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It was swelteringly hot outside, the sort of heat that rose off the pavement in waves. Sitting in the park, on their regular bench, Crowley basked in it. The demon was not a snake any more than he was a human, but there were some preferences which seemed to permeate both forms. He had always been a fan of basking; limbless and looped around the branches of a tree, as a mess of limbs sprawled out on the ground. It was a pastime he had kept up, even after his serpentine obligations had ended. He even had a favourite spot, up on the roof of his apartment block. Crowley was good at basking. Even in the heights of summer, he never grew too hot.
Creatures like he and Aziraphale had no business getting too hot, thought Crowley, glancing around at the angel on his right. They could control the temperature of their physical corporations at will. Aziraphale had no good reason to have removed his jacket and folded it neatly over the back the bench. He didn't need to roll his shirtsleeves up to the elbow, exposing rather an alarming amount of golden-haired forearm. He just liked the effect. He just liked to play at being human. He was a ridiculous angel.
Giving a yawn, Crowley turned his attention back to the park at large. The scene was one of lethargic tranquility. Across the lawn, three ducks were fighting over a leaf that they thought was a crisp. A woman was jogging along a nearby path, pushing a baby in a pram. Two teenagers sat under a small tree, eating chips from styrofoam boxes.
Crowley let his eyes slide over them.
The pair couldn’t have been more than sixteen - gangly creatures with skinny boy limbs and adult hands. The taller of the two was staring off into the distance as he chewed on his lunch. The shorter was ostensibly doing the same but giving the game away, every so often, by glancing around at his companion. There was a palpable air of interest around the pair of them; of youth, and potential, and hormones.
This world was full of that feeling, the demon thought. Earth was full of possibility and beauty, yet humans invariably spent their lives staring at one another.
It was ridiculous, really. Crowley knew he should laugh at the concept. Only, the thing was, celestial and occult creatures weren’t much better. Look at him and Aziraphale, he thought. Here they were, enormous cosmic power at their fingertips, and they were choosing to spend their afternoon sitting on an uncomfortable park bench, reading a human newspaper, just soaking one another in. Their entire plan for the rest of the evening consisted of just hanging around together. Bit embarrassing, when you thought about it.
Crowley scratched at his nose, glancing sideways at the angel, admiring the little line that formed between his brows as he concentrated.
Noticing the attention, Aziraphale glanced up.
Crowley quickly pretended to be interested in something over by the duck pond.
The angel looked down again.
After watching the ducks for a minute, for posterity, the demon turned his attention back to the teenagers and found them still not-watching one another. He wondered, briefly, whether the boys’ presence in the park hadn’t been ordained by some Higher Power - to mirror his internal struggle over his own best friend. Then, he decided, on the whole, God probably had better things to do than watch him squirm.
Across the lawn, the teenagers both selected another chip and began to nod their heads in synchrony, movements matched to some inaudible beat. Squinting, Crowley noticed small white buds pressed into their ears. One per human. A shared set.
Wrinkling his nose, the demon gave a disgruntled noise.
“Ugh…”
Beside him, Aziraphale looked up and reshuffled his paper.
“Something the matter, dear?”
“Nah,” Crowley frowned, watching the two teenagers continue to bob their heads. “S’just…”
“What?”
“I, uh… AirPods,” the demon offered in explanation, waving a hand towards the two humans. Aziraphale’s looked over, blinked a few times, then looked back to Crowley.
“Some kind of audio playback device, I presume?”
“Yeah. It was a project of mine from a while back,” Crowley explained. “Thought I could make headphones a bit more irritating, you know? More expensive, designed to fall out as soon as you started running, easy to lose, right pain in the arse…”
“Well, it certainly sounds like one of yours.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve just realised that I missed a trick,” Crowley admitted. “Remember how you used to see young almost-couples sharing wired earphones and having to sit close, and brush up against one another.”
“Minds on their hearts,” the angel smiled, fondly.
