Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Golden Girls marathon running on Crowley’s flatscreen TV went suddenly quiet when an imposing red Are You Still Watching? button dimmed the screen, interrupting one of Dorothy’s biting remarks.

The change in volume jolted Crowley upright on his sofa, not quite asleep, but well on his way there. He squinted at the text for a long moment, checked his watch, then fumbled around for his remote to continue the show. He had work to do, but one more episode wouldn’t hurt. He might not have typed a single word in over two hours, but his laptop was still open on the coffee table in front of him, and that had to count for something.

Just as he settled back against the cushions to reacquaint himself with Dorothy’s troubles, a knock came at the door.

Crowley frowned over his shoulder at the silent intercom on his kitchen wall, and slowly hauled himself to his feet when the knocking became more urgent. He was actually starting to worry by the time he reached the peephole, but one look through it put all of that to rest. He swung open the door with a weary sigh.

The fist Aziraphale Fell had been pounding against his door halted midair when Crowley flung it open. He was quick to bring it back down, where it smoothed out the front of his waistcoat before settling into his trouser pocket. He looked far more chipper than anyone had the right to be at this time of night, but that was Aziraphale Fell. Always showing up impeccably when Crowley needed him most, even if he was hardly ever wanted.

“How’d you get in the building?” said Crowley rather gruffly, revealing to himself that maybe he had dozed off for an episode or two after all.

“I would’ve buzzed,” Aziraphale replied primly, “but someone was collecting an UberEats delivery as I arrived, and slipping in behind them seemed much faster. Shall we get on with it?”

Crowley grumbled as a hand stuck out to weasel a path between him and the doorframe, and before he knew it, his literary agent was waltzing into his home. Crowley stared mournfully at the empty doorway before swinging it shut and following the man inside.

“It’s half eleven,” he whined. “Normal people are asleep at this hour.”

Aziraphale took one unimpressed look around his swanky apartment to raise his eyebrows at the reruns galavanting across his TV screen.

“And yet.”

Crowley rolled his eyes and shucked his hands in his pockets as he followed Aziraphale towards the living room.

“No concern for privacy, you have. It’s the middle of the night— what if I was… If I was having a wank or something?”

“I wish you would,” Aziraphale shot back, making Crowley blanch. “Maybe that’ll inspire you to finally get this romance written.”

It was a cheap shot to be vulgar, but it usually worked Aziraphale into a right tizzy that Crowley had way too much fun with. For him to agree and gloss right past his schoolboy obscenity was telling; he was in serious trouble.

His (admittedly, usually quite pithy) survival instinct urged him to delay. He was normally an expert at putting off the inevitable. Deadlines, and the consequences for missing them, were mere suggestions to the untouchable A.J. Crowley.

While his agent poked around his TV remote to put Dorothy and her friends to bed for the evening, Crowley looked him up and down for something he could use. It wasn’t the first time Aziraphale had invited himself over, but it was still bizarre to see his vintage-cut assistant in his home, creating a blur of beige in his otherwise sterile flat of glass and leather. He didn’t note anything too different about him; just an impatient look on his face, an extra crease of worry on his forehead, and— bingo. A corked bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon in his other hand.

“How about I fetch us some glasses?” Crowley offered oh-so graciously as he reached for the bottle. Aziraphale spun around to face him and yanked it out of his reach before he could get within a foot of it.

“You can have this when you’re done,” he said sharply.

Crowley frowned, his mouth hanging open. “Done what?”

“Tomorrow’s proposal.” Aziraphale smiled without a single ounce of joy in his eyes, and proceeded to make himself comfortable in Crowley’s favourite armchair. It was the most Aziraphale-esque thing in his house, but with all its sharp lines and lustrous black leather, he still looked horrifically out of place in it. “You’re a week behind schedule.”

Crowley’s eyes followed the alluring bottle as it was placed down on his glass-top coffee table. Then his words caught up to him.

“That’s— that’s not tomorrow.”

Aziraphale took a deep breath, raised his eyebrows with far more cheek than necessary, and checked his wristwatch.

“I stand corrected,” he smiled coldly. “It’s today.”

Those words sunk in a little quicker. Then they sunk in again, and again, as all their layers of meaning knocked him to the ground and smacked him over the shoulders while he just stared uselessly at an expensive bottle of red.

“Right,” he bit out. He knew from past experience that speaking slower did nothing to slow the rapidly increasing beat of his heart, but he couldn’t help but try. “Right. Okay. Fuck…”

He rushed into his kitchen to make a start on something caffeinated and comforting, but quickly reshuffled his priorities and skidded back around to go and fetch his laptop’s charging cable from his bedroom. It wasn’t where he left it, so he hurried over to the sofa, only to find it already plugged in and cheerily keeping his laptop in the green. Crowley sank onto the sofa to wake the screen, then stood back up with an urgent look at Aziraphale.

“Did you want a cup of tea before I get settled? I can also order us something in case we get peckish—”

“Crowley.”

Aziraphale sat forward, perched on the very edge of his seat to hold terrifyingly steady eye contact. Crowley froze.

“Sit down.”

He did.

“Please,” he said delicately, “for the love of God, write something.”

Crowley snarled under his breath, but pulled the laptop forward onto his knees as he was told. He made quick work of closing out of his unused tabs, shutting down every minimised program that was cluttering his taskbar, and opened up the barely-touched draft of his Final Proposal document. When he remembered he had a pile of useful notes in a Moleskine by his bedside, he barely got two inches out of his chair before Aziraphale was honing in on him again.

Crowley rolled his eyes at the man’s hawk-like reflexes. “My notebook,” he said sharply.

“I’ll get it. Where?”

Crowley sighed. He didn’t have a headache, but rubbed his temple just for emphasis.

“Nightstand. It’s right on top of everything, so there’s no need to go snooping,” he chided, then melted into a pout when Aziraphale smartly took the bottle of wine with him.

With his handwritten notes beside him and a slew of revised synopses open behind his word processor, it shouldn’t have been that difficult. Putting the first word on an empty page was always the hardest part, and he had loads of words floating around his screen already. The idea had been offered, edited, revised, cut back and added to, flipped upside down and poked at with sticks of varying lengths and sharpnesses. All he had to do was cut the drivel and lay out the plot beats on a concise, exciting, marketable page.

The thing was…

The thing was: All the relentless back and forth over character arcs and plot twists was certainly helpful when he was penning his usual action thrillers. He needed Aziraphale to scrutinise his ideas and caulk up the plot holes early on, so his imagination could run wild with double crossings and exploding space shuttles, and create new story arcs out of the relentless fact checking Aziraphale was so good at. It usually helped to sterilise his stories and look at them from every angle before really getting his hands dirty in the prose.

But this was not a trademark A.J. Crowley action thriller. Sure, he was sneaking a little bit of high stakes drama in there to keep the characters on their toes (and the executives off his back), but this was… Quiet. Gentle. And more notably: romantic.

The thing was, Crowley had never written a romance before, and his usual playbook wasn’t working here. The idea had gripped him one day and his muse had run with it, wrapping her greedy hands around these two brand new characters and dragging them to the surface of his mind every time he sat down to write. He was so utterly taken by them, transfixed by their passion, and he could not rest until he committed himself to putting their romance to the page.

But now, after all these weeks of hammering at the idea in shared Google Docs, picking apart every little gesture of love and yearning until it felt like he was reading a biology textbook, and watering down a fiery romance to lob it across boardroom tables, he felt… Deflated, to say the least.

The thing was… Crowley was way over his head, and had no fucking clue what he was doing.

He gently set the laptop beside him on the sofa and rubbed his temple for real. Aziraphale, who had curled up in Crowley’s armchair with his Brogues perched on the edge of the seat cushion, cradling the untouched bottle of wine to his chest like a prized trophy, perked up straight at the first sign of movement.

Crowley braced himself. Asking for help had never been easy, but Aziraphale had been nothing but good to him. He hated to admit it, but If anyone could sort this out, it would be him.

“Okay, so…”

He grimaced at his blinking cursor, turning his eyes to the ceiling instead.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he rushed out in one painful breath. “It’s just not… It’s not working. She won’t talk to me.”

She being the almighty power that kept Crowley writing all these years. The mysterious force that fed him idea after idea, waking up in the middle of the night with solutions to month-long problems, because she didn’t give a damn about schedules or bankability. She was his muse, and she was a bloody-minded old bitch with a mean sense of humour.

“I know I’ve hit walls before, and you’re remarkably determined about getting me over them, but this… I don’t think I can pull this off. It might be best for everyone if I just drop it. Maybe I could just churn out a 14th instalment for the Saint Asmodeus series to keep the publishers happy.”

Crowley tore his gaze away from the ceiling only to fix it on his hands, laughing weakly to disguise how much it hurt to say. To give up. From the corner of his eye, he saw Aziraphale rise to his feet.

“...Like hell you will,” came his unexpectedly hard reply. Crowley’s head whipped up to find a positively murderous looking Aziraphale looking down at him, his hands clenched tightly around his wine bottle.

With one fist around the neck and the other squeezed around the cork, his hands flexed and yanked the thing right out in one angry swoop. The ceremonious thunk echoed against the sparse apartment walls and Crowley winced, unable to help picturing his own neck being twisted in that grip. So much for sympathy.

“Do you know how long I spent fighting for this book?” Aziraphale shot past him, and though a break from his gaze should have been a reprieve, Crowley felt his anger in each of his heavy footsteps and the aggressive banging of cupboards as the man searched his way through the kitchen for a glass. “I went toe to toe with Gabriel himself for this genre change.”

“Aziraphale…”

“I used up every favour I had saved, not to mention every complimentary anecdote in my arsenal to fluff up your more-than-capable writing ability. Both true and less-than.”

He slammed a glass down on the coffee table with a little more force than necessary, and hurried to fill it with a slosh of wine. The bottle remained in his hand while he downed half the glass in one go.

“So.” He set that hard glare back on Crowley, who sunk a little lower in his seat. “You better find your blasted muse already. I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

The apartment fell into a less than companionable silence as Aziraphale dropped back into the armchair, already refilling his second glass.

“...Rough day at the office?” Crowley said weakly, his smile just as lacklustre.

Aziraphale gave his glass a withering look. “Don’t get me started.”

He sipped at that one much slower than the first, finally taking the time to savour each mouthful instead of throwing it back with a heady gulp. When the wine hit the halfway point in his glass, he looked up to find Crowley still sitting there, hands pinned between his knees and glare warily fixed in a staring contest with his blinking cursor.

Aziraphale sighed and leaned forward enough to plop his wine glass on the coffee table between them. Crowley lifted his head.

“Half a glass when you finish 100 words,” he offered.

Crowley winced, his nose involuntarily screwing up as he regarded the half drunk wine.

“At least get me a clean one?” he muttered.

Aziraphale sighed with a little more volume and a lot less sympathy as he set the bottle on the table, but sat back with his legs crossed primly at the knee.

“Are you afraid of my cooties?” he carefully enunciated.

Crowley rolled his eyes in an attempt to play him off, but his tiredness made the movement come across as full bodied petulance. He wasn’t a germaphobe by any means, but in a carefully constructed apartment of minimalism and cleanliness, why would he put himself through dirty dishware when a sparkling alternative was just a few steps away?

“200 words for a fresh glass,” he bartered. That seemed much easier than picking another fight over Aziraphale’s indifferent use of coasters.

His agent thought on that for a moment, narrowing his eyes and steepling his fingers like a supervillain. Then he swooped forward to pluck the glass back up and finish it for himself.

“Deal.”

“And slow down on that, would you?” Crowley grumbled as the second glass was emptied. “There’ll be nothing left for me at this rate.”

“Then you’d better hurry up,” Aziraphale shot back, already reaching for the bottle.

Crowley all but yanked his computer into his lap.

He started by writing what he already knew: his inciting incident, the climax of the first act, everything he’d written a dozen times before. He was four-hundred words deep before he realised he was in flow, only because he stumbled headfirst into a snag that ripped him right out of it. His notebook had gotten him this far, but the next page was half blank with a hasty fill this in later note from his past self. Crowley could strangle him.

When he lifted his head to stretch his shoulders and rub out the crease in his brow, he found himself face to face with a glass of wine in an outstretched hand. He snatched it up and drank it down like a lifeline without even checking if it was clean, but a glance down at the rapidly emptied thing confirmed Aziraphale had fetched a fresh one from his kitchen. Now he was perched on the edge of the glass coffee table in front of him, swirling a glass of his own with the bottle still firmly in his grip.

Crowley looked back at the empty space on his page and quickly shifted from typing to fidgeting. The arrhythmic click of keyboard keys was all too soon replaced with the steady clack of his teeth against the empty wine glass.

“What are you struggling with?” Aziraphale asked gently. Crowley jumped, only then realising that Aziraphale was still there, still watching him closely.

He set the glass aside and picked up his notebook, glaring at it before passing it off to his editor. Aziraphale merely peered down the page, refusing to take it in hand. Crowley dropped it back onto the sofa.

“I’ve left all these gaps for ‘relationship development’ scenes that I didn’t know how to fill before. And still don’t.”

Aziraphale shrugged like they weren’t pushing against a ten hour deadline.

“Just bracket it and move on,” he said. Crowley exhaled roughly, but Aziraphale continued before he could protest. “The overarching flow of the story is more important right now; don’t get hung up on details tonight.”

“But—”

“You can do this,” Aziraphale said sternly. “You’ve done it a thousand times before.”

The movement of his hands yanked Crowley’s attention away from his screen, and he watched with mounting interest as Aziraphale topped up a glass with a much more generous helping. Crowley reached for it instinctively, but Aziraphale swiped it out of his reach when he lifted it up to his own lips instead.

Crowley snarled through his teeth as he watched the Cabernet Sauvignon disappear past pink lips.

“You can have another in 200 words,” Aziraphale smiled cheekily. “Come on, now. You could do this in your sleep.”

It was less the approaching morning and more his growing thirst that had Crowley doing as he was told, typing a vague [first date goes here] then moving straight onto his next plot point. He always found it frustrating to fill his page with Aziraphale’s stupid brackets, but he couldn’t deny that it felt good to get right back into the flow of writing without letting those pesky blocks drag him down for hours at a time.

After his first pause, he managed to type his way through another hundred or so words before hitting another gap on the page. The second he clamped a fingernail between his teeth, Aziraphale piped up, “Bracket it,” and another glass was handed his way.

In hurdling over the mental blocks like Aziraphale asked, Crowley managed to write steadily for the next hour without much complaint. He was vaguely aware of his agent moving around the room as he did so, poking through his shelves and muttering judgement over his music collection, all the while pouring himself more and more glasses of wine as the night went on.

At quarter to two, Crowley saved his document for the final time, then sat back with a sigh of relief and a twinge in his lower back.

Fixed to celebrate, he all but tossed the laptop onto his coffee table and stood up to retrieve his well-earned bottle of red, only to find Aziraphale curled up on the opposite end of his sofa with the stained black glass hugged to his chest. Crowley grumbled to himself as he hunched over the man to see if he could pry it out of his hands like an Indiana Jones artefact, but one proper look at the thing confirmed it was basically empty.

“Bastard,” he whispered at the soundly sleeping editor, his teeth sharp around the word but his voice soft enough to not wake him. Aziraphale barely stirred, only curled his knees closer to his chest to hoist them away from the edge of the sofa.

Crowley dug into his linen closet to find a blanket — his hand pausing over the fleecey winter throw and instead grabbing a rough woven quilt that made his skin itch to touch; that’d show him — and dumped it over Aziraphale’s shoulders. Then he trudged to his bedroom, gave up halfway through unbuttoning his shirt, and collapsed face first onto his bed for the night.

Crowley hadn’t drunk nearly enough to be hungover — Aziraphale and his vigilant guarding of their bottle had made sure of that — but his lack of sleep that night had him rising with a dull ache behind his temples, leaving him no choice but to hide behind his darkest sunglasses in order to face the bright white walls of his publishing agency.

He remembered how impressive he found the building when he first signed on with them. No one could hold a candle to the professionalism or high class treatment at Guardian Publishers, especially considering they were such a titan of industry that the CEO herself could mercilessly turn a man to salt and still rake in a positive quarter. As long as people were reading, people were buying Guardian books, but they considered their image just as important as their content, and were dutiful in upholding it.

Nowadays, Crowley just wished they’d chill out for a minute. Maybe invest in some light dimmers, and stop giving him such side-eye when he wasn’t at least ten minutes early for every meeting.

At 9:59 AM, a confident stride began echoing down the gleaming white halls. Crowley recognised the Publishing Director’s distinctly American prattle well before he came into view, eventually rounding the corner with his two assistants hurrying along either side of him. He reached reception at exactly 10:00, where he came to an abrupt halt and gestured both hands at Crowley.

“Crowley!” Gabriel greeted, kicking that imposing baritone up a notch and gesturing in the vague direction of a conference room. “Shall we head in?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before turning towards one of the open doors, assuming, as he always did, that everyone would follow. Crowley stumbled in his attempt to rise out of his seat fast enough.

“Shouldn’t we wait for…?”

Gabriel whipped around at the sound of Crowley’s hesitancy, his face falling as he looked between the empty conference room in front of him and the equally barren lobby behind. The devastatingly chipper receptionist waved at him when she caught his eye, sitting up straighter to be seen over the enormous front desk. He ignored her.

“Where is—”

Luck of the Devil, Aziraphale chose that moment to burst out of the lift like he had a running start.

“I’m here, I’m here,” he exclaimed, looking only slightly harried as he slipped right past them, towards the conference room Gabriel was halfway approaching.

“You’re late,” he said pointedly, shaking his watch as Aziraphale passed him.

It was 10:01.

Crowley slipped in behind him and dropped his iPad case onto the round conference table. The gentle thwack of it hitting the tabletop was a mere pindrop beside the earthquake caused by the stack in Aziraphale’s arms, which shook the table as he unloaded his laptop and leaning tower of notebooks with a heavy thud.

Crowley liquified into the chair next to him, and snuck a proper look at the man while Gabriel and his assistants laid out their laptops across from them. His editor had hurried home to shower and change before the meeting, so the only sign of his impromptu wine sleepover was the slight squint of his eyes that hinted at a mounting headache. Even though he’d slipped away before Crowley had cracked a single eye open, it clearly hadn’t been early enough if his frazzled demeanour was anything to go by.

Gabriel inched his chair forward and folded his latticed fingers atop the table, but Aziraphale was still standing, still muttering to himself as he rearranged the stack of documents in front of him to get to his laptop at the bottom.

Crowley leaned over the table and drawled, “Before we start, could I trouble someone for a—”

A manicured hand placed a takeaway coffee cup firmly down in front of him. Crowley made a noise between a scoff of annoyance and a sigh of relief as he lifted the steaming drink to his lips.

“Thanks,” he whined as Aziraphale finally settled into his seat, with a cup of his own already tipped up for a long and desperate sip. “I still owe you one, though.”

“Mmm.” Aziraphale gasped for breath when he finished his mouthful and set what had to be an empty cup aside. “When Paris Burns,” he muttered in agreement, “You promised me crêpes after everything that manuscript put me through.”

“Gentlemen, if we’re all ready…?”

Their attention whipped up at the voice of the awaiting Director. Crowley sat up a little straighter, smiling as he swallowed the lump in his throat and pried open his iPad case.

“Right,” he grinned. “Let’s talk romance.”

Crowley frequented several cafes around Mayfair, and a few dozen others scattered around Zone 2. His home office was a place of peace and focus, perfect when he was on a roll and needed to follow a fragile tangent of inspiration, but embedding himself amidst fretting students and gossiping mothers always made it easier to breathe during the slower, more finicky parts of writing.

EDEN was the kind of place that described itself as a hole-in-the-wall, but saw just as many customers as a train station Starbucks on a Monday morning. Its tall ceilings and white stone walls were curtained with vines and hanging greenery, and the clientele included equal measures of unsociable grad students and local Influencers, who didn’t actually drink coffee, but loved peppering the backgrounds of their selfies with recycled bamboo decor.

It was the kind of place that had an Instagram page and spelled its name in all capital letters. Sometimes it was so loud that all the chatter peaked into a waveform of white noise, whilst some days the tables were so empty it looked on the verge of bankruptcy. It lived down a wonky brick alley but displayed its name in luminescent white neon, tempting every passerby to stick their heads in and see what hidden gem they might have just discovered, just like 10,000 online followers before them.

EDEN was by far Crowley’s favourite. It was too bright and too pretty and he could hardly think how to spell his own name as long as he was inside, but sometimes that’s just what he needed to get through a writing block. Not to mention the baristas were so busy, it was the only one of his haunts that didn’t recognise him for the regular that he was, leaving him free to slither by unnoticed to his favourite table against the back wall.

The table was barely big enough to fit his laptop alongside the salt and pepper shakers, and the chair was a death sentence for his fifty-two year old sciatic nerve. But, simply being there was enough to make him feel productive, even as he sat unmoving and stared at his blinking cursor.

Aziraphale emerged out of the crowd with a mug and saucer in each hand, which he placed gently on the slip of table that wasn’t engulfed by the laptop. He adjusted it a little once his hands were free, nudging the keyboard slightly over the edge of Crowley’s lap so their coffees sat less precariously, then collapsed into the seat opposite. Crowley barely noticed his screen jostle.

“Right…” Aziraphale began muttering to himself as he unfolded a hardback journal from his satchel, only interrupting himself with a little hum of appreciation into his first sip of cappuccino. The noise finally brought Crowley’s attention to the present, just enough for him to notice that a latte had been placed down for him. He plucked it up by the handle and nursed it against his lip, then went right back to staring.

“I have minutes from our meeting on Tuesday if you need a refresher,” Aziraphale offered, his voice distant as he read through his notes. Crowley replied with a dim grunt.

He could remember it well enough on his own. He’d mustered up his usual gravitas that helped him sell his stories, but that alone was not enough to woo the Publishing Director this late into the timeline. Gabriel was good at his job, though perhaps a little too by-the-book, which made him a little too ruthless. He looked for bottom lines, and when he cast his gaze over Crowley’s final outline, all he saw were empty brackets.

“I would’ve liked to see more fleshed out by this stage,” Gabriel had said cooly, and Crowley had slunk right back into his seat, shrinking like a scolded schoolboy.

Thankfully Aziraphale had been there, fighting for him as always. Well— fighting for him as long as Gabriel was in the room, otherwise it was just plain old fighting.

He’d jumped right into the spiel that writing wasn’t a linear process, and even though there were gaps in some places, they were sitting on swathes of detail in others. Nevermind that most of what came out of Aziraphale’s mouth was total hogwash, he still said whatever was needed to get them back in Gabriel’s good graces. Crowley didn’t say much after that, just sipped his coffee to avoid putting his foot in it, and nodded obediently whenever Aziraphale came back to his steadfast assurances that he would get it done.

That part didn’t sound like a lie, but it did err on the side of a threat.

“What if I befell a fateful accident?” Crowley asked, suddenly, back in the present. He looked up and Aziraphale frowned at him, mouth open, apparently halfway through saying something. Crowley continued with his interruption anyway, “And I died before I could finish it?”

Aziraphale stared at him a beat longer, then relaxed with a weary roll of his eyes when he connected Crowley’s completely disconnected train of thought.

“I simply wouldn’t allow it,” he muttered into his coffee.

Crowley shivered, believing it.

Aziraphale sighed and turned his attention back to his notebook. “As I was saying, if we want to meet Gabriel’s deadline to be considered for Christmas Season publishing, that gives us three months to work with. Two, if you wanted to give me a chance to breathe while I edit, but when has that stopped you before?”

He gave Crowley a pointed look, which Crowley did not return.

“We could leave it for next year’s holidays, of course, but Guardian is much more likely to give you the freedom to experiment with future projects if you can hit all the marks with this one.” He paused, pinching his brow, then set his cappuccino down and got right back to work. “So: three months, that means 800 words per day. Might sound like a leap at the moment, but once you’re in flow you’ll soar past it. And, only an additional 300 more per day would bring you in under two months, which means…”

His incessant arithmetic faded into the white noise of cafe bustle. Crowley sipped occasionally at his coffee and blinked at his screen, willing a single thought on the page. His cursor blinked back, indifferent to his suffering.

Blink, blink, blink.

Thwap.

Crowley shot upright when Aziraphale smacked a loose piece of paper over his screen, snapping him out of his trance. He’d finally finished musing, and was staring at Crowley expectantly from over the top of his antiquated little reading glasses.

“I’m working,” Crowley growled, snatching the paper out of Aziraphale’s hand to throw it back at him. He resolutely ignored the way it spiralled uselessly in the air instead of landing anywhere near his target.

“Minesweeper doesn’t count just because it’s on your work computer.”

“I’m not playing Minesweeper, I’m trying to fill in these fucking plot holes,” Crowley snarled, surreptitiously closing the minimised Minesweeper window that was still floating in his taskbar from earlier. “Are you like this with all your authors?”

He slumped back in his chair and watched as Aziraphale leaned out of his seat to pluck up the fallen flyer, somehow still haughty while he faffed about with litter. Crowley assumed he would feign innocence, hopefully even volley him a “Like what, dear?” that would set him up for a much needed rant about personal space and micromanaging.

But Aziraphale kept a stern glare on him as he straightened the paper back into his journal and dusted off his hands.

“Not all my authors need to be coddled this much.”

Crowley dissolved into a slew of irritated consonants and slapped his laptop shut.

“Now, what I was saying, before your little tantrum—” Crowley stuck his tongue out, and Aziraphale ignored him, “—is that, perhaps, this might be call for a retreat?”

He slowly pulled his tongue back in, frowning from behind his sunglasses. He arched a brow to make sure Aziraphale would see it.

“What, lock me in a windowless hotel room until I finish the book?” he scoffed, entirely joking.

“If that’s what it takes,” Aziraphale replied, entirely serious.

Crowley blanched, shooting back in his seat. “Oh, come now…”

“I spoke to Gabriel already… Just to get an idea of budget and whatnot. He’s willing, only because I reminded him of the exemplary quality of work you’ve provided us in the past.”

Aziraphale spoke much more carefully now, even tiptoeing around his teasing, like the author was a timid animal he might frighten if he moved too quick or too loud. Crowley could only bare his teeth in protest as his agent pulled a hefty stack of papers out of his satchel and laid them on top of his computer.

“I thought it might be worth considering, to help with—”

“Did you print out Air BNB?” Crowley squawked, half amused, but mostly horrified. He was powerless to his curiosity once his eye landed on the topmost page, and dove forward to start rifling through the stack with an incredulous frown.

Sure enough, Aziraphale had brought him a slew of listings, ranging from penthouses in Edinburgh to hotel suites in Berlin; all bearing a URL bar at the top of the page and half a rainforest worth of footer content after each property.

“Christ Aziraphale, this is…”

“Would you please just look?” Aziraphale pleaded. “It doesn’t have to be one of these, but this is the budget Guardian has given me. It’ll give us a solid month for you to write, entirely undistracted, and get this thing done right.”

Crowley muttered disdainfully under his breath as he thumbed through the pages.

He wasn’t totally opposed to the idea; plenty of the greats had done it after all, and he basically did the same thing already when he accidentally shut himself away for weeks at a time to follow a creative tangent. What griped him was the nagging frustration that he couldn’t do this on his own, that the idea he’d been so passionate about was completely beyond him unless they shackled him to a typewriter. In those conditions, how good a story could it possibly be?

The rentals were all awful anyway; a bunch of soulless art installations masquerading as houses that would do nothing to inspire romance for his muse. Sure, his own apartment was a little sparse, but it was his. He bought the art, he arranged the throw pillows, he hauled the beautiful glass-top writing desk off the side of the road when he stumbled upon it at the start of his career. Torturing himself in someone else’s neat marble box wouldn’t make him write faster, it would only leave him maladaptively daydreaming about everywhere else he’d rather be.

“Is this what you think I like?” he muttered, still grimacing at the sheer amount of paper in his hands.

“Your flat isn’t exactly hospitable,” Aziraphale snipped. Crowley felt instantly soothed by the return of his pompous tone. “Would you prefer to find one yourself?”

“Yeah, the only way I’m agreeing to this is if I get to pick where I’m staying.”

“Absolutely!” Aziraphale brightened considerably, and only then did Crowley realise his mistake. “Then we’re in agreement!”

