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There were stars in his dreams, and a hailing thunder of meteorites, but no sun. It was cold. But that was normal, wasn't it? One would be deathly cold in space or on earth without the light and warmth of that heavenly regard. Cold and grey.
He surfaced from the uncommonly deep slumber to the pebbly sound of rain pattering against the bedroom window.
Aziraphale opened his eyes.
Grey watery light rippled overhead. He felt underwater; as if while they'd slept the rain had pelted down and flooded up until their cottage was submerged, swallowed down by the inconstant whale of February English weather. Alone, the only companion the weight of the water, pressing in on him from all sides.
But that was awfully silly. He was perfectly dry, sleep-warm even, his legs tangled up in bedclothes. And he was not alone. He pushed a hand through cool sheets, and found...
...empty space.
Crowley?
He reached out with his angelic sense and found empty space in each of the cottage's rooms, upstairs and down. Emptiness in the garage—no Bentley, hmph—and the gardening shed, and in the wet clumps of the still-wintering flower beds of the back garden. Silent bulbs, wrapped in wet earth. Empty, alone. Not even a hint of demonic essence amidst the dripping trees.
"Crowley?" he whispered.
Empty air.
But the same air was also rich with the scent of brewed coffee. Crowley had made a pot before he went off wherever he'd gone.
It was probably much later than it seemed, given the lack of sun.
He debated lolling about in bed a bit longer. No, there was no need. They hadn't anything planned for the day. And now that he thought about it, Aziraphale did remember Crowley mentioning something offhand last night. Something about a jaunt into the village for seeds or garden supplies or somesuch.
To be honest, Aziraphale hadn't been listening closely. They'd been enjoying nightcaps on the back terrace, after all, sitting together in the loveseat with the soft cushions. The starry night wheeling overhead, a wonderful glittering projection to make him marvel at the vastness of God's creation, and yet…and yet his focus had been local.
He'd been admiring the way Crowley's fingers had threaded through his own, had been holding his breath as Crowley's thumb designed strange new wandering sigils into the well of his palm, the lines growing warmer and slower and softer with each stroke until Aziraphale had turned, aching, to meet him in a kiss.
"Angel," Crowley had muttered against his mouth, "angel—"
They'd forgotten to finish the nightcaps. The glasses were probably filling up with rain this very minute.
Well, no matter. He'd get up and get dressed, make himself a cup of tea and enjoy what was left of the morning.
He considered staying in his dressing gown, or just having one of those lovely days where he swanned about in the buff, but the weather was so dismal and chilly he couldn't help putting on all his usual things with his usual care.
Pants. Trousers. Socks with their springy garters. Vest and shirt and waistcoat. Pocket watch, to which he spared only the briefest of glances—ten before eight in the morning—before tucking it away.
Today all these accoutrements felt less like his long-held costume of humanity, and more like a soothing swaddle. A soft, warm armour. A second skin. He tightened his bow tie in front of the mirror and smiled at himself. Now? Tea. Yes.
He took himself down the silent stairs to the kitchen. Tea would be just the thing to shake off this sudden brown study. Tea and perhaps a book…or perhaps…
He could bake something! A pie? They still had apples in the cold cellar from last year's harvest, possibly. He set the kettle on the hob and went to investigate.
The dough was easy enough. Flour. Cold butter that he unthinkingly miracled into lard halfway through crumbling it into the flour. A big pinch of salt. Colder water. He coaxed it together with a tender whispering for flakiness, chilled it. Rolled it. Chilled it again while he peeled apples.
His hands were getting callused. His hands, that had remained soft through millennia of plague and storm and rebuilding with stone and wood and brick, had only become marked here in this quiet retirement. He who had felt the roaring spark of smiting fire leave his fingertips without a singe now boasted a small shiny burn the size of a thumbprint on his forearm from the top of the oven.
Crowley had kissed him there. Mouth of Hell, sharp-toothed and sharp-tongued, cooler than the white-hot smear from an Earthly appliance.
Where had that demon got to?
Never mind. It was fine. Never mind.
They had been living the cottage for over a year now, and Aziraphale still had trouble adjusting to the existence. To living without looking over his shoulder. Old habits—especially those held for untold millennia—were difficult to break. Even humans with their fleeting mortality knew that. But he could try. He would not give in to the worry that could still riddle him like a worm.
