlet of braided leather worn around her waist. There is a golden bangle around her ankle that Aziraphale touches first, briefly marveling at the familiar serpentine shape of it, but then he quickly raises his gaze to the woven leather circumventing her needless navel.
“Let me see you,” Aziraphale whispers, resting a hand on either of Crowley’s knees.
Crowley draws in a rattling breath and reaches to untie the front part of the rag. She can almost smell herself in the small tent, but it’s the strange ozone smell of arousal, rain, and wet desert more than the scent of any blood. She manages to free the front bit without fumbling but merely snaps her fingers so the knot at the back undoes itself without further tarrying.
When she pulls the rag away from her body there is only a coin-sized red spot on it, deeper in color, not enough to have even soaked through the cloth. Aziraphale bears judicious witness to this without averting his gaze, and then peers down at the red curls sprawling over Crowley’s mound and then lower between her thighs. There’s not enough blood for her cunt to be wet with menses, but she bites her lip in burning self-consciousness anyway, wishing she could read every new thought that flits through the angel’s mind.
“Well,” Crowley rasps. “Here we are.”
“Here we are,” Aziraphale echoes, stroking the inner part of her knee. “May I touch you there?”
“Gods, yes,” she says, widening the spread of her hips as if to welcome him home. “Please. Whatever you want, angel, anything—everything.”
Aziraphale makes a warm sound in his chest and slowly moves to dip his fingers into the wet heat between her folds. He’s precious in his gentleness, first slipping his middle finger in at the place that leads to her core before he withdraws it again, rubbing some of the pinkish slick onto the pad of his thumb. This he brings up to the pearl of her clit he finds at the peak of the soft folds, carefully rubbing there until Crowley faintly squeaks and lets out a swear.
In a perfect world she would languish the hours away with Aziraphale’s face at her breast and between her thighs, but every moment feels like it’s been stolen on borrowed time neither of them have to spare. The night is both eternal and finite all at once, and what Crowley wants most is to look into the angel’s eyes, to kiss him and whisper things she can’t say aloud against his lips as she holds him impossibly deep inside her. She wants the shape of him to fill old wounds and cracked places, for his light and goodness to spill over into her broken vessel until she’s made whole, if only for a short time.
Aziraphale must be reading between the rippled currents of her thoughts, because he lowers himself back into her orbit for another kiss, as if to reassure her he’s still there more than anything else. “You’re perfect,” he says a little breathlessly, stroking a stray bit of hair away from her face. “Tell me what you need.”
“Inside me,” Crowley blurts, not wanting to waste a single second more. “I want to feel you everywhere.” She gets her hands around his biceps and hooks both ankles behind his knees, and with a little deft maneuvering she brings him crashing down against her so their bellies are married together and his cock is pressed into the crease of her thigh.
Just the unimaginable bliss of feeling his body against hers with nothing between them is enough to make Crowley’s eyes sting. Her hands immediately rove over the expanse of Aziraphale’s skin, trying to memorize everything she can feel by touch alone. He has the tiniest sprinkling of hair on his chest, and it tickles in a funny little way when he lowers himself down on one elbow to bring their vessels into better alignment.
“Do you even know how bloody gorgeous you are,” Crowley babbles, sniffling between the sweet kisses Aziraphale feathers along her jaw. “Somebody carved you out of white marble and starlight and brought you to life just to make me mental,” she says, getting a handful of the angel’s ample bottom and squeezing appreciatively. “Mmfh. Just to torture me specifically, no one else—and you have no clue, faffing around like you do on your heavenly errands, sweet and supple as little pear tart.”
Aziraphale blushes enough that it stains his chest, fair lashes cast low. He groans softly when Crowley tips her pelvis up and makes the friction on his cock that much sweeter, taking her hip in his grasp and grinding a little into the raw sensation.
“My dear,” he breathes, brow creasing as something bodily shudders through him. “You’re going to be the end of me.”