“Oh, for…” Crowley sneered as the papers were yanked out of his grip and unceremoniously stuffed back into the brown leather satchel at their feet. Aziraphale looked far too happy, wiggling in his chair as he set his things to rights, but the second Crowley flipped his laptop back open, he sobered in the face of that blank white page.

There sat his lonely cursor, blinking mercilessly.

He licked his teeth and opened a browser, letting the autofill take him to AirBNB.

“I know that look,” Aziraphale warned, catching Crowley’s attention in earnest. What had he done now? “The budget is fixed. If you’re set on a more expensive property, it’ll have to be a shorter booking. Likewise, if you want more than a month, it’ll need to be somewhere cheaper… Please, give me one less thing to fight the publishers on.”

Utterly delighted by the thought that hadn’t even crossed his mind, Crowley burst into a grin. He quickly stifled it and moused over the search filters.

“Of course,” he said seriously, then set the cap £10 higher just to remind them he was worth it.

It took Crowley a while to narrow down his search, but he eventually found the perfect place.

He began at the cafe, scrolling aimlessly through well-fitted apartments and hotel suites while they finished their coffees. He scrolled despite his initial reluctance to the idea, if only because it gave him an acceptable excuse to ignore the empty document that hid behind his browser window. His hunt continued in earnest when he was back at his apartment, finally alone with his thoughts and surmounting realisation that maybe this wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Three nights later, just shy of the witching hour, Crowley landed on the perfect listing and emailed Aziraphale without a second thought. It came in £32 under budget, even after adding a few more days to the booking calculator, but it would do. Crowley was sure he could come up with another minor misdemeanour to offend his corporate overlords.

Aziraphale’s initial list had spanned quite far beyond the channel, but in the end, Crowley landed on an isolated cottage only a few hours from London. It didn’t really matter what was outside his door if he was going to have his nose buried in his laptop all day, so he’d narrowed down the location filter, and lost himself in photos of wood fireplaces and duck ponds.

The Tadfield cottage had all of that, and more. The surrounding paddocks stretched on for miles in all directions; the old wooden furniture was charming and misshapen, crafted by the imperfect artistry of human hands; every surface was accompanied by some kind of throw blanket or beaded cushion, even the outside picnic table that would be a perfect writing desk if the weather allowed it. Every nook and cranny looked welcoming, every shadow felt cosy. It was a traditional little thing of thatch, stone, and probably a few spiders, but it was undeniably romantic through and through.

Crowley’s phone buzzed just as he was about to put it down for the night, and shouldn’t have been surprised to find a reply from Aziraphale in his inbox. The man never stopped.

Crowley sank into his sheets once his phone was back on its wireless charging dock. He stifled a yawn into his pillow, then stifled a smile into his forearms, as images of his little writer’s retreat continued flashing through his mind.

Now that the next few weeks were booked in, he couldn’t help imagining how he might spend his days there, even daring to believe that a change of scenery was all he truly needed to get his fingers moving over a keyboard again. Against all odds, he was kind of looking forward to it. What could be better than a month alone, without anything, or anyone to distract him?

Chapter Text

Crowley had his suitcase packed three days before he was scheduled to leave, save for the slew of gadgets he zipped up with his chargers in the morning. He had no idea how much use he’d actually get out of a laptop, iPad, phone and Surface — especially since Aziraphale mentioned something dastardly about disabling his online access for everything but his Google Drive — but figured he’d rather be safe than sorry, and would simply bring them all.

He even tucked a blank journal beside his half-full one, on the off chance he actually got swept up in all that fresh air and antiquated scenery. He used to find planning on paper quite helpful, and he only hoped he’d remember how.

At 9:32 AM, Crowley’s intercom buzzed while he was hand washing his morning coffee mug. He shouldered the call button as he dried his hands.

“Who is it?”

“Joan of Arc,” Aziraphale sighed, his recognisable hauteur crackling through the intercom speaker. “Here with your ride— unless you were planning on walking to the station.”

Crowley grinned at the screenless display and grabbed his keys.

“Be right down, mademoiselle.”

He caught the lift down to find his agent waiting right outside the lobby doors— although waiting implied a state of inertia, a moment of stillness between harried tasks, and Aziraphale’s mind was rarely still. His nose was buried in a book, his brow gently furrowed as he scribbled something onto another overstuffed page of his daily planner. He leant against the bonnet of his car for a solid surface to write on, but the Volkswagen Beetle’s¹ bulbous curve looked like it was only making things harder.

“That is not your car,” Crowley droned, scuffing his shoes with how sharply he stopped on the pavement.

His sunglass-tinted gaze swept down the length of the vehicle, taking in the silver side detailing and whitewall wheels. It couldn’t be newer than 1960, maybe ‘65 at a stretch, and aside from a smattering of dust skirting the fenders, it was absolutely pristine.

Aziraphale looked up at the sound of his voice, and his smile burst like sunlight through a stormcloud.

“Isn’t she a beauty?”

He leapt up from the bonnet to take Crowley’s bags, bustling to get them packed into the boot like he wasn’t twenty minutes early for the Tadfield train.

“Why is it yellow?” Crowley moaned, utterly taken aback by how bright, how silly, how perfect it was for the man currently preening over it.

Aziraphale swept right past his contempt and opened up the passenger side door. Crowley intentionally dawdled his way inside.

“You like classic cars, don’t you?” his agent asked chipperly as he slid into the driver's seat, already adjusting the mirrors and buckling his seatbelt.

Crowley did. He had a 1954 Bentley R-type² parked in the secure garage directly beneath their feet, which could only dream of being as spotless as Aziraphale’s fucking Beetle.

“Not yellow ones,” he muttered instead.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes but was fighting a smile, far too amused by his petulance.

The teasing was always a fun way to start his day, but Crowley’s annoyance quickly hardened into something more genuine once Aziraphale began to drive. He handled London roads nothing like he handled publisher meetings, too busy hesitating and triple checking every blind spot to fit smoothly across the unrelenting lanes of traffic, and showed more respect to the speed limits than he ever did to Crowley’s Google Doc revision comments.

The only thing that stopped his fingernails from drawing blood with how deeply they cut into his knees was the reminder that he would soon be free of this. Free for an entire month, deep in the country with weak enough phone and internet service that he might not even hear the snarky edge in Aziraphale’s stream-of-thought editorial notes.

It did a little more than that, actually— the closer they got to the train station, the more the idea of an entire month to himself became downright soothing, and he dared to feel excited for the retreat ahead. Maybe he was romanticising things again, who knew, but by the time Aziraphale indicated for the turn into the station, Crowley was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement for the journey.

He could start with a writing exercise on his laptop, something simple and romantic about his two lovers meeting on a train. He’d soak up the atmosphere of the clacking rails and drifting scenery, perhaps add a trickle of rain to the window to draw the pair of them closer together—

“Just here’s fine,” Crowley griped, sitting forward to point at the pick-up-drop-off zone Aziraphale was rolling past.

“We can’t park here, Crowley,” he huffed.

“We don’t need—” Crowley grumbled and sat back in his seat, the drop-off zone already well in the rear view mirror. No point arguing. A few more minutes and he’d be free.

Then a few minutes passed, Aziraphale found a park, and Crowley stood beside him while he unlocked the boot. The mental gymnastics, on top of his firmly dug-in heels of denial, took him a few minutes to figure out why he was looking at four bags when he’d only brought two.

“...You’re coming,” he finally said.

Aziraphale cast him a curious look after hoisting the last bag onto the pavement. A single one of his grandma-curtained atrocities was enough to dwarf both of Crowley’s sleek black armoured cases put together.

“Of course I am,” he laughed, frowning as Crowley’s stunned silence sank in. “You think you’d get anything done without me there?”

He extended the handle of Crowley’s case and offered it to him, then started on his way to the station entrance. Crowley did what he could to school his pout, gripping his bags a little too tightly as he followed after him.

“Might’ve,” he muttered.

It did not rain during the train ride. Crowley’s laptop sat open on his tray table, but the morning’s whiplash left his brain too scrambled to dream up any for himself. It was easy to sit silently with Aziraphale’s nose buried in a book for the whole journey, but his racing thoughts refused to get the memo.

Every glance at his screen erupted all his thoughts into a frantic mental scrabbling of consonants and hand gestures, which he could neither comprehend nor ignore. Every glance at his editor left his foot twitching to stamp like a toddler, as he couldn’t imagine a less romantic getaway. His cursor blinked relentlessly the whole ride.

From the train station they caught a local cab, which drove them through the village of Tadfield and out the other side in a total of thirty seconds. The view on their way to the cottage was pretty, but daunting; they ventured past little patches of woodland and empty farming paddocks, and with nothing but nature on all sides, Crowley already felt in over his head.

When they reached the cottage itself, Aziraphale stayed back to chat to the cab driver, exchanging small talk for tourist advice while Crowley descended the path to his home for the next thirty days (38 seemed, in the end, a tad excessive— he was sure he could get this done in 30, but now he wasn’t sure of anything at all). The garden was on the neat side of natural, and the house itself was worn but well cared for. All in all, it was beautiful, quaint, and certainly out of the way. He could feel the reception bar dwindling on the phone in his pocket with every step he made towards it.

“Isn’t this lovely?” Aziraphale broke through his tangled thoughts with a chipper little smile as he brushed past to unlock the front door.

Crowley finally found his voice when the two of them stood inside, admiring the balance of open space and cluttered furniture, shelves littered with tchotchkes, and tabletops with invitingly clear surfaces. He stood there for a long while, trying to remind himself of the excitement he held at the start of the morning, while Aziraphale began poking around every doorknob he could get his hands on.

“This one’s the bathroom,” he announced, speaking mostly to himself. “That looks like the master bedroom. So this is… Ah, no, that’s a linen closet. Where’s the second bedroom…?”

He puttered around for another minute until the problem became painfully evident. He paused in the middle of the room and gave Crowley a wary look.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Crowley reiterated through gritted teeth.

He shut his eyes in an attempt to hide away from Aziraphale’s weary sigh. There would be few places to hide in a cottage this small, so he figured he ought to get used to the sound of Aziraphale’s unamused huffing and bustling around.

When he opened his eyes again, his agent was straight into problem solving mode. He muttered under his breath and tapped his fingers incessantly against his palms while he considered the room, and before Crowley could even dump his bag somewhere out of the way, Aziraphale had started shoving furniture around to make a little space for himself. The largest sofa was commandeered for a bed, with an end table pulled up beside it for his chargers and his vitamins.

Just watching him was exhausting, so Crowley fixed his sunglasses and fled into the kitchen.

The cottage welcomed them with a gift basket full of nuts and chocolates, a cupboard stocked full of tea and coffee supplies, and a wine rack loaded with middle-of-the-road reds. Crowley wouldn’t have minded cleaning them out within the first few days, but his stomach was already grumbling for something a little heartier than Ferrero Rocher. Beyond the teabags and sugar, the pantry didn’t stock much of substance, so he sat down at the breakfast table and started working on a list.

He kicked up his feet while Aziraphale rearranged their living room, filling a note on his phone with groceries. He had to purge over half of them when he remembered they’d be carrying everything on foot, but eventually narrowed it down to two decently weighted bags worth of food.

The living room was finally still when he sauntered back out with his list in his pocket. Aziraphale’s sofa looked like it was hit by a tornado of clothes and books, whilst the man himself had absconded to an armchair with his planner in his lap. He perked up, glancing at Crowley from over the top of his reading glasses, and closed the diary over his thumb.

“How’s it look?”

Crowley grimaced at the upturned suitcases and miniature library that used to be their sitting room.

“Might have to find you a set of drawers,” he wondered aloud.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “I meant the kitchen.”

“Oh.” Crowley grinned. “I’m going to pop into the village for some groceries. I’ll be back in… Whatever that thing is that you say.”

“Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” Aziraphale murmured as he tipped his attention back to his book. “With tea, I hope.”

“There’s plenty in the kitchen,” Crowley called as he made for the door, only just catching the excited lift of Aziraphale’s head before he stepped outside.

The town wasn’t half bad, really. It may have been small, and he certainly never would have visited if he weren’t being handcuffed to a nearby radiator— but for what it was, it had its charms.

It only took fifteen leisurely minutes for Crowley to make it back there on foot, passing some truly scenic farmland as he went. Proper 4K wallpaper kinds of landscapes, with the spire of a humble vicarage in the distance and rows of delightfully wonky houses leading into the town square. The first building he spotted was a pub — because this was Crowley, so of course it was — but he was also pleased to find the local grocer still open, a kitschy cafe beside it, and a post office that seemed to have compartmentalised with a bookstore. All in all, town triangle might have been more fitting, but it was as picturesque as a postcard, and would make a nice backdrop for the next month of his life.

He loitered around town until his tension melted into relaxation, then that eventually into boredom. After strolling down the aisles of the grocer to procure them some real food, he stuck his head into the pub to find out if a bottle of wine (or three) might be on offer. Crowley learned that the joint was run by an odd couple named Tracy and Shadwell, who informed him that his cottage was well stocked with a wine rack he was more than welcome to uncork— they’d clocked him as a tourist immediately, and with his AirBNB being the only holiday rental available in the whole town, they proceeded to dump half an hour’s worth of history on him before he could leave. With the promise of an ‘82 Chateau Giscours waiting for him in his little kitchen, he didn’t even mind.

To his complete and utter lack of surprise, Aziraphale was working at the main dining table when he made it back to the cottage. He barely lifted his head from the laptop, notebook, and draft manuscript that were each fighting for his attention, only stirring out of his focused haze when Crowley began clinking and clunking the groceries into the cupboards.

“How was your walk?” he asked distractedly.

“Feeling much better,” Crowley admitted, shouting just enough to be heard through the kitchen wall. “You’d like it, probably. They’re all stuck in the 1600s.”

Aziraphale made a distant, thoughtful noise, but said nothing else. With everything put away and a random bottle plucked up from the wine rack, Crowley sauntered back out into the living room to join him, cocking a hip against the table to keep his balance as he picked at the plastic seal around the bottle cap.

(There were older, corked vintages at the back of the cabinet, but starting small and working his way up seemed like the smarter way to get through the month)

“How do you feel about some writing?” Aziraphale suddenly asked, eyes on the wine like it had insulted him. “With the thirty days we have here, you could be finished by the end of our stay if you manage 2,240 words per day. It’ll be slow to start, but you usually catch up when the flow starts to kick in, so I wouldn’t worry about—”

Crowley huffed out a laugh as the seal cracked beneath his palm.

“Not today.” He stole a sniff from the open bottle, humming appreciatively before setting it down on the table to aerate. Then he tilted forward, pressing a single finger to the top of Aziraphale’s laptop, and tipping it closed. “Travel days don’t count.”

His agent grumbled as he watched the screen slowly click shut.

“Really, there’s no need for—”

“End of story,” Crowley grinned wickedly. “I’m exhausted from that train, aren’t you? Go on, go for a walk or something.”

Aziraphale sighed and shook his head, then fluttered his lashes over some quick mental maths.

“Alright, fine. 2,000 and…. 320 words,” he amended. “Every day. Starting tomorrow.”

Crowley beamed and gave the wine cap a celebratory toss, only just managing to catch it when it came back down.

“Whatever you say, angel,” he hummed.

Aziraphale made to rise from his chair, but aborted it mid-movement to cast Crowley a withering look.

“Oh, not that again.”

Crowley froze, his hand squeezed too tightly around the bottle cap as he mentally stuttered through what he’d just said. The slip of a pet name caught up to him and he whipped back into a grin.

“What? You are, aren’t you? You work for Guardian, and you’re my guardian angel,” he said breezily, tossing the cap again. “Sitting on my shoulder, kicking your little legs out, wishing I would stop drinking and swearing and sleeping in—”

On his third toss, Aziraphale caught the cap midair. He shoved it into his trouser pocket with a roll of his eyes.

“I’m going for a walk,” he announced, looking twice as exhausted as when they’d arrived.

Crowley hoisted himself up to sit on the edge of the table, kicking his own little demon legs and waggling his fingers as Aziraphale made for the door. More wine for him.

It was awkward, there was no denying that, when dinner time came around.

They managed to avoid each other for most of the day, lounging around and basking in birdsong like they were there for leisure all along. Aziraphale even stuck his nose into a book that was already printed and bound, without any kind of red pen or sticky note pad in sight. They reconvened as soon as night fell, making their way back to town with Crowley leading them to Tracy and Shadwell’s pub for a proper meal.

It wasn’t forced-laughter or shifty-eyes awkwardness when they nestled into a vinyl booth together — in fact, Aziraphale didn’t reveal any outward signs of discomfort as they sipped their pints and cut into their parmigianas — but the silence was painful, tightening Crowley’s skin with every squeak of cutlery against their plates.

There was something undeniably intimate about sharing a meal in such close, dimly lit quarters, and he couldn’t remember the last time he and Aziraphale had done it. Had they ever? The only dinners he could recall were strewn across conference rooms or hunched over his coffee table, with a deadline looming and barely any attention paid to the food itself.

They were so few and far between, he could practically remember the menu of each one. When he’d first called Aziraphale to info-dump his thoughts for this new book, his agent had arrived at his flat with an armful of Chinese takeaway boxes and a bagged bottle of Merlot tucked under one arm. Crowley had the barbecue duck, and Aziraphale had one of just about everything else.

“Did you ever end up going back there?” he wondered aloud as he speared individual peas up the tines of his fork. “You were so keen to try that duck for yourself.”

Crowley looked up to find Aziraphale gaping at him, his eyes narrowed and brow furrowed in confusion. Then he blinked and his face relaxed when the invisible pieces fell into place.

“No, I completely forgot,” he sighed wistfully. “Perhaps we can dine-in when we’re back in London, to celebrate the book. That’d be a nice way to close it out, don’t you think?”

Crowled hummed, nodding to himself while Aziraphale sipped his ale. Maybe by then, the awkwardness will have lifted.

It surged back when they returned to the cottage, following Crowley like a shadow as he neared the doorway to his bedroom. The bedroom. Singular, because he was a stupid single-minded idiot who couldn’t put one and one together, let alone two and two. Lingering in the doorway, hesitant to disappear through it and start his nightly routine, he cast a glance back at Aziraphale in the living room.

But Aziraphale calmly carried on, just as he always did, primly sorting through his folded clothes as if making a grown man sleep on a sofa for a month wasn’t a terrible inconvenience. Once he found his pyjamas, he disappeared into the bathroom to ready himself without a peep of protest, leaving Crowley to click his door shut and fall, still silently, into bed.

The silence finally disappeared in the morning, and all of the gentle, intimate awkwardness with it.

Crowley woke to a shrill screech of curtain hooks and a sudden burst of light that surged right through his eyelids. He lifted his head off the pillow to make out the vague shape of his agent standing at the window, whose edges continued to blur as he turned and fussed about the room.

“What time’s’it?” Crowley croaked as he hoisted himself up onto his elbows.

“Good morning! It’s nearly—Oh goodness,” Aziraphale froze, before the vague shape of an arm quickly raised to cover up his already obscure face. “You didn’t tell me you sleep naked!”

Crowley heaved out a sigh and sat forward to rub the sleep crust from his eyes, making no moves to hide or cover his bare chest.

“Not naked, I’ve got pants on,” he grumbled into his hands. “What are you, a swooning suitor from the Victorian era?”

“Regency, not Victorian,” Aziraphale muttered. Crowley lifted his head to glare at him and found him completely turned away, even though his hand was still covering his eyes. “I’ll leave you to get dressed, shall I?” he said to the wall.

“Christ, Aziraphale, I’m sure you’ll survive a bit of torso. We’re both men, eh? Nothing you don’t see in the mirror every day.”

Aziraphale huffed something under his breath then started towards the door. Crowley rolled his eyes and twisted over to his nightstand, but faltered at the unfamiliar landscape.

“Wait,” he startled. “Will you, er… Would you pass my glasses?”

His agent finally turned around then, the fuzz of his head swaying indignantly behind his hand.

“We’re inside, Crowley,” he tutted. “It’s a lovely day, I’m sure you’ll survive a bit of daylight.”

“Please,” Crowley said sharply.

Aziraphale paused, and in the silence, Crowley could practically hear the ticking of the cogs turning around his head. He fidgeted with the edge of his blanket, suddenly overcome with the urge to tug it up and over himself, until Aziraphale finally made up his mind and spoke again.

“Where are they?” he asked gently.

“Left them on the dresser, I think,” Crowley muttered, throwing a point-like gesture across the room, to the set of drawers Aziraphale was standing in front of. He watched from the corner of his eye as the man waved a hand around it searchingly, before releasing a soft aha! under his breath and plucking them up.

“Are these your usual pair?” he asked, hesitating on the other side of the room as he inspected them. “They’re kind of… Blue. I thought the lenses were blacker than this.”

“Yes, yes,” Crowley hissed and beckoned him over impatiently. “They get darker in the sun.”

“They— What?” Aziraphale gasped his amazement and held them up to peer through the lenses. “That sounds like something out of a sci-fi.”

“Aziraphale.”

“Alright you, I’m just curious,” Aziraphale said chipperly and held the glasses out. Crowley snatched them as soon as he was close enough.

He breathed a sigh of relief and slid them up his nose, relaxing as all the indistinctiveness washed away from the room, replaced with firm edges and crisp details. He tucked his fingers under the lenses to continue itching the last of the sleep-fog from his vision, then sent Aziraphale an unfiltered glare when he realised the man was still standing there watching him.

“I never realised they were prescription,” Aziraphale murmured.

Crowley curled over to sink his elbows onto the bed, propping his chin up on his hands and obscuring his scandalous four chest hairs from Aziraphale’s delicate sensibilities.

“Is there a reason you’ve woken me up so violently?”

Aziraphale sighed far too fondly and made his way back to the door. “I’ve made tea. I’ll bring it in once you’ve dressed,” he said over his shoulder.

Crowley’s stomach conveniently waited until the door clicked shut to start rumbling, its interest piqued by the thought of tea and a hot breakfast.

Before getting up, he finally lolled his head to regard the open window. The grass in a distant field shimmered like ocean waves as a breeze rolled through, perhaps the same breeze that made the trees in the garden bob and bounce their leaves overhead. The high noon sun soaked everything in warm light, and there were honest-to-god finches fluttering around the garden’s antique bird bath. Crowley smiled sleepily into his hands.

It was a nice day.

Crowley had barely finished his plate before Aziraphale was dragging him out of the house, too literally pulling him by the arm to show him the garden.

“You’ll never guess what I found on my walk yesterday!” Aziraphale hummed excitedly to himself as they stormed the stone stepping path around to the back of the house.

“A tree,” Crowley guessed boredly, more concerned with switching his mug from hand to hand so Aziraphale didn’t yank his tea all over the grass. “A rock. A mushroom.”

Aziraphale came to a sudden stop amidst a circle of patio chairs, releasing Crowley’s arm so he could theatrically gesture across the back garden, where a low cobblestone wall had been cut out and decorated with a pile of outdoor cushions. Crowley squinted at Aziraphale’s beaming smile and sipped his tea.

“A bench,” he noted. “Well done, you.”

Aziraphale dropped his hands and rolled his eyes, then waved Crowley the rest of the way over.

“It would make a perfect writing nook, don’t you think?” he tried, waving his hands around it like a cartoon car salesman. “Nice comfortable spot, plenty of fresh air… It’s so lovely and picturesque, I thought of you the moment I saw it.”

Crowley muttered to himself as he finished his approach, peering at the wall with heavy scrutiny. Only a short section of the cobblestone had been carved away to create a seat, while a smooth stone slab was plonked down to make a tabletop next to it. With a long stretch of meadow ahead of it, and an overhang of the garden’s trees and shrubbery on every other side, picturesque was right. Uncomfortable looked right, too.

“It’s a lump of stone, Aziraphale. My back hurts just looking at it.”

“Oh hush,” Aziraphale muttered as he grabbed Crowley’s arm again. He ushered him over, just forcefully enough for Crowley to stumble over his feet and slosh a little tea against his fingers, before he sat him down onto the cushions. “Just have a look, would you?”

Crowley hissed and set his mug on the stone benchtop to make a forceful display of flicking the tea off his hands.

“I’ll make you another one,” Aziraphale smiled before Crowley could even complain. Damn him— that was half the fun. “What do you think?”

He put aside mockery and petulance for a moment to wiggle against the cushioning, surprising himself with how supportive they were. It was certainly more comfortable than the chairs at EDEN. He sat up straight, leant his arms on the slab as if to write, and hummed appreciatively at the perfect height and sturdy surface. It didn’t rock or tilt despite how precarious it looked, and the surface was as smooth as his glass desktop back home.

“Alright,” he sniffed, “I concede.”

He shot Aziraphale a look before he could start with giddy, victorious clapping.

“If you bring me coffee, because now I don’t plan on moving ever again in my life.”

“Yes, fine,” Aziraphale huffed, his smile undeterred as he demured his celebrations into an affectionate pat on Crowley’s shoulder. “I’ll bring your things as well. What would you like? Laptop? Notebooks?”

Crowley thought about it as he slouched over the tabletop. “Notebook,” he eventually confirmed with a nod. “Too bright for a screen today.”

“I’ll be back in two shakes,” Aziraphale beamed, practically skipping his way back to the cottage.

He returned five minutes later, which was precisely enough time for Crowley to come to the abject decision that this was his favourite spot in the whole cottage. This was the escape he’d been looking for. His novel may have been a little more urban than all the cobblestone and thatchwork that surrounded him, but the atmosphere was powerfully palpable. It was the long stretch of clear sky and crooked horizon that got to him, not to mention the sounds of the garden that collected into a gentle symphony from all sides.

He could certainly take that atmosphere and inject it into his story. Or, he could lean into it entirely, and drag his characters a little further from the city, a little further into the past. His outline was weak enough for those kinds of changes, anyway. The first ten thousand words he’d already written were mostly incoherent, with more of a focus on the way his protagonists felt about each other than where they stood in time.

“You’ve had an idea, haven’t you?” Aziraphale’s voice tore him out of his daydreams, making him suddenly aware of the stupid grin on his face as he stared into space.

“Maybe,” he tried to grumble, but it came out mostly indecipherable through his stubbornly persistent smile.

His two notebooks were placed gently in front of him, as well as his go-to fountain pen and an unfamiliar pencil that must’ve come from Aziraphale’s collection. Part of him felt like he ought to poke at that, to tease Aziraphale about the stationery shop he must have brought along with the library worth of books— but for the first time in a while, he was more concerned with his fiction, and simply flipped open the top journal to get to work.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Aziraphale said gently, fading himself into Crowley’s background as he added a steaming mug of coffee to the pile.

Crowley startled awake when a platter of food was placed down on the table, rattling with a touch more force than necessary. He peeked one eye open from behind his sunglasses and peered at the man looming over him.

“Comfortable?” Aziraphale sighed with his hands firmly on his hips.

He considered sitting upright, but the second he started to lift his shoulders, the sun’s warmth seemed to intensify and melted him right back down again. It turned out that the cushions on his bench were removable, and made for a rather comfortable bed when he laid them out on the wall behind him.

“Terrifically so,” he mumbled, uncrossing and recrossing his ankles that were propped up on the tabletop. “Is that lunch?”

“Come on, up you get,” Aziraphale dithered in place of an answer. “Have you written anything at all?”

“I’m thinking,” Crowley drawled.

“Of sheep, maybe,” Aziraphale huffed when the author made no attempt to move. “I’ve edited 10,000 words since breakfast. What have you been thinking about?”

Crowley’s frown deepened behind his sunglasses.

In all honesty, he had been thinking before he fell asleep like a cat in a sunbeam. As soon as Aziraphale left him his coffee, he’d flipped open his notebook and charged straight for the latest page, only to falter at the unfinished question that waited there. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t convert the cottage’s wonderful romantic ambience into grand gestures of love between his characters, and those empty brackets continued to haunt him.

He knew what brought them together, what trials they had to face, and most importantly how he wanted things to end. But the romance in between was so lacklustre, they might as well have been work colleagues merely forced together by circumstance.

Crowley wasn’t ready to give up on the day’s inspiring ambience just yet, so he’d kicked his feet up and eased back into daydreams. It wasn’t his fault if he couldn’t come up with a single tangible idea in that time.

“Romance,” he answered simply.

Aziraphale sighed and sank against the side of the tabletop, still attempting to sit primly whilst half-leaning on a stone slab. He slid the lunch platter aside and plucked up Crowley’s notebook, rearranging things on the table with frustrating persistence.