“Their genitals, more like…”
Aziraphale pursed his lips.
“Well, yes. That, too.”
A moment passed, the pair of them watching the two humans under the tree. The taller of the two boys commented on something, the shorter one replied, then they both involved themselves in a renegotiation of the remaining sauce and chips.
“Anyway, I was just thinking it was bit of an oversight,” Crowley continued, eventually.
“What was?”
“Getting rid of the wires. Sitting close together was probably much more of a temptation than any hellish irritation they'll feel over losing overpriced tech.”
Aziraphale’s eyes slid over to Crowley’s face, a strange expression lingering around his eyes.
"Possibly."
“Just look at those two,” Crowley gestured, towards the teenagers. “Completely useless. How’re they supposed to end up carrying on if - left completely unsupervised - they’re still sitting a whole bluetooth connection apart? I mean, come on. I’m practically aiding chastity, at this point!”
Aziraphale watched him for a long few seconds. Then, lowering his paper, he leant over and kissed Crowley softly on the cheek.
The demon’s body jerked backwards in surprise.
“Wh-what was that about?” He sputtered.
“Oh, nothing, really," Aziraphale sighed, turning back towards his paper.
Crowley stared, brain scrambling for context.
“Did you just kiss me because I’m shit at my job?”
“Well, that certainly does make things easier…” Aziraphale continued, glancing up at him with warmth in his eyes.
Crowley glared at him.
The angel sighed.
“My dear, I was just reminded of how very much I love you. And that made me want to kiss you. I didn’t think you’d mind. Was I wrong?”
“Uh-,” Crowley blinked. “No, not really. You just… caught me by surprise is all.”
“Well, alright then. ”
Aziraphale turned calmly back towards his paper.
Crowley continued to stare.
They didn’t really do public displays of affection, he and Aziraphale. He supposed it was a hangover from the pre-armageddon days - when they’d had to be so careful about even letting on that they knew one another.
He had, of course, heard Aziraphale say that he loved him before. The angel had said it a number of times. The first time had been on the night they had switched bodies, when he had pulled Crowley close (wearing the wrong body and feeling entirely wrong-footed) and told him they were going to be okay. The second time had been a few days after that, (both of them back in their own bodies, this time) when Crowley had presented him with a fully restored and reordered bookshop, proud little grin pulling at his stupid mouth.
It was just that the words had always been said in moments of great emotion, before. And they had always had context of ’You’re my best friend and I love you’. And that wasn’t the case, today.
Crowley watched his best friend as he shook out his paper, turned the page, and began to read the article in the top left corner.
“How?” he blurted out, after a few minutes had passed.
“Hm?”
“How do you love me?”
The demon wasn’t entirely sure why exactly he was asking. It was only that Aziraphale hadn’t specified and somehow it felt important to clarify. Particularly with the topic of conversation. And the strange look in Aziraphale’s eye as he had said it. And… and yeah, it just felt important…
Aziraphale glanced up, thoughtfully, then turned his eyes back down to his paper - as if he thought that Crowley might find his next words easier to deal with if they weren’t looking at one another when he said them.
“I love you however you need me to love you,” he said, simply. “For the rest of our lives.”
Crowley blinked.
It was not the first time he had heard Aziraphale say ‘for the rest of our lives’, either. They had talked about their mutual decision to stay on Earth, before. They had discussed committing themselves to humanity and the world. The angel had cried into his shoulder, the night after Armageddon, and apologised for how they’d had to push one another away, and promised that that would never happen again. He’d said that he would always be there, for Crowley, for the rest of their lives. However long they had left.
Commitment, they had talked about, then. Friendship, they had talked about. Even love, they had talked about. But they had never really combined all of those aspects in one conversation. And they’d never gone into detail.
“S’just a bit of a dangerous precedent to set, isn't it?” Crowley offered, eventually, watching the tip of Aziraphale’s nose catch in the summer sun. “I am a demon, after all…”
“You are you,” Aziraphale answered, calmly. “That is rather the point.”