“Not yet I’m not,” Crowley fusses, wriggling beneath his weight before grazing her teeth over the roundness of one pale shoulder and sinking down just hard enough to make Aziraphale gasp. “Not until you end me first. Come on now, angel, show me how you can lov—”
Aziraphale’s mouth crushes into hers, swallowing up the word before it fully shatters between them. Crowley growls and sinks her blunt nails into his back in a mild fury, still not breaking the kiss but almost screaming into it through the spill of fresh tears, because she wants him to know, she needs him to know—
There is a sudden shift between their bodies, a slip of hand, and then she feels the head of Aziraphale’s cock nudge against the velvet heat of her. She goes slack beneath him, no longer making any noise other than her labored breathing while tears stick fast to her blinking lashes. It’s imperative that Crowley does not miss this, this millennia-awaited act of wholeness coalescing through her vessel in the moment they join together.
“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, a little shakily. He holds his cock by the base, still not sunk into the fullest depths of her, even when she wraps her long legs around his waist and squeezes. “Oh, Crowley.”
“Don’t talk,” she hisses, grabbing him by the chin and steering him around until their eyes are snagged together, the greywash of a sea storm colliding with the raw gold of a distant sunset. “Show me, you bastard. Show me.”
Crowley doesn’t blink as Aziraphale pushes inside her for the first time. Not even at the brief tightness of passing discomfort, watching him watch her back in kind, the both of them lost in some momentary trance. The angel’s lower lip trembles and a bead of crystalline sweat prickles at his hairline. Crowley doesn’t even realize there are tears rolling back into her temples until Aziraphale reaches up and brushes one away with the pad of his thumb, fully sheathed inside her now.
The fullness of it has made her forget to breathe. When she sucks in a gust of air again, surprised and with spots dancing across her vision, her expanding lungs sob with relief and she laughs, thrilling in the way her inner muscles clench around Aziraphale’s cock with each jump of her flat belly.
“Are you in any pain?” Aziraphale whispers, searching her face. “Have I hurt you?”
“No, I’m perfectly peachy,” Crowley rasps, threading her arms around his neck to revel in the newness of it all. “Get that somber little look off your face,” she adds, giving him a watery smile. “I’m good, scout’s promise.”
The rain is slowly beginning to dwindle but their lovemaking has hardly begun. It’s clear neither of them have done this before, but there’s no means to a definite ending in the progression of it all, Crowley supposes. They aren’t doing this with any set purpose beyond the act of being one, dovetailed together. Being whole, for just a little while.
She’d be content to merely hold him in her arms for an eternity, but then Aziraphale shifts above her, reaching down to grip Crowley’s narrow hips, and rolls her back on the bedroll just the slightest bit so he sinks even deeper into her body until she can feel his balls resting against her taint.
“Oh!” she squeaks, eyes widening, feeling something syrupy and hot bloom through her pelvis as her fingers dig into Aziraphale’s shoulders. “Oh, fuck.”
“Indeed,” Aziraphale manages, withdrawing the barest bit before pushing back inside her again. “I believe—this is the way of it, as the men and women do.”
“So keep ruddy going,” Crowley urges, lashes fluttering as the angel repeats the motion, this time with a little more fluid thrust in his hips.
Her throaty sounds seem to embolden him, and Aziraphale braces his knees and pins Crowley’s bent form beneath him, searching her face as he fucks into her in earnest. It’s lewd and bizarre and magnificent—odd-smelling and intoxicating at the same time, with the dull slap of skin on skin and the residual sting of his girth stretching her open for the taking. Crowley’s belly prickles with gooseflesh that crawls down her thighs and calves despite the heat pooling between their bodies. A new curiosity sparkles in her mind, and she reaches between them to find the place where Aziraphale’s cock is pressing into the slick heat of her cunt.
Her fingertips graze the soft skin of his shaft—wet from both their fluids, she thinks, mixing together into something that’s indistinguishable in its source. Aziraphale groans above her, movements only briefly stuttering as his eyes drip closed. Crowley’s hand dips lower to touch the delicate skin of her own body, making a V with two fingers where her inner labia is parted around Aziraphale. Each new thrust grazes between her knuckles, the keen awareness of being fucked open something so animal and intimate all at the same time.
Crowley hesitates to touch her own clit, wanting to stretch this mile for as long as she can take it, and when the demon withdraws her hand from between their bellies Aziraphale reaches for it before she can wipe the slickness away. There’s a wild hunger in his eyes, a look she hasn’t seen since they were beneath the falling house of Job, and when he takes her long fingers into his mouth without warning her cunt clenches and leaks around him.