“Let’s regroup,” he decided for them both. “If we want to reach 75,000 words in 29 days — although, I suppose it’s more like 28 and a half now — minus the 10,000 you’ve already got…”

“Nah,” Crowley purred. “I was thinking of trashing them.”

Aziraphale fluttered his eyes shut and gripped his pen a little tighter. Crowley had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from smiling as he watched his agent mentally count to ten.

“That puts you over 2,500 words a day,” he eventually continued. “Now, clearly we’re still struggling to get off the ground, so perhaps if we adjust that to a curve: say, 1,000 to start, with the goal to increase it to three or four—”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley interrupted, when it became clear that Aziraphale’s determination would outlive his own petulance, “do you know why I agreed to this whole reclusive writing retreat thing?”

Aziraphale fidgeted, opened his mouth too quickly, then shut it again when he decided against whatever snarky response he’d been tempted by. He shook his head.

“I thought I’d be getting a month off from this,” Crowley flung a hand out, gesturing up and down at the entirety of him.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes and smacked the journal back down on the table.

“I’m here to help you,” he snipped. “But if you don’t want it; you don’t want it.” Then he stood up, dusted off his trousers, and gave Crowley one last withering stare. “You can come and find me when you do.”

Crowley rolled his eyes, then stuck out his tongue when he realised Aziraphale wouldn’t see it through the tint of his sunglasses. His agent was already halfway back to the cottage.

He was plunged right back into the garden’s imperfect silence, but it didn’t feel quite so serene as it did before his nap. Crowley sighed and tipped his head back to stare at the clear blue skies above. Even out here, far away from the noise of the city and the distractions of day to day life, he couldn’t hear her. His muse remained tight-lipped and coy, working in her mysterious ways and not talking to anyone. Not even Aziraphale would be able to help with that.

When Crowley jerked awake a second time, he felt a little less languid about it. He sat up too quickly and rubbed the back of his head, squinting around at his much dimmer surroundings. The sun was low in the sky and its honey-soft warmth had slipped into an evening chill that even the birds and crickets had begun to flee from. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep again, and rushed to collect his things and start carrying it all back into the cottage.

To his relief, inside was bright and warm. To his surprise, Aziraphale was busy in the kitchen.

Crowley set his empty mug and half-picked lunch platter on the kitchen table as quietly as he could, but the soft clinking of plates still managed to draw Aziraphale’s attention away from the stove. He perked up at the noise, offered a slightly strained smile, then turned quickly back to his frypan.

“Evening,” Crowley murmured as he sauntered over. “Look at you, Mister Uber-Eats-and-Fine-Dining actually fending for himself. What’s on the menu?”

Aziraphale made a noncommittal noise and poked at the pan with a spatula. Crowley blanched.

“Are they the chicken cutlets I bought yesterday? The fuck did you do to them?!”

“I don’t know!” Aziraphale exclaimed, his shoulders hunching up defensively. “I didn’t do anything!”

Crowley hovered a hand over the hissing pan and reeled back just as suddenly. “That’s way too hot,” he tried to scold, but the look of distress on Aziraphale’s face was so comical he couldn’t help but smile, and it wasn’t long before that barrelled into laughter. “You’ve destroyed them.”

Aziraphale scowled at first, apparently too frustrated to stand for any teasing, but let go of the pan and allowed Crowley to weasel him out of the way.

“They’re not that bad,” he muttered. “We can probably save it…”

“They’re— Aziraphale, they’re still pink inside. How did you even manage this?!” Crowley guffawed as he cut into one of the charcoal steaks, and the sight of raw chicken was just abhorrent enough to have Aziraphale covering his mouth to hide his smile. “Where’s the bin? We’re starting over.”

Cooking his own meals wouldn’t be the end of the world; he was certainly awake enough now.

After tipping Aziraphale’s lost cause into the rubbish, Crowley turned down the heat and added their two remaining cutlets to the pan. He murmured to himself as he cooked, just to help himself concentrate— he was not teaching Aziraphale by explaining that chicken needed to sit on a low heat, to be turned slowly, to mix the seasoning together for a satisfying blend. It simply kept him on track, to make sure they didn’t waste their remaining groceries, and telling Aziraphale how to prepare their vegetables was just a pitying attempt to give the man something to do.

If he had an extra pair of hands to help him out, he would use them. It was definitely not fun.

Aziraphale thanked him by pouring them each a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, then with actual words as they sat down to eat.

“That was very kind of you,” he added as an afterthought.

Crowley snarled without any heat as he jabbed a floret of broccoli into his mouth.

“Shut up,” he mumbled around it, still inexplicably smiling.

“Well,” Aziraphale smiled back as he dragged his laptop towards his plate and pried it open to read while they ate. “It was. No food poisoning, for a start.”

Crowley focused on his food as he poked around his plate, mentally noting what worked and what would be improved by another trip into town for more spices. Eating was an easy way to wipe the stubborn smile off his face, until the slow clacking of Aziraphale’s keyboard keys caught his attention, and he thought of a better way to use it.

“Huh, you know what else I get a month without?” he realised aloud.

Aziraphale perked up, giving Crowley his full, curious attention as the author took a slow look around the cottage. It was modernised enough, but the only gadgetry was their own, and there wasn’t a printer in sight. Aziraphale would have to do all of his editing digitally.

“Your red fucking pen,” he declared, his smile growing into a fully fledged grin while Aziraphale’s curled into a half-hearted scowl.

Halfway through the next morning’s coffee, Aziraphale found Crowley back at the cobblestone wall, relaxing at his self-proclaimed writer’s nook.

He came with Crowley’s laptop, notebook, and every pen he could fit in the clamp of his palm. They sprawled across the stone tabletop as he set everything down.

“You left your things inside,” Aziraphale said pointedly.

Crowley slowly lifted his head from where it rested on his forearms, blinked as threateningly as he could, then turned back to watching the bird bath.

“Day three,” Aziraphale continued. “We’re looking at some twenty-eight hundred words a day, if you’re going to—”

“Please,” Crowley groaned.

“—If you’re going to meet this deadline. The longer you take to start, the higher that number is going to get, which is only going to—”

“Look at this place: it’s beautiful,” Crowley tried again. “I just want to enjoy it for five minutes without you nattering in my ear about schedules and shit. I thought you always said rest was an important part of the writing process.”

Aziraphale sipped his tea until Crowley finished.

“I do say that, but you’ve been resting for the last six months already. If you’re so obsessed with the atmosphere here, then…”

Crowley watched as Aziraphale dithered, looking around the garden as if to find his answer. When he suddenly turned back to the author with a sharp glint in his eye, Crowley didn’t know whether to be excited or afraid of what he’d found.

“...Then why don’t we use it?” he suggested, smiling far too coyly. “You’ve found such a romantic spot, it’s a well of inspiration just waiting to be had. We should be having… I don’t know, candlelit dinners, and—”

Crowley interrupted with a loud, completely involuntary snort from the back of his throat. Aziraphale raised an impatient eyebrow at him.

“You want to wine and dine me?” he snorted again, “After that mess you made last night?”

Aziraphale’s excitement sobered a little, then faltered entirely as Crowley laughed into his coffee.

“Alright, I might need a little bit of your help…” he admitted. “But for the most part, I guarantee I can make this the most romantic getaway you’ve ever been on.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “You win that by default, because I’ve never been on one before.”

“I’ll take that win,” Aziraphale said seriously, tilting his teacup against Crowley’s coffee mug to give himself a cheers. “Anything to get you writing. What do you say?”

Crowley’s gaze drawled across the tabletop at his laptop, his notebook, at the unseen pages of questions he still couldn’t answer. He tried to picture the trainwreck that would be a night of forced romance with a person he felt zero affection for, wondering whether it would do anything to help at all, or if the whole thing could cause more harm than good. Then he considered the alternative: sitting right where he was, staring at the same screensaver of green hills and falling leaves, forcing out the words all the same.

He perked up, and tried not to look too eager about it when he realised, “We’ll need groceries.”

Aziraphale shrugged and nodded. “Very well.”

“I should come,” Crowley said carefully. “Help you pick something easy, that even you couldn’t burn.”

Aziraphale considered that for a moment, then eased into a smile as he nodded again. “I haven’t seen the village in the daytime yet! Oh, this will be lovely— and work, of course. It’s still very much work,” he noted, in a weak attempt to be stern with himself.

“Whatever you say.” Crowley grinned and leapt up from his seat, delighted to spend yet another morning not writing.

There was only so much in Tadfield that Crowley could use to extend their morning out, but after pointing out the post office’s little bookshelves and suggesting they take an early lunch at the cafe, he managed to kill a few measly hours. Picking out groceries for an easy-to-cook meal was much harder, as images of food poisoning and charred ingredients flashed before his eyes with every consideration that came to mind.

Crowley loved any excuse to stay away from his laptop when his writer’s block was this strong, but would gladly take 20,000 words over a week in front of a toilet bowl.

In the end, he picked out a pre-made sauce, some canned tomatoes, and a bag of pasta. Not even Aziraphale could fuck up pasta.

Crowley even tried to work once they settled in back home. He sat at a writing desk in the main room, appreciative of Aziraphale’s miraculous ability to tidy away his pig stye to make the living room look like a living room again, and basked in the cottage’s interior ambience. There wasn’t much movement on his screen, but he honestly tried, even pulling out his phone at one point to start his stopwatch in a half-remembered attempt at a productivity timer.

“Aziraphale?” he called across the cottage, when the nagging thought of this isn’t right, surely I’m forgetting something became too distracting to bear.

He waited a minute, until his agent’s head poked out of the kitchen doorway. “Yes?”

“How do those po-do-ro timers work again?”

Aziraphale tapped his nails against the doorway, his face otherwise expressionless as he processed the question. He snapped his fingers suddenly, then disappeared back inside.

“One moment.”

Crowley reread the last sentence of his notes seventeen times, and forgot he’d asked Aziraphale anything at all by the time he wandered back out with his laptop resting on his arm.

“Pomodoro timer,” Aziraphale read aloud, jolting Crowley out of his seat. “Twenty five minutes of focus, followed by five minutes of rest. There are websites I can run for you, or we can use a kitchen timer—”

“Got it,” Crowley nodded, already adjusting the time on his phone screen.

“You have tried them before,” Aziraphale added. “Four years ago. It made you anxious.”

“Don’t remember,” Crowley mumbled as he readied himself at the starting line, setting his document to rights. “Worth another shot, anyway.”

“Good luck,” Aziraphale tittered as he drifted back to the kitchen.

Crowley canned the timer ten minutes in. It only made him anxious.

His focus was as brittle as it had ever been when Aziraphale finally started preparing their dinner. An entire day, and Crowley had barely made it to three hundred words. But, as Aziraphale’s frustratingly cheery voice piped up inside his head to remind him, it was three hundred more than yesterday.

He was all too glad to be done with it all when he heard the real Aziraphale muttering to himself through the wall, making pained little noises of stress as he clanged around with pots and pans. Crowley seized the opportunity to shut his laptop and dump it in his room in favour of saving their dinner from certain death.

“Everything alright in here?” he cooed from the doorway. Aziraphale leapt up at the unexpected sound of him, looking understandably sheepish as he juggled three different pans he had absolutely no need for.

“I want to do it,” he said sternly. “But… Well, some tips might help. To start with.”

Crowley grinned and sauntered over to peer down Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“That one for the pasta,” he murmured, nodding to the saucepan in his right hand. “And that one for the tomatoes.”

Aziraphale eagerly thrust the unneeded frypan into the cabinet as Crowley hoisted himself up onto a counter to watch. Once Aziraphale set the empty pans on the stove, he turned to the dry ingredients laid out beside it, and hesitated.

“Boil some water first,” Crowley supplied. “The spaghetti will take a few minutes, so you want that started before you do anything else.”

Aziraphale sighed with relief and turned to fill the saucepan with water from the faucet.

“I did look up a recipe,” he explained, “But all the websites I tried were filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of nonsense without so much as an ingredients list. Then I had a look around here for an old fashioned cookbook, but they all used different things than what we’ve bought.”

He looked so genuinely frustrated by this, Crowley bit the whole of his tongue to try and stop from smiling.

“I’m more amazed you’ve never cooked spaghetti before,” he admitted as nicely as he could. “You were a student, once.”

Aziraphale shot him a look. “Of course I was, about a hundred years ago. Can you blame me for eating out now that I can afford it? I have standards.”

“I know you do,” Crowley muttered, abysmally failing to sound irritated by it.

While the water slowly heated, Crowley pointed out what utensils he ought to chop and prepare the herbs with. If his hand ever got too close to an ingredient, Aziraphale was quick to swat him away, assuring him that it would only be romantic if he prepared everything alone. Crowley sat back and kicked his legs against the cabinets as he watched his editor’s careful work over the cutting board.

Once he was popping the lid off the sauce, Aziraphale shooed Crowley out of the room so he could mix the dish together and surprise him with the final result. As if Crowley hadn’t sat there and walked him through the entirety of it. Still, he shook his head fondly and left to wait at the dining table as he was told.

A minute later and Aziraphale was popping back out, but not with their plated meals. First he brought a bundle of linen under one arm, spent a solid five minutes trying to convince Crowley to shut his eyes, then pattered another two trips back and forth from the kitchen. Crowley opened his eyes to the strike of a match, and gaped as a tall candle was lit in between their plates.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale scolded. “I wasn’t done.”

“The fuck did you find all this?” he squawked with laughter as he took in the candlelight, the steaming plates, the sudden disappearance of their laptops and notebooks, and a tartan yellow tablecloth to complete the look. He plucked at a corner of it, grimacing. “Though, I wouldn’t call tartan romantic exactly.”

“It’s all they had,” Aziraphale huffed as he adjusted the lightswitch on the other side of the room. The cottage fell into a cosy darkness, warmed by the light of the candles and backlit from the open kitchen door. “Besides, tartan is stylish.”

“Sure it is.” Crowley picked up a fork and poked idly at his spaghetti as Aziraphale took the seat across from him. He pulled in his chair and the silence became suddenly unbearable. “Smells good, at least. Well done. No smoky black bits.”

“Thank you for your help,” Aziraphale admitted. “I’m rather excited to try it. Let’s dig in!”

For a few long minutes, the rattling of salt and pepper shakers and gentle scraping of cutlery overtook the crickets’ song that filtered through the cottage windows. Crowley hummed a single note of approval after his first bite, Aziraphale nodded proudly after his own, and the conversation remained dead on arrival.

“This is weird,” Crowley declared, his eyes fixed on the slow spiralling of spaghetti around his fork.

“No it’s not, it’s fun,” Aziraphale beamed immediately, looking far too genuinely excited.

“What exactly is romantic about this?” Crowley doubled down. It was dark, but that only made him squint, his eyes straining behind already dimmed lenses. “Besides, dates are for getting to know each other, and I know everything about you already. You weasel your way into my life enough.”

Aziraphale straightened up at that, eyebrows shooting into his hairline as he dropped his cutlery and fumbled around his pockets.

“That reminds me,” he muttered into a napkin, “I went looking for ideas earlier this afternoon. Ice breakers and so on.”

Crowley rolled his head back with a groan when he spotted Aziraphale’s phone in his hand, lighting up the other side of the table with a sharp white glow.

“Don’t tell me you’ve found the 30-something questions that lead to love,” he groaned, disdain enunciating each word.

“Oh, I’ve got plenty more than that,” Aziraphale murmured. “Why don’t we start with these: Fifty first date questions. And if those don’t work, I have another list of eighty, and another of 160.”

Crowley croaked out another laugh and put down his cutlery to properly pinch his brow. “Go on, then. I bet I could answer any of them.”

“We’ll start with the light-hearted ones first, shall we?”

“No need to go easy on me.”

“What’s my favourite meal? Hmm, that one’s not exactly fair, because you hardly eat anything to begin with.” Aziraphale tapped his fingers against his lip as he stared hard at his phone. “Something with Peking duck, I think.”

Meanwhile, Crowley stared, his mind completely blank.

“Er, chicken… Parmigiana?” he guessed.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “That’s just what I had last night. Far from my favourite. Try: devilled eggs.”

Crowley scoffed and sank back into his chair. “Devilled eggs? That’s not a meal,” he protested.

“Neither is espresso, but you certainly treat it like it is,” Aziraphale countered. Crowley rolled his eyes and beckoned him to get on with it. “Here we are, an easy one: What’s my favourite book?”

Crowley took a deep breath and considered another frustrating lack of options.

“...It’s not one of mine, is it?” he ventured, smiling weakly.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes so hard his posture flagged. “I know you’re mad for Matthew Reilly, yet you can’t even pick my favourite author.”

Crowley stared at him hopefully.

Aziraphale began: “Jane Aus—”

“Austen,” Crowley exclaimed as if he’d come up with it himself. “Pride and Prejudice.”

Aziraphale sent him a withering look. “Persuasion.”

“...That was my next guess.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Aziraphale sighed, clearly fighting a smile. “I’m still waiting for you to wow me, or do you need me to go easy after all?”

“Shut up,” Crowley sneered. “Give me another. I’m just warming up.”

“Favourite vacation spot?”

“...Paris?”

“South Downs. Secret talents?”

“Boring me to death…”

“Magic.”

Crowley choked. “What—”

“Ideal superpower?”

“Er…”

“Celebrity crush?” Aziraphale’s smile, for some reason, only grew with amusement. “Number of siblings? Middle name?”

Somewhere along the way, he had set his phone down and tipped his chin into his hands, asking Crowley whatever came to mind that he might have a chance of answering.

“What’s my favourite colour?” he even asked, growing ever exasperated.

Crowley strained with the determination to get a single question right. His gaze landed on the crisp button up shirt he wore beneath his waistcoat, and sat back far too confidently in his seat.

“Blue.”

Aziraphale finally lowered his elbows from the table and sat back to match Crowley’s relaxed posture. He dared to feel victorious as the smile spread broadly across Aziraphale’s face.

“Yellow,” he corrected, and Crowley swore.

“Alright, so, we spend more time talking about me than I thought,” he conceded, feeling far more sheepish than he expected to. “Is it my fault you only ever nag me about plot holes?”

Aziraphale bowed his head and Crowley swore he saw him laughing into his napkin.

“Of course I don’t blame you for it, dear boy,” he chided, conveniently choosing the endearment that made Crowley’s skin crawl the most. “We’re colleagues, after all. I know more about the fictional Saint Asmodeus than some of my oldest friends.”

“Same here, honestly,” Crowley muttered.

“Why don’t I find something from the cellar, and we can learn about my taste in red wine?” Aziraphale suggested, smiling cheekily.

“That’s the best idea you’ve had all night,” Crowley grinned.

As they drained the last of their second bottle, with bloated bellies and all four feet kicked up onto the coffee table, Crowley yawned with both arms stretched high over his head. Aziraphale’s hand wobbled as he tried to pour, and managed to hit the glass by the third go.

“Anything you could use in your story?” he asked slowly, concentrating on firmly starting and ending each word so none of them ran together, which only managed to exacerbate the amount of wine he’d consumed.

Crowley suspected Aziraphale was just trying to shut him up, but unfortunately it worked. He promptly lost the tail of the dolphin tangent he’d been on, and accepted the glass that was handed to him.

“Dunno yet. We’ll see,” he nodded, not entirely confident about that, but plenty confident that Aziraphale would have just as many ridiculous evenings up his sleeve. “Did you say you practised magic? Like, Penn and Teller, smoke and mirrors nonsense?”

In total honesty, the evening felt like a total bust. There were much more important things for his characters to do than sit around by candlelight exchanging stories from their childhoods, but for all the wasted time, Crowley could see how much Aziraphale was trying. He was in no rush to admit that it had been a thoroughly unromantic evening, and was happier to sit back and enjoy the way his agent’s hands waved excitedly when he talked, and the unabashed way his eyes crinkled over each smile.

Chapter Text

Crowley was laying in bed, awake but buried beneath the duvet, when Aziraphale came knocking at his door. He was deep in a mental argument of reasons for/against getting up, and jolted his head off the pillow at the mere thought of caffeine.

“Bring coffee,” he shouted. The door creaked open right away.

“Are you clothed today?” Aziraphale muttered, slowly approaching with a mug in each hand.

Crowley threw back just enough of the blanket to sit upright, revealing another night of sleeping shirtless.

“Nope,” he yawned.

Aziraphale halted in his tracks, but after a quick sigh, forced himself to continue over to Crowley’s bedside. It took Crowley a few helpless smacks of his hand to locate his glasses in their new spot on the nightstand, but managed to slip them on and take his coffee with little spillage.

Aziraphale perched delicately on the edge of the bed, but still turned his gaze to the curtained window while he sipped his tea.

“How are you feeling today, productivity-wise?” he asked into his cup.

Crowley still wasn’t sure how he felt human-wise, and probably wouldn’t until he was on the other side of an empty mug and a hot shower.

“Dunno yet,” he offered when he realised Aziraphale wouldn’t turn around to see him shrug.

“Excellent!” his agent jumped, startling Crowley with his excitement. That was not the reaction he’d anticipated. “In that case, I’ve had another idea, and would love for you to join me in the garden when you’re ready.”

He risked a shy smile over his shoulder, but quickly bustled to his feet the second his gaze dipped towards Crowley’s exposed collarbone. Crowley snorted at him, laughing openly as Aziraphale hurried for the door. He only paused long enough to rip open one of the curtains as he passed it, then disappeared out of the room.

After lounging around beneath his blankets for so long, getting to his feet and facing the day actually sounded quite appealing. Crowley wasted barely any time in the shower, shaving beneath the spray of the water and ruffling his hair just dry-enough with a face towel. The sunlight suggested it would be warm outside, whilst his smartwatch told him otherwise, so he struck a balance with a thin henley and a thick cardigan before finally trudging outside in bare feet.

He rounded the side of the building, stepping between the stone path markers to let his feet sink into the cool grass, and spotted Aziraphale immediately. He sat just beyond the cobbled wall, his pale skin and white hair practically glowing under the sun’s gentle touch. The shade cast by the garden’s trees covered Crowley in a prickly cold, but stepping out into the clearing was like easing right back into the shower spray that had awoken him so warmly.

“A little afternoon delight, huh?” Crowley called out, spotting Aziraphale’s picnic spread amidst the fluffy grass as he approached.

Aziraphale spun around, looking delighted at first, until Crowley’s words sunk in. Then he scowled and smacked a hand on the yellow blanket— their tablecloth? —beside him. Crowley hesitated at the edge of the blanket before sitting down, instead taking a moment to process everything his agent had laid out.

In the centre of everything was a curved wicker basket, still half wrapped in plastic and ribbons from the day they’d arrived. He spotted chocolates, nuts, three bottles of Pinot, and far too much cheese for any two people to survive, but at least that was lunch sorted for the next few days.

Aziraphale had also brought with him a cheese knife and some wine glasses, a cutting board to serve everything on, and approximately three hundred books.

“Is this why your bags were so heavy?” Crowley scoffed as he eased himself to the ground.

Aziraphale wiggled over to make room, though it didn’t make much of a difference with the towers of hardbacks that shifted with every dip of the blanket. Crowley crossed his legs and dipped straight into the basket for a Ferrero Rocher, ignoring every responsible savoury option his hand delved past.

He expected his agent to smack his hand or protest his choice, but instead the man simply hummed and turned a page in his lap. It was only then that Crowley realised he was writing, with a fountain pen in hand and his silly little half moon glasses balanced on the end of his nose. Crowley leant over to have a look, chewing obnoxiously in his ear as he squinted at Aziraphale’s indecipherable cursive.

“So what’s the plan here?”

Aziraphale ignored him (and all his pestering) until he finished the end of his sentence, then capped his pen and twisted to face him properly.

“We’re having a romantic picnic,” he declared.

Crowley popped another chocolate into his mouth. “What’s romantic about it?”

“Well.” Aziraphale looked around as if it were obvious. “There’s chocolate. And wine.”

“And half the London Library,” Crowley nodded at a Penguin paperback that was slowly sliding off the top of one of the haphazard stacks, inching towards their gift basket.

“Oh— yes!”

Aziraphale uncrossed his legs to rearrange himself and face Crowley more directly, then tucked his feet underneath him. In the brief movement, Crowley couldn’t help but smile at the little flash of tartan socks that poked out from the bottom of his trousers, which disappeared into perfectly polished Oxfords. He glanced down at himself and laughed at his black and grey trackpants, and the cardigan that had stretched at least two sizes in the wash.

One of them was dressed for a date with Mary Poppins, the other was dressed for bed. He wasn’t sure whose idea of romance they were going for, but, well. They were certainly covering their bases.

“I’ve been taking notes of common themes that arise in the more popular romances,” Aziraphale explained, flapping his diary in hand. “New and old, classics and cult. I thought we could go over pros and cons for each of them, and pick out some tropes you like that could make the novel more fun.”

Crowley propped an elbow up on one knee and sank his chin into his hand. The other continued poking around the basket, pulling out boxes of dried fruits and salted meats that were hidden beneath the veil of hard cheeses.

“Alright…”

“I’ve had a look at some of my favourites already,” Aziraphale said as he patted a smaller stack of hardbacks at his feet. “But I wasn’t sure what you liked. I’d love to go over their themes with you.”

He looked at Crowley expectantly, who froze halfway through fitting a whole cracker into his mouth.

“You firs’,” he mumbled. Aziraphale rolled his eyes, less than fond.

“Come on now. Give me one romantic story you like.”

Crowley swallowed uncomfortably around the dry biscuit and reached for one of the wine bottles, relieved when Aziraphale let him. He cracked the seal and poured them each a generous glass, hoping his careful hand would give him another minute to recall a single story he’d enjoyed in the past.

“Much Ado,” he muttered eventually.

“Oh, the play?” Aziraphale perked up as he opened his diary back up. “Always good to have a classic to refer to. What else?”

Crowley squirmed and downed half his glass. “Love Actually.”

Aziraphale began to write, but paused when his nib hit the page. “The film?”

“Yes the film, alright? It’s— I don’t like romance novels.”

He hiked up his shoulders as he snatched the bottle again, wondering if it would still count as his first glass if he never actually reached the bottom of it. He poured as slowly as he could, hoping to put off meeting the inevitably judgemental stare coming from the man beside him, whilst wishing Aziraphale would break the silence so he could simply nod and avoid it altogether.

To his surprise, when he lifted his glass to his lips, he saw Aziraphale writing. Love Actually.

“What don’t you like about them?” he asked, his tone even and unreadable. Looking up at his face was just as much so, his brows barely lifted as he met Crowley’s eye with nothing but curiosity and patience cushioning the gaze.

Crowley perched his wine glass in his lap.

“Um. I dunno. Whenever I— they’re always in first person, and it makes my skin crawl,” he tried. “I don’t mind it in action thrillers, but for some reason I hate it for romance.”

Aziraphale nodded and wrote something down, though Crowley couldn’t imagine what.

“Perhaps you don’t like being told how to feel,” he guessed.

Crowley blanched as he flashed back to the last romantic novel he’d read, in which he found himself screaming at the protagonist for falling so suddenly for a man clearly brimming with malicious intent. The casual air in which Aziraphale read him, with his head bowed to write and his prissy little glasses perfectly framing the end of his nose, made this feel an awful like therapy.

“When are we going to do something romantic?” he urged, reaching out to flip the book shut in Aziraphale’s hands.

His agent scoffed, startled by the interruption, then again by the question. “What do you think we’re doing?”

“Feels like school,” Crowley hissed. “I don’t want to talk about why the curtains are blue, I want to figure out where I’m putting the window.”

“I’m literally surrounded by romance novels,” Aziraphale huffed and gestured around as if Crowley had somehow missed them. “What is unromantic about this?”

Crowley swatted the diary out of his hands entirely, then snatched it up before Aziraphale could get ahold of it. He twisted in place to set it far behind him, picking the furthest stack from Aziraphale’s reach, and definitely not grinning at the pink little pout of the man’s lips.

“Romance isn’t about thinking,” he declared. “It’s about doing things.”

“Look who’s suddenly the expert,” Aziraphale said dryly. “What do you propose we do? Spin the bottle? Truth or dare?”

“No,” Crowley grumbled as he struck two ideas off his mental list. “Not everything has to be an event. Like… Here.”

He didn’t know how he hadn’t thought of it sooner; it would certainly get Aziraphale to shut up.