“But…” Crowley watched him, measuring his words carefully. “What if you went around promising things like that and then I went and… and wanted you to love me in some grotesque way like…” he pulled a face, motioning towards the two humans under their tree, “…earphones, and touching… and all that nonsense…”
Aziraphale tilted his head, slightly.
“I’ve taken that into account.”
“Oh.” Crowley’s mouth had been prepared to pulled back into a smirk - prepared to laugh the whole thing off, pretend it was all a joke - but Aziraphale’s words drove the air right out of him. He blinked. “Right.”
A few moments passed, his demonic heartbeat overexerting itself against his demonic eardrums, then Crowley realise that he needed a touch more elaboration. It really wouldn’t do to misread this sort of thing.
“Sso, you’d be interested in that sort of sstuff, then? I mean… touching and whatnot?”
Aziraphale took a moment, still staring down at his paper, before replying.
“It’s something I like,” he replied, eventually. Diplomatically.
“Right.”
They sat in silence for nearly ten seconds.
“Is it something you like?” Aziraphale asked.
“Uh…” Not with just anyone, the demon thought, but definitely with you. Yeah, definitely with you. “Yeah, I mean… I could do.”
“Is it something you'd like with me?”
Crowley tried hard not to swallow his own tongue, eventually managing a few sounds that closely approximated English.
“Y-yhsss…ss’it isss…”
“Well, then.” Aziraphale cleared his throat and turned over his paper, magicking a pencil from thin air to fill out the crossword. “I suppose that’s something we shall have to consider.”
A couple of seconds passed in complete silence. Crowley’s brain short-circuited, then slowly clicked back into gear, grinding through the events of the past few minutes and trying to rectify them with six thousand years and all that he had ever understood about Aziraphale.
A few feet away, across the bench, the angel took a steadying breath, then began to mark out answers to his crossword.
“No rush,” he assured Crowley, calmly, after thirty seconds had passed. “Just… have a think on it.”
The demon let out a heavy breath.
“…Kay.”
It was a bloody good thing they weren’t meeting one another’s eyes, he thought, staring into the side of his best friend’s cheek. If he got any redder, he might spontaneously combust.
They sat for five minutes in contemplative silence, Aziraphale filling in the answers to all of the ‘down’ questions. Crowley eventually managed to tear his eyes off the angel and stared around the park, hoping for inspiration on what to do next - but nothing came. The ducks, by the river, continued to fight over their leaf. The teenagers, under the tree, continued to bob along in time to their music. A few more humans walked past, on their way to other things, but none of them had any advice.
Eventually, Crowley realised he was just going to have to go on instinct.
Slowly, bone-shakily carefully, he rearranged himself on the wooden bench, hooking one arm over the back of the frame and sliding one leg closer to Aziraphale’s across the seat until their knees touched - the lightest touch the demon could manage.
At first, Crowley thought he might have gone too light, because Aziraphale seemed not to notice. A horrific few seconds passed while the angel traced out an ‘a’ in the final box of ‘candelabra’. Then, taking a slightly longer breath than usual, Crowley’s friend pressed his knee back into the demon’s and left it there. And they sat. Knees pressed together. Touching.
Crowley stared fixedly ahead, towards at the river.
Well. There they were, then, he thought, as his heart rate began to plateau. Touch established. Slippery slope, from here on in. A bit exciting though, too, another voice muttered at the back of his consciousness. There was a whole world of things open to them if they were both interested in touch.
“Those Ear Pod things sound like a particularly vile invention, by the way,” Aziraphale offered, after they had sat for some time. “There was no need to make headphones any easier to lose than they already were.”
“AirPods.” The demon corrected. A little higher than usual. A tiny bit breathless.
The angel’s smile twitched.
“Either way. Very evil.”
“Thanksss.”
They sat a while longer.
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