Aziraphale’s thrusts slow to an easy grind, simply rolling his hips to keep the fire stoked low in Crowley’s pelvis. She swears and hisses and watches him in numb awe as he sucks their fluids from her fingertips with that pretty pink tongue, gentle and savoring like he’s sampling the finest milk and honey.
“Greedy little angel,” she chokes out, pinching one of her nipples with one hand and snatching his wrist with the other. “Come down here and let me have a taste.” Aziraphale comes back to her willingly, smiling as their lips press together and Crowley’s tongue plunders up into his mouth.
It’s something earthy and metallic, with an undercurrent of strange sweetness she would have never known to expect. Aziraphale continues to grind into her, deep and steady, with the bulk of his belly dragging over her clit as they rock against each other. Crowley’s eyes prickle again, stomach tightening as she feels something begin to descend upon her in a distantly cresting wave. All it takes is the pinpointed thought of Aziraphale touching the darkness nestled inside her, while he kisses her hungrily with a mouth touched by her own blood, for her to abruptly gasp and shake apart beneath him.
She wails into his mouth with the trembling force of it, muscles bearing down and fluttering, heels digging into Aziraphale’s arse to pull him deeper into her vessel.
“Shh,” Aziraphale soothes, keeping their foreheads bowed together as he gently fucks her through the tingling bliss of it all. “You’re taking me so well, my darling, so wonderfully precious and eager.”
“Shut up,” Crowley wheezes, shaking all over as she begins to drop down from her peak. “Come inside me before I have to wring it out of you.”
Aziraphale’s eyes flash with a pinch of blue lightning in the shadowed tent. “Is that what you want?” he asks, speeding up the roll of his hips. “Tell me again.”
“I want it, you bastard,” Crowley snaps, clawing her nails up his back, rending at the places between his shoulder blades where his wings would spill free from a different plane. “Wanna feel it when you let go, angel. All for me, only for me.”
“And you think I’m the greedy one,” Aziraphale grunts, making Crowley’s bones creak as he folds her in half beneath him. The words are throaty and harsh, punctuated by his panting breath, but he threads their fingers together and pounds into her without mercy as he starts to spiral toward his ending. “Such a wicked temptress, using me to take your fill, you clever little snake.”
“I am, I am,” Crowley miserably agrees through searing tears that never fully dried, trying to weakly nod as each brutal thrust jolts her body. “Please, ‘Ziraphale, I want it so fucking bad—let me have it, make me yours.”
“You are,” Aziraphale gasps. “You always will be,” he swears, and then the creases between his brows smooth out into the pale smoothness of polished stone and his mouth drops open in some wordless bliss. He trembles against her as his spine bows, for some eternal moment as beautiful as a statue wrought in ecstasy.
Crowley can physically feel it as the angel’s balls draw up and tighten, and then the shock of heat when his prick jerks inside her. There is no more cresting pleasure on her end, only the divine satisfaction of feeling him spill over with jolting spurts that keep coming. Aziraphale slowly wilts above her, still sheathed to the hilt, and lowers his head into the welcoming place between Crowley’s neck and shoulder to rest at last.
“Oh, my beautiful dove,” he whispers several long moments later, kissing her wrist before he releases her hands. His lips drop against her shoulder, her jaw, and along one freckled collarbone as he idly touches the circlet of leather still tied at her waist. “Thank you for sharing your heart with me.”
Crowley reaches up to hold Aziraphale’s head against her, eyes straying to the ceiling of the tent beyond the curve of his shoulder. Another flash of lightning illuminates the desert night, but the thunder is more muted and distant now, wandering somewhere to the southeast.
“You feel wonderful,” Crowley says, fingers gently scritching through the silky tufts of curl at the back of Aziraphale’s head. She feels their tandem heartbeat with each pulse of the angel’s softening cock inside her, already mourning the loss of it when he inevitably has to pull away and leaves her empty. “Are you alright? Talk to me, angel.”