He plucked up one of their crackers, carefully stacked it with a slice of pre-cut cheddar, and used a clean knife to smear a dollop of dip on top. Aziraphale watched him dubiously as Crowley lifted the cracker to his editor’s mouth.

“I’m perfectly capable of feeding myself,” he protested.

“Go on,” Crowley sang as he tipped and tilted it in front of his face. “This is PDA 101. When in Rome… Do as the romantics do.”

He watched Aziraphale study the cracker for a long time, so long that he barely felt the smile that crept onto his face while he hesitated. He really shouldn’t have felt so triumphant when Aziraphale finally opened his mouth and let himself be fed, but winning out over his agent’s stubbornness would never not be satisfying.

It didn’t help that the man’s eyes fluttered shut the second the cheese hit his tongue, and a quiet sigh of delight hit Crowley’s fingers before he pulled away.

“That good?” Crowley teased.

Aziraphale dug into their gift basket for a patterned paper napkin, patting it gently to his lips before answering. “I’m a little hungrier than I realised,” he admitted, and started poking around for another biscuit immediately.

Mission accomplished. Aziraphale never spoke with his mouth full.

“What are you smiling at?” he muttered as he stacked up another cracker. Crowley finally noticed the searing ache in his cheeks.

“Nothing,” he muttered, trying to scowl, but was overtaken by another grin when he watched Aziraphale lose a battle against a smile of his own.

They sat in a bizarrely comfortable silence as they tore more earnestly into their gift basket. Crowley only got one real scowl when he pretended to use a Jane Austen hardback as a coaster for his wine glass, but otherwise the picnic felt like a productive use of the sunny afternoon. He had even relaxed by the end of the first bottle, and stopped trying to force feed Aziraphale olives every time he so much as opened his mouth.

“What’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever read?” he asked, watching with unblinking concentration as Aziraphale poured a fifth glass for each of them.

“Errr, goodness…” Aziraphale had to put the bottle down to think, apparently. Crowley waved a hand towards his glass but it was just out of reach. “I think it was in…”

“No, no—” Crowley lurched forward to grab the glass from him, startling Aziraphale with his sudden closeness. He relaxed as he watched Crowley fill the rest of his tipple with a wobbly hand, both of them more than a little day drunk with their bellies padded with nothing but dry bread and salted meat. “I don’t care what it was. Or what it said. That’s my point.”

“Your point?” Aziraphale mumbled, watching just as dumbly as Crowley ever-so-kindly topped up the rest of his glass as well.

“It’s not romantic to think,” Crowley tutted. “It’s romantic to do— and— feel. So, most romantic thing you ever read: Just from memory, how’d it make you feel?”

He punctuated his question with a little clink against Aziraphale’s glass, then sat back feeling very proud of himself. He could ask fancy questions too.

Aziraphale tilted his head back and sighed at the clear blue sky. After a long moment of silence, Crowley was about to scold him for thinking so hard, but he realised just in time that he was basking. Remembering, perhaps, but it looked equally likely that he knew very well how it made him feel, and he simply wanted to relive it. The thoughtful crease in his brow didn’t run as deep as it usually did, and his fingers drifted mindlessly around the rim of the glass in his lap.

“I felt like I’d been stabbed,” he sighed again, so wistfully that Crowley wondered if he’d misheard.

“Stabbed?”

Aziraphale smiled at him, his head still tipped back to the sky.

“I know you don’t want to hear the passage, but I still remember it word for word. I am half agony, half hope. I felt that pain exactly, right through my chest. I felt it for a whole week after putting the book down.” He bowed his head and sipped his wine, but his smile persisted even as he poked back into their basket of food.

“I’d never felt that way about anyone, but the words made sense somehow. I was… Jealous, I suppose, of this fictional character, even though it sounded so painful. Just to have someone they felt so strongly about.” He smiled as he plucked out a chocolate, and anchored his glass in his lap so he could unwrap the foil with both hands. “But I wasn’t upset; I was grateful. To have a chance to experience such profound feelings through their eyes, even though I’d never come close to it before.”

He turned to Crowley then, with the chocolate ball pinched between two fingers. Crowley froze as Aziraphale raised his hand in offering.

He thought, fleetingly, of the dusty book covers and inky pen he’d been clutching all day; of the old blanket he’d carried and laid out, dithering in the grass with the bugs and the soil; of wine spilled and wiped, fingers licked as they ate and bitten through laughter.

Then he thought: fuck it, he wanted chocolate, and opened his mouth.

Aziraphale fed him gently, his eyes fixed on his fingers as he placed the Ferrero Rocher onto Crowley’s tongue. He bit down to hold it in place and his lips grazed the tips of Aziraphale’s fingers as they drew away. Even as he cracked the nut between his teeth and felt the chocolate glaze every inch of his mouth, the press of Aziraphale’s fingertips shot through it all, lingering on the edge of his lips long after his hand was lowered.

That was certainly more intimate than he expected. Even after feeding Aziraphale countless bites all afternoon, he wasn’t prepared for the soft graze of fingers on his own lips to feel so… Nice.

He was strangely disappointed when Aziraphale turned right back to his wine without a second offering.

Crowley opened his laptop at the dining table without much reluctance. They ventured back inside when the sun was still high, and Aziraphale dedicated himself to cleaning up their mess so Crowley could focus. He leapt to agree, beelining straight for the closest available surface with his computer hugged to his chest, eager to sit around groaning at a screen if that’s all it took to get out of doing dishes and laundry.

He didn’t expect to actually feel inspired.

He started in an empty document, typing the digital equivalent of hasty pencil scrawlings to chase a feeling he couldn’t name. It wasn’t a knife in his chest, but there was definitely some kind of warmth; all he could grasp were hazy wisps of smoke from a fire so distant he couldn’t locate the flames.

He could feel it burning though, small and timid in the depths of his bones, until his fingers stumbled over innocuous words that suddenly fanned the heat like a mighty gust.

Crowley typed desperately after it, hunting down anything that stoked that fire.

Rolled up sleeves. Fabric taut around the curve of an arm.

The ducks make her laugh and she forgets what she’s saying, which makes her laugh harder. His face hurts from smiling. He doesn’t notice.

Talks with her hands. They move more than her mouth. They keep moving, even through her silence. They sway ever closer, close enough to touch.

wine stained cupid’s bow

kissed clean

Arm hair caught by the sunlight, skin sheathed in gold

forgetting to breathe in the face of an unexpected smile

She feeds the ducks, but not the good stuff. she has standards. They don’t know what they’re missing.

feeds him.

pink nail beds. pink lips.

throw her down but the grass is soft and catches her fall. touch his lips. bare skin shouldn’t taste this sweet. the craving runs deeper with every graze. push him down and cradle him tighter than the earth ever could

no room for agony

It had been months since Crowley had fallen into such a state of focus; he didn’t even hear when Aziraphale left, nor when he returned.

The threads were thin, but piece by piece, he’d begun to tie his disconnected thoughts together. He had three pages of… something, when something was dropped on the table in front of him and he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Sorry, sorry!” Aziraphale waved his hands and did a terrible job of wiping his amused little smile away. “Dinner. I thought you heard me come in.”

Crowley tipped down his screen to find an open container of bangers and mash waiting. It smelled of rich gravy and was steaming with heat, either freshly cooked or recently microwaved. He raised a curious brow.

“I didn’t think you’d want pasta again,” Aziraphale sheepishly explained. “Not that I mind cooking! But— Well, just for tonight, I popped down to the pub to bring us back something heartier.”

“Oh. Cheers,” Crowley muttered, and shuffled his things around the table to sit his dinner next to his laptop. After a wine soaked lunch of finger food and chocolate, he couldn’t deny how appealing a full plate of sausage and veg looked right then.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” Aziraphale added chipperly, with an infuriating wink and a pair of thumbs up thrown in the direction of his laptop.

Crowley rolled his eyes and stabbed his fork into a carrot, staring back at his screen while he waited for the man to leave. Right as the tines hit his teeth, his brain all but shouted out a lost word he’d been fretting over, and he shoved the cutlery aside after that single bite. It was good: soft and earthy and dripping with gravy, but closing out the tangent of prose he’d been staggering through would be better.

When he finally surfaced from the whirlpool of concentration he’d fallen into, his dinner was cold and the cottage was dark.

Crowley grit his teeth and prepared himself for a very snooty editor when he rose out of his seat, considering he’d just sat typing on his loud keys and glowing screen for lord knows how many hours, in what was technically the man’s bedroom. He wasn’t at all surprised to find the sofa bare when he turned around, assuming Aziraphale had gotten up for a walk to pass the time or maybe even crawled into Crowley’s bed when he wasn’t looking— he certainly would’ve deserved it.

But another inch to the right and Crowley found him, curled up in an armchair with a book opened flat on his chest. He sighed with relief, but shut his laptop slowly and dimmed the light of his phone screen to guide his way around. Just because he’d fallen asleep didn’t mean he couldn’t wake up, so Crowley was careful to creep into the kitchen, where he slid his boxed dinner into the fridge to reheat the next day. A microwave was much louder than keyboard keys, and he wasn’t about to risk invoking a sleep-disturbed wrath.

He inched towards his bedroom, but paused when his hand grazed the back of the abandoned sofa and the lump of folded quilts that were draped over it. He ran his finger along until he found the softest of the bunch, then dragged the blanket from the sofa to the armchair as quietly as he could manage. Aziraphale stirred as it was tucked up to his shoulders, but settled back down with an unconscious sigh once he was covered.

Crowley held in his tired groan until he crossed the threshold of the bedroom, finally releasing the day in a muffled huff into his pillow.

Crowley needed no help getting out of bed the next morning. He rolled off the mattress straight into writing, kipping back up at the dining table with every one of his gadgets perched around him like a peanut gallery of productivity. He really only needed one at a time, but if he started itching for a different kind of key beneath his fingers, he wanted to make sure an alternative was close enough to switch to without interrupting his flow.

Despite waking early, the living room was already cleared by the time he got up: the blankets were neatly folded, and couch cushions fluffed and placed back in their usual corners. The front door was also propped open, allowing for the gentle autumn breeze to sweep through and liven the place up with its chill.

Crowley didn’t stop to look for his agent before he started writing, just grabbed his cold dinner from the night before and sat the box in his lap while he worked. He picked at his food while he picked at his document, slowly approaching something resembling a full belly as he neared a full page.

His progress was steady, but it was slower going than the night before, with more pauses for chin scratching and rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. He knew where he wanted his sentences to go, but finding the words, the letters, the keys, was an inexplicably steep climb. Inspiration was just beyond his grasp. Something was off.

A shrill ringing snapped him out of his already flimsy focus, and he cast a look around his devices and all their dim screens. When he tipped down his laptop screen, he spotted the offender on the other end of the table, its default ringtone chirping at top volume and the vibration jostling it in place. Aziraphale’s mobile.

“Phone!” Crowley shouted.

He propped his chin in his hand and watched the device wiggle precariously closer to the edge of the table.

“Phoooone!”

Aziraphale’s hurried footsteps interrupted his third cry, and the phone was snatched up in fumbled haste.

“Aziraphale Fe— ah, hello Uriel,” Aziraphale answered cheerily whilst shooting Crowley one of his coldest glares. Crowley grinned and kicked his feet. “Yes, I have it. I was told Thursday would be fine. No, in Gabriel’s email…”

Aziraphale rubbed a tired hand over his face as he muttered into his handset. As distractible as he was, Crowley didn’t stand a chance of writing anything whilst Aziraphale was on the phone, so he felt zero guilt for sitting there and smirking whilst his editor grumbled away.

“Good morning,” Crowley greeted when he realised it was the first time they’d seen each other.

Aziraphale frowned and pointed at the phone in his hand. “Well, I included the notes for… Yes, but we don’t have the rights for that one. We’re still waiting on the—”

Crowley nudged his foot against the back of Aziraphale’s leg and delighted in the shocked glare it earned him. His agent shuffled down the table, leaning against the corner instead of the side, but Crowley simply sank down in his seat to further his reach.

“Yes, I’m listening.” Aziraphale held no mercy as he smacked Crowley’s foot away. “Give me one moment, I’ll get my computer.”

He muffled his mobile against his chest as he bent down over Crowley’s shoulder, uttering a scathingly impatient, “Child,” before fleeing to the other side of the room. Crowley snorted and watched him go, grinning ear to ear.

His smile fell as soon as he turned back to his laptop.

Perhaps it was time for a change. He slouched lower in his seat as he pulled his iPad to his chest, then his Surface, then his laptop again, and even tried on his phone at one point. When it became apparent that his muse’s lips were zipped for the day, he stacked everything to one side and absconded to the kitchen for a much needed cup of tea.

Aziraphale’s call had ended by that point, but he still huffed and muttered to himself with a creased forehead and all his attention fixed on the computer in his lap. Even from the other side of the room, Crowley could see his phone screen lighting up with notifications from where it sat precariously on the armrest of his armchair.

Making a second cup of tea seemed like the only right thing to do.

Aziraphale looked up suddenly when Crowley stepped into his eye line with two steaming mugs in hand. He looked so surprised, so genuinely touched by the offering, it almost made Crowley laugh.

“I should be bringing you tea,” Aziraphale gently scolded as he took one from him.

“You’ve done it all week. ‘Sides, I could do with a break.” Crowley tossed a scowl towards his abandoned gadgetry. “Cheer me up, would you? What’s on the romance menu for today?”

After their bizarrely enjoyable picnic, he couldn’t deny he was a little excited about what else Aziraphale might’ve been planning. He only hoped his hopefulness didn’t shine through too strongly.

Aziraphale was immediately so focused on himself, he didn’t notice either way: he straightened up in his chair, wiggled his shoulders, and smiled far too smugly. Whatever he’d planned, he was terribly proud of it, and Crowley’s heart thrummed at the thought.

But, he only teased, “Wait and see,” before taking a pointed sip of tea.

Crowley scoffed and slouched against the side of his editor’s armchair. “Wait and see? At least tell me how long I have to wait for.”

Aziraphale swatted a dismissive hand at him then curled it back around his mug.

“Just until tonight,” he promised. Crowley heaved out a great inconvenienced sigh.

“Are you taking me stargazing or something?”

Aziraphale faltered, his smile falling against the rim of his mug. Crowley caught it immediately and barked out a laugh.

“Oh. How did you guess?” he pouted.

“What else is there to do around here?” Crowley cackled. “At night, no less.”

Aziraphale’s frown was deep-set as he thunked his mug onto his end table and turned back to his laptop.

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

“You should keep better secrets,” Crowley chastised him with a bump of his fist against Aziraphale’s arm. The man coiled away from it and swatted at him again, this time thwacking his hand against Crowley’s side in an attempt to shoo him away entirely.

“I can’t believe you ruined the surprise,” he grumbled.

He didn’t, though.

Not really.

As it turned out, saying “we’re going stargazing” and actually going stargazing were two very different things.

One of them made Crowley laugh, invoking images of glittery Hallmark cards, bland planetarium presentations, and young couples canoodling on picnic blankets while a prop telescope posed for nothing but plausible deniability.

The other took his breath away.

They didn’t wander far; they didn’t have to. Their trusty tartan blanket joined them in the grass at the back of the property, nestled by the duck pond barely ten yards from where they had their picnic. The porch light was just bright enough to let them see each other in the dark, but not enough to wash out or compete with the stars above.

And god, there were stars.

Aziraphale’s constant nosing around the cottage had paid off, for he somehow managed to find a cheap little telescope in one of the house’s many nooks or crannies. It perched to one side of their blanket, wobbling on its rusty feet and fighting against every minute adjustment they tried to make, but Crowley hardly needed it. Tilting his head back was enough to enjoy what looked like a billion trillion Christmas lights twinkling overhead.

“I’m sorry this isn’t working as well as I’d like,” Aziraphale muttered over the telescope’s eyepiece. “Are you near-sighted or far-sighted? I can’t imagine you’ve got a very good view without this—”

“It’s fine,” Crowley uttered, still totally mesmerised, still completely breathless. “It’s gorgeous.”

Aziraphale pulled back from the telescope to follow Crowley’s gaze up to the sky. He smiled; the porch light caught the edge of it, lighting up the corner of Crowley’s vision.

“This doesn’t seem very you,” Crowley murmured to himself. He hadn’t exactly intended for that to be out loud, but when Aziraphale tilted his head curiously, he decided to just roll with it. “You know, sitting still. Admiring.”

His editor rolled his eyes, but didn’t seem too put out by it.

“I think you’ll find I do nothing but sitting still and admiring. Only, it’s usually words.”

“Yeah, but this is—”

“I do like it, though,” Aziraphale continued ever so quietly, and Crowley snapped his mouth shut to hear him out. “I like… Savouring things. I got into this work because reading for a living sounded absolutely divine. But, it’s always a little more complicated than that, isn’t it?”

“Capitalism,” Crowley added dryly, earning him an unexpectedly musical laugh from the other.

“Indeed,” he murmured as he turned back to the eye piece. “Now it’s all go go go. Finish five books so we can start on the next twenty. I forgot how much I liked to simply… Sit.”

Crowley’s head lolled aside, watching as the man’s hands continued to flutter around the telescope’s knobs and dials.

“This was a purely selfish evening then, was it?” he teased.

“Oh, not at all!” Aziraphale smiled without looking up. “Was I wrong to think you’d enjoy it?”

Crowley frowned gently, and itched his chin for a lack of anything better to do with his hands.

“No,” he said slowly. “But how’d you guess that? I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about…”

Aziraphale laughed, filling the empty fields with another soft melody. His look at Crowley was slightly amused, and far more incredulous.

“Do you even remember your own stories?” he teased. “Every time you need a scientist character, they’re always something astronomy-adjacent. Not to mention the stargazing scene in The Mountain. That was…” He sighed, but it lacked his usual weariness. “That was practically poetry, Crowley. It’s very obvious when you write about something you love.”

Crowley turned back to the sky when Aziraphale’s insightful gaze became a little too pointed to handle. He eased off his elbows to lay flat on his back, latticing his fingers over his chest and looking back up at the galaxy’s natural bokeh.

“...That was on a spaceship. Does it count as stargazing if you’re in the stars?” he wondered aloud.

Aziraphale chuckled at his commitment to contrition. “What do you call this, right now?” he asked with a broad gesture at the surrounding fields. “Is Earth not just another celestial body, out in it?”

Crowley shrugged. He had a point.

“All I’m saying is, you’re much more romantic than you give yourself credit for. We’ve just got to find a way to bring it to the surface, into your plot.”

Crowley tipped his glasses onto his forehead to massage his closed eyes. He left them there after he pulled his hands away, letting the sky blur into one messy splash of light that blended into the horizon and the cloudy outline of his fingers.

Write a novel. Be romantic. Gaze into the synapses of the universe.

All very differently said than done.

“Ah!” Aziraphale suddenly exclaimed, even though the sound was barely a breath at his side. Crowley tilted his soft, unfocused gaze towards him. “I finally— oh, Crowley…”

Crowley fumbled to slam his glasses back over his eyes. It wasn’t that he needed to see Aziraphale’s face when he sighed his name in such a gentle, awed tone. The encroaching darkness was already vague enough without his piss poor eyesight making it hazier, and he just… needed to see Aziraphale’s face.

“Should I be impressed that you managed to get that thing working? Or impressed that you managed to take this long to find something to look at?” Crowley choked, attempting a sarcastic wave of his hand at the hundreds and thousands scattered above them. Aziraphale was glued to the eyepiece and didn’t seem to notice.

“It’s nothing special, really,” he murmured, but his smile was beaming. “I managed to line it up on the moon. You wouldn’t believe how finicky—oh, it doesn’t matter. Come and look.”

He pulled back slowly, hovering his hands around the scope like he was readying to catch it if it fell. Crowley followed his lead and sat upright just as carefully, dreading to jostle anything with a wrong move. Aziraphale would surely be insufferable if he ruined the angle after all that work, and he desperately wanted to see what had made the man so breathless.

“Don’t lean against it, just hover over… Yes, there. You might need to tilt your head a bit. Do you see?”

Crowley strained to line up the lens of his glasses with the telescope’s eyepiece. He shifted a little further, shuffling closer to where Aziraphale was sitting when he perfected the adjustments, but all he could grasp were little flashes of light.

“It’s just black,” he grumbled.

“Come this way a bit,” Aziraphale coaxed with a hand cupped over Crowley’s shoulder. It barely pulled him closer, his palm laying a warm and comforting weight to one side rather than gripping or tugging him, but it was enough to draw him in.

When Crowley finally gave into its pull and leaned all the way into Aziraphale’s space, the lenses aligned, and a gasp jumped up his throat.

There she was.

A perfect saucer of mottled white, filling the whole of the lens, in unfathomably perfect clarity.

He couldn’t believe how brightly she shone. It was like staring into a sun that glowed with a halo of cool silver. He also couldn’t believe the sharpness of her edges, how defined the rickety old telescope managed to show all her shadows and ridges.

The cloudy blemishes; the freckles of light; even the Tycho crater, a vivid burst that reached out like stretch marks on a plush underbelly— all familiar and beloved, but he was rapt with the wonder of getting to trace each curve with his naked eye. He was seeing her, really seeing her, because there she was, right in front of him. Not a photo, nor an impossibly crisp 8K render from the world’s greatest supercomputers. Just him and Luna, face to face, with a little curved glass and an expensive prescription between them.

Aziraphale’s hand moved, reminding Crowley there was one other presence there as well. The warmth of his palm lifted, shocking his shoulder with a phantom rush of cold air, and the rest of their closeness caught up to him. He shifted back slightly, un-bumping their folded knees, and gently relaxing the grip he didn’t remember tightening around Aziraphale’s arm. When he started to lean back, severing the last of the closeness between them but loathing to leave his view of the telescope so soon, Aziraphale’s hand returned to his back.

“Oh, you don’t have to move, my dear. I'm just getting the thermos. Keep looking as long as you like.”

The closeness of his voice sent a startled shiver down his spine. Crowley shifted in place and glanced at his editor from the corner of his glasses, where the frames turned to metal grates and his vision turned to dog shit. Beyond the slight twist of his torso, Aziraphale barely needed to move to find it, leaving them still quite huddled together.

Crowley decided he would survive it, and refocused on the eyepiece.

His second look was just as marvellous as the first, and for a long moment, he lost himself staring at every little detail. He still couldn’t quite fathom how brightly the moon glowed from so far away, even as she inched out of the centre of the lens. He could have tried moving it, or asked Aziraphale to do it for him, but he dared not disrupt the perfect alignment his editor had slaved over. Besides: the gentle creeping out of frame served as yet another reminder that she was there, alive almost, and Crowley merely bore witness to her languid nightly trek across the sky.

He should’ve done this sooner. It was incomparable to the planetarium showcase he’d once attended, back when researching for The Mountain At The End Of The Universe. As crisp and large as those digital renders had been, they paled in their attempts to express the vastness that was above them. They paled compared to Aziraphale and his rusty old telescope.

“What a total waste of money,” he sneered half heartedly, still glued to the lens.

“The… The telescope?”

“What? No, the…” Crowley leaned back to frown at him, realising all too belatedly that he’d had yet another conversation entirely in his head. “Sorry. I was thinking about the—”

“Oh—” Aziraphale suddenly smiled against the lip of his travel cup. “That dreadful observatory. Yes, I remember how disappointed you were after the whole thing. I can’t believe it’s taken us this long to go properly stargazing,” he recalled, all on his own, as he extended a second cup out in offering.

Crowley stared down at the hot cocoa steaming from the little plastic dish, only partly at the hand that was holding it. His second, just as belated realisation, was of how cold he was, and how perfectly a boiling homebrew would hit the spot.

His third, perhaps the most belated of all, was that Aziraphale understood him.

Always had.

Crowley sat back on his feet and cradled the cocoa to his lips. He leaned back from the lens to give Aziraphale another turn if he wanted, whilst Crowley stared into space— the dark, foggy kind, at the edge of the property where the shadows blended into the horizon and the hills crept into the sky. He sipped his drink and thought about that realisation for a long while.

“We’ve known each other a long time,” he mused aloud. “Written together a long time. I mean, you and I.”

“You and me,” Aziraphale quietly corrected. Crowley looked up suddenly, and found him smiling as he peered into the telescope’s eyepiece.

“Right,” he laughed, but his smile was quick to fade. “What I mean is... I could always rely on you.”

His gaze had lowered back into the depths of his mug, but saw from the corner of his eye when Aziraphale sat up to look at him. His mirth had faded, replaced with a quiet look of concern, close to bordering on worry.

“You’d tell me if I was writing total bollocks, wouldn’t you? If something was really, really wrong?”

Aziraphale’s expression shifted into a dubious, suspicious squint.

“Have I given you any indication that I wouldn’t?” he scoffed. “That is, entirely, the point of me.”

Crowley laughed again, but couldn’t even smile around that one. “Right.”

“What’s wrong, my dear?”

He snarled out a frustrated breath and lowered his cocoa just enough to scrub a hand over his face. It knocked his glasses off kilter, but he didn’t bother fixing them; he could hardly see in the dark anyway.

“Something. I don’t know,” he admitted. “Things should be moving forward but something is just… Wrong. It doesn’t feel like my usual wall. It feels like. I’m writing the wrong book entirely. I’m not trying to get out of— I don’t know. Dunno how to explain it.”

He could feel his hackles rising with every stammered word, and dreaded to lift his head to see Aziraphale’s unamused, irritated, petulant, or god-forbid bored expression. He kept his eyes down and clung to the hope that Aziraphale would understand this too.

Then a hand touched his own, and he nearly threw his cup across their picnic blanket.

Crowley’s eyes blew wide as he looked at the connection of their hands, then grit his teeth and pleaded for his startled heart rate to slow when he saw that Aziraphale was merely holding him steady to top up his half-drunk cup from the thermos. His editor’s gaze was stern with concentration on his dimly lit task, and as much as it would pain him to find it, Crowley couldn’t help but stare in search of any frustration that might have been evident.

“The idea isn’t gripping you as strongly as it once did,” Aziraphale murmured. Something unravelled in Crowley’s chest to hear it explained so simply, and he nodded. “Perhaps you need to remember what drew you to it in the first place.”

The thing, the band around his lungs or whatever it was that had crept beneath his skin when he wasn’t looking, re-wound itself twice as tightly when Aziraphale looked up to meet his eye. Then again when the touch drifted away from his hand.

“Why don’t you tell me about Ana? What does the main character see in her, why does he love her?”

Crowley took a slow sip of cocoa as he watched Aziraphale refill his own. That should be an easy enough question; he knew his characters inside and out already, and talking from the heart made it feel a lot less like homework.

“He loves how much she cares,” he said at once, without even needing to pause for thought.

But Aziraphale did, smiling into his cocoa. “About what?”

Crowley faltered. Apparently it needed some thought after all.

“About…”

He faltered again when Aziraphale’s hand reached out to him, and this time he had the wherewithal to watch its journey. It skipped past his mug and went straight for his face, and for a moment, for some indiscernible reason, Crowley thought he was about to be kissed.

He released a tight breath when Aziraphale’s hand did not cup his face, and instead plucked at the edge of his skewed glasses. He fixed the frames into place, rolled his eyes fondly, then smiled right back into the telescope’s eyepiece. Crowley swallowed what felt like a rock in his throat.

“Everything,” he choked out. “And, uh. Everyone. She cares so much about everything she does, and everyone she meets. It’s…” He hesitated when Aziraphale glanced up at him, but pushed through it to finish a thought for once in his life. “It’s mesmerising to him.”

“Of course…” Aziraphale eased into a wider smile as he sat back, huddling around his little cocoa for warmth. “I forgot, that scene with the children in the woods is technically the first time they meet. What else, then? What keeps him coming back?”

Crowley nodded as he scrambled for something else. When he finally stumbled upon it, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

“She doesn’t take any shit,” he smiled to himself. “From anyone. Even the people she likes— especially people she likes. She may be finicky and difficult and hard headed, but, that makes her good at what she does, so she doesn’t change herself for anyone.”

Aziraphale watched him curiously, nodding for him to continue, refusing to interrupt.

“She’s not what she appears, either. I think that drives him a little bit mad. He knows where the differences end and she begins, but there’s still things that surprise him about her. She’s so… fastidious, but out of nowhere she’ll get excited about things she has absolutely no right to get excited over, and it’s both maddening and totally invigorating.”

