So I didn't post this yesterday because I thought the week wasn't happening, but @book-omens-week came to life, so here it is one day late!
Also here at Ao3!
In the summer of 1984, both Aziraphale and Crowley went into moult.
Moulting was, in the opinions of Earth’s longest serving supernatural agents, approximately as irritating and pointless as hereditary Satanists and televangelists. Angels and demons lacked both breeding seasons (and reproductive parts, generally) and (in the modern day at least) any dependence on their wings for warmth. This was the twenty-first century, not the fourteenth. Or the fourth. Or…the negative thousandth. Aziraphale, who was especially allergic to anything that stood in the way of his planned hours of reading, avoiding customers, and enjoying meals, declared moulting as “antiquated and bothersome.” Strong words from heaven’s most British angel.
There were relatively few repercussions to being a supernatural being in a human suit, but the itching, scraping, tickling sensations that assaulted their wings every century or so was one.
Generally, an angel or demon’s wings existed in a sort of “pocket” of ethereal or occult space that didn’t exactly remove them but did keep them in a non-intrusive plane of semi-existence. This allowed earthly agents to walk the planet without constant worry that they might knock things over or having to sit awkwardly in chairs designed for wingless humans (heaven’s plush office chairs were specifically designed with the comfort of wings in mind; hell’s splinter-ridden wooden straight backs were engineered to crush wings as much as possible). During the centennial moult, however, the irritation crossed dimensions. Most agents (all but two, if we’re being honest) immediately scarpered off to their particular home office at the first sign of loosening feathers (even hell had steam baths, relaxing once one blocked out – or grew to enjoy – the screaming of the damned). Only Crowley and Aziraphale remained stubbornly earthside for the duration.
Chancing opportunistic reassignment to a desk job by certain unfriendly superiors wasn’t worth avoiding a little feathery discomfort.
It was on July 16th in the sixth year of the Antichrist’s existence on Earth that Aziraphale’s antique phone rang pleasantly to indicate a caller. (It had not always rung pleasantly, but one too many angelic glares and caused it to tone down its original shrill bell.) The angel plucked it up absently.
“A.Z. Fell Books-”
“’M moulting.”
Aziraphale sighed. Crowley and his determination for bad manners. All he said aloud was, “Ah,” and then, “no meeting then?”
He pretended that he wasn’t disappointed. The two of them had been meeting nearly weekly for five years now, to go over the reports from their respective agents on the Dowling boy, and Crowley had such an instinct for inconspicuous little restaurants that served absolutely amazing food. They tended, also, to be rather quiet and empty – most likely due to mob connections, honestly – but having an angel around was known to encourage Good Deeds even in Al Capone, creator of soup kitchens, so Aziraphale didn’t worry about the exact financial backing of Crowley’s collection of little-known brunch spots. As with most things concerning the pair of them, it would all come out in the wash.
“Mm…no,” Crowley agreed. Then, with smug mischief: “Means you’ll be next, angel.”
What, Aziraphale thought unangelically, a demonic brat.
Aziraphale huffed loftily. “I am aware, you old serpent,” he snapped, and Crowley snickered down the line.
Their moults hadn’t always been coordinated. Aziraphale’s had been set to his creation, while all demons were reset to their individual Falls. In the first millennium, they’d never been foolish enough to allow the other to see them in moult. In the second, Aziraphale had accidentally stumbled upon Crowley moodily moulting in South America, but had been polite enough not to mention the scattered remains of feathers. In the wake of the Agreement, however, more regular association over the last millennium had come with the extremely unexpected side effect of coordinating their moults.
It was frankly a little embarrassing.
“Well, enjoy!” the demon said cheerfully, mood always buoyed by sharing his frustration with others. “May the itch be with you!”
He hung up without saying good-bye. Of course.
(It took several minutes for the joke to properly register, but it did. Crowley had insisted Aziraphale watch the Star Wars films as payback for attending the opening night of Jesus Christ, Superstar on stage. “I’m telling you, it’s a classic Greek story, minus the tragic ending,” he’d urged. “You’ll regret it if you don’t see it on the big screen! Televisions won’t be nearly big enough for decades!”
Aziraphale had grudgingly admitted that Crowley had been right, though naturally he never said as much out loud. Couldn’t let Crowley get too full of himself.)
--*--*--*--*--*
Three days later, Aziraphale was a kind-looking being of absolute annoyance.
Apparently, we would be going for a full moult this century, and the musty air of the bookshop was no help to dry and itchy skin. The last few mobsters he’d sent off had nearly wet themselves, but then, they shouldn’t be trying to buy his bookshop, should they? And intimidation was such poor taste.
The phone rang. Even it sounded petulant.
“A.Z. Fe-”
“I have a sort of sauna,” Crowley said, without a greeting and apropos of nothing.
