Chapter Text
It was an evening in late June, or possibly early July, the first time it happened. Aziraphale remembered particularly because the street outside his shop was still firmly in the vibrant and glittery throes of Pride season, festooned in rainbow regalia from streetlight to shutters.
It was quite late in the evening. Aziraphale was locking up, preparatory to going upstairs, when he spotted Crowley coming, as Aziraphale thought, across the street towards the shop.
Aziraphale straightened, a smile threatening, and unlatched the door again with a thought. It had been a day or two since he'd seen the demon, and the prospect of an evening spent languishing in a bottle of red with him was cheering indeed. Except, as it transpired, Crowley's destination was not the bookshop at all.
It was one of the quirks of living in Soho that one often encountered, mostly (although hardly exclusively) on Friday and Saturday evenings, gaggles of young people in revealing attire, passionately energised at the thought of grinding their intimate parts on one another in one of the district's myriad clubs. Aziraphale certainly didn't mind -- on the contrary, he'd cast an appreciative eye over more than one young man as he passed the bookshop, especially when the craze began for mesh jerseys and midriff-baring things that were far more crop than top.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious from what Crowley was wearing that he had a similar destination in mind, but then, Crowley had always garbed himself like an expensive, Gothically-inclined rentboy; and moreover, Aziraphale had known him for several thousand years and had never known him willingly go anywhere cramped or sweaty unless he was on the job.1 Since the not-apocalypse, Crowley, like Aziraphale himself, had been a free agent: no longer did he tempt, torture or titillate in the name of Hell. Crowley was evidently not under anyone's orders.
And yet, the fact remained that he was crossing the Soho street at pace, wearing an unfamiliar leather jacket with studs on it and a springy-looking top which glittered like haematite and had (there were no two ways about it) been left apparently unfinished by the manufacturers, stopping abruptly above Crowley's navel.
Aziraphale stepped back from the window, nonplussed, as Crowley, thus attired, passed without affording the shop a second glance.
He wasn’t going the right way for any of the larger clubs and he wasn’t – yes, all right, the jacket was leather, but Aziraphale dismissed with a skittish mental curlicue the idea that Crowley intended to spend his evening at any venue nominally or aesthetically dedicated to that material. He was two stone too slender and – as the springy top and its dimensions made obvious, although Aziraphale knew it anyway – far too follicularly challenged for that. But there was one place, appropriately hollowed out in the cellarage of a shop (of the kind that now appeared in perfectly ordinary shopping centres, but which still had a cordoned-off backroom selling colourful plastic items with the IQ of a bright Tamagotchi, and also chocolate dicks), where Aziraphale really could imagine him fitting the bill. After all, Crowley enjoyed be-bop.
Aziraphale hadn’t been inside a club during ‘club hours’ for twenty years. He knew the cocktail menu but mistrusted the very notion of what he persisted in calling “disk jockeys”. Of course there were places that needed a guardian angel, though he hardly thought such ministrations underpinned Crowley’s patronage. And anyway, Aziraphale thought, there were enough hovering spirits, better and more humane than either of them, tethered to those places by association and memory.That being the case, Aziraphale could only conclude that Crowley had dragged himself up in this garish outfit (which, yes all right, looked more than slightly fetching) because he wanted, for personal reasons, to slither into a club full of overheated young men in sartorially unimpeachable style. Crowley had decided, driven by some unknown motivation, that this was what he was going to do with his life now;2 no longer content to spend a wholesome Friday evening in the bookshop flat, no! Instead, for Crowley, the draw of the body glitter and the sensual bath bomb, the bright pink shop frontage and the slyly cocked eyebrow.3
Aziraphale didn't know what the reason was, and that infuriated him.
Crowley, by this point in Aziraphale’s denunciation, was fully out of sight, but far from out of mind. Aziraphale went to bed, or rather, he went upstairs and lay down on a soft horizontal surface clutching a well-worn first edition of Brideshead Revisited. For once, though, Waugh wasn't enough to hold his attention, although Aziraphale did manage to muster a frisson of the old familiar irritation as the plot devolved into all that terrible business with Sebastian and his German friend. What was he doing with himself, Aziraphale thought crossly, as if he hadn't read the book a hundred times. What life choices, when he could be having a quiet evening with his friend who loved him dearly.
Possibly there was some element of projection at work.
Aziraphale sighed and removed his reading glasses. Presuming that Crowley did not in fact intend to spend the rest of the world’s life in a cellar under Wardour Street, Aziraphale could and would ask him about it the next time they met, and then see. It was probably all some ridiculous misunderstanding which Crowley would clear up at once.4 Brideshead Revisited set atop his current bedside stack, Aziraphale decided, mistakenly, that a little sleep would help him.