His editor, who had taken to gently leaning his chin on his hand, sat up straight once Crowley trailed off. He cleared his throat and straightened his bow tie (a miraculous feat with only one hand), a familiar ritual that always came before he either congratulated Crowley on a job well done, or completely annihilated whatever he’d just written. He sucked in a nervous breath and held it.

“Well… He sounds quite smitten with her,” Aziraphale began gently. “But I may need an updated draft, because in the version I’m reading, none of that has come through at all.”

Crowley’s teeth clenched, but his editor didn’t look remotely upset by it. Just slightly perturbed.

He opened his mouth to justify himself, determined to defend all the characterisation he’d carefully littered throughout his notes. As confident as he’d been, he came up entirely blank. He wasn’t exactly sure how to explain that all of that had been plucked from the unseen depths of him, without a single actual scene in mind.

“...I’ll do better to get it onto the page,” he eventually muttered, if only to stop gaping like a fish.

Aziraphale smirked and pulled up his cocoa for a pointed sip. “Be sure that you do,” he said, but his smile was far more fond than placative.

Even when he was there to comfort, Aziraphale still managed to be prissy, stubborn, and plenty fastidious. But Crowley nodded easily, and would do whatever it took to see his smile shine with pride again.

Talking with Aziraphale about his characters was nice, but it wasn’t the eureka moment he was hoping for.

His eureka moment came days later, when he sidled into the bathroom while Aziraphale was shaving. Crowley was still waking up, his throat raw and his vision bleary even through his glasses, and had to lean the whole of his weight against the counter to stay upright. He plucked his toothbrush out of the cup holder with a grunt for Good Morning, whilst his agent splashed his face and cleaned off the last of his shaving cream with a washcloth.

“Tea or coffee this morning?” Aziraphale asked, chipper and lively as ever.

“Co’thee,” Crowley just managed to slur around his toothbrush.

Aziraphale gave him an amicable little pat on the shoulder and dropped his razor into its cup on the basin. Once the door shut behind him, Crowley’s eyes wandered lazily over the countertop. He froze.

His gaze landed on the cup of toothbrushes, then the cup of razors. For such an innocuous thing, the realisation was sudden enough to slap him wide awake. As a man who lived alone for most of his adult life, it was strange and unfamiliar to see two of them there, leaning together against the edge of the glass, with fresh drops of water still clinging to Aziraphale’s blade. His toothbrush went completely still in his hand as he stared.

He knew what he needed. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew it.

A man.

His main character needed a male love interest.

Crowley sped through the rest of his morning routine, shirking half of it in favour of rushing into some clothes and plucking his coffee out of Aziraphale’s hand as he bustling his laptop out to the garden. His agent mistook his frazzled energy for inspiration and left him to it, smiling delightedly as Crowley sped out of the cottage to his writing nook.

He was certain, but he wanted to be positive before he brought the change to Aziraphale. The first and only thought on his mind was finding an old drafted scene between Newt and Ana, and seeing how it felt if he changed her name. He started with carelessly find-and-replacing her name, then scoured through the document to manually rewrite her pronouns.

Backspacing simple her’s into his’s turned into adjusting more of the minor details, like Newt toying his fingers across the nape of a neck, instead of threading between the strands of long flowing hair. But, even where changes didn’t need to be made, he found himself typing more regardless. Her laugh became giddier, her sarcasm more biting. All the traits he’d described to Aziraphale, everything he couldn’t place, began to flourish on the page.

It was supposed to be a quick test, a chemistry reading, if you would, but without thinking, he found himself continuing where the scene left off. He only stopped when his notes dictated that a side character was to arrive, but if anything, the interrupting only made the cogs turn faster. One thought turned into a tangent, and before he knew it, he was steamrolling ahead.

He didn’t need to invent a new character. Best of all, he didn’t need to throw away all of Ana’s development to fit this new face. Everything could stay the same, if he only made Newt fall for his supporting character instead of her. The underlying tone of loyalty and comradery between the two men was already bordering on homoerotic, so what if he just… Solidified the metaphors? Pushed them one step closer, until they fell into each other’s arms?

That thought alone, of Newt putting his hands on Oliver, of holding him tight and pressing his lips firmly into his auburn hair, stuttered Crowley’s hands over the keyboard. He exhaled a steadying breath, swallowed another inexplicable rock in his throat, and kept writing.

When he finished the test scene, he didn’t stop to reread it. He opened up his notes, and began to fill the holes. Brackets were deleted, taken over by swathes of prose. Metaphors started linking together, gaps were smothered with text, and his Ideas note file doubled in length.

Two hours later, his word count ticked over 3,000. His hands, seeming to move entirely on their own, showed no signs of slowing. He felt his muse more than he heard her, enveloping as he wrote, guiding his hands to the keys he needed.

“...What are you doing?”

Crowley reeled back at the sound of a light and oddly strained voice behind him. He whipped around on his bench to find Aziraphale standing there frozen, a cup of tea in each hand. He was staring at Crowley’s screen, where Newt held Oliver’s face in his hands and stared at his friend’s lips in yearning.

Crowley had never been so sure of anything in his life, but the incredulous look of shock on Aziraphale’s face filled him with immediate dread. He thoughtlessly grabbed his laptop screen and snapped it shut, anything to disrupt the hole Aziraphale was staring through it.

Even with it shut, he continued staring, standing stiller than Crowley had ever seen him in his life. Crowley, on the other hand, began to vibrate from the inside out.

“I found it,” he said as he picked his nails, bounced his leg. “This— the— what was wrong. What was missing. It wasn’t right before. But I’ve found it now. The story.”

His editor finally blinked, his eyelashes fluttering like he was straining to hold his gaze open. Crowley was minorly relieved he hadn’t turned entirely to stone.

“Oliver is the supporting character,” said Aziraphale slowly, still staring as if reading from the absent screen.

Crowley shot to his feet.

“Yes, but— I’ve looked at the notes, and this actually works better. And if I make him a witch, instead of a fellow witchfinder, his character makes a whole lot more sense. And his relationship with Ana fits that way. I can keep her, see— every issue I was having with the second act disappears when you look at it from a romantic perspective, and—”

He stopped his breathless ramble when Aziraphale managed another slow blink, before finally setting his gaze on Crowley’s face. His brow was beginning to crease with worry.

“Have you ever written queer literature before?” he asked carefully.

“I’ve written gay supporting characters before,” he said quickly. “And Ms Ashtoreth— she was bi, remember?”

Crowley was running out of things to do with his hands, so he tried to pluck the mugs out of Aziraphale’s to set them down on the table. His editor’s grip dissolved around them, and his hands floated midair for a beat before he latched onto his own fingers to wring them out.

“That’s not the same,” he countered, looking understandably apprehensive as his eyes landed back on the closed laptop.

“It doesn’t matter,” Crowley pleaded. “These— they transcend all that. It’s just two people in love, it’s not about—”

“Crowley…” Aziraphale murmured.

He rubbed his fingers against his temples and his frown lines etched in deeper. Crowley could see the cogs beginning to turn, could hear the squealing of the overwrought machinery, and dreaded what might happen if he lost out to logic and contract requirements.

Crowley dumped the mugs onto the table and grabbed Aziraphale’s hands, pulling him over to the bench seat. He was stunned enough to move easily, to be sat down in front of the computer and retreat back to hand wringing when Crowley knelt beside him to lift the screen, scrolling to the start of his document.

“Please just look. It all makes sense. I’ve had a dozen new ideas too, tying up all those loose ends I couldn’t figure out before. I’ll send you everything. Please look.”

Aziraphale did not. He couldn’t tear his eyes off Crowley.

“You know this is a genre change,” he said, strained and slow, his brows knitted together with worry.

“I know. That’s why I need you on this.”

His hands were moving on their own again, but this time skittered far from the keyboard. He clutched Aziraphale’s hand in both his own and stared down at it, his lip bitten and his knuckles white as he prayed for Aziraphale to care about one more thing.

“Please, fight for me.”

Aziraphale looked away at once. He looked to the trees, to the sky, taking a deep breath as he weighed up the tangled red tape of options. When his gaze drifted back down, it landed on the laptop; unable to help himself when he was poised in front of prose, he eventually began to read.

The worried lines on his face remained even when he reached the bottom of the page, even as Crowley released his hand to let him scroll further, but stayed at his side with his knee dug firmly into the grass. He didn’t scroll through it all, and sat on each page for much longer than it would usually take him to read, as if scrutinising every word three times over.

Then he sighed, and Crowley perked up like a Pavlovian mutt. It was a sharp huff that drifted out slowly once it left his lips, the irate kind of sound that he only ever made when Crowley was testing his patience: when he took too long to answer the phone; when he realised Crowley was only disagreeing with all of his notes for the sake of being contrary; and most notably, when he was successfully tempted into something he knew he oughtn’t do.

“It’s good, right?” Crowley couldn’t help but ask, scratching at his own cuticles to stop from reaching out again. “You’d tell me if I was mad?”

Now that Aziraphale’s focus was on the screen, he couldn’t look away from it so easily. But Crowley was watching like a hawk, hunting for the slightest of movements that eventually came in the form of a short, curt nod.

“It’s very good,” Aziraphale relented.

Crowley held his breath. “Yeah?”

Aziraphale’s hands fretted over his keyboard, tracing the edges without pressing the keys. When they finally settled on either side of it, holding the computer like a delicate, precious thing, he nodded more earnestly, and finally met Crowley’s eye.

“Let me look everything over. Then I’ll call Gabriel.”

Crowley’s hands were moving on their own again— as was the rest of him. He released the most relieved breath he’d ever held, then, for the first time in twenty years of book signings, contract negotiations, conference meetings, crunch sessions, and impromptu cafe lunches, he yanked Aziraphale into a hug.

Much later, once the cloudy sky had turned a more threatening shade of grey and they’d both retreated into their respective corners of the cottage, Crowley overheard the call begin. He tried to put it out of his mind, instead focusing on optimistically rearranging his notes to allow for all the new changes, and stayed holed up in his bedroom so Aziraphale could focus.

Snippets of conversation drifted through his open door, barely enough to hear, but just enough to weave through and unravel his flow. His hands were still on the keyboard and his eyes were glazing out of focus when Aziraphale started to raise his voice.

He fought the urge to stand in the doorway and eavesdrop, but he managed to get the jist of things. Aziraphale wasn’t exactly shouting, but his tone was stern, determined, and left no space for Gabriel’s half-thought objections. Crowley had no idea if Aziraphale had actually done the research for all the claims of profitability and manufacturing that he was making, but he sold them all as confidently as concrete facts.

Aziraphale had dropped to a terse, quieter tone when Crowley crept out to the kitchen, likely transferred to one of Gabriel’s assistants to organise the updates to Crowley’s contract. He was too focused on his screen, his phone, his handwritten diary to notice Crowley cross the room, but sighed with relief at the cup of tea that was eventually set down in front of him. Crowley scurried right back to the kitchen once he’d delivered it, and laid out all of their remaining groceries to see what he could rustle up for dinner.

The rain soon began in earnest, starting as a light pattering against the kitchen window that eventually turned into a steady thrum. Crowley lit the fireplace while the oven was baking (with a Youtube tutorial for starting wood fires open on his phone, turned down to mute so Aziraphale wouldn’t notice), and even cleared away some of the mess that had accrued around the cottage.

Really, it was Aziraphale’s job to advocate for him, but even Crowley knew he’d been pushing his luck for the whole of this novel. It was all he could do to thank the man for his dedication, for his loyalty, for his care.

An hour later, he plated up an Italian beef roulade with a homemade mushroom sauce— a personal favourite he hadn’t made in years, but managed just fine without another Youtube tutorial. He set Aziraphale’s on the coffee table in front of him, carted away his empty mug, then returned with a wide glass of Pinot Noir from the the back of the wine rack, where all the fancy corked bottles lived.

Aziraphale plucked up the glass eagerly and savoured his first sip. He sank back against the cushions as he sighed out the tension of the day, whilst Crowley perched himself on the arm of the sofa, with his plate in his lap and his wine glass balanced on one knee.

“This better win a bloody Booker Prize. Or I’ll…” Aziraphale muttered. He cradled his wine to his chest and shot Crowley a weary look, but he was relaxing deeper into the sofa with every grateful sip. “Or I’ll never talk to you again.”

Crowley snorted, smirking around a mouthful of pasta. “Oh woe. However will I cope?” he teased, but a very real horror cut through him to even consider it.

Chapter Text

When Oliver sank against him, Newt couldn’t help but gasp. How many weeks had it been since his closest friend, his trusted confidant, had grazed his lips across Newt’s neck and whispered that sweet confession? The memory, this new reality, still managed to seize his heart in his throat every time he came face to face with it.

But that did not stop him. He wouldn’t let anything stop him now they were finally alone.

He arched his neck in a silent plea for Oliver Conor[?] to take him back to that moment, to feel his heart pound just as hard as it had before, leaping against Conor’s lips. His lover — because he could call him that now — dove forth to meet him, taking Newt’s pulse into his mouth like it belonged between his teeth. His hands moved just as confidently, barely hesitating when he fumbled against Newt’s fingers in an eager exchange to untie and strip all the layers between them.

Newt would have this night last forever if he could, but allowed himself one surge of impatience; heaving Conor [maybe Thomas?] down onto the middle of his bed, so he could easily drink in the sight of him as they shed the rest of their clothes.

His breath caught again; Conor Thomas’ gaze was hard set and ravenous, and the tussle left him just dishevelled enough that his heaving breaths looked positively wanton. Newt sat back upon Thomas’ thighs and took the moment to collect himself, while the other’s hands scrabbled to decide where they wanted to lay next. When a soft hand finally palmed the length of his hardness, Newt

Crowley sank his head into his hands and groaned.

He knew this part would be difficult. Of the few romance novels he’d forced himself to read — researching just enough to justify his foray into the genre, so he could tell the story he wanted to tell — he always found their crescendos of intimacy so lacklustre. After all that tension, they shove a tab into a slot and Bob’s your uncle? He was surprised to find even the raunchiest of novels he picked up left him feeling so… disappointed.

Maybe he just didn’t care for their characters. Maybe the writing was subpar. He dared to feel optimistic when his scene first began, and the evolution of touch flowed freely from his fingers. Of course he was bound to hit a wall sooner or later, but he found himself facing a different hurdle than he expected.

Aziraphale had been right to question what he didn’t like about those other novels; that question helped him approach typical tropes and scenes through a lens of what he felt was missing, what he could improve. The only problem was, while he knew that the usual flow of intimacy wasn’t enough for him, he had no idea what to write in place of it.

Because, well… Fuck. Crowley stared at Newt, who stared down at Thomas’ awaiting body, and felt just as frozen as the unfinished sentence that he’d left to a screeching halt on his screen.

Frustrated, determined, and maybe just a little bit horny, Crowley started on a new line and took them back to kissing. Yes: kissing was good. Kissing was easy.

Thomas’ hands cupped his jaw to hold him close as they gasped into each other’s mouths. The feel of the man against his lips, the all encompassing taste of him, it was all so gratifying that he couldn’t hold back a needy moan. He had no time to feel bashful before Thomas was keening into him, rewarding his enthusiasm with the press of his hips. It was all he could do to slide a hand down the man’s firm stomach, find the step of his hip with his thumb, until his fingers settled against the

Crowley groaned again and shoved his laptop aside.

How was this even supposed to progress? Such an intimate moment felt like the only right course of action, but he had no map to guide him through writing it.

His frustration was only building as the night crept on, squeezing the last of his motivation out of view. It had been a good day, truly — even after losing an hour of his valuable free time playing Tech Support to recover an unsaved document Aziraphale thought he’d lost — but it was about to crash land on a terribly sour note.

Before his scowl could evolve into a fully formed tantrum, Crowley massaged the wrinkles from his brow, shut his eyes, and counted to ten.

Romance wasn’t about thinking, he reminded himself. Just feel. Just… do.

He pulled his laptop back up and reread the last few lines of the scene.

Stopped worrying about what came next, and focused on the moment.

Let himself enjoy it.

Didn’t stop the hand that slid towards the waistband of his pyjamas.

The second he came in contact with himself he knew the night was a bust: he’d run out of all sensical thoughts, and it would be foolhardy to expect any more prose out of him now. He was far too pent up.

With the idea of productivity thrown to the wind and one hand still deep in his trousers, Crowley continued writing, but this time for himself. If Aziraphale had taken his free-roaming internet access away, what else was he supposed to do?

He conjured up memories of one night stands from years past, old girlfriends, and one particularly stimulating internet video he could rerun almost shot-for-shot behind his eyelids. He didn’t think about why his hasty one handed typing of all those sensations made him feel far more alive when it was Thomas’ legs Newt was sliding between, of a man’s torso he grinded against and of his wetness pressed against him.

Yes, alright: Physiologically, it didn’t make a lot of sense. But Crowley was far beyond desperate, and it’s not like anyone would see it. He was writing in an empty, private document, which—

Crowley paused. His hackles rose as his eyes flicked up to the header of the page.

He’d completely forgotten how the scene began, that the document started out as yet another one of their shared brainstorming pages, with a list of intimacy ideas that unexpectedly snowballed into fully fledged prose. His only relief was that he was writing in the middle of the night, and that Aziraphale’s icon in the top right was…

Oh. Dear god.

There it was.

He inched his mouse cursor over the default blue AZ initials that stood in place of a profile picture. He moved slow and terrified, despite knowing he was panicking over nothing, that Aziraphale’s account would be idle as it always was, lost in an infuriating sea of a thousand open tabs. Crowley swore that one day he would find a way to get into that man’s computer when he wasn’t looking, just to shut down his browser and let the poor thing’s RAM take a single breath of relief. Maybe even clear the cache if he was being particularly exasperating. He had come so close when Aziraphale was demanding all that free tech support on the couch earlier, but every time Crowley tried to—

He gasped and gripped himself tighter when his cursor landed over the icon, and a crisp white Aziraphale Zacharius popped up with no (Idle) indicator in sight.

He held his breath. Froze, like maybe he wouldn’t be seen if he didn’t move. Desperately willed some, any, of his brain function back online.

Then the baby blue cursor that matched Aziraphale’s initials jumped a few lines down the page, confirming his very conscious presence in the document.

In a single breath, Crowley yanked his hand out of his pants, deleted the last page and a half of miserable nonsense with a single click, then threw his laptop down the side of his bed.

Neither of them mentioned it.

Or anything else, really. It was the quietest morning in the cottage so far, without a word exchanged between them.

Aziraphale woke him up with a cup of tea as usual, but Crowley rolled over as soon as it was set on the nightstand, pretending to fall back asleep. There were no ripped open curtains or impatient little huffs for him to get out of bed; Aziraphale simply delivered it then left, gently shutting the door behind him.

He knows how little sleep you got, Crowley’s brain unhelpfully reminded him.

When he finally ventured out of his room for something more substantial than hot leaf water, all they managed was an exchange of tight smiles for Good Mornings. Aziraphale was quick to turn his attention back down to his planner, mercifully ignoring Crowley’s hasty escape into the kitchen.

His editor was clearly just as embarrassed to have caught Crowley in his moment of vulnerability. Vent-porning. Like he was his young teenage self again, scribbling fantasies in an old exercise book he kept under his mattress when he couldn’t figure out how to smuggle a Playboy magazine past the corner shop’s CCTV.

He lasted about an hour before the awkwardness got so stifling that his need to flee won out.

“I think I’ll pop out for a bit,” he declared at the doorway.

Aziraphale looked up at him suddenly, double-taking out the nearest window while Crowley wiggled into his boots.

“It’s pouring with rain—”

“Great!” Crowley barked, and grabbed a raincoat as well. “I love rain!”

It was a miserable walk, even with the zip secured up to his chin and the hood pulled over his face. The rain was cold and constant, obscuring his vision with drops smearing his glasses no matter how carefully he tried to shield them. Even watching his feet the whole time, he managed to step too close to every puddle, and caught muddy splashes all the way up to his knees by the time he arrived at Tadfield.

Still, it was a whole lot easier to breathe out there.

Crowley beelined towards the town’s little cafe for something to warm him up after that dismal journey, then headed straight for the post office as soon as he had a steaming takeaway cup of coffee in hand. Their humble selection of bookshelves had stuck in his mind since he first noticed them— at first, thinking of how Aziraphale would react to such a quaint little corner, and rolling his eyes at the overenthusiasm his agent would express over something so meagre. Now, he strode inside with purpose, hoping that maybe he could take things into his own hands and get this embarrassing conundrum solved, clearing the air in the cottage before tea time.

The clerk was busy tending to a short line of patiently chatty customers, leaving Crowley free to slink over to the books. There were more than he remembered; a few decently stocked sections, even labelled by category, and the Romance shelf was most attentively stocked. He gravitated towards it, his grip tightening around his coffee as he scanned his options through waterlogged lenses.

Crowley grimaced.

Mills & Boon, the lot of them.

He even picked one up, picking out the least bodybuilder-clutching-a-swooning-damsel cover he could find, and flipped through the pages. Lots of quivering thighs and an overreliance of thrusting, with even more hourglass figures and high masc yardworkers inside.

Even if it wasn’t all so straight, it was far too polished. His boys were bumbling, a little slow on the uptake, and more than anything… soft. Newt had let himself go, but he looked better for it, and Thomas (or maybe… James would suit him better?) let it be known how much he liked that about him. They were both older, not perpetually twenty like all the protagonists staring at him from the shop’s shelves. Imperfect, but passionate, and incredibly unsuited to all this athletic bouncing from page to page.

Crowley dumped it back on the shelf face down, and wandered over to Sci-fi & Fantasy. A.J. Crowley lived in the Thriller section, sometimes Adventure or even Contemporary if they didn’t know where to put him, but Sci-fi would always be his happy place. The only thing that stopped him was the sight of a tiny LGBT sign from the corner of his eye, but when he rushed down to his knees to inspect the twelve books on display, deflated to find all of them brightly coloured and thoroughly sanitised for children and teens.

He creaked back up to his feet and continued working through his coffee while he browsed. Another unexpected sight caught his eye, this one bringing a much needed smile to his face: Nestled between Cronin and Danker was a Crowley best seller, sporting Guardian’s familiar winged logo on the spine and a shiny New York Times foil on its cover. He pried it out and smirked at the shiny black lettering, then put aside his coffee to fan the pages with both hands.

Without even thinking, he flipped past the copyright, title page, dedication, the artfully formatted contents, straight through his prose to the back of the end matter. It had been a while, and he’d long forgotten what his editor’s note said.

He was not ashamed to admit that the note made him laugh, if only for the memory of Aziraphale’s face when he cracked open his proof copy and read it for the first time. He’d sat there with his eyes shut and his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose for two solid minutes whilst Crowley cackled with glee, and he could still recall the conversation that followed in vivid detail.

“I take it you didn’t get paid,” Aziraphale had muttered.

“Not a cent,” Crowley smirked. “I’m surprised she didn’t deduct anything off my advance, actually. But, seeing as I’m down a hundred pounds, how do you feel about getting us the first round tonight?”

The look Aziraphale sent him had been particularly scathing, but Crowley hadn’t thought for a second that he actually meant it.

“I’ve just crunched a week straight to get this thing ready for print,” he’d snapped, actually, not that Crowley thought about it. “I’m going home.”

“Go oooon,” Crowley crooned, completely undeterred. “We have to celebrate. Why go home to drink so much of a fancy bottle of red that you end up texting me about its tannins and shit, when you could just come out for a pint and play sommelier in person?”

He also remembered the way he leaned his chair back on two legs, because he remembered the way Aziraphale’s eyes darted to watch them tilt. Concerned for his safety, even whilst wishing death upon him.

“Maybe I’ll throw up on the pub stairs, then fall backwards and still manage to land in it. Can’t get entertainment like that just anywhere,” Crowley continued.

Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed impatiently, but his lips had pursed in the way that was usually to hide the curl of his smile.

“Yes… That was rather impressive,” he said dryly.

Crowley latched onto his words and ignored the tone that delivered them, eventually, somehow, managing to drag Aziraphale to The Dirty Donkey. He didn’t actually make Aziraphale pay for his drinks, though he received plenty more snark once the alcohol started to flow. Crowley, as always, gave as good as he got. They got into another heated discussion about the ephemerality of eBooks versus the evils of deforestation, this time roping in co-workers from the Legal and PR departments that Crowley hated the least. They fussed and argued non stop, but still clinked their glasses together with every new round.

Aziraphale left only halfway through the night, waving everyone a curt goodbye and hurrying out to catch a cab before he could be persuaded otherwise. Thinking back now, his agent definitely harboured some genuine annoyance for him that night, which Crowley had only exacerbated with all his… Crowley-ness. But, when he next saw the man a week and a half later, Aziraphale was back to rosy cheeked smiles and lobbing plenty of playfully scathing remarks.

In short, he walked it off. Absence made the heart grow less sick-to-fucking-death of him, and they bounced back without a single crack in their foundations.

Crowley sobered to remember the stifling silence he had to return to now, with no bustling city cafes to part ways at, nor weeks of separation to cleanse their social palates.

In one desperate last-ditch effort to solve all his problems, Crowley hurried back to the cafe and thanked the nearest available deity that his phone was in his pocket when he’d left the house so suddenly. He took a table by the door, pretended to sip from his already empty cup, and squinted across the room to copy down the wi-fi password from a chalkboard above the coffee machine.

The phone reception in town was nearly as weak as the cottage’s, so the sight of a full wi-fi signal had him leaping to open his browser and finally get back to sweet digital reality. It was so ridiculously relieving to watch anything other than Google Docs load on his screen, it wasn’t until the first page loaded that he realised what he’d typed into the search bar.

Apparently searching for “gay sex” gave him nothing but Pornhub thumbnails, ass rammer cream pies and high definition cocks that were twice as wide as the mouths they were jamming into.

Crowley’s eyes widened in horror and he fumbled to close the tab the second it loaded, cursing himself for searching so carelessly.

He slapped his phone face down on the table while he looked over his shoulder, heart racing as he scanned a look around the cafe to make sure no one was close enough to notice him. His anxiety spiked when he caught the barista’s eye and earned himself a strained smile, and everything he’d ever learned about I.T. in his spare time promptly vanished from his mind.

Would the owners be able to see what he did on their network? He’d heard things about public wi-fi being susceptible to hackers— couldn’t that mean that any other customer might see his history while he was connected to it?

With jittery fingers that had nothing to do with his large double Americano, Crowley closed every other tab, then scoured through his settings to erase his browsing history. Just to be safe, he also deleted his cookies, cache, and anything else with a “reset” button beside it. Without looking back, he then raced out of the shop, deciding he’d survive just fine on homemade drip coffee for the rest of his stay.

Crowley returned to the cottage much more gently than he left it.

Aziraphale lifted his head when he heard the approaching crunch of boots on the gravel path, then quickly turned back to his laptop before the door handle had a chance to jostle. Crowley was clearly anxious, and the last thing he needed was Aziraphale’s gaze piercing him the moment he showed his face again.

He nestled a little deeper into his armchair and pretended to focus, keeping his gaze securely on his laptop screen while the door creaked open behind him. He waited for the sound of shoes to be toed off, for his raincoat to be hung, before Crowley appeared in his periphery then promptly disappeared into the kitchen.

“Welcome back,” Aziraphale tentatively called out. “How was your walk?”

“Ugh,” came through the kitchen wall.

Right. Better not push.

He gave himself a moment to clean off his glasses, then readjusted his screen and settled in for a few hours of calm, quiet focus before one of them would need to raise the question of dinner. He tried to keep his head down and ignore it when Crowley finally emerged from the kitchen, but felt an inward sigh of relief when he caught sight of the man crossing over to the dining table to set up one of his writing devices.

Silence was fine; silence was good. They’d already had plenty of days in which they successfully existed in the shared space, working on their own things and barely even noticing each other’s presence. Aziraphale would be able to catch up on some important emails, clear out a few backed up queries (he could never really bring himself to close his submissions, no matter how full his plate. He hated the thought of a potentially incredible author slipping through his fingers because of a single missed moment), and hopefully zone out the other man entirely.

Then, Crowley groaned. Aziraphale looked up, then immediately back down when he saw him standing from his chair without so much as a single clack on his keyboard since sitting down. It was easy to follow the shadow of the man’s presence as he moved about the room, especially because he was moving towards Aziraphale. Then he stopped just as suddenly, standing stiffly in the middle of the living room.