“How lovely for you.” Aziraphale’s voice didn’t match that word, lovely. It dripped with sarcasm, instead.
“What I’m saying,” the demon continued, unbothered, “is I have a sort of sauna with a huge tub that would fit two to maybe five human-shaped beings, or two with wings that could use some hydration.”
Aziraphale’s eyebrows rose. “Are you inviting me to your flat? To moult?”
A pause. “I’m…informing you of a possible adventitious situation.”
“In your bathroom.”
“Psh,” Crowley said, though he would deny it under oath, “’s more than a bathroom. More a bath……ah…throne…room.”
Aziraphale let that one slide.
“Very well,” he said, mood lifting at the thought of steam and warmth and maybe cajoling his friend into plucking a few especially loose feathers he couldn’t easily reach, “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“Right,” the demon growled, and there was the dial tone.
--*--*--*--*--*--
It wasn’t that Aziraphale and Crowley were especially fussed about nudity. You couldn’t be, living as long as they had, in as many cultures as they had. Besides, even with the closer connection they’d formed to these latest corporations over the last few centuries, they were still, well, bodies. Nothing to get excited about.
It was just that Aziraphale could count on one hand, with some fingers taped neatly together, the number of times he’d been to Crowley’s Mayfair flat. They met covertly all over London to discuss their current…project…and Crowley occasionally popped by the bookshop with wine or dessert or lunch or a book or…whatever else caught his fancy. But they didn’t meet in Crowley’s flat. Which Aziraphale was more than fine with – it was much too open, empty, and white for his scattered and cluttered taste.
But the promise of a good steam got him up and moving.
--*--*--*--*--*--
Crowley wasn’t nervous about having the angel in his flat, because Crowley didn’t get nervous. Crowley was calm, cool, and collected. He was the epitome of all the good c’s. Calm, cool, collected, comfortable Crowley, definitely not bouncing his leg nervously as he guided Aziraphale through his open flat, past the terrified plants, through the bedroom (“Two beds?” Aziraphale asked, but Crowley pretended not to hear. Two beds was perfectly reasonable. What if he needed a second bed? Who was the angel to question his decorative choices? It didn’t have anything to do with Aziraphale and the possible, if unlikely, scenario that he would need somewhere to stay that was well-warded against angels and demons and less generally known than the bookshop.), and into the promised bathroom.
He heard the happy little sigh as they entered the steam-filled chamber and grinned to himself.
Crowley’s flat wasn’t really his home – he wasn’t the sort to need a home, as he reminded himself on a regular basis. It was a place he stayed when not out and about doing evil. As such, the only rooms he really dedicated attention to were the bedroom, because he loved sleeping, the plant room, because they did have certain requirements beyond threats and beratement, and his ridiculously oversized and luxurious bathroom.
“It’s lovely,” Aziraphale said, a little pink cheeked already. The recessed pool was already filled with plenty of hot water, the air heavy with steam, the rain-style shower heads keeping up the heat and humidity. Where most of his apartment was white, this room was a dark charcoal-gray.
Crowley didn’t blush or clear his throat or mutter a random syllable (he did). “Strip down and step on in,” he said instead, trying to sound officious.
He was able to slide right in, being of demonic stock, but he had the opportunity to snicker his way through the angel stepping in one toe, ankle, shin at a time. Aziraphale certainly wouldn’t boil, but he’d be plenty pink after this soak.
Aziraphale shot him one of his patented bitchy looks. Crowley grinned back toothily.
It was interesting, seeing Aziraphale bare for the first time in a few centuries. He still wasn’t making an Effort, but his heaven-assigned muscles were covered with a soft layer of fat and downy gold hair. There were dimples at the small of his back, and a comfortable jiggle to his thighs completely absent in Crowley’s own corporation. Aziraphale looked comfortable and lived in and…content. Well, besides the whole end of the world thing.
Crowley glanced down at himself, mostly hairless, tannish skin slick with sweat, slender from top to bottom. He fancied he liked his own lived-in body as well. What a strange old world.
Once they were settled in the seats – “This does remind me of that lovely bath in Turkey, do you remember?” – “’Course I remember. Why do’ya think it reminds you of it?” – they took twin breaths, leaned forward, and let out their wings.
The angel gave out a low groan that made Crowley laugh, head thrown back, until he caught sight of the poor things. Their wings were similar in a great many ways – the same bluish-white, strong and broad (if not broad enough to lift them off the ground in any logical or scientific fashion), a little shine in the right light – but where Crowley’s were as neat as possible aside from the crumbling feathers here and there, Aziraphale’s were a mess.
“Still, angel?” he asked.
Aziraphale huffed. “They’re fine.”
“You look like a feathered hedgehog.”