Angels very rarely dream, but Aziraphale had a disconcerting one that night, and awoke so discombobulated, that – notwithstanding a terse and inangelic vocabulary – he accidentally sold four books in one morning. A favourite cup chipped between his fingers. The newspapers, which Aziraphale still had hand-delivered (much as he enjoyed meandering through to Argyll Street, via the skincare concessions in Liberty, to purchase the Guardian, The Celestial Observer, and occasionally The Lady or Vogue),5 looked as though somebody had put their size twelves across them in an hobnailed boot. He was distressingly low on oolong, and someone had been sick on the kerb outside his shop. 6 The unprecedented sales in his bookshop meant unprecedented footfall, and Aziraphale’s headache made squinting and scowling at each customer equally incrementally more taxing as the morning wore resentfully into its afternoon sequel.
And then the bell jangled, and Crowley walked in.
Walked, thought Aziraphale resentfully, wasn’t the word for it.
Crowley lurched like a tarantula at the awkward adolescent stage, lolled (almost in both senses) beside a new display-case which Aziraphale had been most displeased to discover that morning. The demon cast a sunglassed eye over its contents – Michael Field, Amy Levy, a nice reprint of Flush and three different biographies of Vita Sackville-West – with an expression which, even at a distance and behind those lenses, a quivering Aziraphale recognised as both sardonic and meaning. The angel accordingly tried to look like he had no idea who Crowley was. The demon approached the desk.
Crowley smiled at him, hatefully cool and cheerful. “Lunch?”
“It is three p.m.,” said Aziraphale, and he meant it to sting.
“Is it?” Crowley asked. He looked at his wrist, where his watch wasn’t, and touched his bare skin with an abstracted and reminiscent air, the vaguest hint of a secretive smile playing over his lips, and Aziraphale hated him.
“Yes,” said Aziraphale (devastatingly, he trusted), and jabbed at the till-buttons. Since he was neither selling nor cashing up, this had a bad effect on the till and made it emit receipt-paper. The torn-off stub accused him of selling Pride and Prejudice for £5.99, which was offensive.
“Oh,” said Crowley, who still had a little bit of glitter about his temples. “Late one. So, come on, come on.”
"Has it never occurred to you," Aziraphale asked flatly, "that if you will loaf over and ask me to lunch at three in the afternoon, it is very likely that I will already have eaten?"
"Yes," said Crowley, lavishly unfussed, "but I've known you six thousand years, angel. You can always eat again."
"I will have a coffee," Aziraphale said, after a long, cold moment. Part of him longed to turn Crowley down flat, but the sensible bit of him was more interested in mining him for information, and it never did to cut off one's own nose to spite one's face.
They went to a luridly-coloured cafe in a neighbouring street, which had won Aziraphale's heart by opening mainly at eleven in the morning and occasionally not until two, according to the proprietor’s whim. Aziraphale thought this an admirable exercise of free will, and also enjoyed their bubble tea, which he often dropped in to order when passing. Crowley, naturally, ordered tea on its own; it was only right and proper that Aziraphale should ask for a waffle with gelato and strawberry sauce, just to make sure the poor dears were taking in enough cash to meet the exorbitant rent.
"Wonder what that's made of," Crowley mused, pointing at the elaborately bedecked waffle on Aziraphale's plate. "It's sparkling, look."
"Ah, yes," Aziraphale said, following Crowley's line of sight. "Edible glitter. All the rage in summer these days. Mainly cornstarch, I believe."
"Is it," said Crowley, smiling. He had propped his chin in the palm of one hand and was eyeing Aziraphale with an unreadable expression, mouth quirked at one corner. Aziraphale felt abruptly quite sick of Crowley’s inscrutability (though what, he wondered, would become of Crowley scrutable?), and took the feeling out on his waffle, stabbing at it fiercely enough that one tine of his plastic fork crumpled in on itself.
"Oops-a-daisy," said Crowley, repairing it, which only served to irritate Aziraphale more.
"Speaking of glitter," he said, "there’s some in your hair."
“Is there?" Crowley cocked his head slightly, making the stuff twinkle in the light from the street. "Maybe it's just my natural verve expressing itself. Had you thought of that?"
"No," said Aziraphale sourly, and glowered at his gelato.
A waiter, with the impeccable discernment and tact common to his kind, chose this moment to appear at Crowley's elbow, cloth in one hand and menu in the other. He was obviously about to ask if Everything Was All Right and whether Anything Was Wanted, but before he could do so, Crowley looked up, the waiter looked down, and both of them broke into identical expressions of pleased surprise which made Aziraphale feel slightly sick.
“Hey, Anthony,” said the waiter, and Aziraphale broke out in prickly heat. Absolutely fuck off, he thought, unbidden, and did not wish the thought unthought. Anthony. It wasn’t that he disliked it, but it simply wasn’t Crowley’s name . It was a garnish, an adornment – not unlike the glitter, he thought, as the waiter dropped the cloth on the table (Aziraphale regarded it as he would have done a cow-pat) and put a smudged, stamped hand on Crowley’s arm. Crowley smiled.
“Hey! Long time no see.”