Aziraphale slowly, carefully, met his eyes. Crowley whipped off his glasses to rub his own, the frustration and discomfort evident even with a hand obscuring half his face.

“...Yes?” Aziraphale prompted.

“How do—” Crowley started then stopped just as abruptly.

He stared at Aziraphale through naked eyes, a sight he rarely got the chance to appreciate, before slapping his glasses back on and shifting his weight. He smiled weakly— not in size, but in spirit. A grimace, more like.

“Two men,” he said curtly. “How do— ngk. How do two men do it?”

Someone could have held a match to Aziraphale’s ears for how quickly they burnt. He ignored it, pretended they wouldn’t inevitably flush an obvious shade of pink (if they hadn’t already), and slowly removed his spectacles.

“So, you would like to include an intimate scene after all—?”

“Yup, and we’re not going to talk about last night,” Crowley shot out with a hurried, herculean effort. “Because— well, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. So can you… Do your magic wizard research thing for me, please and thank you.”

Aziraphale tensed so suddenly it was a miracle he didn’t snap the reading glasses in his hands. Even jokingly, Crowley veered as far away from those common courtesies as physically possible, even going so far as to resort to danke’s and por favor’s if Aziraphale was being stubborn about it. He may have sounded strained and rushed, but there was certainly nothing light hearted about Crowley’s voice just now.

Coupled with the fact that he was asking for help without an exhausting back-and-forth to wear him down first? Aziraphale knew: this was delicate.

“Alright…” He gestured invitingly at the sofa, struggling to concentrate with Crowley standing awkwardly in the middle of the room like a scarecrow, and was relieved when he reluctantly took the seat. “I take it you’d like to know the full extent of it. Not just the universal kinds of o-oral sex, or…”

Crowley nodded jerkily.

Aziraphale took another steadying breath and continued to ignore his burning cheeks. He gently lowered the lid of his laptop, focusing all his attention on detangling the embarrassment from his thoughts. To be professional.

“Well, for two cisgender men like your characters, they would most likely want to partake in anal sex. There are just as many, er, positions, as with vaginal penetration, but due to a lack of naturally produced lubrication, the preparation is a little more…”

He’d made the mistake of talking to the fireplace. When he flicked his gaze back over to Crowley, he found the author growing increasingly pale, and his eyes increasingly wide.

“...Are you alright?”

The man flapped his jaw for a few useless seconds then croaked out a sob parading as a laugh.

“I’m sorry, you just—” He coughed. “You just know all this off the top of your head?”

Aziraphale stared at him for longer than he’d care to admit.

“I should hope so,” he said slowly.

Still, Crowley said nothing.

Aziraphale tried again, “I’m… gay?”

The words felt so strange to say. Aziraphale hadn’t come out to anyone since… Oh, Lord— ever.

He’d never had to come out before.

Even his mother, when he ran up to her at eleven years old and said he wanted to ask a date to the school dance, asked him what the boy’s name was. His father disliked him long before either of them knew why, and he’d never once been approached by a woman at a bar with the wrong idea. No one had ever gotten the wrong idea about Aziraphale before. Everyone read him like a book.

Except the writer, apparently.

“...You’re gay?” Crowley asked, genuinely flabbergasted.

“Yes,” Aziraphale breathed back, genuinely flabbergasted.

After a very long silence, in which Aziraphale stared at Crowley and Crowley stared at his hands, the author choked out another strained laugh. At least that one sounded slightly less like a pained animal.

“Maybe we should have finished that list of getting-to-know-you questions after all,” he rasped, and Aziraphale laughed for a lack of anything better to say.

“Sh-should I continue, or?”

“Uh—” It was Crowley’s turn to flush red, his ears perfectly camouflaged into his hair before his hand swept up to cover them as he fiddled with the arms of his glasses. “Could you write it down for me? Like when you normally— You know.”

“Absolutely. Definitely. More than happy to,” Aziraphale rushed out, relieved to dodge the bullet of lecturing a straight man on The Wonders Of Gay Sex.

The rain was relentless. It carried on its steady trickle for days, until the rhythmic pattering on the rooftop faded to nothing but white noise in the back of Crowley’s mind. He became so accustomed to waking up, writing, and falling asleep to that sound, the silence was deafening when the rain finally stopped.

He stood abruptly from the desk in his bedroom to stick his head out the nearest window. At the first sight of tentative sunlight, Crowley was out.

Aziraphale found him at his writing bench nearly two hours later, one leg stretched out into the grass and the other folded up beneath him. He was doing a terrific job of simultaneously basking and writing, with his tight jeans pain-stakingly rolled up to his knees, his sleeves to his elbows, and his shirt buttons mostly abandoned in an effort to soak up as much of the brittle sunlight that could reach him. He slouched over the table with his chin in his hand, whilst the other twirled a sharpie during the pause between ideas.

He noticed Aziraphale coming down the path during one of these pauses and tipped his head to watch him approach. One of his hands held a large coffee mug to his lips — though it presumably had tea inside, if Crowley knew anything about his agent — and the other was carefully balancing a small plate stacked with a second mug and a wobbly pile of biscuits. He set it down just as cautiously as he carried it, and sagged with visible relief when Crowley plucked up the mug to ease his load.

“Where’ve you been off to?” asked Crowley, pointedly looking Aziraphale’s raincoat up and down.

“Hmm? Oh.”

Aziraphale spent far too long rearranging the plate of biscuits just so, first fixing the stack to fill in the gap from the missing mug, then moving the plate itself until it fit nicely between all of Crowley’s journals and cue cards.

(He’d optimistically brought his laptop out with him, but the tiny dash of sunlight reflecting off his screen made it so difficult to see that he was actually relieved when the battery went and died on him. Switching back to pen and paper with his laptop left on one of the tarped patio chairs, its charging cable stretched as far as it could reach through the open kitchen window, ended up perfectly suiting the day.

With both his notebooks as well as Aziraphale’s handwritten notes sprawled out for him to reference, he jotted the worst of his problem scenes onto cue cards, and had made quick work of rearranging them to visualise where his plot holes were hiding.)

“Groceries,” Aziraphale said vaguely. It sounded as if he had plenty more to say, but his distracted gaze was already wandering over the table to see what Crowley had worked through so far.

“Nice walk?” Crowley couldn’t hold back his lazy smirk at Aziraphale’s inattention. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the man so dazed.

The question seemed to be enough to finally snap him out of it though, and Aziraphale shuffled to lean his back against the table and take a sip from the mug that had been resting half-forgotten against his chin.

“Yes, it was lovely,” he answered quickly, shaking his head at his own distractedness. “How’s it been going? Have you— erm, my notes. Have they been… helpful?”

If it were twelve hours earlier, Crowley might’ve choked on his tea. He still swallowed a little too hard at the sudden mention of the most awkward conversation of his adult life, but managed to regain his composure as he set his cup down a safe distance from any of the papers.

As it happened, he studied every word Aziraphale had given him, finding himself utterly fascinated the more he read. Once he got over the discomfort of reading such intimate details in Aziraphale’s clinical syntax, his imagination ran rampant with befitting moments of intimacy for his two main characters.

“They were, actually. Thanks,” he said earnestly, automatically reaching for the topmost sheet of unlined paper that Aziraphale had covered in his perfect cursive. “I even made some notes about Newt and his man. And, uh, a couple of questions. If it’s not too weird, I would appreciate any feedback you had about… Yeah,” he added less confidently.

Aziraphale looked down at the sheet being offered to him. He straightened his back and lowered his mug; something softened in his eyes when they landed on Crowley’s contrastingly crooked handwriting.

“Of course,” he said softly as he took the page. “Is this what you’ve been working on today?”

Crowley leaned back in a languid stretch. He didn’t feel quite as mortified as when he first asked, but was still relieved for the easy change of subject.

“Nah, I wanted to work out the last few kinks with the love triangle. Ana needs more of a role in the final act, or everyone’s going to just write her off as a blockade.” He leaned back against the table and laid a hand over his heart. “Our main character may be flaming now, but she’s still dear to me, angel.”

Aziraphale grinned into his mug, just for a moment, successfully amused. Crowley beamed.

“Speaking of— have you heard anything more from Gabriel?”

His agent tipped his head back and let out a quiet hum, bordering a sigh. “No, the dragon seems to be sleeping for now,” he confirmed, thank god. “If we can… Oh, bugger.”

Aziraphale blinked suddenly as if he’d been slapped, and ran a hand over his face. Before Crowley could even open his mouth to ask what had gotten into him, the answer hit the back of his hand in the form of a cold, fat raindrop. He groaned and shook it off as he slowly sat upright.

“Knew this wouldn’t last,” he snarled at the gradually darkening sky.

Aziraphale was already bustling to collect their mugs and biscuits, even though each drop fell sparsely enough for him to count and name them as they landed. Crowley took his time getting up, starting on the buttons of his shirt before ever rising from the bench, willing to withstand a measly few raindrops for an extra minute of sunlight.

Then, a measly few turned into a sudden downpour, and his annoyance flung straight into dread as a sheet of rain began pummelling them out of nowhere.

“Ah fuck!” Crowley shouted as Aziraphale gasped.

He shot towards the cottage with one thing on his mind, all but diving for his laptop with open arms. He yanked out the cable and snapped the screen shut, trying not to think too hard about how much water was already coating it before he stuffed it down into his half buttoned shirt.

Only once his precious computer was safe in his arms did he realise Aziraphale was shouting at him, and had been since he took off. He faltered his next step towards the cottage to look back over his shoulder, bewildered how the man hadn’t beaten him to the door already.

“Aziraphale?” he shouted through the rain, but it seemed like Aziraphale could hear him just as poorly as he could be heard. “Come on already!”

Crowley’s glasses were mottled with raindrops, obscuring his vision down to basic bleary shapes, but after a single step back he realised what he was seeing. His agent, fumbling in the grass around the cobblestone wall, had shed his rain jacket and flung it over Crowley’s notes on the table. A few crisp white sheets had kicked up in the unexpected breeze and were crumpling in the wet grass, and Aziraphale was charging his polished Oxfords into the mud to retrieve them.

“Never mind those!” Crowley hollered after him, waving a hand over his head to get the man’s attention. When he finally caught it, Aziraphale began frantically pointing at the writing desk and shouted something indecipherable right back at him. He was, Crowley guessed, furious that he’d left all his notes without a care. “It’s all rubbish!” Crowley tried shouting again, this time urging him over with a sweeping beckon of his arm.

It managed to hurry Aziraphale along enough to give up on the remaining papers in the field, but he still made an effort to stuff everything he’d saved under the cover of his rain jacket. Crowley watched, still beckoning whilst hopping anxiously from foot to foot, as Aziraphale bundled up the coat into his arms and finally turned towards him. As soon as he sighted Aziraphale’s first actual step forward, Crowley continued his mad rush back to the cottage.

Standing in the open doorway, he only just managed to get the laptop pried out of his shirt when Aziraphale made it to the threshold.

“The hell is wrong with you?” he growled, more baffled than angry, as he set his poor computer on a side table then hurried back to the doorway.

There wasn’t much of a porch to speak of, just a feeble little awning that would have to make do. The last thing he needed was to land a massive bill for water damage, and he was just as unwilling to stand around mopping all evening. So, he crowded Aziraphale at the front door, keeping them both at the front stoop so their drenched clothes and muddy shoes didn’t track puddles into the house.

The raincoat stuffed with books and papers, which Aziraphale hugged tightly to his chest as he carried it from the garden, was thrust into Crowley’s hands. He obediently turned to place it down in the entryway, along with their boots and coats and the laptop that he prayed would turn on again someday.

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?!” Aziraphale cried. “Leaving all that hard work out there to dissolve!”

Crowley grumbled under his breath, but stammered into silence when he turned back around.

Aziraphale was shivering ever so slightly, his brow furrowed into a miserable frown and his lips pursed in the sweetest little pout. The sudden exertion was enough to tinge his cheeks pink, although that might have been in part his anger— his face was hard to read when his head was bowed and his attention fixed on his hands.

Crowley was so focused on the quiver of a raindrop that clung to the man’s lashes, he foolishly followed its journey when Aziraphale finally blinked it free. It landed with a smack on the man’s wrist, melding with the rest of the rain that drenched his skin and pulled his sleeves heavy around his arms. He was so lost staring at these tiny, visceral details that it took him a moment to realise what Aziraphale was doing, then another to realise he ought to do the same.

Still, even as he grabbed a fistful of his own shirt to wring it out like Aziraphale was, he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the flex of the man’s arms, and the tendons that sharpened the ridges of his knuckles. When Aziraphale dropped the still-sopping fabric to flick the water off his hands, it fell against his chest with a wet smack, and clung so stubbornly to the curves of his torso that the hue of his pink skin blended through the white linen.

Crowley made a noise.

Aziraphale glared, somehow misinterpreting what Crowley couldn’t even interpret for himself.

“Those notebooks better be worth it,” he grumbled, restlessly pulling at his shirt again to lift it from his skin and squeeze out more trickles of water.

“I told you, they’re all rubbish,” he muttered back.

Aziraphale glared again as he reached up to ruffle his fingers through his hair. He grimaced as he tried to squeeze and flick the worst of it away, only managing to cover the rest of him with more water. Crowley was only vaguely aware of the stillness of his own hands.

“Don’t be so grumpy,” he croaked out, also vaguely aware that he was staring where the pink silhouettes of Aziraphale’s nipples shone through his shirt. “Proper Mr. Darcy, you are.”

Aziraphale tutted almost playfully, but when he gave up on his hair and noticed Crowley’s stare, he quickly reached both hands for his bowtie to shield his chest from view.

“Very kind of you to say. But I feel more like a drowned cat,” he murmured, turning his body ever so slightly away. The slight change in angle was enough to snap Crowley out of his daze, and he barked out a laugh when he caught up to Aziraphale’s comment.

“What does that make me, then? I’m only jealous you can pull it off,” he reasoned.

After one more feeble squeeze of the black shirt still hanging off him, Crowley gave up and yanked the whole thing over his head. The air was chilly with the rain still hammering down just beyond their awning, but it felt leagues better to haul all that sopping fabric off. Aziraphale glanced at him, then quickly away.

God only knew why it came then, but a thought occurred to Crowley as he watched the fabric of Aziraphale’s bowtie slowly unravel from around his throat.

“Is the gay thing why you’re always covering your eyes when I’m half-naked?”

Aziraphale shot him an impatient, unamused look.

“Obviously,” he muttered.

“Obviously,” Crowley mimicked, finally stretching back into a smile. “You fancy me or something?”

Aziraphale’s lashes fluttered shut.

“You wish,” he mumbled, then shot Crowley another cold look over his shoulder. He was half turned now, inching so slowly away that Crowley hadn’t noticed it, with his hands paused over the buttons of his shirt. He continued, rather pointedly: “It’s only polite. I do wish you’d return the courtesy.”

Crowley snorted. His gaze remained fixed as Aziraphale finished turning his back to him, even as the buttons began to pop and the taut pull of the fabric began to loosen.

“But I like women,” he said, still staring at the smooth expanse of muscle that rippled across Aziraphale’s back with every little flex of his arms.

It wasn’t that cold in the house, but with them both shivering so violently beneath their towels, Aziraphale took to lighting the fireplace after his shower.

Crowley took the bathroom second, running the water just long enough to warm himself up, bathing more in steam than in water. He slipped into a heavy pair of trackpants and a thick, long sleeved henley, and once he trudged back out to the living room, found Aziraphale equally rugged up in a thick sweater over his matching flannel pyjamas.

He was also on the sofa, curled up against the armrest with a printed manuscript in his lap. His sofa was directly in front of the fireplace, and the empty space beside him looked so very inviting, but Crowley was painfully aware of the two other armchairs in the room that would make far more sense for him to take.

Like an uninvited dinner guest, Crowley went searching through the kitchen for something to bring with him; an offering that might dampen the sharp edges of his presence. It was a ridiculous notion, he knew that— but somehow, it worked. As soon as he thunked a bottle of wine down on the coffee table, Aziraphale perked right up and folded a dogear to mark his place.

He watched in polite silence as Crowley twisted the corkscrew into place, then held out their glasses for him to pour. There were no awkward looks as Crowley sank onto the other end of the sofa, only pleased hums as wine was tasted and feet were tucked up onto cushions.

Dinner would probably be something easy— pasta again, unless Aziraphale found something more interesting on his grocery trip —so there was no need to fill the silence with inane questions for the time being. They sat comfortably together, sipping at their wine, watching the flames flicker in the hearth, and listening to the steady roar of the rain.

“It’s not so bad, when you’re not drenched in it,” Crowley thought aloud. Aziraphale gave him a doubtful look over the top of his glass, so he doubled down. “Kind of romantic, really. Like a Richard Curtis film.”

Aziraphale followed his gaze to a window streaked with endless drizzle. He watched for a moment, took a delicate sip of Tempranillo, then hummed a complacent sigh.

“I suppose so.”

That was apparently enough for him, as he fixed his reading glasses up his nose and turned back to the unbound book in his lap. Crowley couldn’t help but stare a little longer, far more taken with the elegant flow of rainwater than the bickering flames in their hearth.

He was reaching for his iPad before the thought finished forming in his head. It was less of an idea, more of a feeling.

He saw Aziraphale’s head lift up to look at him when he set down his wine and unfolded the iPad’s keyboard, but his editor didn’t speak. Probably didn’t want to interrupt his flow like usual, happy to cast a curious glance over his screen then leave him to it once he started to type.

When Crowley melted deeper into his slouch, too engrossed in this new scene to notice when his feet began to slip down the length of the sofa and nudge against Aziraphale’s thigh, he didn’t speak then either. He just lifted his manuscript, let Crowley settle into place, then silently nestled back down with his arm weighed comfortably over the ankles in his lap.

Newt’s heart thrashed against his chest, each pound of it shaking his ribs and lilting him forward. Zach was so close to him now, he could make out each bead of rain that clung to his lashes and carved valleys down the curves of his face.

“What are you saying?” he heard himself ask, his shaking voice barely audible above the thunderous rain.

He watched Zach’s brow furrow in frustration and a pang of fear ran through him. Deep down, he knew what his friend had said to him. Even deeper, he might even find the desire to say it himself. Until he could get the words out, he just needed to hear it again.

And again, and again, and again.

Unless his stubbornness would be Zach’s last straw. The crease in his brow was set, determined, and Newt wondered if this marked the last time he would see those bright eyes shining for him. He opened his mouth again, clueless as to what would come out of it, but knowing he had to say something to take them back before the downpour began.

Zach surged forward before he had the chance, and he felt the cold, coarse press of hands on his cheeks right as warm, soft lips caught against his mouth.

Aziraphale’s gasp fell out of him before he could stop it.

His grip tightened around the iPad in his hands and tried to keep his gaze focused on it.

He couldn’t. He looked up at Crowley, half frowning before he could stop it.

Crowley sat up like a school child under scrutiny, though the effect was somewhat lost on the fact that he was perched on the edge of the dining table. At least his legs stopped swinging.

“Is it alright?” he sort of smiled, sort of grimaced. “Salvageable, at least?”

Aziraphale blinked. “I haven’t finished.”

“Oh. Sorry,” Crowley laughed nervously. His legs began their slow and steady kick again, but he couldn’t quite bring his spine to relax.

Aziraphale turned back to the glowing white screen, his frown deepening at the intimacy in his hands— at the man he saw on the page.

At himself.

“You changed the love interest,” he noted with a miraculously light voice.

“Ah, yeah,” Crowley groaned, rolling his head in a way that caught Aziraphale’s attention immediately— locked to every flicker of movement like a prey animal in a bustling woodland. “Sorry I kept fucking around with the name, it took me a while to settle on one that felt—”

“No, I mean…”

It was Crowley’s turn to look at him suddenly, his brows raised and an odd look in his eyes. Squinting like he was… confused, somehow.

Aziraphale swallowed and bowed his head back to the screen.

“‘His fingers threaded into the tufts of downy blond at the back of his head, fitting between each knuckle like—’ I thought he was ginger,” he asked somewhat breathlessly.

Crowley’s nose scrunched up and let his head tilt and sway like it wasn’t quite attached to him.

“Nngh, yeah. Changed it. It, uh. It felt right. Like: good visual contrast to Ana, you know, always harping on about her dark hair and lashes and everything.”

Aziraphale took a deep breath. He didn’t feel any better.

“Right.”

He did his best to finish reading the scene, though his attention waned towards the bottom of the page. He could feel Crowley’s eyes on him the whole time, see the subtle flicking of his fingers from the corner of his eye and the extra sway of his leg when his ankles bounced on each swing. The man was clearly nervous, clearly invested in whatever feedback Aziraphale would have for him, but his brain was quickly ballooning with a thousand questions and worries, he barely had room for critical thinking.

He held onto the iPad for a few minutes longer in an attempt to separate the facts from the wailing sirens in his mind. Crowley watched him like a hawk, but didn’t comment on the stillness of the screen once he reached the end of the document.

As time crept on, his grip involuntarily tightened, and he realised he couldn’t materialise a single thought beyond Me? Me??

“...How do you feel about the scene?” he eventually managed to deflect.

Crowley clearly wasn’t expecting that and squirmed uncomfortably for a moment. He looked away before answering, searching the ceiling and its rustic wood beams for answers.

“I mean… I haven’t snogged anyone in a while. ‘Specially not that tenderly,” he snorted, shaping the letters too crisply for an excuse to laugh. “So, uh, I’m not sure if it hits the mark. But— I also feel like it works for them? The set up and all. The pacing feels good.” He nodded to himself slowly, and his gaze made a slow crawl back to Aziraphale’s face. “Why? Have I completely flubbed it?”

Aziraphale inhaled another shaky breath, exchanged another look between the prose and its author.

“What gave you the idea?” he asked softly. “The… The rain yesterday?”

Crowley nodded, a picture of innocence. Aziraphale felt his chest flush with newfound heat at the memory of the man’s unabashed staring.

“You know, with the fire and everything,” Crowley slowly added. “Said it felt romantic. Did I? Maybe I only said that in my head—”

“No no, you did,” Aziraphale added quickly. “But, um. What about… Zach? Where did you… How did you come up with the name?”

Crowley opened his mouth too quickly, then left it hanging as he squinted across the room in thought.

“Think I read it somewhere,” he mumbled. “Must’ve been in one of your books.”

Aziraphale swallowed a rock and gently placed the iPad on the table between them. Crowley’s face twisted as he looked down at it.

He didn’t know. Crowley had no idea what he’d written.

“Alright, come on: You’ve got to give me something. How bad is it?”

Aziraphale tipped his head down to slide off his reading glasses, desperate for an excuse to look away and think.

The difficult thing was: it wasn’t bad. Not even close. It had the devoted sort of imagery that Aziraphale adored, and though his prose usually needed a bit of thinning out to start… It was good. No matter what Gabriel thought he knew about marketability and target demographics, this would sell, and it would wow.

Even more notably, Crowley was finally motivated, and the adoration he was feeding into his pages was palpable.

The thought of jarring all of that, of making Crowley reel back in horror when Aziraphale pointed out what he was doing, of tainting these characters he’d finally come to love, and ultimately, stifling this novel from ever seeing the light of day— Aziraphale had to shut his eyes to bear it.

“It’s wonderful,” he finally said. He forced his eyes back open; Crowley was watching him just as closely, a matching twist of worry on his brow. Aziraphale quickly continued, “I don’t think you need to be worried about your ability to write queer intimacy.”

Crowley didn’t move. Didn’t blink. His top lip only peeled back to strengthen his grimace.

“But?”

Aziraphale quickly shook his head. “No ‘but’s.”

Crowley immediately deflated with relief, but he still eyed Aziraphale suspiciously for all his dramatic humming and hawing.

“Really? Okay… That’s good.” He hesitated. “Nothing has to change?”

Aziraphale took another deep breath. He even started to feel better.

“Nothing has to change.”

Crowley’s smile grew much more confident as he bounced to his feet.

“Al-right! Okay. Cheers for that. I reckon I’ll keep writing today; might just see where the scene takes me,” he gushed, and triumphantly scooped up his tablet. “Come bat me with a broom or something if I haven’t started dinner by six.”

“Will do,” Aziraphale murmured as he watched him leave.

Crowley’s flow was impenetrable for the rest of the day. Aziraphale tried tip-toeing around the house so as not to disturb him, but even when he asked an outright question about an email they’d received earlier that morning, Crowley didn’t hear. Aziraphale’s praise had lit a fire underneath him, and nothing was getting through his focus.

When the clock ticked past 6:30, Aziraphale started cooking. He didn’t have the heart to interrupt him. He’d rather take his time, rereading a recipe book a dozen times over to make sure he didn’t mess it up too badly, and was able to surprise Crowley with a half-decent stir fry at seven.

The author groaned when the plate was put in front of him, acting dramatically put-out that Aziraphale had gone through the effort without saying anything— but with his eyes still glued to his screen while he ate, he was clearly relieved to have all the extra writing time.

He only tore his eyes away from rereading his last paragraph when Aziraphale turned to the door to let him eat in peace.

“What are you doing tonight?”

Aziraphale froze in the doorway, almost frightened to turn around. His heart seized in his chest when he eventually dared to glance over his shoulder, and found Crowley’s head tipped back over his chair, watching him with wide eyes and a delighted smile.

“I… Um, I— Wh— I’ll…” He blinked and turned to face him properly while his lips remembered how to move. “Why?”

“Just hold off on reading until I say, okay?” Crowley grinned. “It’s all a mess right now and I think the emotional pay-off will be more satisfying once I get it all in the right order.”

The knot in Aziraphale’s throat detangled with his next exhale. The book. Crowley was talking about editing his book. Not spending time together, not another faux date…

Irregardless, he still couldn’t find a single confident sound to verbalise. He merely nodded, offering an overenthusiastic thumbs up and hurrying into the living room the second Crowley turned back to his meal.

He brought his laptop to the dining table, but it took so much strength to resist the tab of their shared document that he ended up closing the screen entirely. Without a myriad of words to distract him, all he could focus on was the empty seat across the table, and his bone–deep disappointment to be eating alone.

He tried to shake it off, rolling his eyes at himself and forcing down a few small bites. That was about all he managed though, and eventually retired to his makeshift bed with the mostly-untouched meal left in the fridge for later. His stomach was too knotted up to handle anything more.

Aziraphale laid in the dark for a long while, staring at the outlines of furniture and listening to the distant clicking of Crowley’s keyboard.

Butterflies, he realised as his eyes drifted shut.

Not anxiety. Just butterflies.

Chapter Text

Crowley set up his laptop to reread the previous day’s scene over breakfast, and dove back into writing before he finished his morning tea. This had been his routine for days: waking up with tea in the kitchen, reading back the last thing he’d written, then writing until his wrists began to ache at lunch time. He would pack up and take a walk around the property while Aziraphale prepared some lunch, and by the time he came back inside, he’d see his next plot threads dangling in front of his screen.

His agent left him alone for the most part, quietly going about his own work in between some modest cooking and cleaning. He always left the room to take a phone call and rarely followed Crowley on his walks, even when the rain dried up into a cloudy haze.

That morning, Crowley skipped his game of musical chairs to find the most comfortable spot to write in, and got straight into his scene at the breakfast table. His notes and outlines were mostly all conglomerated now; he wrote each scene chronologically, following the natural tangent from one to the next. Smiling from the chair across from him, his muse sat clearly in his eyeline, feeding him yarn through nimble fingers so he could weave each piece into place without pausing over knots or tangles.

Crowley wrote so steadily he didn’t notice the darkening sky through the kitchen window, nor any kind of ache in his lower back or fingers. He wrote through Aziraphale’s bustling in the kitchen, through the switch from sunbeams to lightbulbs, but finally allowed his attention to be dragged away when Aziraphale gently pushed his laptop aside for a steaming plate.

He ate quickly, shovelling down his food without paying any attention to its texture or taste. The current of his flow was strong enough to drag him straight back into it, but the second he set his cutlery aside, Aziraphale reappeared to lift his laptop out of his reach.

“Oi!” Crowley protested, snatching at the air. Aziraphale ignored him and shut the lid, tucked it under his arm, then offered a glass of red wine into his outstretched hand.

He frowned at it, but only so much. It was wine, after all.

“You’ve been writing all day,” Aziraphale noted delicately. “Let’s have a little break.”