“Well that, my dear, is just rude.”
Crowley pressed a wet hand to his chest. “Who, me? Rude? To an angel? Never!”
Aziraphale did not grace him with a response.
The silence relaxed into comfortable familiarity for a time. Crowley curved his wing close and began the slow process of preening. Aziraphale closed his eyes and leaned back in the hot water.
“At least we don’t have to do this every year,” the angel said eventually. “And it doesn’t take weeks. Or months.”
“Months?”
“Saw a film.”
“Right. Thought you read books.”
Aziraphale rolled his eyes. Crowley smirked.
Crowley let his legs float up, scaled toes poking out into the steam. Aziraphale studied them a moment. He looked…soft and lazy. Crowley liked it. Aziraphale was certainly better at relaxing than he was, but it still didn’t happen every day.
Crowley wiggled his toes. scales rubbing pleasantly.
“Do they shed?”
Aziraphale raised a wrist and waved it lazily. A find brandy appeared in his hand and, to Crowley’s pleased surprise, the demons. It didn’t occur to them that perhaps heat didn’t go do well with alcohol, but then, a great many things didn’t occur to them on a daily basis, and it was rarely a problem.
“Birds?”
“No, snakes. Or. You. Your….” Aziraphale waved a hand. “Your feet or. Your spine. Do they shed?”
Crowley took a gulp – he never was much of one for classy sipping. “Curiosity, Aziraphale? That’ll get you into trouble.” His smile was sly.
“Do they?”
Ah well, not taking the bait today. He could never be certain with Aziraphale; that was the fun part. If he was too easy to fluster, it’d be boring. And Aziraphale, prim and proper and bitchy and annoying and holier-than-thou and intelligent and sarcastic, was never boring.
“Yeah. Sometimes.”
Aziraphale hummed.
“Itches.”
Aziraphale nodded. If the angel slept, Crowley would think he was cozily half- asleep.
Really, it was a shame the angel didn’t sleep. Crowley’d love to snap a picture of the angel with his faced squashed in a pillow, maybe drooling a little bit. Lovely blackmail material.
Daring and mischievous, he poked one plush knee with his toe.
The angel shot him a half-hearted glare.
From there, the conversation began along the customary rambling paths, unfamiliar setting not preventing comfortable old arguments or the occasional tipsy giggle. In the miraculous heat of the bath, as feathers fell and new ones wiggled in, an angel and a demon who certainly weren’t friends chattered and teased and managed to forget, for a few precious hours, about the end of everything they held dear.
(Even, perhaps, each other, though they didn’t say as much. Of course.)
Can be read here on Ao3. My week's work is named "6000 Years of (Something?)"
Summary: Corporations were more a business asset than a personal thing, in the beginning.
==
The first time Aziraphale saw his eventual husband, the demon was a snake.
Aziraphale was standing on the wall of the Garden, contemplating the meaning of right and wrong as applied to the allocation of ethereal weapons when a large black snake slithered up beside him and commented, “Well, that went down like a lead balloon.”
(This is not precisely what he said, of course. They were speaking in Enochian, which is not the most adaptable language in the world – think French but times 1000 – and lead balloons didn’t exist. Translating from the ethereal language is tricky at best. Please allow for artistic liberties.)
Aziraphale was understandably distracted, but it is impossible not to form first impressions in certain circumstances. Personally meeting the snake whose temptations had changed the entire course of human history qualifies.
The demon was black from snoot to tail, with scales that shone with a rainbow of color in the sun. His (Her? Aziraphale was unclear enough on human sexes without taking demons or snakes into account. Angels were sexless – did Falling stick demons with one or the other organ set? How would he know?) the snake’s were bright and intelligent, the voice cautiously friendly. A handsome snake, despite all the color they’d just caused.
The chatted for a bit, not yet under the pressure to battle that would develop over the next centuries. At the end of the conversation, as the rain fell, Crawly slithered awkwardly away (the poor thing had legs just a couple of hours ago, after all – quite unfortunate for the species as a whole, it’s not as if Crawly was the genuine terrestrial article) and Aziraphale went to give the Eastern wall a check-over. He assumed, logically enough, that he wouldn’t see the demon again. After all, he belonged in Eden, and Crawly had been slithering off into the World.
----
The second time they met, they discorporated each other.
It was an understandable if regrettable mistake. They both looked drastically different from that day on the wall, and tensions had been on the rise between their respective home offices from the moment more demons slinked up in Crawly’s wake. After all, Aziraphale expected Crowley to be a snake, and Crowley expected the off-the-line generi-angel he’d met a few decades prior.