As they’d very obviously seen each other night before, Aziraphale thought this at best a feeble witticism, and continued to sulk into the strawberries.
Aziraphale had always disliked watching Crowley interact with anyone else -- anyone, anyone at all, excluding small animals and that time Crowley had got stuck at a party talking to Mother Teresa.7 He had spent millennia not looking directly at the issue, knowing it must reflect some enormous flaw8 in himself, but he knew it to be true. Crowley had, and had had, other friends: he did not spend all, or even most of his time (until recently) with Aziraphale. So it was all perfectly quotidian, but at the same time made Aziraphale feel deeply catty and possessive.
With this young person, though, the usual low simmer of irritation had instantly become a frenetic boil. Possibly it was the fact that he was touching Crowley, as if Crowley were not an immortal occult being, shaped by God's own hand and subsequently varied through theological misunderstanding, but instead the glittery Camden layabout as which he self-fashioned. Possibly, it was the fact that Crowley had been with the waiter and his ilk last night, when Aziraphale had been perfectly open to spending a pleasant few hours with him – which the serpentine bastard must have known – only to be roundly ignored, in favour of a sweaty cellar and music with unintelligible words. Not a nice burgundy and something amusing on toast, oh no. Not the choicest newcomers in Aziraphale’s drinks cabinet. Not friendship.
The waiter was slim and dark-eyed and Aziraphale begrudgingly admitted this probably had something to do with it as well.9 He was experiencing a growing urge to kick Crowley under the table and then exclaim piteously about it, as if it had been an accident.
Then the young man produced a leaflet, slightly crumpled, from the back pocket of his jeans (Aziraphale was frankly astonished said jeans had room for anything except his pert buttocks) and proffered it: "Did anyone give you one of these at Throb? You'd be really welcome."
Throb, thought Aziraphale furiously. Throb! He could feel a long-threatened red mist descending. His tea-cup clattered like the shutting gates of Hell.
Crowley was pretending not to notice. Aziraphale knew it was pretence, because he'd caught a sidelong flash of the yellow eyes and a twitch in the jaw before Crowley determinedly pasted a smile on his face and looked away, turning his shoulders towards the waiter.
"Oh, yeah, I've seen these around. The protest against the Johnson Bill, right? Portland Place?"
"That's it," said the waiter. He was looking at Crowley as if he was dessert. Which he bloody well wasn’t. In fact if, metaphorically speaking, the waiter so much as picked up a spoon in reference to Crowley, Aziraphale was prepared to chop off said waiter’s hand at the wrist.
Unexpectedly, Crowley turned to Aziraphale. "Robbie has a hand in organising this," he said brightly, waving the leaflet under Aziraphale's nose. "Sure I'll be there. Important stuff."
Robbie swayed off, which was improbable unless those stupid jeans were predominantly lycra, and Aziraphale, whose red mist had become a vast plume of carmine indignation, tried to plot a response that would not register as if written in the oversized, spiky capitals of a spinster attempting her first anonymous letter, finally throwing down the devastating: “Oh, please!”
Crowley raised an eyebrow. A bead of gelato dropped onto the back of Aziraphale’s hand. Crowley looked at it, and then flicked his eyes back up to Aziraphale's face, looking somewhere to the right of amused. "Good shot," he remarked drily.
Aziraphale tsked and wiped the back of his hand on his napkin (not cloth. He hoped it was recycled paper, at least).
"What's that face?" Crowley said, in the same half-laughing tone. He sounded as if he were addressing a child who was doing something entertaining but was too young to understand why, and Aziraphale hated it intensely.
"Well," said Aziraphale, unable or unwilling to hold his tongue entirely. "A protest? As if. It’s patently a transparent attempt to seduce you."
" As if?" Crowley repeated. He was properly smiling now. "Don't worry, angel. I know it's not really your scene. I won't ask you to chaperone -- promise."
The red mist was now the sort of near-sentient fog which had no place anywhere outside a Gothic novel. Aziraphale crossed his legs under the table and drew himself firmly upright. "I will have you know, " he said tightly, "that were you to actually want my company,” – a little quaver here, but Aziraphale flattered himself that the dreadful import of his words was too mighty for it to register, – “ it would most certainly not be the first protest I've been to. Far from it, in fact. Far from it!" He brandished his fork threateningly.
“The O.P. riots? Qu’ils mangent brioche ?”
The fog suddenly became black ice. “Chaeronea. The Law Reform Society. The MRG. Civil rights for all, for all persons – standing and in several cases lying with the poor children protesting their inadequate care as they suffered from a disease that I believe your colleagues regarded as one of their finer hours.”