Crowley huffed and groaned as he was dragged like a child to the living room, but once he settled with an oomph onto the sofa and let the Merlot linger for more than a second on his tongue, his body was admittedly relieved by it. He watched as Aziraphale sat a little more primly onto the opposing armchair, cradling a glass of his own.

Crowley cleared his throat and Aziraphale finally took a sip.

“Nearly finished the crossroads scene today,” he said. “Once I—“

“No book talk,” said Aziraphale, somehow soft and stern all at once. “You need a proper break tonight. I don’t want to hear a word about it.”

Crowley narrowed his eyes. “Who are you and what have you done with my agent?”

Aziraphale laughed, barely, seeming to stiffen up in his chair and only just manage to resist a roll of his eyes. That was more like the Aziraphale Crowley was used to, and the familiarity of his strained response relaxed him even though he’d hit some kind of nerve.

Who was he kidding: he relaxed because he’d hit some kind of nerve.

“Alright then, how was your day?” he asked instead, slouching a few inches deeper.

“My…?” Aziraphale paused, seeming surprised to have been asked at all. “Well, I… had tea with you. Then went for a morning walk while it was still dry. I thought about bringing my readings out to the garden, but everything’s still so wet, it would take all morning just to dry off the picnic table enough to sit down, so…”

He adjusted his grip around his glass, restlessly flitting his fingers around the edge of it, but he gradually loosened up with each word he got out. Crowley nestled his chin in his palm and leant forward, unwittingly chasing the man’s growing ease.

“I ended up lighting the fire and working most of the day out here,” he continued, gesturing at the coffee table that still homed his laptop and a stack of half-read manuscripts. “Mostly just emails until lunch—“

“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about work?” Crowley grinned.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes at him that time, making no attempts to hide it.

“Well I didn’t slave over a single email for thirteen hours.”

Crowley rolled his eyes back at him, but it only earned him some sharply raised eyebrows in return. Suddenly doubtful, Crowley checked his watch and blanched.

“Has it really been thirteen hours?” he squeaked. Aziraphale nodded, letting his contrition melt into smugness. “Christ. Alright, no book talk. Pray continue.”

Aziraphale stifled a sweet little laugh that unwound the last of the tension hiding in Crowley’s shoulders. He finished his glass as Aziraphale continued recounting his day, and kept one ear on the conversation when he went to find the bottle for refills.

Crowley interrupted three more times as his editor spoke, topping up their glasses while commentating on Aziraphale’s choice of lunch and asking questions about the birds he saw by the pond. Before long, they’d finished the bottle, and he was throwing out any old questions that might keep Aziraphale talking.

He wondered if the man went for many walks back in the city. What did he normally like to do in his spare time? Friends, boyfriends, hobbies, things like that.

“You want to know about my boyfriends?” Aziraphale asked, with wide eyes and a small voice.

Crowley squirmed. He didn’t, really. Why did he have to hone in on that part of the question?

“Writing a romance novel, aren’t I?” he deflected.

Aziraphale’s gaze didn't quite reach him, but didn’t quite reach the floor either.

“I thought we agreed, no book talk.”

“Yes, true, you’re completely right,” Crowley prattled as shot to his feet, grateful for the swerve. “Look at me, still in work mode. I think we need another one of these.”

He plucked Aziraphale’s empty glass out of his hands without asking, but it was given to him freely. Then he disappeared into the kitchen in search of another bottle, and came back with three.

Once he returned to his sofa and Aziraphale’s refilled glass was returned to his hand, his editor still looked a little distant. He looked at his hands after sipping down a greedy mouthful, but raised his brows and spoke as lightly as if asking about the weather.

“What about yours?”

Crowley sank a little lower on the couch and tipped his head back over an armrest.

“Don’t remind me,” he groaned. “I haven’t been out with anyone in so long… Last girlfriend was years ago now. Never seemed to be worth the bother anym—“

“I mean,” Aziraphale interrupted, then his cheeks darkened to a shade reminiscent of the wine in his hand. “Well, about your boyfriends.”

“My—?”

All the brain receptors usually responsible for cohesive thought suddenly felt a lot like a computer keyboard in the path of a stubbornly persistent cat.

“I’m not… I haven’t…”

“Oh.”

Aziraphale’s quiet little breath of understanding brought the room to an abrupt silence. Crowley’s gaze blurred at the wine in his hand and his brain made no clearer strides forward.

,..;,llkjjjjj;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Aziraphale eventually added, either a minute or twenty later. “You just write…”

He shook his head at himself. Crowley’s eyes whipped so suddenly onto the movement that it tore him out of his daze.

“It was a very lovely kiss scene,” he finished softly.

Crowley wasn’t sure how to answer that; how he was supposed to answer that. To Aziraphale, or to himself.

So he did what he always did, and laughed.

The sound made Aziraphale pause with his glass an inch away from his mouth, giving him space to wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. Crowley watched as soft pink was stained moist red, then hauled himself upright to refill their glasses with a smile of sharply gritted teeth.

He shrugged as he topped them both up, laughing even drier when his gaze found itself wandering right back to the damp line of Aziraphale’s lips.

“I’ve got a good imagination.”

Aziraphale didn’t mean for their “short break” to last the entire night, but Crowley had written for thirteen straight hours.

And, when Crowley re-emerged from the kitchen with three wine bottles in tow, there wasn’t a single bone in Aziraphale’s body that wanted to deny them. It was wine, after all.

The little slices of tension mostly evaporated once Crowley began pacing the room, just like old times. It put Aziraphale in the memory of novels long since past, of crunch evenings in Crowley’s apartment where the author would zigzag between his artsy furniture, spitting ideas for Aziraphale to gently parry. Even though he kept his promise and veered away from discussing his book, the energy in the room let him slip comfortably back into that supporting role.

Aziraphale didn’t mean for their “short break” to last the entire night, but Crowley clearly needed it. After three more shared bottles, the author had loosened up considerably; smiling, snorting, and lounging across furniture with twice as much fluidity since the start of their evening. Aziraphale was glad for it, until Crowley suddenly flung himself up from his languid sprawl, into a slanted perch on the very edge of a couch cushion.

“How long are you going to keep torturing yourself on this thing?” he moaned, frowning deeply as he arched his back and flexed his shoulders. “Just ask me already.”

Aziraphale sobered; an unfortunate turn of phrase that wasn’t nearly as literal as he needed it to be.

“As— I— Ask you what?” he stammered.

He knew exactly what, and knew his stomach would drop to hear it, but couldn’t think of a damn thing to say that might delay the conversation a little further.

“To use the bed,” Crowley said far too easily— another inaccurate turn of phrase, which didn’t account for how stickily his words slurred together after four bottles, with roughly five glasses per bottle, divided by two for each of them, many glasses of wine. “Kick me off for a bit, or just share it. It’s big enough for seven.”

“It’s definitely not,” Aziraphale breathed breathlessly.

“Two, then,” Crowley grinned toothily. “Can’t say it’s not big enough for two.”

Aziraphale opened his mouth, but still couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Crowley was swaying slightly, balancing like a cobra coiled on the end of his sofa— on the end of his dreadfully tight and uncomfortable bed for the last three weeks.

The thought of Crowley on his bed made for a momentary short circuit, which bloomed an uncomfortably shy heat in his chest and had him blinking far too quickly to avert his gaze. Crowley read his aversion as trepidation and rolled his eyes.

“I’ve sat on it enough to know what a nightmare it must be to sleep on.” Then he was standing, hoisting himself up with an exaggerated groan and flapping a hand at Aziraphale’s wine glass. “Come on.”

Aziraphale stared at his hands for too long before handing over his half empty glass. Crowley grunted like this was some great inconvenience, plopped it down on a table, then reached for Aziraphale’s wrist instead. Oh.

The breath was already knocked out of him before Crowley hauled him to his feet.

“Are you going to bed now then?”

“Yeah— did I not say that? I’m fucked.”

He was dragged halfway across the cottage before enough of his brain came back online to tug his hand out of the author’s loose grip.

“I-I’m perfectly capable of putting myself to bed,” he scoffed, though he had been aiming for haughty.

Crowley halted far too suddenly, swaying from the force of his own inertia. He looked at Aziraphale, then down at his hands, and snorted like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

“Right. Well— I’ll save you a side,” he promised, his grin so charmingly lopsided as he stumbled off to his room.

Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself, and stood frozen in the middle of the room for a long while. It was only when he heard Crowley’s returning footsteps that he snapped out of his daze and made a mad dash for the sofa, where he pretended to sit and carry on with his wine as Crowley crossed over to wash up in the bathroom. He didn’t even know why he pretended— he was exhausted as well, the lone mention of bed enough to have his eyelids drooping and realising how long they’d let their night drift on.

But something about stumbling into bed with another man had his hackles rising, if only to escape the goosebumps that bloomed across his skin. He hadn’t the courage to go into detail, but he was in much the same boat as Crowley: it had been a long time since he’d seen anyone, and the sudden slip into domestic intimacy made his heart hammer as loudly as the first time he read his middle name romanticised on Crowley’s page.

It wasn’t that he was scorned, or incompatible with romance. He rather enjoyed it, really, but one day he blinked and realised he’d become one of those middle aged spinsters who was married to their job. Every time he tried to put himself out there, he realised how thinly divided his attention became, too focused as he was on authors like Crowley to give any real time to a significant other.

The additional realisation of being too married to Crowley to date anyone, and that Crowley was the man he was about to wander into bed with, had him diving for the coffee table to finish the remains from both their glasses.

He was foolish. Stupid. Far too wistful. And yet, once he heard Crowley’s final retreat from the bathroom back into his bedroom, Aziraphale knew he’d be joining him soon enough. Maybe it was all the wine (four bottles, times five, divided by two: whatever that was—) or maybe it was the twinge in his lumbar that had been near-constant since their arrival, but Aziraphale knew there was no way he’d be sleeping on that sofa tonight.

Aziraphale rose from the sofa, half agony, half hope, and crept towards the singular bedroom.

He moved so slowly, so hesitantly and quietly, that the room was entirely still by the time he touched his fingers to Crowley’s door. The lump of his author under all the quilted blankets barely stirred, four × five ÷ two glasses deep into sleep. Aziraphale held his breath as he crossed the threshold, shivering with each step that took him further from the hearth’s crackling embrace.

He lifted the blanket and set his jaw at the bare chest that greeted him, already slumped over, with an arm above his head and his cheek crushed into the pillow. Aziraphale stood in silent mental preparation, only mildly distracted by the faint dusting of hair that swept across Crowley’s chest and crept down over his belly, but grew mildly more distracted as he marvelled at the plush parts of his body that nestled between the sharp edges of rib and hipbone. He finally snapped out of his stupor — enamoured with the ability to stare unseen, but equally horrified at his impropriety of wanting to stare at all — when Crowley unconsciously shivered in the cold.

Aziraphale hurried into bed so that he could pull the quilt back over them, tucking it all the way up to their chins. He couldn’t stare at Crowley’s body if the body was hidden, but found himself still staring all the same, ignoring the sharpness that sank between his ribs as he settled his head on the pillow and his eyes on his author.

He looked different in sleep. No glasses obscuring the lines of his face, no smirk screwing up his mouth and disguising Aziraphale’s fondness with outrage. He was also bloody warm, damn near feverish. Aziraphale nestled closer on instinct, creeping towards the heat he thought he’d left behind in the fireplace. Crowley’s penchant for sleeping shirtless suddenly made a whole lot of sense if this was the kind of heat he exuded even on the coldest of nights.

It was a fearful comfort to shift so closely that he could feel the man’s breath upon him. He could hear the pounding of his own heart, thrumming so loudly he was sure it would wake him. He kept his eyes fixed on Crowley’s face to ensure that it didn’t.

Aziraphale sighed despite himself, his heart thrashing even wilder as he tipped his head close enough for their noses to touch. Still, Crowley remained steady and motionless, whilst every one of his soft exhales drove a warm, soothing knife deeper into Aziraphale’s chest.

He crept a hand out from the blankets and touched the tip of his forefinger against Crowley’s cheek, just to see if he’d wake.

Then he let it drift, tracing the length of Crowley’s jaw, just because he could.

“You stupid man,” he whispered.

His finger caught the edge of Crowley’s lip, drawing a soft sigh out of the man beneath his touch. The knife nestled deeper.

“How can someone as clever as you be so…?”

Aziraphale trailed off when he realised he was speaking to himself as much as he was the author in front of him.

Of all the days they’d shared a roof, there had been one constant: Aziraphale always woke up first. Even on his brightest mornings, when his motivation carried Crowley out of bed the second his eyes opened, he always found his editor neatly dressed and well into his morning routine.

To open his eyes and find Aziraphale not only asleep, but curled up so close to him, was surreal to say the least.

Driven by a night of lucid but nonsensical dreams, in which his characters danced over plot holes and urged the next chapter onwards, Crowley awoke rather quickly. His mouth was dry and his head was pounding, reminding him of just how many glasses he downed the night before, whilst also explaining how his editor was sleeping so heavily into the morning. They better not do that again.

He waited just a beat before getting up, though. Soaked up the warmth from another body, fortified himself for the cool morning air he was about to subject himself to. Let his fingers unfurl from the clutch of pyjamas they’d sunk into, loosening until they rested limp atop Aziraphale’s waist. It would be so easy to shut his eyes and melt back down, chase the man’s heat another inch across the bed until he could bury himself firmly into it…

But in the end, his pounding head demanded too much of his attention, and all he could do was try and stifle his tired groan as he slunk out of bed.

He chugged a glass of water while the kettle boiled, then another once he found a stray pack of painkillers amidst their sprawl of toiletries. He felt a little more alive by the time he poured his coffee, but still running on autopilot as he brewed a tea for his editor.

After his first sip of caffeine, the rest of his brain functions were mostly back online— enough to make him hesitate when he looked down at the half made tea in front of him.

The sudden image that came to mind, of him walking the tea across the threshold and waking the man in his bed, made his stomach churn with an unfamiliar anxiety. That was… He didn’t know how or why, but it was too soft. Far too domestic. It would be inappropriate.

But wouldn’t sharing a bed be inappropriate too?

Crowley groaned at his untethered ego from the night before. Who let him make decisions after that many bottles?

Too hungover to decipher why it bothered him so much in the first place, Crowley finished stirring in the milk and poured a fresh glass of water. He didn’t want to be an arsehole. He left his coffee on the counter as he carried the tea and the glass back to his bedroom, banished all intrusive thoughts of waking Aziraphale with a kiss to his temple, and set the drinks down on the nightstand so he’d wake up to those instead.

(He paused once he placed them down, of course he did. Now that his vision was sharpened by his glasses, bearing witness to Aziraphale bundled up in bed was nothing short of captivating. He sank like a marshmallow into the foam of a hot chocolate, buried up to his chin so that all Crowley could see were unruly curls and his little pout of sleepy concentration. It made him lean in a little closer, searching for what else he could see beneath the tide of quilts, but Aziraphale only pulled them tight around himself as he stirred, and Crowley could only smile at the picture of pure unconscious relaxation.)

He gave himself this minute to appreciate, sigh, and come to his senses. Then he scarfed down a slice of unbuttered toast and got to writing.

Aziraphale returned to the sofa the next night. Crowley only realised it when he sat up in bed after dinner, shuffled to one side, staring at his door in waiting. He sat like that for an embarrassingly long time, then fought himself even longer over whether he should go out to check if Aziraphale planned on joining him.

He ended up tiptoeing out under the pretence of needing the bathroom, and deflated a little when he spotted the neat stack of blankets that converted the couch from seat to bed.

Then he accidentally caught Aziraphale’s eye, and nearly walked into a wall.

“Night,” stammered Crowley as he hastily recovered.

“Goodnight,” said Aziraphale, just as tightly. Then he piped up again, right before Crowley reached the bathroom door. “Thank you for sharing with me last night. I won’t make a habit of getting in your way, but it was a much needed break from this old thing.”

“Any time,” Crowley croaked, then disappeared to the toilet he didn’t need.

After a few more days lost in a focused trance, Crowley was looking at a finished draft.

The last scene often crept up on him, but it had never completely caught him off guard before. One moment he was procrastinating a difficult scene by wrestling with his spell check settings, then his protagonists were disappearing into the sunset before he knew it.

He stared, perplexed at the word count at the bottom of his page. He’d even passed his goal, giving Aziraphale plenty of padding to work with after his edits and inevitable cuts.

“I’m done,” he announced, still staring at the crisp little numbers.

Aziraphale sighed. Crowley lifted his head.

The rain had made a comeback and was crashing down with much more determination than before, confining them both to the cottage for the brunt of the day. Crowley sat at the dining table again, his chair twisted to overlook the rest of the living room. He had a perfect view of Aziraphale, who was curled up at one end of the sofa with his feet tucked up like an Austenian protagonist, the rain pummelling against a window just over his shoulder. There was a bulky notebook sitting on the cushion beside him, and a swathe of manuscript papers stacked on his lap.

His pen froze over the page and he blinked slowly at Crowley’s declaration.

“No you’re not,” he said calmly, then continued marking.

Crowley took a deep breath as a smile finally cracked through his stunned reverie. He supposed that was fair— he had made a rather constant habit of giving up at various points of the process, telling Aziraphale he was quitting, retiring, and at one point setting fire to all his progress (When Paris Burns had pushed both of them to their limit) whenever things got difficult.

“Yes I am,” he said slowly.

He watched as Aziraphale continued writing, presumably finishing a sentence before sparing Crowley any of his attention. His gaze lifted slowly, a beat after he raised his head, and his frown formed slower still.

He took one look at Crowley, at his straight back, raised brows, and hands folded neatly in his lap. Aziraphale’s eyes blew wide.

“No you haven’t,” he said again, this time in disbelief as he threw everything aside to stand up.

Crowley sank back against his dining chair, his smile creeping wider as he watched Aziraphale flutter about with papers and books until he found his buried laptop. As soon as he laid hands on it, he shot back onto the sofa and hauled it onto his lap, opening the screen with one hand and stretching the other towards Crowley.

His hand grasped midair, beckoning incessantly for something as he started his frenzied search for the right tab.

“Tea: Black, English Breakfast,” he stammered, eyes fixed on his screen and fingers still flapping impatiently.

Crowley smirked and melted off his chair to do as he was asked— told. Demanded.

When he delivered the mug into his still outstretched hand (with the teaspoon of sugar Aziraphale was too preoccupied to ask for), his editor had found his reading glasses and was hunched over his laptop, already deep in Work Mode. Crowley had a million questions about what he thought of it all, but knew better than to try and interrupt him while he read.

He gave Aziraphale a quick pat on the shoulder, was inevitably ignored, and left to go collapse into bed for a well earned nap.

It was difficult to withhold all his commentary, especially when Crowley was so noticeably fidgety with anticipation, but Aziraphale was determined to wait until they were both seated in a booth at the local pub before getting started.

Crowley had slept during the entirety of his first read-through. It gave Aziraphale the freedom to gasp, bite his nails, and mutter incessantly at the characters’ choices as he followed along their journey— which he would have done even if Crowley was there, but always preferred to go without his judgemental sniggers and eye rolls.

The author upped to silently pace around the cottage during Aziraphale’s second read, which was a much more concentrated, editorial pass. He was a fast reader, but took to paper much better than screens, so it was well and truly dark by the time he finished.

Crowley did well to resist asking any questions, or even peer over his shoulder when Aziraphale was in the thick of it, but his leg bounced violently under the table while they ordered dinner and handed back their menus. He hadn’t even misbehaved during the cab ride over, going so far as to open the door for Aziraphale and let him climb in first to escape the ever-constant drizzle.

Finally settled in their booth, surrounded by the small town bustle of weeknight regulars, Aziraphale folded his hands over the top of their table and smiled at the man across from him. He took a deep breath in an attempt to fortify himself, his head still swimming with all of Newt’s adventures. Crowley sat stiffly, his posture only somewhat jostled by his tapping foot.

Aziraphale opened his mouth. He paused when the barkeep waddled over to place their drinks down on the table. The man was thanked, and the pints ignored. Crowley didn’t blink.

Aziraphale slid his lager to one side and readjusted his hands over the table.

“It’s good.”

Crowley exhaled sharply when he finally spoke, a tight huff of relief that did nothing to loosen his tense shoulders.

“...Uhuh?”

Aziraphale laced his fingers a little tighter together, locking the ridges into place to stop himself vibrating all over the table. Poor Crowley wouldn’t have realised it was eagerness, not anxiety, that held them there.

He let his smile spread a little wider, oozing from polite into delighted as he leaned a little further over the table.

“Crowley,” he said meaningfully, “it’s good.”

The author stared at him in disbelief for a short, distinct moment, then let in such a deep breath Aziraphale thought he might choke on it. His exhale melted him back against his booth seat, and he reached for his drink.

“Yeah?” he asked, eyes wide with disbelief.

Aziraphale merely nodded, and Crowley’s next breath tumbled into a laugh of pure delight.

“Oh, fuck me,” he cackled, beaming into his first sip.

“…I did have some notes about the pacing of the first chapter, and a minor consistency issue during the witches’ sacrament— but, yes, Crowley. It’s very good.”

Crowley grinned at him, too pleased to be put off by his nit-picking. He was straight back to his usual swaying, fidgeting for fun, and squirming in his seat like an under-stimulated toddler as he tapped a finger beside Aziraphale’s untouched drink.

“This is a celebration,” he noted, terribly proud of himself for noticing, “not a firing squad.”

“Just a celebration,” Aziraphale confirmed, before following the instruction of Crowley’s tapping, and unwound his fingers to pick up his pint. “Just for us.”

Crowley slithered forward to clink their glasses together before he could pull a sip from it. He was sprawled halfway across the table, relaxed into every corner of Aziraphale’s vision, and it wasn’t until seeing that totally carefree smile that he realised how much he missed it. Although they still had a long way to go before Newt and Zach were ready for the shelves, Aziraphale felt impatiently excited for whatever Crowley’s next idea would be. For those early days, where he got to watch his unfiltered creativity thrive.

Would he write another romance? Aziraphale’s heart undeniably sped up at the mere thought. He certainly had a talent for it.

Before he could ask what Crowley thought of doing next, the owner swung by to deliver their meals. Crowley thanked her profusely then stuck right into it, still grinning around every messy mouthful. Aziraphale’s instinct was to scold, but he could only bring himself to smile as he watched the man hack into his food.

“You really had me going for a second there, being all quiet and serious,” Crowley mumbled with a full mouth. His joy was infectious— but, there were only so many bad manners Aziraphale could take, so he pointedly tossed a napkin his way. Crowley floundered to grab it before it even left Aziraphale’s hand. “But, this is nice. D’you still want to do Chinese?”

Aziraphale paused with his cutlery wedged into his steak.

“Oh,” he deflated. “I completely forgot about that.”

“We can do both,” Crowley said lightly. “Once we get back to London, we’ll get dressed up and have a nice dinner in the city. That can be our celebration for the finished manuscript— or, just because. Whatever you like.”

He was grinning again, teeth clamped around the tines of his fork. Aziraphale’s was still stuck into his food.

“That sounds lovely,” he said with forced cheeriness, then scooped up his pint to hide the twitching of his fingers.

It was hard to believe that, in all their years working together, they’d never done that before. Never just… gone for a meal.

Not like this, at least: not organised long beforehand, without a company credit card or a business agenda on the table between them. Not “just because.” Not like some kind of… date.

Dare he believe that? Could it really be that easy?

After all of Crowley’s panicked floundering over the queerness of two fictional characters, it didn’t seem likely that such an invitation would roll off his tongue so easily. It was more likely to be another subconscious desire that the author didn’t know how to name.

But… A subconscious desire was still enough to make Aziraphale’s heart flutter.

He knew what he wanted the answer to be, but still feared he may be projecting a meaning that wasn’t there. After reading Crowley’s novel in full, the differences between Zach and himself were much more apparent— which should have been relieving. If he’d misread the situation entirely, that meant no awkward confrontation with Crowley about suppressed attractions, nor the inevitable, terrifying question of sexuality that came with them. He’d be dodging a bullet, really. Crowley had already made it perfectly clear that he loathed being told how to feel.

Relief and ignorance would’ve been the easy way out. So, of course, Aziraphale only felt disappointed.

Because he knew what he wanted. He wanted all of this. He wanted Crowley to want him. Even if it meant an uncomfortable conversation about attraction and sexuality and telling Crowley the last thing he wanted to hear; if it meant having to catch that bullet head on.

Aziraphale sat up, fixed the napkin over his lap, and finished his glass with newfound determination. This was a date, he decided. A practice run of what might be waiting for them in London. They’d only talk about real things, like people normally did on dates, and he’d stow away every little smile and gesture and comment that could help him figure out where Crowley stood.

He didn’t want to lean too close: Aziraphale needed a clear view of whatever was happening between them, to properly analyse the flutters in his chest whenever Crowley met his eye, to consider all that might’ve been there. And they wouldn’t talk about work, or the book. Only date-y things.

But, it was inevitable. Once their plates were cleared and their second glasses filled, Crowley asked him everything he thought about his favourite scenes, recalled motifs, the blatancy of the imagery— and Aziraphale was gushing before he could stop himself. It had always been that way, whether they were fighting or joking, on each other’s side or dragging their heels along: Easy. Crowley always made it so easy to be himself.

So he tried his best to sit back and be partial, and take the facts as they came. But he couldn’t resist leaning just a little.

They stayed for dessert, then for last call. They’d spent more time talking than drinking and were barely drunk at all, just high off good food and laughter. They were energised enough, buzzing from a job well done, to brave the walk back to the cottage once they saw the rain had cleared, and stumbled home like unruly teenagers with the screens of their phones lighting the way. Their polite “we’re in public” laughter descended into raucous cackling and unstifled giggles, almost loud enough to drown out the stones that crunched under their feet, and the pounding of Aziraphale’s heart in his ears. Almost.

They spent far too long fumbling with house keys, until Aziraphale realised Crowley had actually unlocked everything rather quickly, and was simply staring at him while he held the door ajar with one hand. Aziraphale lifted his head, blushing at the amused smirk that greeted him.

So much for a practice date. Huddled together in the dark, hesitating over the threshold, Aziraphale had never been so sure that he was about to be kissed.

“Nice little celebration,” Crowley finally said, but leant no further forward. “Not a bad way to end a miserable month.”

Aziraphale bristled, but not as much as he probably should’ve. Crowley was still smiling so freely at him, he couldn’t bring himself to seek out offence.

“Miserable?” he ended up muttering. “Hardly. You finished in the end, didn’t you?”

The author swayed as he chuckled, pressing the door open a little wider. “Yeah, well. Nothing like cramming two old men into a tiny house and drowning them with rain. Want the bed tonight?”

Aziraphale relaxed at the fair point, then stiffened at the sudden invitation. He opened his mouth before he had any idea of what to say, too busy mentally stammering to catch up.

“Um…”

“‘Cause of the, you know. Train tomorrow.” Crowley shrugged violently. “I assume— no reason to hang around if I’m all done. So, better give your lumbar a break before we’re stuck sitting in a carriage for hours.”

Still stumbling in his own head, Aziraphale took a moment to find his words. In the end, he decided it would be easier to nod, but found he was already nodding.

“Although— You have to ride the train too. And it is big enough for seven,” he murmured. “Don’t let me… displace you.”

Crowley flashed him a grin and shoved the door a little wider, and it was only then that Aziraphale realised he’d been standing aside for some time, waiting for Aziraphale to step through. He hurried inside before his blush spread further than the evening breeze could explain, leaving his anguished hopes of a goodnight kiss under the front awning.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, angel,” Crowley drawled as he followed him in.

Aziraphale dithered in the living room for a while, but Crowley went straight to bed. They’d been out late enough, after all.

Sitting alone on his sofa, still rugged up in his coat and shoes, Aziraphale tried taking a moment to straighten everything out in his head, to run through the night and analyse everything he told himself he’d analyse. After staring at his hands for ten minutes and thinking of nothing but the author’s fingers slotted between his own, he accepted the possibility that he was procrastinating.

He eventually holed up in the bathroom to change into his pyjamas and get ready for bed. When he finished washing his face, cleaning his nails, packing his toiletries, and using every little cleanser and ointment he’d brought along for the trip, he knew for certain that he was just killing time. Waiting for Crowley to fall asleep.

Without all that wine to soothe them, he had no idea what it would be like to crawl into that bed; to feel the other man’s eyes on him as he crept closer. So, he allowed himself to hoard one more moment at the bedroom door, hoping it had been long enough to enter without being noticed, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard Crowley’s voice from the other side.