“I’m right as rain,” Aziraphale says, raising his head at last to leave a weary but sweet kiss against the corner of Crowley’s mouth. “This was a rather novel but incredibly invigorating sort of physical experience.”
Crowley snorts and rolls her eyes. “Putting it lightly,” she says, though she indulges in the impulse to reach up and touch his face—the refined point of his nose, each flushed cheekbone, the pretty cupid’s bow of his upper lip and the gentle lines beside his eyes. She doesn’t know why their Creator fashioned them into the picture of middling age, but the signs of a long life lived in merriment suits Aziraphale particularly well, and she’s glad for it. Enough that her breath catches and her lungs stumble when she draws in a new breath, still tracing the contours of her favorite face in all the world.
“Am I crushing you?” Aziraphale gently frets, making as if to roll away, but Crowley shakes her head.
“Even if you were, I’d prolly let you,” she says, croaking out a feeble laugh. “Just—stay close to me for a minute or two more. Please.”
Aziraphale mutely nods, seeming to understand without having the words to say so. He does turn his face to press soft lips against Crowley’s hairline, breathing in long and deep before he relaxes again and lets himself rest wihin the open cradle of her body.
Crowley closes her eyes, unbothered by the stickiness of sex and sweat clinging to their mortal forms. The driving rain is gone, replaced by the soft tip-tap of stray droplets misting down on the tent in a soothing static. She doesn’t want to let herself fall asleep yet, lying there with the angel’s warm body grounding her against the earth they’ve shared a joint custodianship over for millennia.
It’s peaceful in a way, and affirming in others despite the obvious dangers of their coupling. But the sewn hides of the angel’s tent seem to offer some flimsy shield, impenetrable if only for this one night. For once in her immortal existence since the Fall, all things in Crowley’s immediate awareness feel very much well and unexpectedly decent.
They doze together for a time, not truly sleeping but breathing in the same breath, trading nuzzling kisses and soft little fragments of words not fully spoken. Hours may pass, Crowley isn’t sure, but Aziraphale eventually slips from her body and her cunt only offers a subtle twinge of soreness, bereft and empty in the wake of its loss.
“Dawn evades us for the moment,” Aziraphale says softly, the first few words he’s uttered aloud in quite some time. He rises up and simply settles again on Crowley’s right side, quickly drawing up the edge of a thin woolen blanket to keep the chill from their bare skin.
Crowley turns to burrow against him, wanting to live in the marrow of the angel’s bones, or in the soft, supple places of his body instead of the bony shards and slivers of her own. If only they could merge into one vessel, she thinks—well and truly blend into a slapdash watercolor sprawl of greyish hues where nobody could tell where one essence began and the other ended, light and dark be damned.
She could say all this, but she doesn’t. What Crowley says, whispered somewhere under the hinge of Aziraphale’s jaw, is, “I don’t want you to go.”
“I must,” he tells her, somewhat sadly, as he strokes along her upper arm. “I’ve delayed long enough as it is.”
Crowley’s eyes narrow as her heart thumps in her chest. “Your goats didn’t need a bloody rest,” she says. “Not two nights’ worth, anyway.”
“Perhaps not,” Aziraphale agrees, eyes sparkling in the darkness. “But I’m sure they appreciated the visitation as much as I have.”
“The nerve of you,” Crowley grumbles, snuggling into his warmth beneath the covers. “The absolute cheek.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Aziraphale hums, miraculous fingers deftly removing the tangles in her hair as he strokes it. “And even if I did, it seems you’ve enjoyed it.”
“I have,” Crowley mumbles against his skin. “But you’re not gone—not yet.”
Before Aziraphale can open his mouth to speak, she sits up so the blanket falls back from her shoulders, revealing their naked bodies once more. Crowley’s eyes are still slightly puffy from all her crying, and the renewed threat of tears aching in the back of her throat makes her want to spit and chase the hurt of it all away. She grits her teeth instead, and straddles over the angel’s thighs before taking his softened cock in her hand.
Aziraphale makes a mild sound of surprise but doesn’t otherwise protest or bat her hands away. He lies there on the bedroll and gazes up at her, silhouetted still by the light of his queer little glass orb, glowing away like anything. Crowley puts a gentle twist into each upstroke, remembering from her own past exploits how good it feels, and thumbs at the head through its sleepy sheath until, slowly, the blood rushes back in and Aziraphale begins to harden in her hand.