“Hey,” said Crowley, genuinely alarmed, “That was nothing to do with me –”
“Oh, no, precisely. Nothing to do with you in implementation and absolutely fuck all in the succour provided. And there have been plenty of other causes which even your goldfish memory might – remember Anti-Section 28? Writing the Ithaca Statement? Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners? But you don’t actually know where Wales is, do you? And as for your whereabouts on the night of Stonewall, Crowley, some of us were fighting the good fight while some of us were sleeping off dry Martinis with the entire cast of Oh! Calcutta. Which is not - absolutely not to omit your behaviour throughout the 1960s. While you were robbing churches and growing a pageboy bob – ”
“It was not,” Crowley said furiously, “a pageboy bob. It was an Andy Warhol reinterpretation by actual Toni and actual Guy –”
“I was trying to make poor Ken Halliwell see a decent psychoanalyst. You’re a fiend.”
“That is the general idea, angel,” Crowley spat. “But forgive me for wanting to make the best of whatever world we’ve got left.”
Aziraphale seethed. The remains of the waffle were forgotten, and he set down his fork. "Yes, well. That's rather part of the job description, isn't it? Forgiving? Even when --"
"Even when?" Crowley leaned forward across the table. "Even when what? Go on, angel; you've started; you might as well finish."
"I'll get the bill," Aziraphale said, and stood. He half-expected -- well, mostly expected -- Crowley to abandon him there and then, bracing himself for the probability that, when he turned back from the counter, the demon would be gone, nothing but his dust left behind. To his surprise, Crowley was loitering by the door when Aziraphale had handed over the appropriate monies and glowered a little more at Snake-Hipped Robbie at the till.
"Get a last barb in, did you?" Crowley said.
"Certainly not," said Aziraphale, striding past him and out of the door, choosing not to add that this was largely because he didn't care to waste his breath on anyone who thought Club Crowley the hottest destination of the summer.
It was gratifying when Crowley followed, and unreasonably infuriating when they parted on the corner of Dean Street, Crowley bidding him farewell with apparently blithe unconcern. Aziraphale didn’t see him still standing there ten minutes later, of course, but in thought pursued a genuinely blithe and unconcerned Crowley back to Mayfair, where – the angel had no doubt – the demon’s overpriced cell of a flat was now wall-to-wall firemen and rainbows and whatever else Crowley had apparently decided were the accoutrements of the modern homosexual (this was egregious projection on Aziraphale’s part. Firemen made him feel all fluttery and odd, and during the 1980s he had indeed experimented with a tartan tie in seven+ colours). Except, oh no, Crowley was the modern homosexual, the right-on demon who’d clearly decided to celebrate the not-apocalypse by showing off his abdomen and working his way through a quantity (not quality!!) of unsuspecting men. And posing sycophants like Robbie. And he, Aziraphale, renegade Principality and Crowley’s actual friend for six thousand years (Aziraphale was internally shrieking again, and if human, would have had a headache) was meanwhile just – right there!
Aziraphale moved all his Gertrude Stein to the shop window, and aggressively ate a KitKat. It wouldn't do his midriff any good, but he thought the cheap chocolate would pair well with the general taste of enervation in his mouth.
In the event, Aziraphale found that his petty move soon rebounded upon him. The Gertrude Steins seemed to act upon the local female populace as catnip: Aziraphale spent the remainder of the afternoon chivvying girls in dungarees away from the first editions, whilst cursing Crowley, Soho, and himself. He closed the shop at five and went upstairs in pique, albeit not before collecting the remainder of the eight-pack of KitKats with which to soothe himself.
Upstairs in his bedroom, six KitKats and two gins and tonic down, Aziraphale wondered irritably whether Crowley was actually intending to go to the Johnson Bill protest and, if so, whether it was out of a desire to seduce That Boy10 or out of a broader inexplicable drive to Involve Himself in the Community. Crowley had always disdained the whole idea of Community, and Aziraphale found to his mild annoyance (surely this was unbecoming of an angel!) that he'd rather preferred it that way. Perhaps he would go along too, just in case. It wouldn't do to have Crowley making a scene.11
What he hadn't counted on was A Scene -- not the one he'd expected, but definitely A Scene nonetheless -- taking place in the street the following afternoon. He knew it was a scene, because there were a number of people looking at it, and when Aziraphale stepped out of the shop to investigate, it became very clear that It was Crowley.
Crowley had grown his hair. For over a minute, Aziraphale genuinely thought that was the extent of it, and could condemn neither the overweening vanity of a demon who marshalled the universe’s occult potencies to lengthen his locks, nor the shallowness of the perambulating flotsam who stopped on path and pavement to admire it. Aziraphale could see nothing at all excessive about staring raptly at Crowley’s dark-red waved hair and letting one’s ice-cream melt and one’s produce fester as the early-evening traffic built. Humans were, after all, mere mortals.
Crowley even had that very charming topknot, which always put Aziraphale in mind of a ballerina, above the abbreviated cascade of beech-red waves which, in toto, strongly evoked both the late 2000s and – as an enchanted adolescent girl with a chunky pink phonecase was also loudly realising – Aziraphale’s (joint-)favourite member of the heartwarming programme about buying American men button-down shirts and normal shoes.12 Aziraphale was even happy that Crowley's hair was bringing Soho to a standstill. Then the audience parted, slightly, and Aziraphale’s eyes became saucers.