He peeled the rest of the apples, and sliced them, and rinsed each piece fussily and unnecessarily in lemon water. He mixed them with sugar and spices, and some chopped ginger, and some dabs of butter and tiny curls of lemon peel. He filled his crust and tidily covered the filling with its pastry blanket.
It baked, and filled the cottage with the smell of their autumn, their winter, the closeness of their days now linked back to the beginning, to the first bite of an apple in Eden, to sweet tart flavour on the tongue.
He made more tea.
The timer rang, and he took out the pie. Perfection, truly! Not even a hint of scorch round the edge. He set it on a trivet on the dining room table with its tartan-print cloth.
He made still more tea.
He sat at the table and inhaled the scent of Eden. He thought of all those years, all that stuffing down of himself, hiding, like a freshly sliced apple under cover of sweet shortcrust, and his throat caught. Silly how maudlin one could become on a grey day, without the…comforts to which one had become accustomed!
Silly.
He could read. Of course! Ha. There was a book on the table. There was always a book on any given table in the cottage. Aziraphale opened it to its marker and settled down to it. But it wasn't any good. The printed words seemed to run together on the page, echoing the rivulets of rain streaming down the window.
It was still raining steadily. And Crowley still had not come back.
They'd often gone decades without seeing each other, over the millennia. Centuries, even. They'd feared for each other, cared and looked after one other. Oh, never openly, but with the type of jibes and jabs and close attention one saved up for one's best friend. One's other half. One's light and heat in the cold grey.
If something ever happened to you, Crowley had said once, ages ago back in Uz or Uruk or somewhere, I'd know. And Aziraphale had wondered whether he himself could say the same. But of course that conversation was before Edinburgh, and before the Apocalypse-That-Wasn't with the dual snatch in St James's Park, and the way Aziraphale had felt the swift blade sharpening between them, whetting itself upon their hidden connection.
Yes. Yes, Aziraphale would have known if anything had happened to Crowley. Would know.
Which was why this taut, parched fear, sucking greedily at him like some sort of patient eternal sponge; why, it was all bloody buggering nonsense, because there was nothing to fret about, nothing, absolutely positively nothing, nothing at all, STOP—
The kitchen door opened.
Crowley came in, sodden, collar turned up uselessly against the rain. For a blink Aziraphale thought he'd brought the sun rising behind him. But no, it was only his eyes; they were startling gold in the grey of the cottage rooms. There was something bundled under his coat, safe against the rain.
"Crowley." His cheeks hurt.
"Huh," Crowley said. "You're up!"
Aziraphale huffed, which was difficult when one could not stop smiling. "Of course I am! Why wouldn't I be?"
"Because you usually sleep till nine. At least. if I don't, er…encourage or distract you." Crowley nodded at the clock, which Aziraphale apparently hadn't even registered: bang on seven in the morning.
"Oh." He took out his pocket watch, which said...ten before eight. Still. As it had apparently stopped last night, probably whilst he and Crowley had been occupied, and he'd forgotten to wind it. So Crowley had not been gone hours and hours—ages and ages—at all. "Oh, dear."
Speaking of things he was not accustomed to. Sleeping had never been one of Aziraphale's interests. Not until he and Crowley had begun sharing a bed. And even now he thought it more of a place for comfortable sexual exploration rather than forced, unnecessary unconsciousness or worse, discomfiting spirals of thought. But there was something to be said for drifting into dreams with Crowley's warm, love-slack body twined all about him.
It was the very contradiction of his moody thoughts from earlier. After six millennia, he had acquired a new habit. Like the burn, and the calluses. Like forgetting to wind a watch he'd had for over a century.
"So you're up early?" Crowley shook out his wet cuffs. "And…baking pies."
"Just the one pie actually." Aziraphale fiddled with the book. Oh. He held it up. "And reading."
"Oh, very important." Crowley nodded, his eyes gleaming.
"More than sleep, certainly!"
Crowley prowled round the corner of the table to him, and Aziraphale stood, and then without warning or preamble they were kissing.
They kissed so frequently these days in such odd anywhere-places. The kitchen, the garden, the front walk. The hot press of mouth against a neck or chin or nose or cheek, usually in passing—as if kissing had become something as unremarkable as breathing. And yet…
And yet, if it went away…
Suffocation.
Aziraphale sighed and wound his arms round Crowley's neck. Crowley yelped, and stiffened, then drew back.