The evidence of what they’d done together is still a tacky wetness between her legs but she doesn’t whisk it away with a thought. Aziraphale is back to full mast with a few more clever maneuvers of Crowley’s hand, and when she rises up and strokes the head of his prick between her sore folds they both shudder in shared anticipation.
“You don’t have to,” Aziraphale says, gripping Crowley’s upper thighs. “If it’s too much—”
“I want to,” Crowley says, trying to focus on each sweet slip of her cunt over his shaft, the way the flared head catches on her hole and makes her whine. “You’re mine tonight, remember. Unless you’ve already forgotten.”
“No,” Aziraphale says, tipping his head back and baring his bobbing Adam’s apple to her. “I haven’t. Not for one moment.”
“Good,” Crowley manages, and then lines him up again to perfectly sink back down into her angel’s lap until she can feel pressure teasing against the core of her. The sudden fullness brings an afterthought of pain, delicious instead of burning this time. She wonders if she’s bled onto Aziraphale and hopes that she has. His spend in exchange for her virgin menses, an eye for an eye, and both of them forever braided into an invisible pact she’ll carry with her for the rest of her days.
It’s all Crowley can do to simply sit there, speared so beautifully again, breathing with rabbit-quick falls of her chest. She lowers her palms to Aziraphale’s belly to keep herself balanced, opening hazy eyes to watch him through the fan of her lashes.
Aziraphale reaches to take one of her hands, leaving it curled against his middle like a promise.
“If we had mortal souls,” he says a bit wetly, “I would hope that they could touch each other.”
Crowley laughs through the welted ache in her chest, tossing her head back in a cascade of curls. “I can do you one better than that,” she says, and then pours part of herself out from a pitcher of voided starlight on the other plane, the one where their wings go when they’re hidden from the earthly realm. She feels herself slosh up against the white sands of Aziraphale’s shores, and instead of letting her melt back out into the abyss like the tide goes to the sea, he holds her there, reverently cupped in the balmy warmth of all his light.
Time leaves them, then, with the angel locked inside her vessel and her essence. Crowley doesn’t climax so much as she unendingly floats—thrown asunder, scattered across the cosmos, and somehow still tethered in place by the one tangible thing that transmutes between the heavens and earth, though her peers in hell have long since forgotten its meaning or name.
She’s buoyant upon the wings of love, even if it’s a word neither she nor Aziraphale have ever dared to speak in their tireless dance around each other.
Saying it doesn’t matter, not in this place. It’s more than enough, Crowley thinks, to be willingly taken into her angel’s hands and held.
When Crowley next wakes again, the sky is painted in stripes of violet and indigo outside.
She’s curled on her side on the bedroll, lightly covered with her own black shroud and the thin woolen blanket. She blinks and roughly pushes herself up on one elbow, uncaring as the coverings slip down and expose her naked chest. Aziraphale turns and gazes at her from where he’s sitting at the mouth of the tent, the flaps now open to let the cool air in. He’s back in his ivory shift once more, though the leathers and sandals still remain where he set them to one side the night before.
“It’s nearly morning,” he says, making a small show of his hands to reveal the scroll he’s been studying. “I was just doing a bit of reading while you slept.”
Crowley grunts and drags a hand through her hair, surprised by the lack of knotted bird nesting and then, belatedly, by the absence of any tacky slickness at the juncture of her thighs. She reaches below the blanket to feel herself, pleased with the subtle twinge of soreness but disappointed by the lack of blood or any other fluids when her fingers come back clean.
“Did you give me a wash?” she asks, squinting at Aziraphale’s shape in the bluish darkness.
“I performed a mild cleansing miracle on both of us,” Aziraphale says quietly. “Just to tidy things up a bit. I didn’t want to wake you so soon after you’d fallen asleep.”
“Oh,” Crowley says, still sitting there half-naked. “Well, uhm. Thanks, I guess.”
“Of course,” Aziraphale says, looking away as if to give her some sense of privacy in the rising daylight. “Would you like to have some tea before I pack my things up?”