Crowley had grown his hair, and acquired clothes that – Aziraphale didn’t rightly know what to call them.The main garment was, technically, he supposed, a dress. Of course they’d both been women, for Apocalyptic and pedagogical purposes, and also for more social reasons back in (respectively) 1484, 1663, 1927, and – simultaneously, in a then-rare burst of shared purpose in trying to stop Satanists infiltrating a girls’ boarding school – in 1933.13 Indeed, if Crowley had expressed a desire to be henceforth Antonia of the close-fitting Chanel as opposed to Anthony J. Crowley of the leather-based Balmain, Aziraphale could never have admired her less for it. But this was definitely Crowley as Aziraphale knew him (as the dress’s contours made perfectly clear, good Lord) in some sort of clinging, changeable-coloured slip, the kind of thing Cleopatra might have worn as an act of vengeance, beneath an elaborate, cropped black jacket that looked as though its brocade was having a tantrum and that was at least nine-tenths shoulders. This ensemble was worn above, and in a technical but simultaneously laughable sense over what Aziraphale could only call leg coverings (he doubted they were substantial enough for leggings) fashioned in a mixture of haematite, onyx, and jet. They told Aziraphale almost everything there was to know about Crowley’s lower half. Aziraphale could only assume the vain bastard had had to lie down to put them on, then realised Crowley had probably miracled them straight on to his naked legs, and was so offended that his own (sensibly socked, shod, and slack-clad) legs almost gave way.
This was to say nothing at all of Crowley’s shoes, or rather boots. Aziraphale refused to consider these and instructed his brain to wipe all traces. The heels would have been considered immoderate even in the French courts most addicted to immoderation, and worn only by the most decadent favourites of the most extravagant rulers, the very last night before the pitchforks and the tumbrels and the revolutionary bonfires arrived. The boots were pointed and astonishing and Crowley’s walk - that syncopated jutting thing that proclaimed that Crowley had never done an honest day’s work but was about to take the night apart with his hipbones - existed only in the most nominal relation to them. The stilettos suggested that they could kill a man, and that said man would just be grateful for the favour. The sharpness of his sunglasses and the overall glinting, sinuous, embellished effect made him look like a spiteful, gorgeous manifestation of the latest Parisian fashion feud. His hairstyle was that of a gay Renaissance poet. The sigil on his ribcage (visible through the dress) made him look like an absolute tart.
It was an outfit calculated to arouse, and what infuriated Aziraphale above all was the fact that it was having instantaneous effect.
It wasn’t that such extravagant ensembles were rarely seen in Soho. It was more that they were rarely seen at this time in the afternoon, barely even tea time, and that the wearers were usually possessed of far less natural charm and pizazz than Crowley. Part of it was owed to his demonic wiles, but part, Aziraphale had to admit, was simply Crowley’s human form itself, all long clean lines and that splendid, sinful red hair. He looked, Aziraphale thought painfully, like a man determined to deliver himself like a box of Belgian chocolates straight into another man’s arms, and Aziraphale fizzed with indignation at the prospect.
He wasn’t conscious of having locked up the bookshop until he realised that he was on the pavement outside it, keys in his pocket and determination in his mind. Crowley could still be seen — one could hardly avoid seeing him — slinking around the corner, some six foot eight in the heels, looking like a glamorous giant sent to enact sex magic upon the earth, or at least upon Soho and perhaps also Seven Dials. It wasn’t exactly difficult for anyone — even someone as generally inept at the job as Aziraphale had historically been — to follow him.
Crowley sashayed down the pavement like a scythe, cutting an effortless path through the crowd, and in his lengthy shadow scurried Aziraphale, feeling dumpy and infuriated. Every so often he would pause, and Aziraphale's heart would flutter, fearful of discovery, but then on would go the hips again. Aziraphale had never seen anyone but Crowley walk hips-first; it so defined his gait that Aziraphale was sure he would have known Crowley anywhere by it, even from a great distance and without his spectacles.14
Evidently and irritatingly, Aziraphale was not the only person in Soho for whom this was true. When Crowley did eventually halt outside a very crowded and garishly-signwritten bar (Aziraphale hovered furtively on the opposite pavement) two men appeared instantly to greet him at the door.
The men stretched up as if to be kissed, like eager acolytes. Crowley duly kissed them, folding himself nearly in half, it seemed, to do so. Aziraphale seethed. He could just have levitated up to Crowley’s lips and possibly also set fire to a postbox, but aside from the many other unimpeachable reasons why that wouldn’t be happening, it was at least four hours too early for any such behaviour to pass as unremarkable.