The Principalities were among the first to receive earthly corporations, and they were basic at best. Clearly based on the appearance of Adam, they lacked a certain sense of fine detail. Crowley would describe it (and did, to Aziraphale’s later frustration) as a “generic Ken doll with wings.” Even his hair – dark like Adam and Eve’s, shorn short – had a too-even plastic look.
But now his eyes were dark blue, his hair and skin a shade lighted to fit the move into northern Africa. The sculpted perfection of his first body looked much more realistic – softer, more human.
But all Crowley say at first were the wings (angels fluttering them around in full sight was all the rage at the time) and immediately panicked (smiting on sight was also all the rage, and Crowley had just dug his way back to the surface after his last smiting). So he panicked. Ot, when filling out the paperwork later, “calmly booked it.”
Only the angel reached out and grabbed his elbow, and Crowley jerked, hissed, and only realized they were on an unfortunately high cliff (“I was watching the sunset,” Aziraphale defended himself primly millennia later. “I am not responsible for you overreaction!”) when he teetered, the angel tottered, and they plunged to the forest below.
(“If you'd just let go-”
“Don’t try to pin this one on me, my boy!”)
It was only as the occult spirit of a black snake rose from the unfortunate body that a rolling celestial voice asked, “Crawly?”
“I’ve changed it to Crowley, actually,” the snake hissed as the recognized the shining scepter of a Principality.
“Oh,” the thunder said politely, “my apo-”
And then, they popped out of mortal existence and back to their home offices.
“Shhhhhoot,” Crowley muttered, and set off to begin the requisite paperwork for body number 4.
------
They quickly learned to recognize each other by aura over the years. The more often they met, the less importance physical appearance became. It was too variable, based on time, place, and the look of local humans. Besides, corporations were on loan, more or less, from Heaven and Hell - more corporate car than personal transportation.
There were Crowley’s eyes, of course, but the scaled yellow and black of his Core was easier to identify at any sort of distance. And Aziraphale’s “smug angelic sparkle” (Crowley’s chosen wording) was certainly easier to spot than the occasion-specific corporations heaven assigned after his must rarer decorporations.
It was the Arrangement that changed things.
They met up in England, where Aziraphale had been puttering around copying Old English texts with unwelcome Christian additions (the second half under orders from heaven). Crowley came across from Spain, dark hair and warm tan, slender and lanky for sneaking snakily in the shadows. Aziraphale was a smidge taller, broader in the shoulders and just starting to soften in the middle from the war-ready bodies he was always assigned.
The Arrangement was primarily a form of friendly laziness, born of the shared realization that their home offices were using them – and their precious time – to maintain some ethereal/occult balance on Earth. But there were side effects – the sort which led to unaccustomed safety.
As they spent more time together, both heaven and hell formed the mistaken impression that they had become proper adversaries. After all, why else would an angel and a demon spend so much time in relative proximity? Certainly not to bicker and try out local wines and delicacies! As such, they were considered each other’s problem, and other agents generally left them alone. Swapping off jobs allowed them to do less work, but also created a point of content in case something went wrong. (Being accused of witchcraft was a fairly common occurrence for both of them; within a decade of the Arrangement they both had the necessary religious raiment and/or angelic costuming to save the other from the edge of a blade or the crackle of flames).
Aziraphale had a tendency to set down roots every once in a while, settling in for a few decades to read and hoard. This gave Crowley an unofficial base of operations as well, which avoided the weather-related events that sometimes led to discorporation. Sometimes he forgot to pay attention to things like hypothermia or dehydration. But Aziraphale was all about snacks and drinks and warm blankets, so Crowley found himself inhabiting for the same body for close on 1000 years.
So by the time Armageddon was on the rise, they had come to know each other not only by aura, but by face. Crowley knew the dark blue eyes, the softness purposefully maintained over the angelic muscles underneath – the curve of his cheek, the hint of a second chin, the bitchy twitch of his lips, the impeccable hands. The angel’s hair curled around his ears, dark blond or pale brown, carefully nondescript, and he wore glasses he didn’t need because he liked the aesthetic, though he was too stubborn to admit it. Crowley despaired over his light colored button ups and collection of sweater vests and bowties. Why he’d decided to just stop in the 50s and stay there was a mystery even to Aziraphale’s closes frienemy. Aziraphale’s appearance was about softness, approachability, all wrapped up in outfits more suited for four decades prior.
And Aziraphale felt Crowley walking in the shop, of course – the shop was fond of Crowley and refused to shut him out – but it was the sight of dark hair in the latest style, watchful eyes, sharp features, just handsome enough to tempt, but not to be too memorable. His movements, clothes, hair, sunglasses, all of it was designed to make him dashing, cool, human. Seeing it always made the angel smile, quite despite himself.
They were comfortable, their corporations. Recognizable as the odd pair who met in the park or at the Ritz. Homey. Home. Specialized and settled as surely as the bookshop.