Crowley feels her mouth turn down at the corners as she rubs some gritty sleep from her eyes. “Sure,” she murmurs. “Would be nice. S’cold in here.”
“Get dressed and bring the blanket out with you for warmth,” Aziraphale says, moving to reach for his staff resting outside the tent so he can draw himself to his feet. “I’ll stoke up a new fire in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
Once Crowley is wrapped in her black robes again, she emerges into the pre-lit dawn and sucks down the smell of the damp desert. The goats and donkeys are already foraging for their breakfast together, and from where she stands she can hear the belabored sounds of a woman going through the rising pangs of childbirth in the midwives’ tent. Just by practiced ear alone, Crowley suspects the child may be born within an hour or less.
She sits huddled at the fireside with her bare feet on the cool sand and waits with Aziraphale for their final pot of tea to brew all the same. Saying goodbye has never been done with any true formality between them, but after the night’s events Crowley isn’t entirely sure how she might give voice to the bruised melancholy pooling in her chest. Out here under the cloudless sky, it seems less possible to go to the angel and take him in her arms like a real lover would.
“Will you come back?” she asks, once she accepts the enameled cup full of black tea and a generous spoonful of honey. “I mean, will you—find us again?”
“Even if I actively tried to avoid you at all possible costs, I’m sure I couldn’t stay away for too terribly long,” Aziraphale says, casting a sidelong glance at her. He’s gone to retrieve his sandals, leathers, and head wrap from the tent and slowly initiated the process of dressing. “I’ll be back,” he adds softly, as Crowley nods and swallows against the lump in her throat. “Sooner or later, I promise you that.”
Crowley sips her tea and finds she’d rather hold the hot cup between her cold palms than drink it. “A year doesn’t really feel like much of anything, most of the time,” she says. “Being as ruddy ancient as we are, kinda starts to feel like we’re pissing the decades away. But when you’re gone, I…well.” She stops talking, and decides it’s best not to say anything more on the topic for now.
“I know,” Aziraphale says quietly, sighing as curls of fragrant steam curl up from his own cup. “I know.”
They finish their tea in relative silence despite the sporadic wails of the woman bringing new life into the world a stone’s throw away. Crowley knows a spare set of hands are probably needed, especially if Abeni and her mother were up most of the night with the others. The elder midwife’s wrath is not something to be taken lightly, but she’s dealt with far worse and come out relatively unscathed.
In the end, she helps Aziraphale take down the small tent, this time using their joint hands instead of the quick snap of a miracle. He’ll need to lay it out to better dry in the sun wherever he lands next, but Crowley can’t allow herself to think that far ahead.
Once everything is tidied away and strapped into the angel’s satchel and pack, they stand there amidst the rising sun’s sprawling fingers and don’t speak. Crowley arranges the dark head scarf around her hair and sniffs a bit, looking down at herself, wondering if she feels fundamentally changed now in any way, or more or less the same as she ever was.
“Welp,” she says, squinting into the near distance at the spotted goats making up Aziraphale’s modest herd. “Maybe you ought to expect the cracking pair of tits next time, now that we’re all so well-acquainted.”
Aziraphale’s cheeks flush an impressive shade of pink. “Really, my dear,” he mumbles, though his mouth twitches enough to betray the humor sparkling beneath the glassiness of his eyes.
“Be safe,” Crowley says, and strikes out like a viper to leave a chaste kiss on his smooth cheek before the angel can even blink. “Stay thwarting and best of luck on your holy crusades, all that swill.”
Aziraphale plants his staff in the sand and reaches for her, taking her by the hand before she can turn and spirit herself away through the hazy drape of morning. Crowley whirls around to look at him, one ginger eyebrow cocked. It looks as if he’s going to say something else for a long moment, but the angel merely opens and closes his mouth, lips setting into a firm line.
He squeezes her hand in his own, thumb pressing into the heart of her palm.
“Be good,” Aziraphale croaks, chuckling a little despite the tremor in his voice.
“Never,” Crowley says, flashing him a toothy smile even as her heart pounds in her chest.
“Clever demon,” Aziraphale says, brushing one final kiss across her knuckles before gently lowering her hand. “You always give me a fine reason to come back.”