Aziraphale had never seen Crowley kiss. He’d assumed it was an anatomical possibility. And, of course, kissing humans was well within the demonic tempting field — unless you were a demon with frogs or spores or flies on your face, all of which understandably tended to put the humans off. Indeed, in one sense sexual temptation fell rather more squarely within the demonic duties than Crowley had been for some time. But Aziraphale, recoiling from the bar’s sound system but intrigued by the repurposing of leather goods as decorative ceiling-ware, didn’t think Crowley had kissed those men in order to tempt them sexually.
Correction: Aziraphale didn’t think Crowley had kissed those men in order to tempt them sexually and indenture them thereby into servitude to a Lord of Hell and thus to eternal damnation.
He suspected, scurrying to the far side of the bar and wondering whether gin & Dubonnet had come back in (one of the handbags nailed overhead had most strongly evoked the Queen Mum), that Crowley had kissed those men in order to have a nice time.
“Drink?”
“Gin and Dubonnet, please, with three cubes of ice and absolutely no lemon - I am not particular as to the glass. Oh,” Aziraphale added, blushing as he glanced up. “I’m sorry. You’re on the wrong side of the bar. For serving drinks, I mean.”
“But not for ordering them,” the man said affably.
“Oh, well, that’s awfully kind,” Aziraphale replied, trying to crane past and see what Crowley was doing.
The man -- who was middle-aged, Aziraphale supposed, and wearing a leather jacket, but not in a way that felt terribly on purpose -- followed his gaze and smiled. "Some outfit, that."
"Quite," Aziraphale said, flustered at having been caught staring. He really had always been rather awful at stealth. He forced himself to look away, at least temporarily, from where Crowley was holding court on the other side of the room, surrounded now by no less than three fawning young men.
"Not really my sort of thing," the man said, catching the barman's attention with one upraised hand, "but impressive, I suppose. One large Chardonnay, please, and a gin and Dubonnet with -- let me see -- three cubes of ice and absolutely no lemon."
He looked back at Aziraphale, evidently pleased with himself, and Aziraphale threw him a kind smile as if scattering largesse. Humans did, bless their dear little hearts, tend to get so impressed with themselves over having successfully committed minor details to memory for longer than a thirty second span.
Aziraphale ventured another glance across the room. Crowley was now seated, one long leg thrown carelessly over the other, in rapt conversation with a blond boy in white jeans. The boy's hand, Aziraphale noticed with furrowed brow and pursed lip, had come to rest on Crowley's knee, and Crowley, the abject tart, was permitting it. It really wouldn't do -- not that it was Aziraphale's business, of course, but his sense of propriety was ruffled.
"Is that your ex or something?"
"Pardon?" Aziraphale blinked, and the man smiled understandingly.
"You keep --" The man inclined his head, gesturing towards Crowley, and Aziraphale felt himself go pink.
"Oh! Who? Oh, him?” Aziraphale said, as if there were other places one could look than at the terrible redhead mercilessly destroying lives in the garments of a glittering deity from a 1970s space movie. “No, no. No, not at all. I mean." Aware that he was being rather unconvincing, Aziraphale admitted, "I do know him. I was just wondering what he was up to."
"Courting attention, by the look of it," said the man, "so best not give him any. I'm Marcus." He held out his hand.
Not giving Crowley any attention, Aziraphale thought, was far more easily said than done. Still, he managed to focus himself sufficiently to shake Marcus's hand and offer his own dusty pseudonym, little-used since he stopped frequenting gentlemen's clubs where one was expected to have a first name other than "Mister."
The drinks arrived. Aziraphale tried to take in his surroundings, but could hear Crowley’s laugh again. He’d always thought Crowley laughed like a prince. He’d never heard Crowley laugh like that when Aziraphale hadn’t been the cause of, or at least involved in, the sound.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” Marcus said, putting a hand on Aziraphale’s arm. “Just visiting, are you?”
“In the neighbourhood,” said Aziraphale. Marcus’s shoulder was blocking his view of Crowley. It wasn’t helpful.
Of course, Aziraphale didn’t need to see Crowley to think of him. There were times - indeed, the new novels of the nineteenth century had provided useful paradigms - when it felt as if they were connected not by the thin scarlet thread so beloved of romantic humans, but by a great swinging bargepole, heavy and unbending, that impeded all Aziraphale’s movements and was less a tether than a yoke. Wherever he moved, unless he was actually mid-gavotte, it seemed his steps were in some measure dictated by Crowley’s. Not that he could flatter himself with having understood the demon. The abbreviated haematite ensemble of a few nights ago and this evening’s astonishing vision in heels indicated how wrong he’d got him.
He agreed to another drink.
And yet here they were, still yoked together - although that was wrong, wasn’t it? They weren’t in tandem. No shared burden now — all that was gone. They were just serpent and shadow. No mission; no need for counter-strategy. No need for comradeship at all, perhaps; perhaps Crowley had recognised it sooner. Aziraphale realised how little he was enjoying his emancipation. He felt suddenly he had as little understanding of a world without Crowley as he had of a universe without the world. Ridiculous to feel his presence so keenly as an absence. He could hear him still, laughing. (Aziraphale had a private devotion to Crowley’s laughter).