"Sorry." He opened his coat and brought forth a white paper-wrapped bundle. He pushed it into Aziraphale's hands. "Tried to keep them dry."
"For me?"
Crowley grunted. His own hands were slipping around Aziraphale's waist, as if he'd got rid of something bothersome and could now focus on important time-sensitive matters. His fingers stroked into the small of Aziraphale's back and then downward…underneath the waistband of his trousers, lingering to squeeze the soft heft of his flesh, the curve between hip and arse. He used the squeeze to pull Aziraphale closer.
"Now, now, enough of that," Aziraphale chided, despite his own automatic drift up against Crowley's long, lovely body. "Don't you want me to see what this is? What you went out for at five in the morning?"
Crowley shrugged. "Seemed important at the time. And the rain had let up for a minute, so." His breath warmed Aziraphale's neck. His lips drifted beneath his ear in a dizzy line. "But now…"
Aziraphale gasped at the nip of teeth. "Fiend." He tried to reel back a bit, but the table was in the way. "Oh, you're insatiable. Just a moment! Let me—"
He fussed at the paper, caught between unwrapping whatever it was and leaning into the relentless touch, the teasing mouth. The top folds came free, and he was suddenly staring into a cluster of round, cheerful yellow faces, surrounded by trailing English ivy and crumpled paper.
"Sunflowers!" he breathed. "Oh Crowley." He held one of the satiny petals between thumb and forefinger. "They're real. And in February? From the hothouse, eh?"
"Loretta at the market made some comment about flowers for my partner, what with it being Valentine's and all."
"Saint Valentine's Day?!" Oh dear. He cast his eyes towards the streaked windows. The rain had stopped. The grey of the outdoors had shifted into golden light, streaming in through the windows in shimmering rays, and the sunflowers blazed up as bright as Crowley's eyes, as bright as the warmth rushing through Aziraphale's entire body. When had the rain stopped? When had the sun come out?
When Crowley came back to me.
"But I didn't do anything!" he said weakly. "For the day, I mean." And perhaps in defence against any forthcoming accusations about angelic influence on Earthly weather.
"Baked a pie, didn't you?"
"That was a happy accident!" Aziraphale stared into the yellow flowery faces, feeling caught between curdling anxiety and a love like sunrise.
"Nyeeeah, don't look like that. What's to celebrate? Silly holiday. Propagated by Hell. Absolutely made worse by yours truly. Always a big hit with Beelzebub." Crowley snorted. "How the mighty have fallen. I hope Gabriel's got them a dozen roses and a heart-shaped box of choccies."
"Nothing wrong with chocolates," Aziraphale argued.
"Angel, you've just baked an entire pie!"
"Yes, that you are going to help me eat. I couldn't possibly receive such a lovely gift without suitable recompense."
"Oh, recompense," muttered Crowley, and he was kissing Aziraphale again, lifting him up so he was perched on the table, and Crowley could fit himself in between his thighs. "Yeah, alright, go on. Reimburse me a bit."
They dallied there a while, the unseasonably summery sunlight gilding the edges of everything it touched, glimpses Aziraphale caught in the periphery of intoxicating kisses. Crowley's hair. Crowley's jacket, limned in fiery light, Crowley's arms bracketing Aziraphale's thighs on the table. The line of his own hand stroking Crowley's shoulder.
The soft stroke of tongue against his own, the way Crowley stole his breath and gave it back again.
He couldn't breathe without Crowley. Not properly.
Crowley hummed against his cheek. "Thought I'd done a runner, hm?"
"No." But the feeling of that was close to what he'd stuffed down, hidden under his crust. "No, but. It's hard not to—hard to break old habits, yes? And I woke up alone."
Crowley made a harsh sound into his neck. His mouth opened there and sucked a sweet hot bruise, as his hands rose up to clutch at Aziraphale's hair, then his shoulders.
"Crowley…love…please—" He opened his legs wider, clung to his demon's shoulders, kissed his mouth, kissed him, kissed him.
Crowley muttered into his mouth, something of clear demonaic provenance this time, because Aziraphale's trousers vanished. The air was cool on his bare skin. He arched forward, scrabbling at Crowley's hips, desperate to get him closer, and Crowley was shoving at his own belt, too hasty to waste another second on miracles, and then they were finally joining together, one long thrust of Crowley easing inside. Aziraphale cried out, but then Crowley was kissing him again, slow and feather-soft as his hips worked hard and deep, devouring his moans as if they were a delicacy, or necessity.