“Ahh, there you are.”

Well, it would look strange if he kept hesitating now, so Aziraphale hurried on in and let the door hang ajar behind him. It turned out he had no reason to worry: Crowley was mostly horizontal, his head and shoulders smeared against the headboard as he scrolled his phone one-handed. He still wore his glasses, but all of his attention was on the screen perched in the middle of his chest.

Most of his bare skin was hidden by the sheets, but Aziraphale didn’t need the sight of a nipple for his throat to close and his lungs to tighten. Crowley’s bent knees made two sharp mountains in the sheets, and Aziraphale couldn’t help but stare where they smoothed down into an open field, an expanse of soft down waiting for him to carve out his own dips and valleys.

Plenty of things were different compared to the last time they shared, but he couldn’t help but notice Crowley was nestled over to the same edge of the bed. The unspoken domesticity of it brought a familiar ache back to Aziraphale’s chest. His heart thundered at an equally familiar volume as he approached what had become his side.

The lamp flicked off as he picked up a corner of the quilt, and the light from Crowley’s phone was smothered face down by the time Aziraphale had burrowed into place. He laid on his side with his eyes open in the pitch black, unable to help but track the sound of glasses being set onto the nightstand and the gentle tug of blankets as the other man twisted into place.

Aziraphale waited in the dark, too aware of the sound of his own breathing amidst the deafening silence of crickets and rustling leaves that he still hadn’t grown used to. He waited for Crowley to fall asleep, listening for the even roll of his breaths and feeling for a stillness in the sheets.

Once he was absolutely certain, and not a moment before, Aziraphale sidled closer. He shifted as gently as he could, inching towards his last night beside that impossibly warm body.

When Crowley’s head turned on his pillow to face him, he didn’t jump out of his skin, but his heart made a solid attempt at jumping into his mouth.

“Hey,” Crowley whispered.

Aziraphale’s eyes ached for how far they widened, desperate to catch any speck of light that would better reveal the man’s face in the dark.

“Sorry,” he croaked out, mentally cursing himself for not bothering to come up with an excuse if he were caught. “It’s… cold.”

He expected a laugh, or more likely a groan, not for the mattress to gently bow as Crowley turned onto his side and unhesitatingly closed the last of the distance between them.

“I… Oh,” Aziraphale breathed, only just stifling what would’ve sounded like a whimper if he wasn’t careful, as Crowley’s arm slung over him. The man tipped up his chin until the end of his nose pressed against Aziraphale’s forehead, exposing the long line of his neck to Aziraphale’s shaky breaths. “Th-thank you…”

“Thank you,” Crowley whispered back, so softly he nearly missed it. “For… Nyep. All this.”

Aziraphale shuddered, but let himself fall closer until he sank into the space between Crowley’s limbs. He squeezed his eyes shut when his cheek grazed the comfortably scalding skin of Crowley’s collarbone, and couldn’t contain his sigh when the author’s arm drew a little tighter around him.

He suddenly cared very little about scrutinising all the details of their date— including whether or not it could have been a date. He had everything he needed right here, secured around his shoulders, where Crowley bridged the last gap all by himself.

Aziraphale fell asleep smiling; utterly exhausted by the road it took to get there, but overwhelmingly grateful that Crowley had finally worked this one out on his own.

The familiar chords of The Golden Girls theme song started anew, echoing off the concrete walls of Crowley’s Mayfair apartment. It was the third episode that had started without him noticing, but it’s not like Crowley was keeping track.

He was cleaning, which was weird. Only because it was a Thursday night, and Crowley had a schedule for these things. Scrubbing the inside of his kitchen cabinets was a Sunday morning activity, unless he was looking down the barrel of a writing deadline he had absolutely no intention of meeting.

Considering the book was well and truly done, it made no sense for him to be procrastination-cleaning at ten o’clock on a weeknight. They’d already been home for four days, so if there was something big and important he’d forgotten, Aziraphale would’ve contacted him by now. All he’d gotten were a handful of comments on the first chapter, mostly amounting to grammatical errors that Crowley didn’t even have the energy to challenge.

He threw down his scourer and sat back on his haunches, growling under his breath as he wrestled off his dish gloves.

There it was: the spike that shot through him whenever he thought of Tadfield. At first he thought it was anger, if only for how sharply it spread throughout his chest, but he couldn’t think of a single thing to be angry over. When he looked at it for too long, it started to feel like grief; a warmth so heavy that it weighed him down, made it hard to move.

He’d turned on the TV as soon as the thought sprouted, because that made even less sense.

There was no reason to mourn the end of his trip. It’s not like it was a holiday. It was suffocating, exhausting, dreary, and packed with more distractions than if he’d stayed at home. He should’ve been glad to finally escape that rickety house, and especially the man who’d made it even smaller, but Crowley could only recall little details of their trip with fondness. He found himself longing for things that made no sense to long for, like getting to see the furrow of Aziraphale’s brow when he chastised Crowley from across the room, instead of the emotionless Arial he was stuck with in his Google Docs comment box.

Truthfully, he’d never felt so disappointed to finish a book, and that’s what twisted him up the most. Crowley thought he was proud of this one, but after four days home he’d already reread Aziraphale’s comments three times over, searching for something that might have been missing. His editor assured him it was good, but perhaps he had more feedback now that they’d both slept on it. Crowley knew he should just ask, but the thought of reaching out only put his heart on edge.

The cycle was continuing. He was getting all worked up trying to pin the tail on this nebulous fucking feeling, now he was reaching for the grout cleaner. Thank god for the knock at the door that broke him out of his spiralling, but unfortunately urged him so quickly to answer it that he didn’t stop to realise his intercom hadn’t buzzed.

Upstairs, an author cleaned. Outside, his editor paced.

Aziraphale was usually good at sticking to his guns once he’d made up his mind, but something about that locked lobby door made him second guess everything. He came all this way, which included detouring through an off-licence for a bottle of something in case this went well— equally helpful for if it went badly —but now he stood at the downstairs intercom and couldn’t seem to find his voice.

“Hello,” he muttered to himself as he circled away from the building, with the neck of the bottle gripped tightly in his fist, “it’s me. Can we talk?”

He winced at all the ways that simple greeting could go wrong. Crowley would probably feign ignorance just to be contrary, as he so often loved to do: “I don’t know any me’s,” he’d drawl, likely smirking from thirteen storeys up while Aziraphale shivered on the pavement. And, if he even got the question out, there was no way Crowley would stand to hear it. Can we talk always sounded like Can I yell at you, and Aziraphale had spent twenty years watching Crowley weasel his way out of those conversations.

He turned on his heel to continue his circuit up and down the length of the building.

“Good evening Crowley. I’ve brought a Sherry. Might I come up?”

Whatever for? Crowley would tease.

“Just to catch up…” Aziraphale immediately winced and shook his head. They’d just spent the last month holed up together, and knew more about each other than ever before.

“I have some things to share,” he tried instead, but why would Crowley care?

“I accidentally deleted your book,” he huffed, but Crowley would see straight through such a ridiculous lie.

“You’re in love with me,” he gritted out; arguably the most effective, but also the quickest way to a door in his face, a mental breakdown, and a notice of termination.

“We need to talk about—”

Aziraphale stopped, cut off by the sound of a buzzer, and halted by a cyclist jogging up to the door.

He abruptly shut his mouth and gave the delivery rider a polite smile, hoping he hadn’t been caught talking to himself. The man barely noticed him, more concerned with the hefty bag of takeaway he was carting to the door than with Aziraphale’s stifled panic. The real problem came when the tenant arrived at the door to meet him.

He recognised her right away: a woman from one of the lower floors, with a beautifully patterned wardrobe and impressively long dreadlocks, who always seemed terribly hurried even on the slowest of Sunday evenings. Aziraphale had only shared a lift with her once or twice, but if he remembered correctly… Her name was Nina, she owned her very own cafe in Soho, she’d just moved into the building with a friend after getting out of a long relationship, and she loved the Vietnamese place on Wardour St but didn’t recommend the one down D’Arblay.

“Hey Mr. Fell,” she called from the doorway, a picture of delighted surprise. “Are you coming in to see Mr. Crowley?”

Aziraphale hesitated with his eyes locked onto this tiny window— or, door —of opportunity. If he declined her, he knew he might as well go all the way home right now.

“Thank you, dear,” he reluctantly accepted, hurrying in after her before he could change his mind.

In the elevator, Nina seemed to pick up on his heavy headspace and kept the chatter to a minimum. She wished him goodnight before stepping out on the 3rd floor, leaving him alone with his racing thoughts for the rest of the journey. By the time he stepped out into the hall, he was sick to death of pacing and muttering, and stormed right up to Crowley’s door.

He pounded against it just the once, startling when it opened almost immediately. He didn’t get a single second to prepare himself. He was still geared up to keep knocking when Crowley appeared, dressed down and looking slightly frazzled, but undeniably delighted at the sight of him.

There he was, and there it was: the spike that shot through him whenever he thought of Crowley since arriving back from Tadfield.

Aziraphale pushed into the apartment with a huff, but stopped himself in the middle of the room before his feet could start pacing again. He shut his eyes and counted to ten in an attempt to calm himself; the door clicked shut at four, and Crowley’s footsteps came to a slow stop behind him at seven. Aziraphale gave up at nine and spun around.

“Well?” he barked. He really hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but he felt angry, and all this bottling up couldn’t be good for his blood pressure. Crowley only stared at him, his eyes startled wide.

“...How’d you get in?” he asked, his voice light and conversational whilst his brow hardened with worry.

“Why hasn’t anything changed?” Aziraphale asked instead, wrenching the words out with an almost-sob.

He only noticed Crowley drifting closer when he felt a gentle tug at the bottle in his hand, the one he’d forgotten he was holding and had inadvertently been waving around as he spoke. He startled at Crowley’s sudden closeness, just as Crowley startled at his sudden volume, but he let the man pry it from his hands like he was disarming an hysterical gunman.

Aziraphale switched to wringing his hands as the man placed it down on the counter, but he turned right back around and left the alcohol ignored. Crowley’s eyes kept wandering back and forth from Aziraphale’s face to somewhere distant, not quite in the room, and his face was screwed up like he was fighting an internal battle as well as the one in front of him— the one that tore up his throat and made all his words sound more like stifled consonants.

Crowley tried, and failed, to laugh. “Is this about my semicolons again?”

Aziraphale felt like he could burst into tears. Or flames. He must’ve looked it too, because Crowley started to fidget again, the subtle wiggling of his fingers climbing up the length of his arms until his whole body was one big stifled twitch.

“Wine?” he offered, his tone even tenser than his face.

He turned to the kitchen, stepped around an avalanche of cleaning supplies, and started flinging open every cabinet and drawer for glasses and a corkscrew. Aziraphale simply watched, though he could no longer tell if he was stubbornly fixed to the floor or involuntarily frozen in place.

“We were supposed to get dinner,” he said weakly.

Crowley looked up suddenly, never slowing his frantic twisting of the corkscrew.

“I didn’t forget,” he said quickly. “Just… Erm. Waiting. Because… I don’t know.” His hands were shaking as he overpoured their glasses. “Are you angry with me? What could I possibly have done in four days? Without even speaking to you?” Crowley tried to sneer, but it was a weak facade of indignance.

The spike in Aziraphale’s chest softened almost entirely. All that remained was a warm weight, a sinking grief.

“Did you not think that maybe I wanted to hear from you?”

Crowley turned back to him with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Neither wine glass was lifted from the table; Aziraphale wasn’t thirsty anyway.

“...Why?” Crowley asked slowly, wrestling with the word like he’d never said it before in his life. Like there was an inkling, deep down, but when it came to say it all aloud, he—

He still didn’t know.

“Oh… Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale rushed out, stepping forward automatically. Crowley’s eyes widened in surprise but he didn’t move back, not even to flinch. His gaze no longer wandered, but stayed fixed onto the man in front of him.

The last of Aziraphale’s grief melted away and left only warmth in its place. He took both of Crowley’s hands in his own (he reached for his arms, but Crowley offered his hands so freely, Aziraphale couldn’t not take them) and gently led him over to the island counter where their wine sat waiting. He pulled out two barstools, guiding the man to sit as he eased himself onto the second. Crowley pinned his hands between his knees to steady them as soon as he was seated.

When Aziraphale first read Crowley’s novel, when he first realised what was going on in the man’s head, he planned this conversation in excruciating detail. He used to recite it on his walks, flipping through his mental script whenever he had to critique particularly heart-wrenching scenes. But since their night at the Tadfield pub, since Aziraphale somehow got it into his head that Crowley figured everything out on his own, he’d trashed that script. He wanted to make room for important things like editing his novel and, eventually, how to answer Crowley’s intercom.

He floundered now, struggling to remember a single detail of how he’d planned to break the news.

“Crowley, you…”

Aziraphale frowned at himself, frustrated by his persistent hesitation.

They may fight and bicker, but Crowley trusted him with all kinds of things. Aziraphale was his first point of reference for research, advice, feedback— he would kick and moan whenever his editor gave him actual work to do, and reminded him that he was no yes man and never would be, but he also bought Aziraphale a glass of something in the end, and always thanked him in his editor’s notes.

(Well, thanked him in his own ludicrous way)

And there Crowley was, riddled with palpable anxiety, and yet he frowned at Aziraphale’s frown. He tensed to see Aziraphale upset, and even unpinned one of his hands to lay it on the counter between them.

Aziraphale took it without thinking, and decided it might be best to speak the same way.

“My dear… It seems you’ve fallen in… something… with me,” he breathed.

Crowley’s expression remained unchanged, but the grip around his hand turned vice-like.

“I-if it helps, I do believe I’m right there with you,” Aziraphale rushed to add.

After a few agonising seconds, in which Crowley’s eyes grew imperceptibly wider with every blink, he finally tore his gaze away. Now he stared at their hands, dumbstruck by the ease in which they connected.

“That’s…” He paused to swallow a knot in his throat. “You think I’m—? But I’ve never… I like women.”

Aziraphale fought every instinct to roll his eyes, and rewarded himself by reaching over the counter for one of the wine glasses poured earlier. He downed it all in one go. Crowley was glued to his every movement: his eyes darting from his frown, to his lips, to his hands.

“You’re being deliberately daft,” Aziraphale muttered.

He didn’t know if he wanted to wrench his hand away or use his thumb to soothe over Crowley’s knuckles, but he was distracted by a burst of laughter before he could even think about it. Crowley rocked back on his seat as he cackled out startled, gasping breaths.

“Deliberately—?” Crowley grinned, even as he squeezed Aziraphale’s hand to steady himself, and his wide eyes flashed with a familiar mischievous glint. “That only makes you in love with an idiot,” he proudly declared.

Aziraphale gasped, perhaps affronted by the wrong thing, but couldn’t help straightening his back and flexing his fingers over the counter.

“I never said I loved you,” he protested.

Crowley’s grin turned sly and smug as he swayed tauntingly closer. “But you doooo,” he sang. “You totally want to kiss me, and hold my hand, and…”

Aziraphale took in a sharp breath, determined to hold onto his hauteur— but Crowley got so close to him so quickly, he couldn’t hide the tremble in his exhale. As glad as he was that Crowley was taking this well, he didn’t know how he’d survive if it all ended up as one big joke to him.

So, despite the pain of honesty, Aziraphale needed Crowley to know just how deep his words could go. Whether they cut, or soothed.

He looked to Crowley’s lips, partly to make a point, but partly because he couldn’t bear to look anywhere else.

“I really do,” he whispered.

It was downright cruel that the man picked then, of all moments, to lick his lips. Aziraphale stared, and breathed, and wanted.

Neither of them dared to move.

“...You’re sure?” came Crowley’s soft, sobered voice. When Aziraphale forced his gaze up, he found Crowley’s eyes watching him just the same. “That you think I’m…?”

Aziraphale blinked at the momentary sliver of concern he caught in those amber irises, then rolled his eyes at the question.

“I wouldn’t just pop over to question your sexuality on a whim, no.”

The joy finally flooded back to Crowley’s features, and he threw himself back with another laugh. It was not the sharp and boisterous sound Aziraphale was starting to prepare himself for— It lilted and drifted like his relief at the pub, fading into a snort as he leaned back from his personal space but kept their hands fixed together all the while.

As he settled back, his grip gradually loosened, and eventually he lowered his gaze to study where they intertwined. There was something quizzical in the way he stared, but even after his laugh faded to silence, his eyes still brimmed with the mirth of it. Aziraphale gave him this moment to sit with his thoughts, and held himself still as Crowley distractedly traced the lines between their joined fingers.

Once each finger was neatly outlined and squeezed back together, Crowley let out a decisive sigh.

“Well. That certainly explains… some things.”

His voice came soft and wistfully, and with Aziraphale’s attention so fixed on their fingers, it took a moment for him to register the words.

“...You aren’t denying it,” he noted.

Crowley looked at Aziraphale long and hard, but his expression sat at a crossroads of too many thoughts, it was impossible to read the most prominent. When Crowley suddenly looked away to shake his head and roll his eyes at the ceiling, they all came together in a mosaic of… defeat.

“You’re never wrong,” he sighed, like this was some great inconvenience.

He was a picture of reluctance, but the words came easily, in every meaning of the word. His voice was light and toying, easy to brush off, just in case he was ever caught on tape being genuine. But, he spoke so quietly, barely audible, even in such a tall, sparse apartment that liked to echo everything back to them.

It was a secret; something only for Aziraphale to hear, and something he would definitely deny later.

Aziraphale couldn’t help himself.

“Even about your semicolons?”

Crowley’s expression shifted immediately, brightening with glee, then playful outrage, before he quickly schooled it into nonchalance.

“We-ell,” he erred and pulled his hands back in protest. Aziraphale squeezed his grasp tighter to stop him leaving, realising a beat too late that he was only playing. He felt himself blush to fumble such a silly joke, but Crowley stopped at once and squeezed him right back.

They sat for a long while, staring in disbelief and holding each other’s hands far too tightly.

“What, uh… What now?” Crowley whispered.

It was a perfectly understandable question, but Aziraphale’s heart raced to hear it. He hadn’t thought about that part. He hadn’t even thought about…

His eyes wandered back down to Crowley’s lips, but quickly flicked back up when he realised where they were heading. He couldn’t help but smile as he watched the other man’s gaze make the same journey, in far less of a rush to return.

“I suppose, we…” Aziraphale trailed off and tilted his head.

Lord knew when they’d gotten so close; he could count the freckles on Crowley’s cheeks, and hear how sharply his breath rushed out when Aziraphale’s eyes dipped back down to his lips. He could picture kissing him so easily, and his eyes involuntarily fluttered shut when the images began to roll.

The problem was, he couldn’t ever see it ending, and doubted that the first touch of his lips would do anything but stoke his need for more.

“Well—” Aziraphale forced his eyes open and took a steadying breath, “I still have a lot of editing that needs—”

He had about an eighth of a second to watch Crowley’s eyes widen before their lips crushed together. Aziraphale was sure he made a terribly embarrassing noise when Crowley surged forward so suddenly, but when it resulted in Crowley’s hands clutching his face and holding him close, he found he didn’t mind so much. Besides, once he shut his eyes, wove his grip around the man’s wrists to anchor him close, and began to kiss back, Crowley squeaked out a remarkably similar one.

Just as he expected, the press of his lips only made him desperate for more, but at least he wasn’t the only one. Crowley leaned forward so eagerly he nearly tumbled them both off their stools, then slithered to his feet at the first sign of unsteadiness. He never once let off his lips, but manoeuvred his hands until he had Aziraphale’s back pressed to the kitchen counter, his knees parted enough for Crowley to stand between them, and Aziraphale’s arms slung around his shoulders. He set his hands back on Aziraphale’s jaw once they were settled and securely together, but at the first dip of his editor’s tongue into his mouth, let his fingers roam far enough to run through his soft curls and clasp firmly at the base of his neck.

Aziraphale sank against him, pinned between his body and the counter, still hiked up on his barstool so that their stomachs were evenly aligned and he could feel the sharp jut of Crowley’s hipbones through his clothes. He pulled him closer, fisting his hands into fabric and squeezing him between his legs, wanting miles for every inch that was given.

He felt dizzy when Crowley finally tore their mouths apart to catch his breath, and tipped his head forward to meet forehead with forehead.

He smiled as Crowley panted against his lips.

“I do actually have a lot of editing to do,” he whispered.

Crowley cackled, full of joy, “Yeah, that first chapter was a fucking mess.”

Then he kissed him again, and Aziraphale kept kissing back.

It was a marvel how soft and eager it felt to kiss a man who hadn’t snogged in— years, did he say? They moved just beyond the realm of tender, and they met with equally messy overenthusiasm, but it was still miles better than Aziraphale thought to expect. There was something intuitive about it, each of them following the unspoken guidelines of their shared wanting. It was, like many things with Crowley, easy.

It would be far too easy to get lost in it too, so he eventually forced his grip to loosen, even if Crowley whined into his mouth at the first sign of slowing.

He didn’t even get a chance to open his mouth (or, close it) before Crowley pulled back just enough to mumble against his lips: “Stay over.”

Aziraphale tensed. It was difficult to stop it from affecting his grip around Crowley’s waist, but such a neat little invitation shot through him like a live wire. He chewed his lip over every question and all their answers, immediately fretting over what would happen, what that meant, if he could, if he should—

As soon as Crowley caught a glimpse of his harrowed expression, he flew his hands back up to Aziraphale’s jaw and massaged the tension away with his thumbs.

“It’s so late,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s not a safe walk, and the trains will be shit. Plus I ordered food right before you arrived and won’t be able to eat it all on my own. You can use my laptop for your work. And I’ve got spare toothbrushes.”

Firing off excuse after excuse, tripping over his words and trying to act more and more nonchalant as he grew more and more desperate— Aziraphale was laughing before he knew it, coiling his hands tighter around Crowley’s waist and pulling him back to his chest.

“Okay,” he murmured, calming him with a kiss.

Crowley hummed into it, a slow but shallow meeting of lips that left them lingering against each other’s mouths long after it ended.

“Laptop’s in my bedroom.”

Aziraphale sighed dramatically, “How convenient.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Crowley grinned.

Needless to say, not a lot of editing got done that night.

Crowley awoke early the next morning, not to a loving hand in his hair, or even a gentle kiss on the cheek, but to the soft scratching of a pen on paper.

He squirmed a little, writhing to make his consciousness known while also trying to make sense of how his limbs were tangled. His legs were outstretched, he knew that much, but his torso was twisted and he couldn’t quite make out the shape of Aziraphale’s shoulders that should’ve been beside him.

When a hand eventually settled onto his head, that’s when he figured it out: Aziraphale was sitting up, and Crowley had abandoned his pillow to nestle into the crook of the man’s hip. With the mystery of his incredulous spine solved for the morning, Crowley smiled, sighing and burrowing deeper into Aziraphale’s side. The weight atop his head was enough to placate him, its soothing warmth sending him back to the unsteady fringe of sleep and reality.

Until the pen scratching continued.

Crowley peeked an eye open, then surreptitiously turned his head to get a better look at Aziraphale’s lap. On top of the blankets was a sturdy stack of papers, and in Aziraphale’s hand was his notorious red biro.

He lifted his head properly then, hoisting himself up on one elbow. He squinted at the layers of printed text already littered with little red markings, and though he couldn’t make out a single word without his glasses, would put money on it being one of his latest chapters. Crowley dropped back down and buried his head into the plush crease of his waist, jostling Aziraphale as much as he could manage in his sleepy state.

“Did you use my printer?” he grunted, half muffled.

“Mmm,” he barely heard from above him.

Crowley made an exasperated little noise, but he was so buried there was only a fifty percent chance Aziraphale heard him. It would’ve been more on-brand for him to huff and cause a fuss, to whine about his lovely new romantic interest daring to do something as unsexy as read in his bed, but it was also terribly on-brand for said romantic interest to do such a thing in the first place.

He was at an impasse. When Aziraphale’s hand curled into his hair and began massaging slow and methodical circles with his nails, Crowley decided he could have this one.

As far as Crowley was concerned, it was a wildly successful meeting. Gabriel shook his hand twice, Uriel glared her normal amount, and proof copies were finally handed around the table.

The marketing people were already talking about moving the cover art around and making some infinitesimal edit to the title font, but Crowley was just stoked to have it in his hands. The digital advanced review copy just didn’t hit the same, and the finality of a paperback left him as giddy as he was over his first ever book; holding this thing he couldn’t believe he’d created, that anyone was remotely interested to read.

The proof meeting was mostly a show and tell of their final edits, dates for the calendar, and a big round of applause for meeting yet another Crowley launch by the skin of their teeth. Once everyone filtered out of the conference room, he was free to follow Aziraphale over to his desk in the bullpen, where the two of them could talk final notes and celebrate quietly between themselves.

Aziraphale sank with relief into his desk chair, while Crowley swiped half the contents off the unmanned desk across from him. He didn’t even get a reprimanding look as he hoisted himself up to sit— everyone, including the random angel who worked at that station, was used to it by now.

Instead, Aziraphale was busy tucking away all the papers and files he’d accrued during the meeting, until all he had left was Crowley’s book in his lap. Neither of them had opened their proof copies yet, and it was time for their oldest tradition.

“Alright, let’s see the damage this time,” Aziraphale muttered to himself as he unfolded his reading glasses. Crowley was already beaming, his legs swinging violently off the edge of his desk. He didn’t bother opening up his copy, simply clutched a hand around it and held it in his lap as Aziraphale fanned his all the way to the back.

When he got to the last page he frowned, pausing for a moment before thumbing back through the end matter.

“Where’s your editor’s note?”

“...Hmm? Oh—”

Crowley rubbed a hand over his face, skewing his glasses and half of his smile as his memory caught up to him.

“It’s at the front,” he muttered.

Aziraphale tutted out a laugh as he rifled back to the title page.

“The front? Why have you put the editor’s note at the…”

Aziraphale faltered, skipping over the page then stumbling back to it. His face turned serious, and his eyes turned glassy.

Crowley shot to his feet and sent his book tumbling off his lap. Aziraphale whipped off his glasses and rushed to wipe his eyes, then stared in horror at his fingers as if he’d smeared blood all over them instead of regular old tears.

“What? What’s wrong?” Crowley panicked, fumbling to pick his copy off the floor. Did he remember what it said? Had he gone into some kind of fugue state and cast a pox on Aziraphale’s family?

But his words were there, familiar as ever, startling the everloving shit out of his editor.

“My god, I’m sorry— I wasn’t trying to make you cry,” Crowley choked out, unable to help the laughter that bubbled out of him like hiccups.

“I’m not crying!” Aziraphale firmly, though all the rough wiping of his sleeve over his face had reddened his eyes severely. “You just… You surprised me! Horrible man!”

Aziraphale swatted his paperback to ward him away, but every weak thwap of paper against Crowley’s arm only helped turn his laughter from nervous giggling into full-on cackles. He allowed Aziraphale to get a few hits out of his system, then gently caught one of his wrists mid-air to pry the book out of his hand.

He tossed it in with the rest of the knick knacks and curios on Aziraphale’s desk, then took the man’s face in both his hands. Aziraphale allowed himself to be held, but frowned adamantly at the man above him.

“I’ll never be nice to you again,” Crowley promised.

“See that you aren’t,” Aziraphale huffed, instantly breaking Crowley out of his moment of seriousness and back into a mile-wide grin. “That was, quite frankly, disturbing.”

Crowley placed a loud, wet kiss onto his forehead and smiled to feel his brow scrunch beneath his lips. Then he tipped Aziraphale’s head up to press a much gentler one against his mouth, slouching with relief when the man swayed into his touch.

When he pulled away to look at him properly, Aziraphale’s eyes were dry, and his brow was smooth.

“Lunch?” Crowley grinned.

He watched Aziraphale’s smile grow bit by bit until it took over his entire face.

“Oh, alright.”

“And leave that dreadful thing here.” Crowley nodded at the book as he dropped his hands from Aziraphale’s face, letting one catch on the man’s fingers that raised to meet him. “It made my fiance cry.”

Aziraphale finally let his smile tumble into a laugh as he rose to his feet, and placed a hand lovingly over Crowley’s chest as they made their way to the lifts.

“It’s not the book’s fault, darling,” he drawled. “See, there are these awful creatures called authors…”