I decry, Aziraphale thought, with the clarity of a heavenly being who hasn’t yet realised his martini is very strong, every second he is not talking to me at my behest, and I would never compel him; I want him to come to me of his own free will. I resent this glittering finery because he has not put it on for me. I think he’s going to let that boy touch his —
“Sorry? You want — my ‘ phone number?”
In theory, Aziraphale was aware that he did have a telephone number. Privately he suspected it of being an act of Crowley that the little sequence of numbers had even been revealed in print, such that people could ring the bookshop with abandon, demanding folios and first editions and, occasionally, that Aziraphale surrender his premises to the local mob, Or Else.15 It was just that, first of all, he didn't know what it was;16 and second of all, the fact of being asked for it put an uncertain feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"If that comes as a surprise to you," Marcus said, "I must be losing my touch."
Oh God, thought Aziraphale frantically, and wondered if it would be ethically questionable just to slip Marcus into a pleasant little waking dream, just for long enough for Aziraphale to return from whence he came. Manfully,17 he decided the miracle would be frivolous and said aloud instead: "Oh, I'm afraid I've rather given you the wrong idea. I am dreadfully sorry."
Marcus did not look surprised, and Aziraphale was unsure whether this made things better or worse. Then Marcus said, "You should stop pining over him, you know. I don't think you're his type," which definitely swung the mercury towards worse, mostly because Aziraphale was miserably certain it was true. In stouter spirits he might have found the gumption to laugh a bitter and world-weary laugh and direct Marcus and his thoughtful jacket towards six millennia of wing-drooping ineffable misery. But that would have taken a third drink and stoutness of a less abdominal, more emotional kind that Aziraphale currently possessed.18
Instead, he smiled apologetically, ordered Marcus another drink, and slid off his barstool (dreadful, dangerous things) with only one muffled yelp. As he hurried to the exit — acceleration through the crowded bar now permissible since Aziraphale was not above performing miracles due to social embarrassment — he noticed that the slim young creature in white was now entirely seated on Crowley’s knee. Both boy and demon were laughing.
Back in his room above the bookshop (an irritating note through the door left a telephone number and inquired for Joe Orton paperbacks), after streets festooned with couples (necking, talking, definitely not threatening each other with Alpha Centauri), Aziraphale unfurled his wings, just for a moment. They stretched half the width of his bedroom from tip to tip and, in the mirror, he could see as ever that they were ivory and albus, snowdrop and pearl, their tints turning in the light to be crocus, dove-grey, slightly silver and blue. He rolled his neck and shoulders and tried the long, settling exhale. He wasn’t totally sure why he’d done it. He reminded himself that wings do not necessarily reduce the appearance of one’s waistline in comparison, and that you cannot really outfly buttered crumpets and cheesecake. Indeed, even if the appearance of snow-white wings did distract the human populace from one’s circumference and one’s shortness of leg (and Aziraphale was willing to bet that wings granted directly by the Deity would distract most humans from his proportional shortcomings), that didn’t mean that one would or should be able to compact oneself into a pair of white jeans. And even if he did, thought Aziraphale with the bitterness of imminent tears (Aziraphale, through history, had a bad though unconscious habit of unfurling his wings when alone and trying not to cry), Crowley would not want him to sit on his lap.
The fact was, though, the buggering mess of it all, which Aziraphale felt tipped it all from maddening to ludicrous, from unfortunate to pathetic, and which he’d been worm-eaten and concealing since 1941, was that he didn’t want to be the one to sit on Crowley’s lap.
He wanted to push Crowley onto his bed and take him apart. He had spent six thousand years on this mortal earth, astounded by the beauty and complexities of human folly and endeavour, blessing as best he could all the endearing ways they found to love each other, and not untouched by that scattering of mortal light himself. He had at some moments been a fellow-traveller. He had never, of course, been entirely honest; but his desires had (nearly always) been kind.
What he felt for Crowley was not kind. It was savage in its possessiveness, unreasonable, persistent, as timeless and impossible as a cat yowling all night in the yard. It stalked Aziraphale; it stained him like a birthmark; it liked to mock him by appearing before his face and laughing at him for having misunderstood it all so long. It forced Aziraphale out of being the kind of human he’d so convinced himself to be — genial, patient, sweetly diffident, jolly — and told him he was a ruthless vengeance machine with supernatural wings, the direct offspring of a deity so possessive of humanity that She’d murder her own Son just to make a point. Aziraphale imagined kissing Crowley and weighed that against, say, the fall of civilisations and nonetheless felt frightened that he wouldn’t be able to stop once he’d started.