"You think this'll satisfy me?" he hissed. His eyes were sun-bright again, warming Aziraphale to his core, dispelling every last drop of rain and doubt and dread. "You think I'll be paid off and done? I'll never be done with you. Never, never, never—"
"Crowley. Love."
They moved in sweet, sweating tandem, unhurried at first, then rocking into desperation, overflowing in the glow of summer.
"You're mine."
"Yes."
"Say it then, angel."
"I'm yours."
"Mine."
"Yours."
"Won't leave you. Ever."
"No. No, Crowley—no, never—"
"And no one's taking you from me. Even if they tried, I'd find you. You're mine. Mine, angel."
"Always."
"Mine."
"Yours. Yours. Forever."
After, they sprawled on the sun-dappled floor together, Crowley still holding him tight, teasing him gently but mercilessly.
"You made it sunny outside! It's February, angel. In England."
"Oh, hush." He should've known Crowley would sense any mucking about with the weather, even as inadvertent as it was in this case. Just as he'd sensed the ache in Aziraphale's chest, the old dread.
Because he was Aziraphale's, and Aziraphale was his.
"Bound to ping the universal alarms, you know," Crowley continued, really digging into his theme, "this kind of brazen interference with the weather. Angels and their miracles. Global warming in action."
"Nonsense," Aziraphale said. "Humans have that disaster firmly in hand all by themselves. In any case, I'm sure the local residents won't mind an unseasonable Valentine's Day. After all, we might go for a picnic. But it wasn't just me, dearest."
"No?"
"Of course not. Too big a miracle for one ethereal creature."
"Hmph. Not ethereal," Crowley sniffed. "'M occult."
Aziraphale caressed Crowley's hair with one of the sunflowers, loosed from their bouquet, the yellow shining against the red. Gorgeous. Startling. Mesmerising. "I should be insulted," he mused. "The Victorians believed a gift of sunflowers declared a judgement. Haughtiness, hoity-toity, too big for one's boots."
"If the boot—er, flower fits," Crowley murmured, then snorted as Aziraphale bopped him on the forehead with the blossom. "Okay. That was one meaning, sure."
"Oh, are there others?"
"Mmm. Everything has at least a double meaning. Flowers're no different. Victorians are no different. And sunflowers in particular can't be boxed in. Spread like anything. Pop up anywhere." He pushed up the rumpled hem of Aziraphale's shirt, and kissed the soft roll of belly there. "Adoration."
"Oh, I see."
"Meanings, angel. Take whichever you like."
"Doesn't that lessen a meaning? If it can pushed aside in favour of another? Isn't everything something singular at its core?"
"Ah. 'A demon's a demon, for a' that?' An angel an angel?" Another kiss, this one on his dewy hip.
"No." Aziraphale squirmed underneath the kiss. "No, indeed. You contain multitudes."
"And you." Crowley dropped his head to nuzzle and kiss more…centrally, and Aziraphale bit his lip to keep from groaning as he was enveloped by heat. Crowley withdrew for a moment and grinned evilly up at him. "Go on. Tell me."
"The meanings? All of them?"
Crowley dropped his head again. Aziraphale tried to focus as hot wet sensation once again swallowed him down.
"Loyal. Loyalty," he corrected himself, and felt a huff and quiver of Crowley's breath. "Courage. Strength and—and oh, grace. Tenacity. Stubbornness, really, sheer obstinacy. Oh. Oh."
Crowley sighed around him, and Aziraphale touched his hair, his jaw, his cheek, worshipped the line of his marked brow. Crowley's hand slid up to find his, and Aziraphale threaded their fingers together, grazing the newer marks on Crowley's knuckles. Hand of Hell, employer of curses dire and dreadful, and yet scarred now only by garden implements, by Earthly living. Callused twin to his own.
"Optimism," Aziraphale whispered. "Ever looking towards hope."
He was no longer sure who he was talking about. Himself. Crowley. Both of them, linked together as they had been, two halves of one whole. Openly now, turning their faces to a warm and public regard, a wide open sky, without fear or pain. A love combined, immeasurable, energy without form or end, as bright and glowing as the sunlight engulfing them.
Earthly, not heavenly. Something all their own, and yet part of everything. Together.
"Love," he gasped as he spiralled up into joyous golden sparkling pleasure once again, as Crowley's hand squeezed his own. "Love. Oh, my love. Love."