He wanted to be good to him, of course. He loved the demon, the impossible inquisitive angel who had always been more beautiful than any of the leisurewear Heaven-workers with their over-abundant teeth. As Aziraphale folded his wings away, he remembered Crowley’s, the softness of black feathers with their jet and peacock light, the spectacular iridescent darkness that looked so utterly inviting to the touch. Eleven years and an impossible three months ago, they had sat in his shop, pissed and (in Crowley’s case) extraordinarily beautiful, and in the Park, and throughout Crowley had been threatening him with an eternity of Julie Andrews, and even now intermittently Aziraphale thought I shouldn’t mind an eternity of hearing Julie Andrews if what I was looking at were your wings. He wanted to take Crowley for an eternity of British Museum brunches and makeshift picnics on park benches; and delicious little morsels before dawn at Borough Market; and to tell him stories about marches and protests and members’ clubs and all the assignatory love stories told through a delicate wineglass and the sleights of hands and eyes. He wanted to say: look, I was there; I have been to Arcadia; I know all about it. Even if only as a visitor. He wanted to pull together all the strands of love and history in the world, and invite Crowley to admire their weaving and their resplendence.
And then, as above mentioned, he wanted to fuck Crowley into the bed.
It was dreadful, it was inconvenient, it was wholly implausible, and embarrassingly unlikely, and the impulse had never been more depressingly visceral than when seeing the infernal trollop consorting with that boy on his knee.
1Aziraphale could, just about, muster a nice colour in what passed for an English summertime. Crowley had had sunburn in 1843 and been angry ever since.[ return to text ]
2 Aziraphale detected no hint of a spiral in this thought. [ return to text ]
3 Aziraphale knew perfectly well, and at first hand, that the signifiers of contemporary gay life extended rather beyond this remit of Kylie Minogue’s dressing room, but then again, see footnote 2.[ return to text ]
4As if Crowley’s response to the ridiculous were to clear it up.[ return to text ]
5He subscribed to Country Life, the result of an advertising campaign where subscribers also received a free tartan ballpoint-style souvenir pen. Aziraphale had seen similar pens advertised as part of life insurance plans, but couldn’t justify a need. He did not subscribe to Gay Times, but he liked the pictures.[ return to text ]
6As Aziraphale furiously put it, we are all of us lying in the gutter, but only some of us are chucking up there.[ return to text ]
7That, Aziraphale readily conceded, had been one of the funniest moments of his life.[ return to text ]
8Aziraphale felt unable to give it a stronger definition. Not enjoying watching the social machinations of a demon could hardly be deemed sinful in an angel. Not enjoying it because you wanted the demon to concentrate on you undoubtedly could. [ return to text ]
9He himself was of course not snake-hipped. In fact, Aziraphale often felt that it was only in the strictest anatomical sense that he was hipped at all.
[ return to text ]
10Aziraphale thought it highly unlikely any political backdrop would be necessary for the seduction of Robbie, feeling that whatever part of Crowley so fascinated Robbie, it wasn’t his morals. [ return to text ]
11Part of Aziraphale was also thinking that if he stood close enough to Crowley throughout, that man and hopefully others might take them for a couple (incorrect) and assume that Crowley was off-limits (definitely correct). Aziraphale had used this tactic before, and was not even ashamed of it. [ return to text ]
12Joint with all four other members. Aziraphale adored Tan for obvious sartorial reasons, although – with deep regret – could not endorse an incomplete tuck. Bobby made him wish, with painful yearning, that he’d had a son; Antoni made Aziraphale devoutly glad Crowley had not. Aziraphale most often tried to imagine what he’d say if he met Karamo in life and after rejecting inadequate witticisms, always concluded that he would probably faint. Crowley liked Bobby and Tan and thought the others were fools.[ return to text ]
13The Satanists, terrified by the darkness of the schoolgirl heart, retreated (pale and muttering) before half-term, stranding Aziraphale (who felt honour-bound to observe his notice period) and Crowley (who for reasons mysterious remained too) there until Christmas. Miss Fell was humiliated in the staff-student hockey match, and Mamzelle Glissant told all the fifth-years about Collette. [ return to text ]
14Aziraphale, of course, did not need to be short-sighted, and had indeed in the past experimented with being long-sighted, but currently was enjoying the sensation of being able to blur out things more than twenty yards away when he took his glasses off. [ return to text ]
15Aziraphale was never conscious of dealing harshly with these types, but they did have a tendency to come a cropper in mysterious ways. One especially persistent chap had accidentally brutally stabbed himself in the stomach while shaving. Another had fallen out of a window and landed on the local Brexit Party candidate.[ return to text ]
16He knew Crowley’s, obviously, but that was sensible because that was a number he might need to dial.[ return to text ]
17Aziraphale obviously was not a man as such, but descriptivism. [ return to text ]
18And, given the specificity of “six millennia” and the tiny tyrannosaurus cufflinks Marcus was - as Aziraphale now noticed – wearing, a full and frank explanation would have necessitated not so much a cosy waking dream as, rather queasily, a hard factory reset.[ return to text ]